Scripture: Mark 9:14-29
I have resolved to devote myself more to prayer in the year ahead. By that I mean partly, I think, that I resolve to devote more time to prayer in the year ahead, though I’m not completely sure about that. I’m not sure I have a good grasp on how much time I spent in prayer over the last year, or how I would measure that, or whether it’s even very important to try to measure it. Maybe I intend to spend more time in prayer this year. But what I really mean by devoting myself more to prayer in the year ahead is more that I intend to be more intentional about it, and more intense about it, than I have customarily been up to now. This sermon is a first step in keeping that resolution.
For many people, I’m sure, prayer falls into the category of being a self-evident good and therefore doesn’t really need a lot of elaborate explanation or justification, and in fact would be better off without much explanation or justification at all. From a certain perspective it’s one of those things that it’s better to just do than to talk about. I understand that perspective and sympathize with it to some degree. Whenever you start talking abstractly and theoretically about something that by its nature is a matter of the heart and needs to be direct and immediate, there is a good possibility of doing more harm than good. So theorizing—or sermonizing—about prayer is a risky thing. But I’m going to take the risk this morning. It’s what I feel called to do this morning.
Partly because Peg and Ken Witmer are joining the church this morning. One meaning of the act of joining in my mind is that symbolically we are saying that their prayer concerns, Ken and Peg’s prayer concerns, are not just their prayer concerns. They become our prayer concerns. We commit ourselves—they do and we do—to praying for each other and with each other and on behalf of each other. This is a community of prayer, among other things, and when people join the church, I am led to reflect on that.
I also feel called to talk about prayer this morning partly because several people independently said to me in recent weeks that they felt we needed as a church to pray more, to be more prayerful, as we go about our business as a church. I readily agreed with that. Who can be against prayer, after all, especially if you’re the pastor of the church? But it is something that I think is worth reflecting on, and not just accepting as a self-evident good. Why do we need to be more prayerful? In what way? What do we mean by that? It may well be that we need to pray more, or to pray more fervently. It may well be that we need to be more prayerful. It may also be that we need to be more thoughtful about prayer. That too is why I am feeling called to this questionable activity of preaching about prayer.
Let me start with some things that I think prayer is not. Prayer is not an effort to lobby God. It is not an effort to be a squeaky wheel. It is not an effort on our part to convince God of the rightness of our thinking or the goodness of our desires. It is not an attempt to get God to pay attention to our needs or to enlist God on our side. It is not in any way an effort to get our own way, not an effort to cajole God into doing what we want God to do or expect that God should do.
This kind of prayer that I’m being so hard on, that I’m saying is a kind of prayer that prayer is not, is often referred to as petitionary prayer. We petition God for something we want. We ask God for something. That is the form our prayers, at least for many of us, the form our prayers often take. And I should say that in spite of anything that I have just said, or anything I might say later, I do believe prayers of petition are ok. It’s ok to ask things of God. If I want, for my own sake and for the sake of people who love me, to emerge from depression or kick an addiction…if I want a person I care about to get well from a disease or not to be in such sorrow…if I want a relationship I am involved in to be repaired or a spouse, son, or daughter to come home from war safely…if I want something that is not trivial or mean that comes from my heart, how could I not think it is ok to bring that wish to God? Do we self-censor every prayer that dares to ask for something because it is not theologically sophisticated enough? Do we muzzle the very prayers that we may feel most deeply? No, I don’t want to suggest that. In fact, I don’t know about you, but I would have trouble shutting down those kinds of prayers coming from myself. They just seem to erupt spontaneously without asking my permission. So I am not making a motion to do away with prayers of petition. In fact in many ways they may be the simplest, purest form of prayer.
But at the same time, the moment we begin to use that kind of language in our prayers, the moment we dare to ask God to grant some hope or wish of ours, we have stepped through a door and we are in a place we cannot claim to begin to understand. We are in a spiritual wilderness and are surrounded by questions. What am I to think and how am I to react if what I want to happen does not happen? If the person I’m praying for does not get well, continues on some path that is self-destructive and hurtful to others, can’t seem to find any peace or happiness, does that mean that that was the will of God? Does the will of God have anything to do with it? Or, is God a different kind of presence in those situations that have given rise to my prayer? Is God not so much at the other end of my prayer as within it? What do we expect of God, after all? What do I expect of God? Does God in any way intervene in my life? And in what way and under what conditions?
We pray a prayer for someone, a prayer that is pure and simple and loving, and yet as we do we surround ourselves with all these questions. And we know they are there. And we know that we don’t have answers for them. And we know God does not sit at a desk in heaven sorting through all our prayers to see which ones she considers most sincere or most eloquent or most deserving. But how does God relate to our prayers? And who is this God, not the creative power of the universe, but the God Jesus called Abba? We can pretend we have really great answers to all those questions, but it would be a pretense, wouldn’t it? We don’t. We pray mostly not because we should but because we can’t help it, but when we do, we enter a spiritual wilderness.
