“We Don’t Know How to Pray – Get Over It!”

I think most pastors find it astonishing – as do most folk in the pews – that the Bible is full of folk who just don’t know how to pray. We just assume that they wouldn’t even be in the Bible unless they could nail something as elementary as prayer.

            But look at those disciples who followed Jesus around for three years. If anyone should have picked it up it was those folk, who hung on Jesus’ every word as he traipsed the length and breadth of the countryside. But then they come to Jesus and say, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” (Luke 11:1). Jesus responds by giving them a prayer, one we now know as The Lord’s Prayer.

            And here we have Paul the Apostle, the same guy who founded churches throughout Asia Minor and Greece, confessing that “we do not know how to pray as we ought.”

            All of this I think is great news for all of us who tend to get anxious when it comes to prayer. We often tend to think prayer is all about technique. For instance:

 – that we need to breathe deeply, and slowly – never mind that whenever I am intentional about breathing deeply and slowly my heart rate picks up and next thing you know I am panting like a dog.

-- or that we need to empty our mind of all our cares and worries. My spinning instructor is big on this one. She will say, “Okay, for the next two minutes I am going to stop coaching you, I just want you to have two minutes of uninterrupted silence, a time when you can just let go of all the things on your to-do list, all your worries about your health or loved ones, all the things waiting for you back at the office.” So of course while I previously was very happy just thinking about my bike riding, now she has me thinking about that to-list, health worries, loved ones, and the work back at the office!

--  Or that we need to walk the labyrinth, or find a secluded glade up in the mountains, neither of which is ever around when you need on!

            So what happens for a lot of people is they just figure since they will never get prayer right, never master its techniques, they should just forget about the whole thing.

            But friends, Paul reminds us that we don’t know how to pray, but that is alright, because the Spirit intercedes for us “with sighs too deep for words.”  When we cannot find the words, there is the Spirit filling in for us, but not with words – because often our deepest concerns are simply just beyond words – but with sighs. The same God who loves us so much that he came to us in Jesus Christ, taught us, walked with us, suffered for us – that same God is not some sort of cosmic red-pen-wielding essay editor just ready to reject every petition that crosses her desk, but instead is right there alongside us, right there deep within us, supporting us in our deepest yearnings.

            So no, you don’t know how to pray as you ought – so get over it!

            But maybe you are still expecting to get your money’s worth out of this sermon, and so are expecting some instructions on how to pray. Instructions I have none, but I do have some stories to share about prayer as I have experienced it. Not because I am an expert at prayer, mind you, and not that what works for me will necessarily work for you, but in the hope that my stories might help you with this spiritual practice we call prayer.

            So we are driving down to the Jersey shore on the Garden State Parkway a month ago, about 9:00 on a Sunday evening, the car loaded up not only with our bags but also with all the paraphernalia that Julia is taking with her to college, five of us crammed in together, when all of a sudden I hear a high-pitched whine coming from the left side of the vehicle. Definitely not from the engine, from the left side. So I pull over to the breakdown lane and, one eye on the traffic whizzing by, I try to see if there is anything going on with the two driver’s side wheels. Of course I see nothing.  Hoping against hope that I was just imagining things, I climb back in and we start off again, but once we get back up to speed there comes that high-pitched whine once again. So nothing else to do but get off at the next exit and look for a service station. We found one pretty quickly, but of course it is Sunday night and there is no mechanic on duty. The two men working the station, each with accents that seemed to indicate that they were recent arrivals to the States from perhaps Portugal, could not have been nicer or more helpful, even calling a mechanic and urging him to come help us out. But to no avail. A call to AAA produced no better results – they could only offer us a tow, but no mechanical help. So there was apparently only one thing to do – well, actually, two. As I pulled out my smart phone to look for a nearby hotel, where we could spend the night before trying to get the car fixed the following morning, I muttered a silent prayer. Nothing complicated, nothing eloquent like you might find in The Book of Common Prayer, just more along the lines of “Oh God, help us out here!”

