Genesis 18:20-32
Romans 8:26-27
Luke 11:1-10
February 27, 2011
This morning we have been immersed in prayer. We have spoken prayers and sung prayers. We have reviewed Biblical prayer postures and heard scriptures describing different types of prayers. In your bulletin is an insert on rainbow paper that contains a dozen different descriptions of prayer. How would it feel if I asked you to turn to someone near you and answer the questions on the back of the insert – When do you prayer, how do you pray and why do you pray? Would it be as awkward, embarrassing, and scary as if I had asked you to answer the same questions about sex? We can feel as timid and protective about our prayer lives as we do any other aspects of our privacy.
I have shelves full of prayer books and books about prayer. I have several boxes full of the prayer journals which I have kept from time to time over the past four decades. I have prayer beads and am embroidering a prayer rug. I have spent a small fortune on candles and music and meditation cds. I have boxes full of natural objects and pottery and art objects for altars that I can change with the season. I have lists of people to pray for arranged according to the date of their birthdays. I have a couple binders full of prayers and songs and images which I find inspirational.
I am considered a professional pray-er. I get paid to pray in public at least once a week, if not more. I am trained to help people explore and improve their prayer lives and despite all this, I still feel shy and awkward in talking about what goes on behind closed doors in my heart of hearts.
We all carry a truck-load of expectations and ideas about what prayer is and how it should be done, how it should feel, and what should happen as a result. I imagine few of us feel we ever get close to praying like we think we should. I spend hours trying to reassure myself and others that however you chose to pray is o.k. But the hesitancy remains as to whether what I actually do in my life really constitutes genuine prayer. Now this is actually the case more for certain kinds of prayers than for others. I have few doubts about my prayers of thanksgiving and praise. I’m not sure I can tell the difference, but those tend to arise rather spontaneously for me. The prayers I struggle with are the prayers of intercession for people and situations and the prayers of petition for guidance and discernment or decision-making. That’s why Cathy is leading our intercessory prayer ministry. She seems to have a more direct sense of both the call to pray for others, the sense of God’s spirit moving for that person or situation and more confidence in the results of her prayers. Of course that’s not true all the time, but a great deal more often for her than for me. At least I fatigue more quickly than she does.
In prayers of petition and for guidance, When I write a question or concern in my prayer journal, I rarely get an immediate “answer” that I can write after it. Though it has happened on occasion. However it often helps for me to get my question or concern down in words on paper. It is a clarifying process. I am regularly surprised when in the days and weeks following such a process I will notice the subject coming up in all kinds of ways – I may get another idea or angle on it in the shower, or while taking one of my walks, or an article comes in my email or in a magazine; or the topic comes up in conversation with a friend or one of you or with someone I see for spiritual direction. I may notice something in a movie or a book I am reading on a completely different topic. And when I go back to the question in my journal days or weeks later, I discover that I am in a different place with the question or the question may have changed . When I am feeling skeptical I will ask, “Now is that God answering my prayer?” It could be that I am just paying attention and working it out in my mind. And yet at times, those snippets of insight and inspiration, those synchronicities feel like gifts. They seem beyond my control. And I am grateful.
When it comes to praying for healing, I find myself feeling most uncomfortable. Does prayer “work” or doesn’t it?. Never mind how many different meanings there can be to “work”. Is it right for me to ask for particular outcomes, when God alone knows what is right and what is actually needed? When Rich was living with ALS I tried all kinds of prayers. I visualized health and strength in his muscles and nerve synapses. I prayed for the scientists searching for a cure. I found it best to just be honest and ask for what I wanted - even if it was that God magically take away the disease. I figured God could handle and sort out whatever I decided to say. At that point all my energy went to getting through the day. Fortunately I didn’t spend any time worrying about whether I was or wasn’t getting results based on whether I prayed the right way or not, or whether I had enough faith or not. It is really torturous when we decide we are doing something wrong when we don’t get the result we want. It can also be painful to decide that God isn’t listening or doesn’t exist when we don’t get the result we want. Blame never benefits anyone and yet most of us need some evidence that our prayers are having an effect.
During that time, It was difficult to hear other people’s stories of answered prayer and healing miracles. It didn’t give me hope. It just made me think God was erratic and capricious.
It is difficult to talk about answered prayer without sounding like a huckster or a honeymooner. When someone wants to tell me about answered prayer I am suspicious that they either want to sell me something or that they are not quite sober. The problem is that the divine response is in the eye of the beholder. What sounds like an answer to one person sounds like silence to another. What seems like a providential gift to one registers as blind luck for another. The meaning we give to what happens in our lives is our final, inviolable freedom. Only you can say whether God answered you. You can ask someone with more experience than you to help you decide what the answer means, but even then the choice is yours. Are you waiting for God to answer you, or is your life the answer you have been seeking, hiding in plain sight?
I think the bottom line is that those of us who pray do so not because we believe certain intellectual propositions about the value of prayer, but simply because we cannot keep from praying. I pray because I believe in praying.
It is our worldview that permits or forbids prayer, and no one arrives at a worldview on wholly rational grounds. There are all kinds of emotional and historical influences. Therefore to make a rational or intellectual argument about the importance of prayer is fairly worthless.
