Prayer and Work in the Face of Violence
“Breaking News” flashes across the screen, and glancing up, you notice another mass shooting is underway in an American city. Wincing, you shake your head and think, “Not again. We need to pray.” Later that evening, the news highlights the state’s Governor (or Senator) saying, “This isn’t a time for discussions about guns; this is a time for prayer.” Well, yes, prayer is surely needed. But is that all that is needed?
The news of the shooting leaves scratching around at the back of your brain the impression that prayer is a necessary but insufficient response to what’s occurred. The thought that something else, something in addition to prayer, is needed gnaws at you. And your attempts to dismiss the thought won’t go away.
Good.
Why?
When a hurricane or earthquake strikes, we certainly pray for all those impacted by the disaster. But is that all we do? Never. We raise funds to help, send teams to assist with rescue and rebuilding, and provide food, water, and shelter for all those in need. We pray and work. We support the trained men and women who risk so much to help those most impacted. We also create new building standards that lead to safer dwellings, saving lives. We invest in early warning systems and deploy them to serve the public.
Gun violence needs to be tackled in the same way. We can’t merely pray about a kid being gunned down for no reason other than he rang the wrong doorbell. It’s going to take more than prayer to deal with that situation.
When the 911 call came through about that terrible shooting (or countless others I could mention, including the mass murder at Covenant School in Nashville), people went to work. When the blessed first responders and surgeons brought their skills to bear on the shooting victim’s injuries, they WORKED. They might’ve prayed too. But their calling, their holy vocation, was to WORK to save his life. We’d expect nothing less.
Shooting victim Ralph Yari was met by gifted and dedicated, highly skilled, and well-trained medical personnel who went to work, doing all they could to save his life. Did they pray? Maybe. Maybe they prayed that morning before they went to work or in the car on the way. What they did not do when Ralph arrived was stop to pray. Nor did they go out to his shocked family and say, “Yes, we are medical people, but what we need to do right now is pray. Let’s gather ’round and pray. Maybe later, we can deal with his injuries.”
Ralph Yari’s family wasn’t concerned about the prayer life of the trauma team. They certainly did care about the skill and devotion the surgeon and the attending personnel possessed. While we can be thankful for a trauma surgeon who prays, what we need in such moments is one who works skillfully and tirelessly to heal. We also expect nothing less from law officers, the courts, attorneys, social workers, counselors, pharmacists, and physical therapists.
This brings me back to elected officials who say, “We need to pray.”
Well, of course, we need to pray in the aftermath of violence and in the presence of fear, death, and grief. But prayer is not the work elected officials are called to do. They are elected to serve so that the common good is promoted. We did not elect them to hold prayer meetings. On the contrary, we elected them to get to work. Elected officials in this country need a timeout on calls to prayer and should instead GET TO WORK on the problem of gun violence, the leading cause of death among children in this nation.
It’s time for action on this issue. It’s time for work.
Prayer and Work
We are called to pray, but we are also called to work. God commissions us to work, summoning us into various vocations and giving us gifts that prepare us for that calling. We pray that our work is acceptable to God and glorifies him. God has entrusted work to us, empowered us for those endeavors, and is with us in our work. Theologian Dan Doriani notes that, “All honest work is sacred when devoted to the glory of God.”
But the work to be done remains our work. Prayer doesn’t transfer our work back to God. Prayer invites God’s grace to accompany us in our work. Work without prayer is practical atheism; prayer without work is presumptuous theism.
Isn’t prayer also ‘work’? It can be, though it is obviously much more than that. But even when prayer is work, it is not the only work we do. It is, rather, the first work we do. Pastor James Kessler has observed that “prayer is no superstitious invocation; it is an exhausting work of pleading and aligning our hearts with God’s. It is both the beginning and end of our work.” Prayer is the admission that we need God’s grace followed by our praise that he has brought his power to bear on our behalf in wave after wave of mercy.
Yet, between these two poles of prayer, we have to actually work; we evangelize, fight injustice & bloodshed, dig wells, feed the hungry, visit the sick and imprisoned, educate, and make disciples. I don’t simply pray about preaching; I actually preach. A physician doesn’t simply pray for her patients. She gets to work - long and hard - on what has to be done for them to aid their recovery. Legislators should open and close their sessions in prayer, but between invocation and benediction, they will have to do the work they’ve been elected to do.