            The next thing you know Christie is talking to a guy who had stopped to get his car filled up, who also seemed to be of Portuguese extraction, and who had overheard the attendants talking about our problem. So he comes over and tells us his sister-in-law has the same make car, and had the same problem, and that what she learned was that the cause was a pebble jammed between the wheel and the brake, and that the thing to do was to put the car in reverse, go forty feet, and then hit the brakes hard, and the pebble may fall out. With nothing to lose, I gave it a try, out popped a pebble, problem solved, and we were safely on our way.

But prayer is not always about happy endings, or getting what you want when you want it. Sometimes it is just all about being honest about how bad things really are. Ellen F. Davis, in her book “Getting Involved with God: Rediscovering the Old Testament,” tells of the minister who visited a parishioner in a nursing home. The parishioner would not speak to her or look at her, simply glaring ahead all the time.  Realizing that making chit chat was not going to help, she went straight to the Bible, opening the psalms and reading psalms of comfort. But they elicited no response, still the same stony stare. At last she turned to the psalms of lament, reading Psalm 102:

I have become like a vulture in the wilderness,

like an owl among the ruins….

I eat ashes like bread and mix my drink with tears

because of your indignation and anger,

because you have picked me up and tossed me aside….”

And for the first time that stony face softened, for the first time he looked at his visitor, for the first time he spoke, saying, “Finally, somebody who knows how I feel.”

            And prayer often is not even about us, or by us, or up to us. It turns out that on that same vacation as the car trip I told you about earlier I developed a blood clot in my left calf, which turned out to be a big deal, and very, very painful, for a couple weeks at least. All the time. 24/7. It made me quite grumpy, as chronic pain can tend to do to people, but it also made me feel just too bad even to pray for relief.  It was like just as I didn’t have much time for inter-personal relationships because of the pain, I just was not in the mood for that relationship with God which we often think of as prayer. Reaching out was the last thing I wanted to do – I just wanted to crawl inside myself and be left alone. But that is not to say prayer was not important to me. It was. It is just that I knew, that a member of this faith community, this church, I had a whole lot of people, starting with the chair of the Board of Deacons and some members of the choir who were in the know, praying for me. They were picking up the ball for me when I was just in no shape to run with it myself. And I have to say this was a great comfort to me, so much so that it got me to thinking about all those folk who do not have a church or faith community that can hold them in prayer in the tough times, and made me think how terribly lonely that must be.

            Paul the Apostle was right. We don’t know how to pray as we ought. But the good news for us is that it just doesn’t matter, because the Spirit is right there with us in our lack of knowing, our lack of diligence, even our lack of wanting to pray, interceding for us with sighs too deep for words.

So pray at all times, pray free from anxiety about whether you are doing it right, pray in the confidence that you have a divine prayer partner close at hand, praying with you, and for you. Amen.

"What is It? -- God does not always come as we expect..."

The Hebrews knew God and God’s ways. They knew that God had come to them in their captivity, and that through mighty deeds of power – through all those plagues sent down on Egypt, through that miraculous passage through the Red Sea waters – they had been brought to freedom and new life. But now they are enslaved to a different master, to hunger, and of the God they think they have come to know they can see no sign. (Exodus 16:2-15)

            And then they wake up one morning and stagger out into the desert and find a layer of dew spread all over the ground, and when it had lifted, a sticky, flaky, whitish substance on the ground. They scratch their heads, look at one another, and say in Hebrew man-hu, which means “What is it?”

            And then, like in that old cereal commercial, one of them gets their younger brother Mikey to try it, and Mikey says “I like it”, and next thing you know they gather the manna up in baskets and bake it and find that once again they have been freed to new life.  They were not, as they had thought, alone and forgotten. God was with them, and God would provide.

            Their story is our story, a story that is often repeated in the lives of God’s people. It is a story that gives us hope when we find ourselves seemingly alone and feeling abandoned in our own personal wildernesses. A story that happens at those times when we must make the move from “What is it?” to “It is a sign that God is with us!”

            I was counseling a couple this past week in preparation for their wedding, and the bride-to-be related how she had lost her mother three years ago.  That must have been terrible, I said, and hard not just on you but on your relationship as well. It was hard, she said, but he was terrific through it all, and the hard times really brought us closer together.