I want to affirm the honesty, reality, the need and the truth of prayers of petition. I want to deny that we have any claim on God or that prayer should be seen as a technique for having things go our way, or that we have any real knowledge about how prayer “works”. And I think it is possible to say both of those things at the same time. I believe we need to say both of those things at the same time.
But having said all of that, I need to go on, because when I say that I have resolved to devote myself more to prayer in the year ahead, I do not have in mind primarily prayers of petition. And when I hear people say that we need to be more prayerful, I don’t think that’s quite the kind of prayer they are thinking of either. Because prayer has to do not just with asking things; it has to do with putting ourselves in a “right relation” to God and to other people. It has to do with trying to get in the right place, a kind of spiritual “positioning”, orienting ourselves. It has to do with attitude and location. Praying of course may take all sorts of different forms, but to put it bluntly, not to pray is to hold God at arm’s length, or perhaps to put yourself in a position of walking away from God.
More positively, prayer serves to describe our spiritual location, to place us somewhere in relation to God, which is not to say that it serves to identify us as God’s best friend and ally. In fact, much to the contrary. I was talking before about how prayers of petition have the effect of thrusting us into a kind of spiritual wilderness. I don’t know whether you heard that phrase as having negative connotations—a spiritual wilderness sounds like something you might want to avoid—but I didn’t mean it negatively. I believe it is where we are supposed to be.
Because prayer is surrounded by all sorts of questions, because there is nothing given about prayer, because there is nothing certain about prayer, because reaching out for God is such a mysterious, that is mystery-filled, thing, it undercuts all our certainties. It undercuts our very firm-sounding creeds. It undercuts all our well-constructed theologies. It even may undercut those certainties of disbelief we may have, those areas where we are rock solid sure what we don’t believe. They can be undercut as well. And so we are likely to find ourselves much more in the position of the father in the scripture reading who cries out, “I believe. Help my unbelief.” Prayer puts us in this kind of tentative, paradoxical, unclear relation to God which is a relation, not a non-relation, to God and which, I repeat, is a good place to be.
I know this way of looking at prayer may be a bit counter-intuitive for some people. We often imagine that we pray in order to get things cleared up for us in some way. When we have a difficult decision to make, or a situation that is troubling us somehow, we often say we will pray about it, meaning I think that we hope that by bringing God into the picture and be engaging in the process of prayer that, even if we don’t hear some authoritative voice telling us what the right or best thing to think or do would be, that somehow the spirit will work through this process to give us some clarity or peace with whatever it is we’re struggling with. And sometimes prayer does help to un-muddle our thinking. That’s true too. But sometimes, when we are already excessively un-muddled in our thinking, prayer may help to make us less sure of ourselves, less sure that our way is the right way or the only way, less sure that we can be very clear about the things of God. That is a good place to be.
Prayer is not just an outpouring of the heart. Much prayer seems that way. Prayers of praise, for instance, that give expression to the gratitude that is within us, the most basic and profound sense of gratitude. And those prayers of petition I was talking about also tend to be outpourings of heart—want someone’s safety or health. But prayer is always more than that, and needs to be more than that.
And in fact it is always more than that. When we pray for someone’s health, are there not always many implied prayers that go along with it, not simply that an illness end but that in the midst of illness God’s presence be known, that everyone involved be strengthened to live through and love through the situation whatever may happen, that even while we pray for a specific outcome we confess that we are not in control, and so on. We may or may not say such prayers out loud. We may or may not have any words for such prayers. But our prayers are never as simple as they may seem.
Anytime we pray, we plunge ourselves into a realm where we are asking ourselves, consciously or not quite consciously, what it is we are praying for. It is always more than our words convey. Being in prayer helps us to be care-ful about what we are praying for, to enlarge and expand our hopes. We pray for someone to get well. We pray they will be cured. In the process we may be praying for healing that is more than a cure, different from a cure. In the process we pray for peace and for strength and for love, and for faith to lead us through an unknown future. Being prayerful, being devoted to prayer, helps us enlarge and refine and deepen those things that we hope for. It puts us in an attitude of looking for all that is worth hoping for. It is true for churches too. We may be trying to accomplish this and that, hoping for this and that in the life of the church. To be in an attitude of prayer regarding the church is to put ourselves in a position of being thoughtful and care-ful about what we are hoping for the church, more than what is easily said.
Just one more thought for today. Prayer puts us in a place of compassion. In the practice of praying for people, we locate ourselves in a place of compassion. That’s why prayer is not just a matter of putting ourselves in some right relation to God. It’s also a matter of our relationship to others. And it’s not, of course, that prayer is necessary in order to be compassionate. It’s not that we learn to be compassionate through prayer. It’s just that in my understanding of prayer, in my experience of prayer, it puts me in a place of compassion that I am not necessarily in otherwise. And that too is a good place to be. It is the place I know I want to be. It is the place I know I need to be. It is the place I trust we all want to be as we move forward as a community. There are lots of reasons why being prayerful puts us in a good place. There are several I’ve thought of that I didn’t get around to today and will save for another time. But that it puts us in a place of compassion is one that is enough all by itself, and that is probably the most important of all. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 9, 2005