Scripture: Romans 8:18-27
My sermon this morning will I think be somewhat scattered, not logically organized, filled with paradoxes and attempts to express things which cannot be expressed very well, at least by me, will have a kind of a mystical quality to it meaning maybe a bit of a fuzzy quality and therefore I begin with a fear that much of what I want to say I will fail to say very well and that much of it will seem kind of fuzzy to you, or even downright unintelligible. With that as a recommendation, let me plunge right ahead.
It’s been a couple of weeks and people come and go more than usual in the summer, so I feel the need to review a little bit, for my own benefit as well as for yours. I began talking about prayer several weeks ago and at the end of that first sermon having to do with praying, I said that I wanted to continue to talk about praying for at least a couple more sermons, or rather not so much talk about prayer as a topic to look at from the outside but instead to let my words be guided by the words of actual prayers, the written prayers of others that I have found helpful to my own prayer life.
I was hoping that would mean that the sermons would be less in the spirit of talking about prayer and more in the spirit of prayer itself. That turns out to be somewhat difficult since sermons are by their nature sermons and not prayers. It’s not such an easy thing, I’ve found, to turn a sermon into a prayer, though I have heard quite a number of public prayers that in fact were more like sermons, where the pray-er said something like, “Lord help us to remember that…” and then went on for what seemed like 20 minutes saying things that he or she might have said in a sermon. In any case, my hope was that by taking my cue from the written prayers of others that my own words somehow would come more from the inside of prayer than from standing outside of it, looking at it, and making statements about it.
It turned out that when I tried to do that two weeks ago, the first written prayers I happened to turn to were by the Biblical scholar and UCC minister Walter Brueggemann, and as I began to read his prayers without any real preconception of what I expected to experience or what I wanted to find, what I in fact was struck with first of all was a repeated sense on Brueggemann’s part of the hiddenness of God, the silence, the absence, the distance of God—all words Brueggemann used in his prayers, words he used not in speaking about God but in speaking to God. And maybe they stood out to me because they were precisely words that I didn’t expect to encounter so prominently in a book of prayers. Again, this is not a matter of discussing the hiddenness of God as some philosophical concept; it is a matter of recognizing that feeling as part of the act of praying itself.
Of course, I cannot speak for everyone, and it may be that not everyone who prays has that sense of God’s hiddenness or distance, but some do, I know people who do, I suspect there are a great many people who do. Brueggemann does. This man, for whom prayer is very important, speaks in his prayers of the hiddenness of God, and I took my cue from him two weeks ago, reflecting on that part of the experience of prayer. I’m of course not going to repeat that sermon today, but I wanted to recall it, because it needs to be part of what I want to say today, not just background to what I want to say but part of it.
The sense of God’s silence or distance or hiddenness is an important part of genuine prayer, not an obstacle to it. The act of prayer is not a commonplace, taken-for-granted kind of thing. When we seek to bring ourselves into the presence of God, as we do in prayer that is more than public and formal, that is personal and private, just between us and God, we always do so, it seems to me with a certain amount of “fear and trembling”, to use the apostle Paul’s phrase—or we should.
This being, this spirit, this power, this presence we dare to approach in prayer is in a very real sense a mystery to us. We cannot pretend to know God. Our minds do not comprehend God. Our most heartfelt desires have no claim on God. We don’t even know what words to use, as our scripture for this morning says. Anyone who speaks confidently of knowing God should be regarded with suspicion. If we think we have a pretty good idea of the mind, the heart, or the ways of God, it is not God we have in our sights but some idol.
What we do in prayer is enter into a mystery. We give ourselves to that mystery we sometimes name God, and we do not do that casually or with any sense of certainty. Authentic prayer needs to include that sense of humility in which we confess our unknowingness about God and therefore our almost complete lack of understanding of the act of praying. How else do we presume to approach God but with that deep sense of humility in relation to God?
It is a necessary truth of prayer that when we do it we risk throwing our relationship to God into question, risk having a heightened sense of God’s sometimes deafening silence. It is an important truth, but it is not the whole truth. It is a half-truth. The other half of the truth is that God is not far away at all, not when we pray, not ever. God is as near to us as the air we breathe, near to us as the beating of our hearts, near to us as a whisper in our souls, near to us as the face of a neighbor.
Let me be clear what I am not saying here. I am not saying that prayer is a way of closing this great distance between God and ourselves, that in prayer what we are doing is taking several steps toward God and/or through our words invoking God’s presence, inviting God to take several steps toward us. I am not saying that prayer is a matter of drawing near to God or asking God to draw near to us, so that we are within shouting distance, so to speak.