            What is it?  The power of death to divide, or love to grow?

            I was listening to sports talk radio awhile back, and the hosts were commenting on a story that had just broken in the papers, about how on the eve of her wedding day the bride-to-be was accidently pushed into the shallow end of a swimming pool by a bridesmaid, breaking her neck and leaving her paralyzed from the neck down. What the hosts found incomprehensible was that the groom went through with the wedding. They were apparently unable to understand that loving another, through sickness and in health, might not be a duty, but a privilege, not a burden, but a calling.

            What is it? The end of promises made, or the beginning of living into new possibilities?

            Michael Piazza, writing in his blog this week, tells of Valerie.

     “Valerie was 34. She remembered that day last year like it was yesterday. She sat on the sofa stunned, unable to move. She had gone to the doctor to get the results of some tests. She assumed he would tell her she was anemic and needed to take vitamins or something. She wasn't remotely prepared to hear him speak of death, especially her death. She was 34. She had a good job, lots of friends. She did volunteer work for the crisis center and went to church. How could she be terminal?
     Now, a year later she sat on that same sofa amazed at all that had happened in that year. Her body clearly showed the wear of someone fighting to survive, but there was something inside of her that had never felt so alive. It was amazing the changes that had come over her since she learned that she might die sooner than later. Valerie wrote in her journal:

     I'd always been the cautious one, afraid of my own shadow. I wouldn't take risks or do unexpected things. Now, that I have had to face the fact that no one gets out of this life alive, I've been saying “boo” to all of those ghosts. It is amazing how easily all of the things you fear disappear when you are willing to confront them. If you are going to die anyway, why let them keep pushing you around? I just wish I had remembered sooner that I was going to die anyway.
     I've always been afraid of what people would think of me. As a result, I was cynical, condescending, and judgmental of others. It is funny how that works. But, today, when I went downstairs for lunch, I took a handful of quarters and walked up and down the street putting money in parking meters that were about to expire. The meter maid must have thought I was nuts, but today I wasn't afraid of what she might think of me. Now, my biggest fear is that I might waste a single moment of this precious life. Nothing makes me feel more alive than doing random acts of kindness.
     I wish I could tell everyone that if you have to be afraid of something, don't let it be what people might think. Be afraid that you might let a day slip by without really living it, without doing some good. That's the only thing worth fearing. The fear of wasting your life can make you more alive than you ever dreamed of being. I only wish I had some way to tell people before it is too late for them.”

      What is it? An unfairness that makes everything thereafter meaningless, or a wake-up call to an abundant life that is there for the taking each and every precious day?

Back in January, in response to declining worship attendance particularly among young families, we had an all-church off-site retreat to see if we might discern a new way forward. Once again the old adage “Watch what you pray for, you might get it” was proved true, because one of those young mothers we had taken pains to invite finally spoke up and said, “Why don’t we have a Saturday afternoon service?”

Now I had all sots of answers running through my mind, beginning with “But that’s something that Catholics do!”, continuing on with “And where will we find the money?”, and ending with “But Saturday is my day off and my wife will kill me!”

But she went on to explain how hard it is for young families to make it to church on Sunday mornings, what with sports games and practices, drama rehearsals, Chinese lessons and so on, never mind that they would like to have an occasional morning to just lounge around the house. So we put together a planning team, and the enthusiasm and ideas and participation have been over the top, and the word of mouth is spreading and all sorts of folk other than young families are telling us that they want to come, and now we are gearing up for a kick-off service on October 1.

What is it? More “stuff” that just has to get done, or a chance to experience the winds of the Spirit gusting through a three-hundred years young Meetinghouse?

Friends, the lesson for us all is clear. People with the gift of faith are as those with a new set of contact lessons, able to see that there is no wilderness in which we might travel that God is not with us, an abiding, empowering, healing, gifting, liberating presence. We can see that what others might view as a barren, inhospitable desert can be transformed by God into a fertile, nourishing garden.

God will come, but not always in the ways we expect, in the form we want, or on the timetable we would demand. But God hears, and God answers, and God comes.

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