Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 4: A New Frame of Reference (Psalm 73 & 2 Cor. 4:7-12, 16-18)

Prayer in a World of Enemies, Part 4: A New Frame of Reference

August 10, 2025

Psalm 73 & 2 Corinthians 4:7-12, 16-18

By: Pastor Mike Conner

 ***

In the middle of the night, after sending all his earthly possessions across the river, Jacob wrestled with God until he received God’s blessing. After years of quiet wilderness wandering, estranged from his kindred and carrying a murderer’s guilt, Moses was given a purpose by the God who spoke out of a bush that was burning without being consumed. Hiding in the mountains from those who would kill him, the prophet Elijah heard God’s healing voice, not in the storm or in the earthquake or in the fire, but in that “soft whisper” (1 Kings 19:13, CSB). Hitting the bottom, coming to a kind of end, they all met God -- and were changed.

A woman suffering from bleeding for twelve years, who had “spent everything she had and was not helped at all” (Mk 5:26, CSB), pushed her way through a crowd just to touch the hem of Jesus’ robe. And when she touched it, her bleeding stopped. The beggar Bartimaeus cried out from the roadside just beyond Jericho: “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” (Mark 10:47, CSB). Cried out until he was called forward and helped. Paul, the great persecutor of the church, sat in deep darkness with fasting and prayer, having been blinded by the light of the risen Jesus,. When he regained his sight, he was no longer a murderer but an apostle. Hitting the bottom, coming to a kind of end, they all met Jesus -- and were transformed.

The streams of Christian spirituality use different words for moments like these: repentance, conversion, new birth, surrender, consenting, yielding, awakening. There are times in our life when we finally see clearly what it is we need to let go of, or where it is that we need to be drawing on a deeper well of strength and understanding. And we know that clinging to that thing or keeping on as we are without any help limits our experience of God’s abundance, freedom, power, and love. And we know that the only way forward is through change, through meeting and being met by God in our spiritual poverty.

This is the fourth in a series of seven sermons on how Jesus wants to transform our relationship with our enemies. I imagine this series in a V-shape. To make progress, we first needed to go downward, down to the root. As Jesus says to Peter in John chapter 21, “When you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you, and take you where you do not wish to go” (John 21:18, NRSVUE). Maturing beyond the enemy-making cycle takes a kind of openhandedness, a surrender of self-will. We must face the need for change at the deep level of our hearts. If any of us has been able to take some steps along this journey up to this point -- or, I should say, down to this point -- it is because “the Lord himself goes before you” (Deut 31:8, NIV) and readies the way.

In order to let go, we have to know what we’re letting go of. We have to see it clearly and be willing to express how we really feel about it. Not what we think we’re supposed to feel about it, but how we really feel about it when no one else is looking. So the past two weeks we’ve explored those emotional dimensions of sadness and anger that surface and threaten to subsume us when we deal with our enemies.

Even though I’m going to be focusing on our relationships with our enemies, I’m holding open the very real possibility that you might be seeing something else clearly that needs to be given over to God: A friendship, partnership, or marriage that strained or broken. A line of study or work that isn’t right for you. An area addiction or an unhealthy habit. Wrestling with some aspect of your faith. When God gives us the grace to finally see and acknowledge these things, change can begin.

That’s the heart of what I have to say today. When we come to what feels like the end of our strength and understanding. When we’ve seen our predicament for what it is and brought our emotions, sensations, and fantasies about it all to God in prayer, we might feel like we are at our most helpless, formless point. But we are in fact at the hinge, at the moment of conversion. God the potter, who formed the first human creature out of clay and who continues to craft us into vessels able to bear his love and light, meets us in that lowly space. Letting go of our way and our coping mechanisms is the sweet spot, the ground zero of transformative change. If, with God’s help, we can linger there patiently and honestly, God will bless us.

We’re raised on an American ethos of self-sufficiency, self-creation, and impenetrability, so it feels totally wrong to be in that vulnerable, spent place. But Jesus says, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Mk 2:17, NIV). Paul uses the image of the fragile clay jar to get at this truth. As we allow God to hew us out, empty us of all that we cling to -- including our need to have enemies, our right to our anger -- there is more room for God’s powerful light to live.

Some of us might wonder, Do I really need this? After all, I give a lot of my time and money and energy to advocacy, service, or political processes. Yes, even those of us who are committed to making a difference in our community need a transformation of heart. St Oscar Romero once said, “There can be no true liberation until people are freed from sin. All the liberationist groups that spring up in our land should bear this in mind. The first liberation to be proposed by a political group that truly wants the people’s liberation must be to free oneself from sin. While one is a slave of sin – of selfishness, violence, cruelty, and hatred – one is not fitted for the people’s liberation.”[1]

With Jesus and the Psalmist, we have faced the social world as it is: fractured into camps of us and them, haves and have-nots. With Jesus and the Psalmist, we have witnessed both systemic injustice and personal greed prey upon those in socially and economically vulnerable positions. We have let our questions and our anger flow so that they do not consume us. And it’s right here at what feels like the bottom, at what feels like a hollowing out of all those emotions and questions and fantasies that we’ve been either repressing or making an identity out of, that God is waiting to meet us and fill us with love.

