TEACH US TO PRAY
SEPTEMBER 7, 2008

If we were to play a game of word association here, an activity in which I threw out to you the word RELIGION and then asked you to give back to me some phrases or terms that you’d identify with that word, my suspicion is that for most of you, the word PRAYER would slip into this exercise somewhere. This would make sense because PRAYER has always been one of the central distinguishing practices connected with the living out of one’s religious faith, whether it’s Muslims praying to Mecca, Jews forming a minion or all of the well known, TO US, Christian devotional practices. In our Christian tradition, we quite freely and rather loosely say that we come to church to pray. And, even those for whom church going is not an important part of their Christian practice, often justify that by saying that they don’t need to go to church precisely because they can pray to God anytime and anywhere they wish to do so-on a boat, in their garden, while playing golf. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I will say that the golf course IS a place where I sure better pray...ANYWAY.....

The phrase ‘ I will pray for you’, uttered upon hearing of someone’s misfortune, has become for many, church going religionists or not, as common  a reflexive action as saying ‘ God Bless you’ right after a sneeze. From podiums of presidents and political conventions to private conversations in workplaces and on the phone, to prepackaged lines in Hallmark greeting cards, we speak about keeping people in ‘our thoughts and our prayers.’ Even here in a church, after opening greetings and music, it’s not at all unusual for a Pastor to pronounce words that encourage the congregation to join her or him before God ‘in a moment of prayer.’ I don’t know about you, but I can tell you that at least once a week, someone asks me to pray for them or for someone whom they love. I’ve thought, of course, that might be the kind of thing you say to someone who happens to be a Minister when you’re upset or concerned about someone, including yourself, but, upon deeper reflection, I think there’s more to it than that, the kind of more that leads us to listen so attentively to each other’s joys and concerns as we share them at worship, the kind of more that impels us to offer prayer to others who are hurting when we are at a loss for anything else to say.

PRAYER is an integral part of religious practice and invoking prayer is part of the public parlance of those who seek to lead us. From a stage in St. Paul, Governor Palin speaks of mothers saying extra prayers for their children standing in harms’ way in Iraq and a Presidential nominee recounts how prayer helped get him through those horrific years in Hanoi. On the other side, a nominee speaks of standing under the Cross and PRAYING, knowing that in that process, his sins have been washed away and he has been redeemed!

As is the case, my friends, with anything that is taken for granted as a typical part of something, PRAYER can be easily overlooked, unexamined or underappreciated. PRAYER can become so easily associated with religious faith that we who use words that speak of prayer could so easily find ourselves mumbling clichés with no respect to the depth and the power of that of which we speak. That is why in these next few weeks, we are going to go into detail and take a good hard look at the subject of prayer. We are going to contend from this pulpit that prayer is far too important to take it lightly. Instead, we are going to try to go INSIDE THE WORLD OF PRAYER by going inside of the WORLD OF US. In order to make the most of this series over these next five weeks, we must be willing to take a look inside and to ask questions of ourselves. I will try to assist us in this process by putting things out there on the table, so to speak, but for this to work, really work, each listener here and everyone who is unable to be in these pews but reads one of these sermons later, has got to get engaged and involved. You’ll get involved, first and foremost, by THINKING about the questions I ask and the issues I raise and then you might proceed to get involved even more by talking with someone about something you’ve been thinking about. This talking and thinking may even lead to more questions, which you will then proceed to ask. Now, this sounds like a bit of work, perhaps, but THIS is important stuff!

You see, for us who profess to follow the way of Christianity, there is something we all need to understand about Jesus, a very simple, yet profound truth indeed: PRAYER was an important part of Jesus’ life. There is simply no way around that. In Luke Chapter 11, which we just heard, we observe that Jesus, while praying in a certain place, was interrupted by one of His disciples, who had a simple request: ‘ LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY!’ It’s fair to say, I think, that the disciple saw and sensed the centrality of prayer in the life of Jesus, more than likely experienced the IMPACT of prayer on the way Jesus lived His life and sought to gain for himself and other disciples some thing, some nugget of wisdom that could help them in their own lives. Now, dear friends, is that not our task as well.....for our PRAYER to most fully connect with how we live our lives, for our prayer to have IMPACT upon how we treat others and how we deal with the crises we face in the inner recesses of our beings, and those ways we can help others deal with the pain they face in their own?

