We talked about prayer--which I preached about Sunday. I have lots of issues with the 'normal' understanding of prayer. In fact, I don't think 'prayer' is something we 'do' so much as it is a way we 'be' in the world. I don't want to pray a lot--I want to 'be' prayerful. I want to have my eyes wide open and my heart wide open and my life wide open to the presence of the 'divine' that, I assert, surrounds and envelopes us. If we only look, watch and listen.
I don't have what I said about prayer on Sunday written down in any way that would make sense if I put it here. But I did find a sermon from 3 years ago on my computer that addresses some of my concerns and begins to flesh out some of my thinking on prayer.
I'll share it with you (it's on the same lessons from last Sunday--thank God for a three year lectionary!) and come back to prayer another time.
Prayer revisited…
Today
I want to talk about prayer and say some things that the church usually doesn’t
teach about prayer. Two quick stories—decades and time zones apart—that will
help me get started in the right direction.
First
story:When my father was stationed in
England just before the invasion of Europe, he had bad problems with his teeth.
Against the rules of both the Army and the English government, he went into
London and found a civilian dentist. The dentist knew the rules and told my
father he couldn’t possibly work on his teeth. As my father was leaving, the
dentist shook his hand and gave him the Masonic hand-shake which, my father,
being a Mason, returned. “Ok,” the British dentist told Dad, “sit down and I’ll see what we can do….”
Second story: When I was a new priest in Charleston, West Virginia, I rushed to the
hospital because John Weaver, a teenage member of St. James Church, had been
hit by a truck as he walked along the highway. John died shortly after I got to
the hospital and when I was holding his mother, Bea, she said to me through her
great, global grief—“Did God let John die because I didn’t pray well enough?”
That is the most painful and
disturbing question anyone has ever asked me about God. Bea Weaver, mourning
her son, imagined God was waiting for the “secret handshake”, the right words,
the correct formula, prayer devout and impassioned enough to let her son live
instead of die.
What
kind of God would that be? That would be a monstrous, fickle, irresponsible,
crazy God. No God worth our worship, no God who truly loves us, would make
prayer into some kind of parlor game where we have to somehow “solve the
puzzle” before our prayers are answered.
Yet
that is the way the church, more often than not, teaches people to pray. The
church tends to teach people that there is a “right way” to pray, that there is
some skill to be learned, some practice to become facile and adroit with, some
formula that “works” when dealing with God.
Today’s
lessons, I want to suggest, are not helpful at all in wrestling with how to
pray. In fact, and this is just me talking—it isn’t the Truth—today’s lessons
teach us something wrong and misleading about prayer.
The
lesson from Genesis leads us to believe that God can be “bargained” with and
manipulated. On first glance, its rather interesting—even amusing—to see how
Abraham is able to convince God to “lower the ante” on destroying Sodom down to
10 righteous people that can save the city from God’s wrath.
Theologically,
though, that kind of God is as disturbing as a God who would let John Weaver
die because his mother didn’t pray quite right.
No
better is the God in Jesus’ parable about the inopportune neighbor. The
message, it seems to me, is this: “annoy God enough and just to shut you up God
will give you what you ask for….”
That’s
a deeply troubling thought to me. The rest of it is better—the ask
and search
and
knock part, how God will give and find and open—and
the part about God knowing what to give us—a fish rather than a snake, an egg
rather than a scorpion. At least these thoughts reveal a God who deeply and
profoundly “cares” for us and wishes us wholeness and wellness.
But
the whole “prayer” deal is problematic to me. I can’t believe God operates on
the Gallup Poll—though the church seems to teach us that both persistence and
quantity of prayers are important and may just result in answered prayer.
I
want to suggest—just as a suggestion, not the Truth—that maybe prayer is not so
much a skill to be learned as it is a
possibility to be embraced. What if
“prayer” is not so much something we “do” as it is something we seek to
“be”? What if “learning to pray” is not
so much learning what to say to God
as it is realizing how to be with God?
I’m
not suggesting that we don’t DO “prayer”. In fact, that’s why we gather here
each time we gather—we gather to “do the work” of Prayer. That is as it should
be. What I am suggesting is that “doing” prayer—repeating words hoping we’ll
find the right ones, looking for the secret handshake, trying to influence
God—isn’t “prayer” at it’s most profound and significant level.
What
I am suggesting, just as a possibility, is that living “prayerfully” is the key
to “learning to pray”.
What
I am suggesting is that the deepest kind of prayer is something we soak up on
an almost cellular level, in the deepest part of us, in our souls. This
understanding of “prayer” makes it accessible to all of us all the time. It is
more akin to listening than to talking. It is more akin to breathing than to
thinking. “Prayer”, it seems to me, might just be a kind of awareness,
a kind of “being awake” to God, a kind of dance we dance with the Lover of
souls.
****
To
bring all that near, let’s look at Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer.
First
of all, when Jesus tells his disciples “how to pray” he begins with God: “Father,
hallowed be your name. Your Kingdom come.”
Prayer—deep
prayer, soaking prayer, prayer from the soul—begins and ends with God.
Hopefully, praying “gives” us something, “shows the way”, “opens the door”—but
prayer is about God, about being present to God, about being open to God’s
holiness and God’s will and God’s unfathomable love.
“Give
us each day our daily bread.” Prayer is about what we “need”, not what
we “want”. Just enough bread to fill us today; just enough courage to inspire
us today; just enough patience to relax us today; just enough love to let us
love everyone we need to today. Learning to expect what we “need” rather than
what we “want” answers countless prayers we haven’t even prayed yet.
“Forgive
us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us,” Wow, that’s pretty “bad news” for me and I
suspect for you! If the disciples had had their wits about them, they wouldn’t
have asked Jesus how to “pray”, they would have asked him to teach them how to
“forgive”…. Prayer, it seems to me, is as much about “our forgiving” as “God’s
forgiving”—the deepest prayer is forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness….
“And
do not bring us to the time of trial….”
Lots
of people tell me they don’t know how to pray. And, if I were a betting man,
I’d bet my house that everyone here has, in a moment of trial, said something
like “O God…” or “Help me…” or “What now?”
If
you’ve ever done that, you know how to pray. It’s really that simple, just
offering up whatever pain or fear or anxiety or loss is with you in the moment.
That’s Prayer. That’s how Jesus tells us to pray….
Many
people love the Lord's Prayer from the New Zealand Prayerbook that expands and
enriches what Jesus told us to pray. I prefer the minimalist method. This is my
Lord's Prayer.
“You are holy; your Will, not mine; give me what I need each
day; teach me to forgive and forgive me; keep me safe from myself and save me
from 'me'; you are holy. Amen.”
Emmanuel, Killingworth/July 28,
2013/jim bradley
