Scripture: Isaiah 56:1-8; Matthew 6:5-12
This is a sermon about prayer.
This is not a sermon about whether prayer is a good thing. I try not to be too predictable in what I say, mostly so as not to bore myself. I try not to say just what ministers are supposed to say, and I have said more than once that when I begin a sermon I often don’t know myself what I am going to say, but if I were to preach a sermon on whether prayer is a good thing, I know what my answer would be and you know what my answer would be. So we don’t need to go through that exercise.
This is also not a sermon about why you should pray or how you should pray. I am not going to encourage you to pray more, or suggest how you could do it better. I have enough to look after in my own prayer life; I don’t have to worry about yours.
I’m also feeling somewhat sheepish about preaching about prayer at all. Clearly in the case of prayer, like many other things, doing it is a lot better than talking about it. And talking about prayer runs the rather strong danger of violating the spirit of the very thing you are talking about because prayer by its nature is not a rational, analytical thing. It is more than possible that the more you talk about prayer, the further away from it you get.
Still, here I am, wanting to say something about prayer. It’s Lent, after all. I know that for many people that’s not a big deal. For many people Lent is not something you grew up with or particularly care about. I didn’t grow up with Lent either. I don’t think I even knew what it was, and it certainly had little meaning to me until the time I began serving churches that were used to observing Lent. Gradually I came to observe it myself, using it as a time to be reflective about my spiritual life. Not that we can’t be reflective about our inner lives any time, but Lent offers that little extra prodding for me to reflect on my spiritual discipline or lack thereof. So thinking of worship themes for Lent, my thoughts turned in this direction—reflecting on different aspects of my spiritual life—and I can’t do that without talking about prayer.
But as I’ve been saying here, the spirit in which I want to talk about prayer is important to me—and a little bit delicate maybe. Just as I’m not really interested in trying to try to tell you how or why you should improve your prayer life, I’m also not really interested in looking at my own prayer life that way either—reflecting on it in order to see if it needs to be improved, reflecting on it in order to fix it. There’s certainly a place for self-criticism, and Lent is often thought of as a time for self assessment, but the “shoulds” and “oughts” of prayer are not what concern me today. Neither is the spirit of my words to define, explain, catalogue, or answer frequently asked questions about prayer.
The impulse to do this questionable thing—preach about prayer—is I think mostly an impulse to simply appreciate it. To look at prayer the way I imagine an artist might look at her subject, to just see it and present it somehow, to look at it in order to admire it or see it in some particular light, to do no more than simply for a few moments bring it to vision, not to take it for granted. I reflect on prayer simply to say, to myself as much as anyone else: Here. This is what prayer looks like, this is its shape and color and texture as I am able to see it.
So what is the shape of prayer in my life? When I want to stand back for a moment and look at it, where do I look? In a sense, my life is filled with prayer, not because I’m such a praying type of person, but because in my line of work, it sort of goes with the territory. It’s part of my job to produce prayers for public worship, and they are prayers of all kinds, written and spoken, praise, confession, intercession, and so forth. It’s an occupational hazard that at any given time you may find yourself in a situation where someone is going to ask you to pray…and often it would be unseemly to refuse. I find it personally inspirational and professionally helpful to read the prayers of others, and I have a few favorite pray-ers that I turn to, people whose words make me feel like I am praying. All this in addition to the personal prayers I may find time and words for and the people I hold in prayer and all the various ways I might do that. If I want to look for signs of prayer in my life, there are lots of places I might look.
But what occurs to me as somehow most truly, most basically prayer for me is just a sound. A sound maybe something like this…I realize this might not be identifiable as a prayer to anyone else, but it is to me. I don’t know if this happens to you, but I will sometimes just be going about my business and find myself thinking of someone, or maybe remembering something I did or didn’t do, or feeling some loss, or trying to figure something out, or be caught up in some anxious place and then suddenly I will hear some involuntary, inarticulate sound coming out of me…It’s a prayer. I know it’s a prayer. If it had words to it, they would be saying something like “God please let him be o.k.” or “forgive me” or just “oh, no”, but at this point there aren’t any words because this prayer is prior to words.
And that’s the first thing I want to say about the shape of prayer in my life. It’s prior to words. All the prayers we say with words are afterthoughts in a way, and all the words we use in our prayers are often ways we have of trying to make them sound prettier, or more theologically correct, or more acceptable, or more persuasive. But these prayers begin just as some kind of involuntary soul sound, and because prayer is like that, it is something at its most primitive level that is not something I plan to do, intend to do, or even quite know that I am doing. It’s something I catch myself doing. Often by the time I’m really aware of it, it’s already under way.
Someone has said that prayer is putting your heart in your mouth. I find that rings true for me. And it reassures me that those sounds really are prayers. I feel them that way, I recognize them as prayers because I sense that they contain a reaching out toward God, a wordless hope of discovering God’s presence.
Isn’t that what all prayer is? We offer a prayer of thanks for the coming of a new day and we are saying somehow that we have found and hope to find God in this day. Or to put it in different language, we have found and hope to find holiness in this new day.
Or we pray about some difficult life decision or situation we find ourselves in. Isn’t what we are doing a seeking after the presence of God in this situation, so that it will not be a God-less process, so that it will be infused somehow with holiness?