In 1 Corinthians, Paul wrote, “By the grace of God, I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all...yet not I but the grace of God that was with me” (1 Corinthians 15:10). Grace leads to good work, work that glorifies God for the spread of the Gospel and the good of all people.
Thinking Biblically About Work
One of the great gains of the Reformation was a recovery of a more thoroughly Biblical view of work and vocation. This was especially in reference to the sacredness of every vocation as service to Christ, whether it involves work in the Church or work in the marketplace.
In his article on vocational Calvinism, Ray Pennings noted the following core principles of our work before God.
God works, and we are called to bear His image;
God derives satisfaction from His work;
God provides for us through our work;
God has commanded man to work and to work within the framework of His commands;
God holds us accountable for our work and expects to be acknowledged through it;
God provides particular gifts designed to meet particular needs in the advancement of His kingdom;
The Fall has radically affected our work. Work became toil; thorns and thistles frustrate our efforts. Fallen man seeks to glorify himself rather than his Creator through work;
Work is an individual as well as a social activity;
God takes pleasure in beauty, and the Scriptures do not focus simply on the functional and utilitarian aspects of work; and
Christ worked as part of His active obedience, and the believer’s work through Christ is part of that obedience.
Given the Bible’s teaching on work, Tim Keller concludes, “The question regarding our choice of work is no longer ‘What will make me the most money and give me the most status?’ The question must now be, “How, with my existing abilities and opportunities, can I be of the greatest service to other people, knowing what I do of God’s will and of human need?”
Keller goes on to note that “If the point of work is to serve and exalt ourselves, then our work inevitably becomes less about the work and more about us. Our aggressiveness will eventually become abuse, our drive will become burnout, and our self-sufficiency will become self-loathing. But if the purpose of work is to serve and exalt something beyond ourselves, then we actually have a better reason to deploy our talent, ambition, and entrepreneurial vigor—and we are more likely to be successful in the long run, even by the world’s definition.”
We work as image-bearers of God, rest in the finished work of Christ for salvation, and labor by faith for God’s glory with the assurance that the Spirit will empower us to ‘stand fast, always abounding in the work of the Lord, knowing that our work is not in vain in the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58).
Prayer and Work, Violence and Disorder
Our view of work leads us away from passive mysticism and towards a diligent embrace of the initiative, discipline, and industry needed to secure God-glorifying ends. If a person needs work, we don’t suggest that they merely pray about it, but instead counsel them to pray and then go look for the work they need, or gain the qualifications necessary to do the work they believe God has called them to do.
In prayer, we make ourselves available to God’s purpose and confess our need for his strength in our work. Prayer is most assuredly not the abandonment of human effort while we await a miraculous intervention that will do what God has called us to do. If wood for the fire needs to be gathered and chopped, a human agent will have to do it. Praying about the wood won’t get the job done.
This principle is especially important when it comes to being called by God to a vocation ordained to address evil. The civil magistrate is God’s servant to protect the innocent and punish the wicked. In our theology, God’s Law has a restraining power to be deployed in the civil order, and the magistrates have the calling to point to that Law as a foundation for the public good.
When it comes to violence in this society, prayer is definitely needed. But we must stop thinking that prayer alone will change this bloody awful situation. If it could, that and the oceans of tears flowing from thousands of grieving parents would’ve already done the job. There’s no lack of prayer. What does appear to be lacking is the diligent, bi-partisan work of elected officials and citizens ready to tackle the legion of issues that have created this plague. Our elected officials need to take their vocation seriously, and we should be holding them accountable for that work.
Do we expect Utopia? Certainly not. But our current situation is as hellish as it is unsustainable. Pray? I’ve been praying. Millions have prayed. Now is the time to work on curtailing the violence and ending this insanity - that’s authentic holiness in action.
Neither the individual Christian nor the elected official - whether a Christian or otherwise - can go on using prayer as a cover for inaction. We must all start working for a safer society. It’s time to stop excusing our lack of progress in reducing mass shootings and work on creating and implementing the solutions that will foster a safer society for all. With the first responders, medical personnel, police, and all who in every way work to preserve life, let’s get on with the good work that needs to be done.