Scripture: 1Corinthians 13
I quoted portions of 1Corinthians 13 last week and in the process of doing that I made the comment as a sort of an aside that those words really shouldn’t be read just at weddings. So this morning I decided to stand behind my comment and at least do my part in liberating 1Corinthians 13 from wedding ceremonies. But of course I chose it not just to make that point but because it has something to do with what I want to say this morning. I’ll come back to that in just a moment.
I also said last week that my plan for this week and then again two weeks from now is to focus on prayer, but not by giving sermons about prayer, which I sort of did last week, but instead by consulting some collections of written prayers that have enriched my own prayer life in the past and by reflecting on some actual prayers, not talking about the topic of prayer, but letting my words be guided by the prayers themselves. I don’t think I’ve done this before, so I’m not really sure how it will work out, but my thought is to just immerse myself in the language of prayer and see where it leads me.
The first place I have chosen to turn is to some writings of a man named Walter Brueggemann. Brueggemann is known primarily as a scholar and a teacher of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament. Although he has written a number of books mostly on themes relating to the Old Testament, and is also a popular speaker around the country, his primary activity and commitment for better than forty years was classroom teaching. He spent his career teaching in seminaries, teaching courses on the Hebrew Scriptures to people preparing for the ministry.
Brueggemann says in the introduction to one of his books that throughout the forty plus years of his teaching he began every class period with prayer. I don’t know whether that was a common thing in the United Church of Christ and Presbyterian seminaries where Brueggemann taught. (He is UCC by the way.) It was not a common thing at the school where I prepared for ministry, though that was admittedly a school that saw itself more as training people for careers in academics than for the ministry. I remember there was a professor who walked into class the first day, put his notes down, looked up at us and said, “Let us pray.” At which point there were several snickers and a few guffaws around the room from people who thought he was joking. I admit I was one of the snickerers. When I realized it wasn’t a joke, I quickly put my head down, partly in a posture of prayer, partly out of embarrassment. He prayed and gracefully ignored our sacrilegious attitude.
Maybe Brueggemann didn’t have to deal with people like us, but in any case he prayed at the beginning of every class. He admits that many of his prayers were extemporaneous, were said on the run, and were more or less formalities, the way many public prayers are. But sometimes, precisely because he believed that so much of our praying is careless and hurried and a mere formality, sometimes—often— he would sit down and write out as best he could what it was he really wanted to say in prayer. Sometimes his prayers would set the classroom learning in the context of something going on in the world. Sometimes they would relate back to the Bible, what the book they were studying was saying or issues that came up in relating to the Bible. These crafted prayers are collected in two published books of prayers. One is called “Awed to Heaven, Rooted in Earth”; the other one is “Prayers for a Privileged People”. I took these books as the starting point for at least this week’s sermon, opened one of them, and began, more or less randomly, to read.
Here are some of the words that for whatever reason seemed printed in bold, fragments from the first prayers I read:
“All power, honor, glory be to you, (O God) You…sometimes hidden, silent, absent, unresponsive…You are the God who makes all things new…(yet) we hold in our hearts all those places where the newness is not visible and has not come…God, hidden from us…we confess you where we do not see you…God of all our times: We have known from the day of our birth that our primal task is to trust in you…You, you, however, are not easy to trust. We pray against a closed sky; our hopes reduced to auto-suggestion; our petitions more habit than hope; our intercessions kindly gestures of well-being…your silence and absence, your indifference and tardiness are glaring among us.” (Awed to Heaven…pp. 41-47)
There’s more, more that speaks of God being hidden, more maybe not such great words to begin a prayer or a prayerful meditation with, words not exactly calculated to make nice with God, maybe not so wise words if you’re trying to curry favor with God, not the kind of words prayers are supposed to be made of…maybe…all about how God is hidden or silent or tardy…or maybe precisely the kind of words prayers are made of, not nice words but honest words, crucial words, for me necessary words. And I realize without reading very far at all why it is that I have found myself drawn back on various occasions to the prayers of Brueggemann. They don’t settle for niceness, for politeness, for religiosity. They cut through the convention of prayer and take us to that meeting place of God and humans which cannot be conventional and is most certainly uncertain.
If I am to be drawn into prayer by my brother pray-er, I want to know that he knows, as I do, what it means to pray into the darkness. If I am to pray at all, I need to know that I do not need to pretend to a relationship to God that I do not have, that is all sweetness and closeness and confidence, that prayer is not all about polite petitions and nice phrases, that all too often I find myself praying against a closed sky, but also I need to know that that too is prayer. It’s not that it’s some argument I want to make against God. Being hidden or silent is not proof of God being unreal. But if prayer is to be real, it needs to take account of God’s hiddenness. And, God, sometimes that is my prayer to you, not an accusation but a confession that sometimes I feel like I am praying into the darkness, and that itself is what my heart has to bring to you, that I feel like I am praying against a closed sky. But I will keep praying.