A person is sick and of course we want them to get well, and that is surely part of our prayer, but we want other things for them too, and we take into account all the things that may happen, and our prayers become long and full and difficult to say. But we want somehow God to be present in that situation, whatever may happen.
Whether in need or in praise, we pray to discover God, to find holiness in what we are praying about. And when we do, the prayer itself becomes part of the answer to prayer. The discipline of prayer may not be so much setting aside time to do something that is identifiably praying. It may be more the efforts we make to identify those places in our lives where we are already praying, recognizing the ways God is already present or the ways in which the seeking after God is contained in our lives already. If we pay attention, we may catch ourselves praying more often than we realize. The discipline of prayer is not so much imposing upon ourselves some duty to pray but of recognizing and appreciating the presence of God and the longing for God that is already there.
That leads me to a second thought. Wordless prayers are embedded in my life, but the effort to find words for my prayers is important too. There are so many words that swirl all around us. Some of them are dishonest. Some are hurtful. Some are merely trivial or shallow. Some are words that matter as much as life matters, words that have to do with love and justice, with truth and forgiveness. For me the process of trying to give words to our prayers is a matter of trying to sort out for ourselves the words that matter, and to let those words be the ones we speak and listen for. In this sense, I know that prayer is for me not just a good thing, but a matter of life and death. When I pray I am bringing myself back to life by sorting out what matters from what doesn’t.
More than that, I know that when I try to give words to my prayers I am not just trying to find some pious phrases to say to God. I am trying to find my own voice, the voice which contains my anger, my sorrow, my insight, my concern, my hope, my hurt, my intelligence, my dignity, my hollowness, my holiness. For me, when I try to give words to my prayers, every time I try to pray with words, I am trying to find my voice, my voice that is no one else’s and that has something important to say.
Mark Twain said you can’t pray a lie. My version of that is that you can’t pray, not really, you can’t pray in someone else’s voice. To give words to those prayers that are embedded in us, we need to find our own voice. And in this sense too, for me prayer is not just a good thing but an urgent thing, even though it is a process—praying, finding one’s voice—a process that lasts a lifetime.
And still again the words of our prayers are important, not because they have to be just right or somehow eloquent, but they are important because when we try to put our prayers into words, we are practicing raising our voices of behalf of one another. Often in the church there has been a perceived separation between the people who believed that the church should be all about prayer and those who believed (fewer of these) that the church should be about social action. But from where I sit there is no separation. From where I sit prayer is not only where we find our own voices but where we practice speaking on behalf of others. If I do this consistently, faithfully, honestly, passionately in church in prayer, I don’t see how I cannot do it outside the church, and if I do it outside the church, how can I not bring it to the church in prayer?
There are many scriptural passages that deal in some way with prayer. For some reason, and I mentioned this to Drew the first time we met to talk about this worship service, for some reason the passage that presented itself to me was the one where Jesus throws the money changers out of the temple, saying, “It is written, that this shall be a house of prayer for all people, but you have made it a den of robbers.” It struck me that Jesus would call the temple, and by implication us, a house of prayer. Actually Jesus was just quoting Isaiah and I decided to read the original this morning, but both Isaiah and Jesus choose to refer to the temple as a house of prayer, not a house of worship, a house of ritual, a house of sermons, a house of music even, but a house of prayer. And I was wondering to myself if that’s how I wanted to think of us when we come together on a Sunday morning. Is that what we become when we gather on Sunday morning?
And the answer is “I hope so.” If being a house of prayer means that we come here on Sunday hoping for something that will help us see a little bit more clearly the presence of God in our lives, then I hope we are a house of prayer. If in praying we identify ourselves as seekers after God, which may be another way of saying we belong to God, then let this be a house of prayer. If being a house of prayer means that we come here hoping to glimpse the holiness of our humanity, then let us be a house of prayer. If being a house of prayer means that we come expecting to see God in the faces of the people around us, then by all means let us be a house of prayer. If being a house of prayer means that we find here a little help in separating words that matter from words that don’t and words that heal from words that harm, then let this be a house of prayer. If being a house of prayer means being a place where every child of God gains support in finding her or his own voice, then let this be a house prayer. If being a house of prayer means that in our prayers we are only beginning to exercise our voices in speaking on behalf of one another, then let us be a house of prayer.
Jesus once told a parable about prayer. It’s actually a sort of unattractive story about a widow who badgers a judge until he listens to her and gives her what she wants. But the parable is introduced by these words: Jesus told them a parable about the need to pray and not lose heart. I remember those words this morning because as I look at the shape of prayer in my life, I know that’s what it means to me. To pray means to not lose one’s heart.
You know the line from the hymn: It’s me, O Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer. I have been in places, you have too, where I was especially in need of prayers, in need of the prayers of other people to be sure, but also standin’ in the need of my own prayers, or rather my own praying. Because it is the act of prayer itself, not the particular prayer I might be making, that’s important. I catch myself praying, and I know that my heart is still in search of God’s heart, and so I know somehow at some level that it’ll be o.k. whatever it is and whatever o.k. is, it’ll be o.k. I catch myself praying and I know then that I have not lost my heart—there it is, right there in my throat—and I know that somehow it’ll be o.k. And so I catch myself in prayer and I gather myself together and get ready to take up again the journey towards God’s reign and toward just God. Amen.
Jim Bundy
February 24, 2002