Be with us, O Lord, for if
you are with us, nothing else matters; and if you are not with us, nothing else
matters. Amen.
What is prayer? That is perhaps one of the most
fundamental questions of our faith. And the deeper we go into that question
about the nature of prayer, the more questions we end up with. Many of you know
that I spent most of June at Sewanee, and while I was there I took a class on
using poetry and fiction in preaching. One story that we read was called “The
Question of Rain.” In it, a parishioner comes to the minster with an emergency
– the severe drought that the town is going through has no end in sight. He
asks the minister to consider doing a liturgy for rain on Sunday. The minister
though is uncomfortable with the prospect of using an entire Sunday service to
pray for rain, but says that he’ll be sure to include a plea for rain to be in
the Prayers of the People. This doesn’t satisfy the parishioner.
The next day as the minister walks through town, he
notices a lot of people walking out of the factory and soon learns that’s
because there isn’t enough water to run the factory, and that these people have
been laid off. Someone says to him, “I guess this doesn’t change your mind
about praying for some rain, does it?” The farmers beg him to devote the hour
on Sunday morning to praying for rain, on behalf of their animals and crops
that are dying. Next, the matriarchs of the church to come visit with him, and
by the next evening the Vestry has called a meeting to consider the topic.
But the minister insists: we have to trust in God’s
providence; one prayer is as good as an entire liturgy; that he is a minister,
not a witch-doctor who rattles bones and a does a rain dance. People begin to
question his faithfulness: perhaps he doubts that God is listening, or that God
could make it rain. The minister goes to visit his former seminary professor,
and then he speaks with his wife about it, and then comes to realize that
everyone is doing the best they can in the drought, and if a Sunday of rain
prayers is the “daily bread” that they need, there’s no harm in caring for the
people with a service dedicated to rain. Later, that Sunday afternoon, the
storm clouds roll in and it rains harder than anyone ever remembers it raining.
I want to be clear that, like you all, when it comes to
prayer, I have more questions than I do answers. I don’t propose to explain how
prayer “works,” but rather I offer this sermon as one reflection on the
importance of prayer. Prayer is not like an exact-change only vending machine,
where in order to get what you want, you simply need to gather the correct
coins and put them into the machine in the correct order. This is not a sermon
on the mechanics of prayer, but rather on how prayer opens us more fully to
God.
Turning to Luke, Jesus’ comments on prayer not only
provide a model, but also a rationale for a prayerful faith. These verses
comprise the most well-known and often prayed prayer ever. In Jesus’ prayer,
God is seen as being related to us as a father who sustains us and invites us
into a cycle of forgiveness. Thus, the Lord’s Prayer is focused on relationship
– between us and God, between God’s Kingdom and this world, between us and our
neighbors. What the Lord’s Prayer says about God is that God is accessible and
relatable to us, and prayer becomes a means of connection to the fullness of
God.
Scripture tells us that God is able to do infinitely more
than we can ask or imagine. And prayer, specifically the prayer for God’s
Kingdom to come, is a posture of openness towards the infinite possibilities
which exist in God. Prayer is the radical and subversive belief that the world
is not limited to what is right in front of our eyes, that something new and
unprecedented could happen. At the beginning of Genesis, when God creates the
world, God doesn’t think Creation into being, nor is the world created by the
snap of the fingers. No, God creates by speaking, “Let there be light.” And
there was light. By simply speaking something, it possesses a reality that it
did not have when it was unspoken. Prayer taps us into the creative and
imaginative power of God to create new possibilities.
While prayer opens us to the fullness of God, prayer is
also an invitation for us to open ourselves fully to God. Jesus suggests that
in our praying, we should be persistent like someone knocking at the door in
the middle of the night, trusting that God will answer and respond not with a
scorpion or snake, but with food. And I trust that God will do just that, but
the word “persistent” is a poor translation of the word found in Luke. A fairer
translation of that word would be “shamelessness.” It’s not a call toward the
virtuous sounding “persistence,” but rather an invitation to be undignified,
brutally honest, and shameless in our asking as we pound on the door. Prayer is
an invitation summon up the courage to go into those places of your life where
you are your truest self. And when we are in those depths, we can pray out of
the fullness of our being, imaging what the answered prayer for wholeness might
look like.
The
reason why the Psalms are still used so much today isn’t because they are a
part of Scripture, it is because they go into the depths of life, and give
voice to the soul, calling forth new possibilities in God. We could decide to
treat the Psalms like any other reading from the Old Testament, just hearing
from that book on occasion. But no, there is hardly a service in this church,
whether it be a wedding, funeral, baptism, Morning or Evening Prayer, or Holy
Eucharist that we don’t pray with a Psalm.
Consider
these verses from this morning’s Psalm: “Will you be displeased with us for
ever? will you prolong your anger from age to age? / Will you not give us life
again, that your people may rejoice in you? / Show us your mercy, O Lord, and
grant us your salvation.” That is an honest prayer made with no sense of shame
before our Creator and Redeemer. It is the prayer of children asking a loving
father for their daily bread.
There is
no one right way or magic formula to prayer, but rather just a conversation of
speaking and listening. Prayer doesn’t need to be any more elaborate than those
honest truths and longings of our lives. These are the sorts of prayers that
Jesus would have known – honest prayers about asking for our daily bread, for
sparing us from the time of trial, for forgiving us. This week, you might see
what happens when you take five minutes to let your soul speak to God without
the filter of your mind getting in the way. And then spend a few more minutes listening,
paying attention to where the Spirit might be focusing your attention. If
prayer is conversation, then an answered prayer might not be a result out there
in the world, but rather a word spoken back to you, an invitation to see a new
possibility that God is offering.
Jesus’ invitation
is to pray with all of our being – to connect fully to God; to verbalize to God
the things that we can’t imagine ever saying to anyone else, trusting that some
new possibility will come from that prayer. We can divulge our deepest longings
in prayer, knowing that we are not alone. By naming our hopes and dreams aloud,
we work with God in the bringing of God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven.
We can revel in our joys and sorrow in our pain, welcoming God into those
places of our soul, and being welcomed into God’s very same hopes and dreams
for your well-being. It could be that part of the journey towards freedom from
addiction, finding forgiveness in your heart, or encountering healing in
brokenness comes from your prayer which unites you to God’s creative and
redeeming possibilities of faith, hope, and love. Prayer is being open to the
realized impossibilities of God’s grace.
Jesus’ prayer invites us to be shameless in bringing all
of ourselves to God in prayer, and so there is nothing that cannot be prayed
about, no feeling or action that cannot be offered to God. I wonder what things
from the depths of your life you might bring to God in prayer this week, what
impossibilities might come to be through prayer, how might your prayers be
shameless, how might praying the Lord’s Prayer each day this week with
intentionality change your life, and in turn, our world. As for all of the
other questions about praying, such as how prayer works – thanks be to God that
we don’t have to fully understand prayer in order to do it.
