Let Your "Amen" Be Amen

Hi, friends, and welcome to the Weekly Dulin Podcast, a brief weekly reflection from Dulin United Methodist Church in Falls Church. Here, we take time to think together about faith, community, and what it means to live as disciples of Jesus in today's world.

Well, hello, Dulin Church. It's me, James Henry, your pastor. It's good to be with you today for another Dulin Weekly Moment, Dulin Weekly Podcast. So glad you could join me whether you're watching live or listening later on to the podcast. This week, I thought I would talk about something that seems very elementary but came up for me as I was doing my morning prayers and sit yesterday morning in my prayer chair over here.

One of the things I became aware of as I was studying the Lord's Prayer, You'll you remember the Lord's prayer we did eight weeks on that. The Lord's prayer in Aramaic is the final word of almost every prayer we say. How many of you pray? I suspect all of you who are listening pray in some way at some point. If no other time than when you're watching live on worship or you are joining us in person in worship, when we say all the prayers, the last word we say is amen.

And amen, I grew up with that word. And I always just thought it meant the end. I really grew up. No one ever told me that it meant anything else until much later. And somebody told me that amen was the equivalent of so be it.

Declaration that our belief in what we've laid before God matters. There's more of a nuance in Aramaic, at least as I understand it and as at least one of the scholars talked to that I read, sort of spoke to me about what amen was. Amen, we've always transliterated it because amen in Aramaic is becomes Amen in English. It's not translated. It's letters are copied into English, which is how we got the word amen.

But amen in the first century when Jesus would have been using it as part of a prayer. Amen meant was a word that was used as a part of ratifying covenants with someone else or contracts with someone else. And it was a saying that meant I will do my part if you will do yours. Essentially, it's a declaration at the end of a prayer and it's slightly it has different connotations for me than so be it, which is what I later came to understand or someone told me anyway that amen meant. If I'm ratifying a covenant, something that I've lifted up to God as important to me, whether it be change my heart, oh God, whether it be help me to be stronger in my convictions, to walk more closely to you, to engage with the world in ways that brings more love to it.

When I say amen, what I'm saying is I'll do my part. I'm trusting you to do yours, God, but you are expecting as a part of this covenant between us that I'll do my part. I remember when I was a part of when Young Jin Cho, pastor Young Jin Cho, before he was a bishop, asked me if I would write letters for him as a part of his campaign to be a bishop. And we talked about prayer because he and I regularly talked about prayer. I talked about how prayer was important in my life.

He talked about how prayer was important in his life. And he always, he had in fact the phrase on a poster or on a framed image behind him that said, pray as if everything depended on God, work as if everything depended on you. It's an invitation to trust God to take prayer seriously as well as to realize you play a part in doing what God wants done here in the world, bringing the kingdom, bringing love. So when we pray and at the end of that prayer say amen, amen, what we're saying is God we're trusting you to do your part. But all these things I've asked for are laid before you, I'm going to do my part in seeing them through.

Maybe part of that part is simply saying, I trust you enough to leave this in your care. Maybe part of it is some practice that you need to do, some way of reaching out. You pray that you'll be forgiven or that you'll learn to forgive someone else. Perhaps that's one of the things that's on your mind is learning to forgive someone else because forgiveness is hard. And as you pray to learn to forgive, then you doing your part is practicing releasing the thing that is holding you.

When you are praying that you'll have the strength to forgive someone who's done something heinous or whatever to you or to someone you love, you are saying you'll do your part in this. You're not asking for God's magic to just remove it from your heart as much as you're saying help me do this because you forgive me, help me to forgive the other. And how will I do that? Well, incrementally. If any of you've ever seen what it's like to forgive or to let go of something, you release, it still comes back.

You release again, it might still come back. You release again, you learn to recognize when it's coming, you release it even before it fully appears and you return to that moment. That constant movement that happens is you are participating in the amen, the amen at the end of a prayer. It was meant to be this bit about amen was meant to be a part of the final sermon in the Lord's Prayer series that I preached. At the very end, it was my intent to talk about why Amen really matters.

Why it's not just a way to end a prayer. We say it and we know that it's a prayer. How do we know it's a prayer? Because we said I'm in at the end. It's more than that.

It's my commitment to what I've said, which is why when we say it at the end of the Lord's Prayer, it's so important because we are committing to recognizing all of the things we've said as being important to our lives. Trusting that God will do God's part to bring the kingdom. God will do God's part to let us feel and know what God's desire is so that we might do God's desire here, that we might receive whatever it is in terms of understanding or nourishment we need for this day, etc. All those pieces, we'll do our part while trusting you to do yours. I'm in is the ratification.

I've laid this before you. It is out there on the table. I'm trusting you to do your part and I will do mine. It's a commitment. So the next time you're praying, you may be praying, right now.

You may have prayed before you came to this opportunity to listen to the podcast or you may have been praying before you watch live noon on Thursday. Whichever it is, whenever you watch it, whenever you listen to it, you may have been praying before, you may be praying before you go to bed tonight, but when you say amen, just remember that everything you've said is a part of that prayer that you've been saying. You're saying you'll do your part. So often we want to hand things off to God, trust that God will do the thing for us when perhaps we have a part to play as well. So let amen be an invitation to you then.

Each time you pray, each time we as a congregation pray, whether it's the prayer of confession, the opening prayer, the prayer for illumination, any other prayer that might be a part of our services together, when we pray those prayers, we'll take them seriously enough to be willing, even as we're praying the prayers, to ask what part do I play in these words that I'm saying to you, God, in these things I'm asking of you? How can I submit myself more to you? How can I maybe be more active in living into these things I've asked for you to do? Because those are the things that shape us. It is a two way commitment when we enter into faith with God.

It is not only trusting that God will do what God will do, but that we will do what God has called us to do in these prayers that we pray. So thanks for joining me today my friends at Dulin and beyond who might be listening to this or watching it. I wish you all the very best. Let your Amen, your Amen be meaningful, be part of your commitment to be a part of what God's doing in the world. Until our next time together, I wish you all the very best.