Water To Wine: Some of My Story

by Brian Zahnd

Prayer is what religious people do.

How we pray is how we are formed.

We are formed as Christian people as we learn the regular rhythms of praying well-crafted, theologically-sound, time-tested prayers.

The church in the West is no longer public or prayerful. We are now private. The only way we know how to be public is to be political.

It’s a tragedy that the dominant expression of public Christianity in America over the past generation has been one of political partisanship.

The ringing of a church bell is a public act, but it’s not a political act. The church bell is a public call to prayer.

The primary purpose of prayer is not to get God to do what we think God ought to do, but to be properly formed.

Without wise input that comes from outside ourselves, we will never change.

We will just keep praying what we already are. A selfish person prays selfish prayers. An angry person prays angry prayers. A greedy person prays greedy prayers. A manipulative person prays manipulative prayers. Nothing changes. We make no progress. But it’s worse than that.

We pray the Psalms, not to express what we feel, but to learn to feel what they express.

In praying the Psalms we learn to experience the whole range of human emotion in a way that is healthy and healing.

Worship is not a kind of spiritual entertainment—worship is a work of spiritual formation.

Liturgy is neither alive nor dead. Liturgy is either true or false. What is alive or dead is the worshiper.

If I arrive at the time of prayer with a worried mind or troubled emotions, I find it comforting and helpful to have ten minutes or so of prescribed liturgy before I begin to pour out my lament.

Sadly, for these frustrated people, prayer often becomes a giant cesspool of guilt. They’ve been given an intolerable burden. They’ve been told to pray, but they’ve not been given the resources to pray well.

People who try contemplation without first being properly formed in prayer just end up thinking their same old thoughts and calling them Jesus!

Prayer that reinforces our egocentric tendencies is entirely counterproductive.

For the Christian, true enlightenment doesn’t come from empiricism but from Christ.

Christian enlightenment is not about rationalism, it’s about love.

if you see a person or group primarily as a rival posing a threat to your self-interest, you cannot love them.

You will only fear them, and reacting in fear you will lash out at them.

“Lord, I’m willing to see this differently. I’m willing and I want to see this through your eyes.”

“God loved us before he made us; and his love has never diminished and never shall.” —Julian of Norwich[1]

Francis of Assisi: A Revolutionary Life

I came to realize that contemporary revivalism fails to engage the wider culture in any meaningful way and in the end it just wears people out.

What is called “revival” today is mostly spectacle and religious entertainment playing upon the emotions of guilt, desire, and anger.

“It is perhaps the chief suggestion of this book that Saint Francis walked the world like the Pardon of God.”[2]

Francis didn’t spend much time railing against the predominant sins of his age—egregious as they were; instead he offered sinners the pardon of God and modeled a different way to live.

I wasn’t trying to return to an earlier time, but I was trying to pull the past into the present.

could explore their contributions while being fully engaged with my own era.

if we maintain a connection with our theological past, we don’t have to reformulate the essential creeds every generation.

One of the problems with revivalism is its egocentric obsession with the present and its woeful ignorance of the past.

Without a clear memory of church history we become the Alpha and Omega in our imagined self-importance. Christian

“All will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”[4]

architecture itself was an act of worship—something

We must constantly translate Christianity into contemporary culture, but we do so by maintaining a conversation with our mothers and fathers, with our older sisters and brothers.

“The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust” (Isaiah 32:17). Isaiah sees the result of the reign of God as quietness and trust, not riot and protest.

Paul says we should “aspire to live quietly” (1 Thessalonians 4:11) and “lead a quiet and peaceable life” (1 Timothy 2:2). Paul doesn’t advocate riot Christianity, but quiet Christianity.

It’s domestic, not militant.

When Jesus became aware of this, he departed. Many crowds followed him, and he cured all of them, and ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah: “Here is my servant, whom I have chosen, my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased. I will put my Spirit upon him, and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles. He will not wrangle or cry aloud, Nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.” (Matthew 12:15–19)

The church is not a special interest group that has to make its demands known. We don’t have to “fight for our rights” anymore than Jesus did. We don’t have to mimic the noise of special-interest anger. We can be an alternative of quietness and trust. The church doesn’t have to make things happen, it can simply be that part of the world that trusts God and lives under the peaceable reign of Christ here and now.

I’ve come to realize that the main purpose of prayer is not to change the world, but to change me...and

Spiritual formation happens over a lifetime, not overnight.

Eugene Peterson lifted a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche when he described Christian discipleship as “a long obedience in the same direction.”[7]

Impatient saints don’t exist.

Today I’m trying to learn how to mature like a dusty bottle of wine patiently resting in God’s cellar.

Like Jesus, Francis could uncompromisingly denounce systemic sin, while extending genuine compassion to the people caught in its pernicious web.

The only Christian theodicy which I find credible is the confession that God does not exempt himself from the horror of human suffering, but is fully baptized into it.

God in Christ joins us in a solidarity of suffering, and somehow by his wounds we are healed.

Christ saves us from sin and death only by hurling himse...