“But as for me, my feet almost slipped;

my steps nearly went astray.

For I envied the arrogant;

I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

Did I purify my heart

and wash my hands in innocence for nothing?

…

I became embittered

and my innermost being was wounded;

I was stupid and didn’t understand.”

Here the Psalmist gives expression to the inner wound. Feet slip. Envy creeps in. Doubt. Bitterness. But then this:

“My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart,

my portion forever.

…

God’s presence is my good.

I have made the Lord God my refuge.”

What agony! To feel the wounds of living in an enemy-making world, and yet to know deep in our bones that what we hunger for more than anything is God, what we desire more than anything is God. As the Psalmist says in verse 25, “Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee” (Ps 73:25, KJV). That prayer is the expression of our failure to help ourselves and of the possibility of God’s renewing touch. It is that hinge, that point at the bottom of the V.

God, I don’t get it! I’m angry and I’m starting to tell you about it! I’m sad and I’m starting to tell you about it! I’m even envious sometimes and I’m starting to tell you about it! But more than anything God, I want you. Your presence, your mercy, your way. I trust that you are my good. I trust that you are the strength of my heart, even as my heart seems to falter. I trust that what feels very scary, letting you radically reorient my relationship to my enemies, is a kind of death that will bring inner renewal. It’s a trial and a testing I am willing to endure so that your power might find space in me.

Change sometimes feels like trouble! But Paul tells us that “our present troubles are small and won’t last very long. Yet they produce for us a glory that vastly outweighs them and will last forever!” Today is a day for letting God’s love take root in our hearts. We are no longer our own frame of reference. Yes, we live in a world of enemies. But it’s God’s world, a world that God fully and irrevocably entered into, a world that God loved even to the point of death, a world that God carried through death into newness of life, into the hope of resurrection.

When we hit the bottom, when we come to the end, when we are hewn out, we are at our most receptive. Paul says that “we fix our gaze on things that cannot be seen.

I’m going to invite us into a time of inner reflection. I encourage you for the moments that follow to assume a posture of prayer, perhaps placing your feet on the floor, uncrossing your arms and legs, closing your eyes or fixing them softly on a spot in front of you.

As you do that, let’s take a couple deep breaths here: in and out, in and out.

Let your breathing return to it’s regular rhythm, this gift of life that the body gives.

Now, make fists with your hands, ball them up tight. And say to God in your heart, “God, show me what I am grasping, what I am clinging to, when I consider my relationship to my enemies.”

Perhaps it will be a person’s name or face, someone who’s hurt you, or one of those generalized labels we like to use: Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, liberals, the Legislature, the… your will fill in the blank.

Perhaps God will show you a specific memory of harm.

Maybe God will show you your sadness or anger, your envy or confusion, or a specific fantasy of retribution. That you are clinging to these and that they are consuming you.

Maybe God will show you that you are holding tightly to your security, your possessions, and you’re afraid to make a change. Or that it’s your insecurity and inadequacy: “God, I can’t throw a million dollars at it, so I can’t make a difference… God, I’m too old, so I can’t… God, I’m too young, so I can’t… God, I’ve messed up too many times before, so I can’t.”

Or something else might come up that surprises you.

“God, show me what I am grasping, what I am clinging to, when I consider my relationship to my enemies.”

{wait here}

Now, open your hands and turn them over, visualize yourself letting it go, whatever you were holding on to. Let it fall to the ground. Don’t grasp it anymore.

Notice what emotions you experience as you do that. Is there fear and dread? Is there grief? Is there hope and freedom? Notice what you feel in your body as you let go. How do your hands feel? What’s happening in your chest, your gut, your throat, your eyes? As you rest in this moment of surrender, say to God with the voice of your heart, “There is none upon earth that I desire beside thee.”

{wait here}

Finally, turn your hands upward, keeping them open. This is a posture of receptivity. We’re in a position to receive something new, so ask God this: God, when I’m no longer holding onto that old thing, what will you give me to hold? Linger here for a moment and see what comes. Notice how it feels to wait for this gift. And if something specific comes, or even the hint or suggestion of an answer, how does it feel to receive this with open hands and willing hearts?

{wait here}

Take a couple deep breaths again and, when you’re ready, open your eyes and come back into this moment.

Today is the hinge. The scripture says that “it is for freedom that Christ has set us free” (Gal 5:1). Thanks be to God for this work that God is doing in us. Amen. 

[1] The Violence of Love, 198.