So, to this end, over these weeks, we will look at prayer and we will look at ourselves. Next week, we will get very, very practical: HOW do we pray? How often? Where? What style works or doesn’t? This will be so practical that we will actually experience it as we are talking about it. Down the road, we will go back into some of these songs that we sing, we will look at the time we spend in and out of church and we will revisit those ancient words of the prayer of Jesus we say so often that it’s so very easy just to pass it by. If you miss one of these sermons, I’m going to suggest that you pick up a copy of it, either here or online, and I’m also going to encourage you to share what we are doing with people older and YOUNGER alike, for this series, this look at prayer, is for ALL of God’s children, not FOR ADULTS ONLY! Along the way, I will enjoy your feedback, the questions you raise and the experiences you share! Trust me, there is nothing more discouraging for a preacher, or at least THIS preacher, than the sense that what I am speaking about has NO meaning or relevance in your lives.

So, with this backdrop then, and with these hopes and expectations all laid out, before I step down from this pulpit today, allow me to leave you with some thoughts to consider, some questions to ponder as you look both at prayer and then take a look  at yourself:

First of all, when you say you will pray for others or ask others to pray for you, what do you expect will happen? Do you think that the PRAYING will make the result any different? Do you think that by saying MORE PRAYERS, you’ll have a better chance of changing the outcome? Friends, this is pretty pivotal stuff, that which theologians call ‘ the efficacy of prayer’, in other words...what EFFECT does prayer have on actual events? People from many different Christian traditions have, in practice, espoused the notion that by bombarding heaven with prayer, you can change the course of events. Sometimes this gets kind of extreme, like the Colorado Pastor who urged his congregation to pray constantly so that rain would fall on Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, recent among countless other historical examples, ranging from victory on battlefields to success on the gridiron with tons of real life stuff, like health and employment and safety, right there in the middle.

One of the most troubling crises of faith that besets individuals is when they have prayed fervently for SOMEONE or SOMETHING and that for which they have prayed HAS NOT HAPPENED. ‘ I prayed hard, but the cancer came back’, ‘ I keep praying, but the war goes on.’. “ I prayed for her healing, but it never happened.’ This crisis often leads people to dismiss their faith altogether, with the thought that the prayers they uttered were meaningless, that they HAD NO EFFECT!

BUT...AND PLEASE LISTEN WELL.....isn’t there another way of looking at this? If I am sick and you pray for me and I don’t get better, have your prayers been in vain? THAT IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS WE CAN PONDER IN THIS WHOLE PRAYER DISCUSSION- if I pray and it didn’t work, does that mean that it didn’t work? If I don’t get better does that mean you done something wrong in your praying? Would my illness be proof that there is no power in prayer? To all of these questions, I want to suggest that the answer’s a resounding NO! First of all, if you are going to talk about praying the way Jesus prayed, you’ve got to talk about what I’m going to call the THY WILL BE DONE principle. It’s very simple: In praying, you pray that the Will of God be done ON EARTH ...AS IT IS IN HEAVEN.

That is the heart of the Lord’s Prayer, it’s the heart of Jesus’ life as He showed when He prayed to be spared from His death, but wasn’t and may I suggest that it might be the heart of our own? O GOD...THY WILL BE DONE!

But there is also more......If you pray for me, even if I remain sick or get sicker, if I pray for you and the same has happened, something good has still happened to each of us. In praying for me, you have taken a step outside of yourself, in praying TO GOD, you have consciously acknowledged the SPIRITUALITY OF LIFE, that we are bound and connected by something and someone far deeper and greater...GOD...In telling me that you are praying, you are giving me more strength. In your very act of prayer, coupled with your THY WILL BE DONE mentality, you end up drawing closer to that which is the heart of life and you are more strengthened for your daily living! BUT...if prayer is ONLY cause and effect, dare I say that it comes closer to superstition than it does to the heart of Christian prayer, the prayer Jesus taught as He answered his disciple’s simple request...’‘LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY.’

I’m going to end with this for your listening pleasure. Though I am not going to say I concur with every word in it, without question or reservation, I DO think that this prayer written by Jack Riemer forces us to look more closely at some of these questions I have raised and can enhance our inner conversation and thus our conversation with one another.

So, then  ,dare I say, LET US PRAY:

WE cannot merely pray to you, o God, to end war
For we know that you have made the world in a way
that we must find our own path to peace
within ourselves and our neighbors
We cannot merely pray to you, O God, to end starvation
For you have already given us the resources to feed the entire world
if we would only use them wisely
We cannot merely pray to you, O God
to root out prejudice
For you have already given us eyes
with which to see the good in all people
If we would only use them rightly
We cannot merely pray to you, O God, to end disease
for you have given us great minds with which to search out cures and healing
if we would only use them constructively
Therefore we pray to you instead, O God.
for strength, determination and willpower,
To DO instead of just to pray
To become instead of merely to wish-

AMEN+