Scripture: 1Corinthians 14:6-19
As I was beginning my sermon based on the story of Balaam last week, which I sensed and several of you confirmed afterwards is a fairly obscure story, I said that I just might pick a few more relatively obscure Biblical stories to preach on in the coming weeks. I decided against that. It can be sort of fun to find some neglected stories, and my experience is that you just never know; sometimes such stories lead you in some interesting and unexpected directions and cause you to think about some things you didn’t expect to think about when you started.
But as I thought more about it, I found that my mood is more prayerful than playful these days, at least as far as preaching is concerned. I don’t mean that to sound as though my mood is somehow particularly grim or sober or troubled or needful these days. I guess the first thing I have to say about prayer today, and I will have several things to say about prayer today, the first thing is that prayer doesn’t have to be any of those things I just described: grim, sober, troubled, or needful. It is not necessarily, though of course it can be, something we do in times of stress or crisis. So I’m not suggesting that I’m feeling particularly crisis stricken these days. But I do feel more prayerful than playful, and so I decided not to go the direction of seeking out some oddball stories to preach on. If you were hoping for oddball stories, my apologies.
Since I am feeling sort of prayerful these days…I guess that means that I don’t always feel prayerful, which I will confess to…since I’m feeling sort of prayerful these days, I thought I would do some sermons about prayer. Today’s sermon will be a kind of introduction to a few additional sermons on prayer and praying. I have some reservations about doing this. For one thing, I’ve given quite a number of sermons about prayer both specifically during the time I’ve been at Sojourners and over the longer time that I’ve been giving sermons. It seems like well-traveled ground in some ways…not sure that I have much new to say…not that you would have necessarily heard anything I said before—some of it is quite a while ago—or certainly that you would necessarily remember anything I’ve said before even if you had heard it, but still there’s the “been there, done that” feeling that bothers me a little, even if it doesn’t bother you.
Also, whenever I’ve preached about prayer in the past it has been with some reservations and some sheepishness. Prayer is one of those things that is much better done than talked about. I suppose you could say that about just about everything of importance, that it’s better done than talked about, but especially so with prayer, it seems to me. One of my treasured collections of prayers is called “The Language of the Heart”, and it seems to me an appropriate title. Prayer is the language of the heart, and so as soon as we start talking about it, analyzing it, explaining it, expounding on it, prescribing it, defining it, intellectualizing it in any way, we violate the spirit of the very thing we’re talking about.
And it’s not just the intellectualizing. Besides being the language of the heart, prayer might also be described as an emptying of the self, of trying to enter some place, some region of the soul, where we are not at the center of things, where God is at the center of things, and/or where at least other people or parts of the world around us become the center, at least something outside the self that we can focus our whole being on. Ideally, prayer would be completely un-self-conscious, both because it would be spontaneous and would bubble up from somewhere deep inside, but also because the hope of any prayer, or at least most kinds of prayer is to lose that thing we call the self with all its needs and desires and cautions and rationalizations, to lose ourselves in pervasive love, in wonder, in mystery, in God.
That’s not the only way to think about prayer. It’s one way I have. Ideally, I say, prayer would be completely un-self-conscious, its very purpose being to make us less conscious of self, more conscious of God. And so again, the more we talk, the further away we get from the real thing, the actual spirit of prayer. It’s hard, it’s not impossible and there’s nothing wrong with trying, but it’s hard just from this perspective to preach about prayer, hard to do so anyway without some sheepishness.
But, we live in the real world, not some idealized world, and what might ideally be so is not necessarily so. Some of us may find that prayer comes naturally, that we can fall head over heels into prayer without hardly trying; all we need to do is settle ourselves, take a few deep breaths, and there we are: lost in this spiritual place we call prayer. My guess is that for many at Sojourners that is not the case. But I won’t speak for others; I will speak for myself. I confessed earlier that I am not always in a prayerful mood. I will now also confess that I don’t find it easy to pray un-self-consciously. In fact I find it almost impossible. It’s not just a problem of how one is to preach about prayer un-self-consciously, but also for me a matter of how I am to pray un-self-consciously.
Because there are all these questions. Sometimes, it’s true, prayers do come spontaneously to me, just sort of materialize in my mind or in my chest or on my lips or in my throat or around the eyes. That happens. But it’s also true that questions arise, all sorts of questions arise, just as spontaneously. Is anyone listening? Does my understanding of God, small as it is, does my sense of who God is include a being who actually listens to me in the same way a compassionate human being might listen to me? What do we mean when we plead for God to hear our prayer, or whenever we use the language of God hearing our prayers?
Do I believe in an anthropomorphic God who sorts through all the prayer petitions human beings send her way and decides which ones she’ll pay attention to today, or whose petitions will be granted today? What do we mean by God answering prayer? If it’s not the same thing as granting requests, what is it? Maybe the answer we get is not the answer we asked for or were expecting? Maybe it’s on God’s timetable not ours? Do I believe God intervenes in our lives? Arbitrarily? Mysteriously? Or is the point of prayer more like the old saying that “prayer doesn’t change things; prayer changes people, and people change things?”
Does sort of accidental prayer count as prayer, like when someone who’s having surgery soon passes through your mind as you’re driving to the grocery store and you want to say something like “I hope everything goes well” or “bless you” but never really get that far; the person is there for a few moments and then gone. Or when for some reason the miraculousness of creation strikes you in just such a way that you’re overcome with the holiness of it all and you just want to say thank you, except that it’s so much more than thank you and you don’t know how to say it and before you know it you’re back in the real world? Is that prayer? Or does prayer have to be more intentional? Does it mean planning some time to be alone, minimizing distractions, and then praying for people or praying for some thing in some sustained and focused way?