There may be a third half-truth involved in that way of thinking about things, but it is not what I want to say this morning. It is not that prayer brings us closer to God or God closer to us…within shoutin’ distance. It is that God is always, prayer or no prayer, God is always within whispering distance, within sighing distance. In fact that isn’t even quite it. It’s not that God is at the end of our prayers, no matter how close we may feel God to be. It is that God is within our prayers. God is inside the whisperings, the stammerings, the sighs that sometimes are the only prayers we have. “The spirit intercedes for us,” Paul writes in Romans, “with sighs too deep for words.” God is much more than near. God is an indwelling presence, an indwelling presence in our prayers, yes, but in everything else as well. What we do in prayer is not just to address a God who is “out there”, no matter how near or far away, but to open the eyes of our minds and hearts to a reality that already is, God’s indwelling presence in all that is.
I’m not going to quote the words of prayer writers about this. As I have been reading randomly among the collections of written prayers in my library, I have not found sentences that said exactly what I am saying about the indwelling nature of God. It’s more that I sense that to be an assumption or a belief underlying the words I was reading. So I am not going to try to illustrate what I am trying to say with some well chosen quotes. But one prayer did sort of spontaneously spring to mind as I was thinking about this: the Lord’s Prayer. It occurred to me that you can look at the Lord’s prayer in exactly the terms I have been speaking this morning.
It’s often pointed out that the “our father” that begins the Lord’s Prayer is actually a very intimate form of address, not the formal “our father”. He begins with the Aramaic Abba, addressing God very much as a child might trustingly address a loving parent. But then, “who art in heaven”—that sense of being far away, dwelling in some distant, unknown, mysterious place—“hallowed be thy name”—holy is the name and the being of God, not human, not familiar, not comfortable—“hallowed be thy name”. This prayer that Jesus taught as an example of how one should pray begins with that sense I was talking about earlier of God’s majestic distance and perhaps silence. He begins with our humble humanness and God’s mysterious holiness. “Thy Kingdom come, they will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” That too emphasizes the distance between what is and what it is we pray for, whether it is a world without violence or the cure of the disease of someone we love. There is always the possibility that what we wish for will not happen, and certainly some of our deepest and most ambitious hopes are those that we know are not anywhere near coming to pass. “Thy kingdom come.” Let mercy and justice and love and well-being flood the earth. A real but distant hope.
But then, “Give us this day our daily bread.” Suddenly we turn from God in distant heaven, holy, mysterious, heavenly kingdom, earthly realities to God with us, present in the matter of our daily lives, embedded in those earthly realities, God the giver of our daily bread, God who is carried to us and revealed through our daily bread. When I think of daily bread, I don’t just think of course of the food that sustains us, though that is part of it. For me daily bread is whatever it is that sustains us from day to day. Kind words. Loving gestures. Courageous actions. Visions of a world that is anything but God forsaken but filled with the glory of God where the most ordinary of sights becomes for an instant a glimpse of holiness. It is all daily bread. And forgiveness…forgiveness both offered and received because we need both kinds…forgiveness that is healing because it doesn’t come cheaply…It is all the presence of God. The Lord’s Prayer recognizes this too: that God is near, that God is with us, that God is among us, that God is within us, that God is part of us…and that we are part of God.
The title of this sermon is a phrase from Celtic spirituality that I know some of you are familiar with. Thin places refers I think generally to the idea that there are some special places on the earth where that boundary between God and humans, between heaven and earth, seems thin, where the presence of God may seem palpable, where God may seem to be in the air, or where something timeless hovers within the world of time. There is an atmosphere, an aura about these specific locations.
That’s not quite what I had in mind by using the phrase, however. I had in mind more that thin places could be anywhere and everywhere, that to some extent the act of prayer itself may create those thin times and places, those moments where the distinction between heaven and earth may come to seem not so clear after all, where that distinction becomes a little fuzzy. In a certain way whatever else we may be praying we are also praying in all our prayers to be one with God and so in a way every prayer we say or sigh is itself an answer to our deepest prayer. It brings us into that thin place where we and God are not two separate things, not the same thing but not completely different either. Whatever else we may be praying for at any given time, we are also praying implicitly for this, praying to be given the eyes to see how blurry that line is that separates us from God.
Let me close with a portion of a poem I recently ran across by a poet named Lisel Mueller that I think speaks to what I’ve been trying to say. The poem is called, “Monet Refuses the Operation”. It refers to the fact that the artist Monet had cataracts in his later life and the older he got the more blind he became. The poem imagines a doctor who wants to operate on Monet’s eyes so as to restore his sight. I don’t know. Maybe there was such a doctor but it’s not important. The poet imagines the doctor and writes as though it is Monet who is speaking.
“Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being…
Doctor, if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim the world.”
If we could only see. Amen.
Jim Bundy
August 16, 2009