Short Prayers? What about Truth? And, What is Truth, anyhow?

“Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” Luke 8:8b

Without an ear inclined to listen and to receive the truth, there can be no revelation. Jesus asks us to get out the Q-Tips and clear our ears from debris so that we can hear the truth of God when it’s spoken to us. Actually, a well crafted short prayer would make an effective Q-Tip.

Crisis at the Border

The time is the close of World War II.  The place is the border between Poland and Germany.  A frightened family of three yearningly peer through the night toward the land of future freedom.  The Russian army had captured Poland and were ravaging the German civilians making their way west.  This East Prussian family had made it undetected all the way from Kőnigsberg. But now they stood in peril at the border.

What lay before them was a heavily foliaged forest interlaced with a camouflaged network of trip wires, all connected to bells and sirens.  The slightest kick and the sound of the alarms would bring border troops down upon them in moments.  There was no other way across.  They could not go back. Time for a short prayer.

But, then the sky began to darken.  Big black storm clouds brought peels of thunder, which grew to an uncanny intensity and duration.  And when the sky had finished its rampage of booming and bellowing so that the alarms could be heard by the border guards, our family had made it safely through the electronic thicket to a new lease on life.

Is there a God to perform miracles?

The name of this family is Bronowski.  As we sat with them over a cup of coffee listening to the facts of this account, two distinctly different interpretations could be heard.  Frau Bronowski was a devout Mennonite.  To her, the uncanny bursting of thunder at that precise moment was the mighty hand of God’s grace breaking in and blessing them with freedom and safety.  Herr Bronowski, in contrast, was a scoffing atheist.  To him, the thunder was only a coincidence, no matter what good fortune it brought.  There was no God, argued Herr Bronowski.  If there were, he pined, then God would never have permitted Germany to lose the Second World War and fall to such humiliation.  God would never have allowed the death and destruction which this skeptic had observed first hand.  So, we might ask:  was there a miracle or not?

Was it a miracle?

No answer.  There is an inescapable ambiguity to God’s presence.  Whenever God enters our lives, there is an element of obscurity.  There is always the possibility of interpreting our experiences in such a way as to push God out of them.  It is possible to look God right in the face and yet convince ourselves that we do not see him.  It is possible to hear God calling our name and yet attribute that voice to some other source.

What is truth?

Pontius Pilate and the Sanhedrin responsible for the death of Jesus looked the Son of God right in the eye, and yet they thought they were looking at an ordinary person.  Loyal to civil tranquility and loyal to the law of God, the executors of Jesus were face to face with the ultimate truth of the universe incarnate before them.  Yet their eyes focused on the mundane, missing the sublime.  Were they so different from us?

What does it take, I wonder, to enable us to see the truth, to listen to God’s call?

SHORT PRAYER:
God of mystery and truth, attune our ears to your voice and sharpen our sight into insight.  Amen.

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Ted Peters is a Lutheran pastor and emeritus seminary professor. He is author of Short Prayers  and The Cosmic Self. His one volume systematic theology is now in its 3^rd edition, God—The World’s Future (Fortress 2015). He has undertaken a thorough examination of the sin-and-grace dialectic in two works, Sin: Radical Evil in Soul and Society (Eerdmans 1994) and Sin Boldly! (Fortress 2015). Watch for his forthcoming, The Voice of Public Christian Theology (ATF 2022). See his website: TedsTimelyTake.com.

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