Or are all these questions, every one of them, way too left brained, way too “rational”, way too “logical”, and just not quite right? Maybe so. Maybe they are. Maybe you have what you think are good answers for some of these questions. Maybe you don’t have these questions, but have different ones. Maybe you think these questions don’t need answers, or don’t deserve answers. Maybe you just want to ignore these questions, all questions, so you can just go ahead and pray without being troubled by such faithless distractions. But whatever may be the case, whatever the questions, whatever the questions about the questions, whatever the objections to the questions, whatever our desire that they would just go away, for some of us they don’t. They just keep coming. Whatever form they come in, they arise unbidden, spontaneously, so that our prayer life, whatever it may look like, has these questions hovering around, mixing in with the prayers themselves, making our prayer lives more complicated than we would like them to be, making it hard to pray with a “purity of heart”. What to do about it.
One thing I’m not going to do is give sermonic answers to all those questions I just threw out there. I’m not going to give answers to any of those questions. You probably knew that. One result of my having preached on prayer, or at least some aspect of prayer, fairly often over the years is that I’ve come to realize that every answer I’ve tried to give or am ever going to give to any question about prayer is going to be at best partial, which is to say not the whole truth. Prayer is so varied, so multi-dimensional, has so many layers and so much depth that any statement I make is going to be not quite what I want to say, much less a definitive answer of any kind.
In one sense that’s all right, I suppose. All statements I make, or anyone else makes, on any topic that is in any way theological, religious, or spiritual is inevitably going to be a half truth, or less than a half truth. And there’s a place for that, especially since that’s all we’re ever really capable of. But I’m not in that place right now. Maybe I will be again sometime in the future, but I’m not in that place right now, where I would try to do my current best to give a definition of prayer, or tell you why I think it “works”, or in what way it “works”, or talk about all the kinds of prayer that aren’t even supposed to “work”, or argue for why we should do it more, none of that.
What I do want to do before I launch into several more sermons on prayer is simply to validate the questions, my questions and any questions you may have as well. There are lots of scriptures that mention prayer or touch on prayer in some way, and I didn’t start with any particular one in mind, so I pulled out my concordance and was checking out different scriptures seeing if any appealed to me. I came across one that did that I don’t think I’ve ever preached on before. As you heard, it’s from First Corinthians 14.
There’s a good reason why many preachers in general, and me in particular, are not just naturally drawn to First Corinthians 14. Toward the end of the chapter there is this statement: “As in all the churches of the saints, women (do you know what’s coming?) should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.” If those few verses not only tainted the 14th chapter of First Corinthians but gave you a bad attitude about everything else Paul wrote, I would understand. I’m a lot that way myself. I feel like if I’m going to read the letters of Paul at all, I need to be ready to encounter such things, and it makes me a little, shall we say, less than enthusiastic about reading any of the writings of Paul.
But then I remind myself that, for instance, there is also First Corinthians 13, a lyrical passage that really should not be read just at weddings, where just a few verses before those ones about women not speaking and being subordinate Paul wrote: “If I speak in the tongues of mortals or of angels but do not have love, I am nothing more than a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing…” and so on to the end: “…for now we see in a mirror dimly (through a glass darkly), but then face to face. Now I know in part, then I will know fully, even as I have been fully understood. Now, in the meantime, faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” I would hate to lose these words just because Paul also wrote some words I really wish he hadn’t written.
In between are some other words where he is commenting on the phenomenon of speaking in tongues, which apparently some in the Corinthian church were enamored of. He admits that speaking in tongues can be a kind of prayer, an expression that is inspired by God and that reaches out to God, and he doesn’t forbid it. But he goes on to say: “If I pray in a tongue, my spirit prays but my mind is unproductive. What should I do then? I will pray with the spirit, but I will pray with the mind also. I will sing praise with the spirit, but I will sing praise with the mind also.” I am grateful for those words and I chose the passage because of those words in particular: “I will pray with the mind also.” In other words, it’s important that the words make some sense.
I don’t know exactly or everything that Paul meant to say with those words, but one of the thoughts I have as a result of those words is that those questions our minds ask about prayer are not best thought of as obstacles to prayer, hindrances to true prayer, things we try to get rid of so that we can pray better. Far better and truer to say that those questions are part of the fabric of our praying. We don’t have to struggle to answer them so that we can say we’ve dealt with that little problem and don’t have to deal with it any more. We don’t have to ignore them, dismiss them, or deny them. They are just there part of the fabric of our praying. If, that is, our questions also, like our prayers, if our questions too come from the heart, which I believe all good and sincere questions do. It is possible to ask questions more in the spirit of playing intellectual games, or just out of sheer skepticism or cynicism and nothing more. But sincere questions about prayer come from the same hopes, fears, worries, sorrows, gratitudes, uncertainties, and joys that our prayers themselves come from. They are not the enemies of prayer but part of it.
And so as I approach another few sermons on prayer, I will not be trying to answer those questions I raised earlier, or any others like them, not because it is wrong to ask them, or even wrong to try to address them, but because for now I want to just let them be. Instead, what I intend to do is turn to the words of others, not their thoughts about prayer but the written prayers of others. I do this fairly often just as a way of helping me enter a more prayerful state of mind, since I admit it doesn’t always come naturally. For the next few weeks though, I intend to linger some over the words of people whose written prayers have spoken to me in the past when I have read them. My thoughts and meditations in the weeks ahead will not be reflections on the topic of prayer but will be thoughts guided by the words of the prayers of other human beings. Perhaps as a result the coming sermons will become a little less like sermons and a little more like prayers. That would be something worth praying for. Amen.
Jim Bundy
July 26, 2009