We pray because we can’t help it; we pray because we don’t know what else to do; We pray because God’s Spirit in us calls us to pray. We pray because the struggle to be fully human in the face of superhuman powers requires it.
In our world, We are caught unwillingly and often unknowingly in a web of affluence and materialism that keep millions in poverty. We are caught in strands of unearned power and undeserved privilege that continue the oppression of racism. We are caught in nets of fear, silence or helplessness that allow violence to go unchecked. The act of praying is itself one of the means by which we can engage those Powers and forces that keep us unaware and hold us against our will. The act of praying is the way the secret spell of the Powers over us is broken and we begin to regain the freedom which is our birthright and potential as children made in the image of God
Walter Wink says that prayer is the field hospital in which the diseased spirituality that we have contracted from the Powers and systems of our world can most directly be diagnosed and treated.
Be clear that the kind of prayer we’re talking about may or may not involve regular regimens, may or may not be sacramental, may or may not be contemplative, may or may not take traditional religious forms.
This sort of prayer is not a religious practice imposed from the outside, but an existential struggle:
against the “impossible”,
against an anti human collective atmosphere,
against images of worth and value that stunt and wither full human life.
This sort of Intercessory prayer is spiritual defiance of what is in the name
of what God has promised. When we pray for the hungry and homeless we defy the current situation in the name of the justice and well-being God has promised for all.
Intercessory prayer visualizes an alternative future to the one apparently fated by the momentum of current contradictory forces. When we pray for non-violent schools and neighborhoods we are visualizing schools and neighborhoods functioning with equity, respect and skilled ways of resolving differences so people have no need to resort to violence
On the other hand, those who have made peace with injustice, who receive their identity from alienated role-definitions, and who benefit economically from social inequities, are not likely to be such pray-ers
Intercessory prayer infuses the air of a time-yet-to-be into the suffocating atmosphere of the present. New alternatives become feasible. The unexpected becomes suddenly possible, because people on earth have invoked heaven, the home of possibilities, and have been heard. What happens next, happens because people have prayed.
This is the politics of hope. Hope envisions a future and then acts as if that future is now irresistible thus helping to create the reality for which hope longs. The future is not closed. There are fields of forces whose interactions are somewhat predictable. But how they will interact is not. Even a small number of people, firmly committed to the new inevitability on which they have fixed their imaginations, can decisively affect the shape the future takes. These shapers of the future are the intercessors, who call out of the future the longed-for new present. In the New Testament, the name and texture and aura of that future is
God’s domination-free order, the reign of God.
What Christians have too long worshiped is the God of Stoicism to whose immutable will we can only surrender ourselves, conforming our will to the unchangeable will of the deity. But this is not the God of the Bible and this is not the way of biblical prayer. Scripture calls us into the presence of Yahweh who chooses circuitous paths in the desert and whose ways are subject to change without notice. This is a God who works with us and for us, to make and keep human life humane. And what God does depends on the intercession of those who care enough to try to shape a future more humane than the present.
Sweet, sappy, polite prayer is utterly foreign to the Bible. Biblical prayer is impertinent, persistent, shameless, and sometimes downright rude. It is more like haggling in an oriental bazaar than the polite monologues in most churches.
A primary example is the story we heard from Genesis. When Abraham discovers that Yahweh is about to destroy the city of Sodom, where his nephew Lot lives with his wife and two daughters, Abraham blocks God’s path.
“Suppose there are 50 righteous within the city; will you then sweep away the place and not forgive it for the 50 righteous who are there?” Far be it from you to do such a thing!” Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?”
When God agrees to spare Sodom if there are 50, Abraham presses the issue: Would you spare the city if there were 40? How about 30? 20? 10?
God agrees, and though 10 are not found there, God saves Lot’s family, though they are but 4. The Moral: it pays to haggle with God.
Martin Luther understood this aspect of prayer well: “Our Lord God could not but hear me; I threw the sack down before his door. I rubbed God’s ear with all God’s promises about hearing prayer.” I witnessed such prayer when United Hope had their anointing service for Rich. They really rubbed God’s ear with all God’s promises of hearing prayer and healing. They were only following the instructions in Luke’s gospel to ask and seek. They were trusting the promises that our heavenly parent would not scare us with a snake when we asked for fish, nor trick us with a spider if we asked for an egg. And I was embarrassed and humbled and felt loved by their impertinence.
I’ve yet to find any easy answers to many of the difficult questions about prayer. However I believe in praying and so I persist even when the responses I observe are few and far between. I notice that the questions change as I continue the journey and I observe that no two people travel the exact same route. I also believe that our lives are inextricably bound up with the lives of other people. So much depends on things we can never control. But I am confident that no loving action, no loving gesture, no loving thought is ever wasted. So I am committed to taking time to send such love out into this world trusting it will be enough.
Close with page 12 “You with ears bent close to our lips” from Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth: Prayers of Walter Brueggemann,
Preached by Anita Smith Buckwalter
Other sources:
Chapter 11, “The Practice of Being in the Presence of God” from An Altar in the World by Barbara Brown Taylor
Engaging the Powers by Walter Wink