I will keep praying even though I see only through a glass darkly, as 1Corinthians 13 says. The Revised Standard Version of that verse says that we see only in a mirror dimly—not quite as poetic in my opinion, but it does suggest something else that happens in prayer, that what we see as we seek God in prayer, or in any other way, is at least in part a reflection of who we are. Sometimes when we seek God, who we find is ourselves. We pray and what is revealed is something of ourselves, or maybe what is revealed is that mystical image of God in whose image we are said to be made. We see as if in a mirror, perhaps only dimly, but we begin to see who we most truly are.
That wording also suggests to me, since it suggests that prayer reflects back on us, that the notion of the hidden God needs to be turned back on us so that it is not so clear who is hiding from whom, or whether God’s hiddenness is because of who God is or is because of who we are. Brueggemann again:
“Our lives are occupied territory (he often by the way begins prayers without the conventional address—O God, O gracious and merciful God, most holy and loving God—no words of habit or flattery—he just starts out) Our lives are occupied territory…occupied by a cacophony of voices and the din undoes us. In the daytime we have no time to listen, beset as we are by anxiety and goals and assignments and work, and in the night the voices are so confusing we can hardly sort out what could possibly be your voice from the voice of our mothers and fathers and our best friends and our pet projects because they all sound so much like you…So we bid you by the time the sun goes down today, or by the time the sun comes up tomorrow, by night or by day, that you will speak in ways that we can hear out beyond ourselves. It is your speech to us that carries us where we have never been, and it is your speech to us that is our only hope.” (Awed to Heaven…p. 56)
I am reminded of course that prayer is not just about me speaking to God but also about God speaking to me. And that thought carries with it the realization that so far as any hiddenness or absence or silence of God is concerned, it may not be God who is to be held accountable but me. Or at least it is not God alone and God all the time who is to be held accountable. I don’t want to give up entirely my right to challenge God about his tardiness or her silence. But my life is a little bit, I guess, like standing in the middle of an orchestra that is warming up. Brueggemann calls it a cacophony. It is filled already with voices. How would I know if God’s voice was one of them? How would I make out what God might be saying? And since our prayers, my prayers, are so often filled with my words and wishes, there may be little room for the hearing of God’s voice. It is no wonder God so often seems silent. We seem to be doing our level best to make it that way. Even our own prayers get in the way of our hearing.
And so I would say to God: I offer you my heart which sometimes prays—I guess almost always prays—through a glass darkly. I also offer you my heart in my desire in the end not to be content with the Babel of voices around me, in my desire not to be content to live without you, not to avoid you or to try to hide myself from you. I offer you my heart as a gesture of not wanting to be closed to you. Whatever else is on my lips that is my prayer as well, simply that I have the grace to quiet my soul and let it be open to you without any claims to knowledge or virtue, without arguments, case making, or pretense, just open…to you.
Back to Brueggemann one more time before I end for today:
“We tell these stories about being hungry and thirsty and frightened and angry and desperate. And then we tell stories about your food and your water and your presence. But the second half of the story does not ring powerfully true in our own experience, so much so that we find ourselves and our whole beloved community are often pilgrims in a barren land; and we find our sophistication and our affluence does not at all treat our condition of wilderness. So finally we are driven back to you, about to receive and then drawn up short by the one who has nowhere to lay his head (either). We are bold to pray for your presence, but we do so prepared to endure a while longer our thirst and our hunger and our sense of your absence, because we have resolved to be on your way with or without you.”
There were several phrases in that prayer that caught my attention, but particularly the last one: “because we have resolved to be on your way with or without you.” The language of faith tries to assure us that God is with us along our journeys, whatever they may be, continuously with us, reliably with us, lovingly with us, beside us, for us, with us, the very meaning of the name Emmanuel. I do not say this critically as though I am getting ready to say that we should learn to speak some other language. It is the language of our faith, and I try to speak it as best I am able. It is my belief. I want to hold on to that assurance for myself. I want to express that belief as believably as I know how.
But part of speaking that belief believably is to take account of the reality that there are those times when God seems hidden, seems silent or absent. And maybe for some of us for longer periods of time rather than shorter, that seems like the dominant reality. And when that is the truth for us, when that is our truth, it may be because God is hidden by nature or choice, or because we have chosen to look to fill ourselves from other wells, or it may be because the realities of the world make it difficult for words of faith to ring powerfully true, as the prayer suggests. But whatever the cause we all know there will be times when God is not powerfully present and when the very best we can do is to walk by faith and not by sight and not by current experience. And so as Brueggemann writes, “we (pray) prepared to endure a while longer our thirst and our hunger and our sense of absence, because we have resolved to be on your way with or without you.”
To learn (this is me now) to walk in the way of God, as best I am able to know it through a glass darkly, which may not be very well, but as best I am able to know it to gradually learn to walk in the way of God without God’s constant presence, without God’s assured support, without God’s steady guidance, without God’s sustaining spirit, as well as when those gifts are tangibly present and abundantly real, to learn to keep on trying to walk in the way of God without God or with God is my prayer today. That will sometime be, I believe, what we are all called to do. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 2, 2009