“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.

On the Road Again – Or, at Least, the Bike Path

It is part of my new “get fit” routine. Biking the Cape Cod Canal bike trail. It has been tough going, but I seem have worked up to ten-mile sessions, which on a fat tire bike gives me a good workout, even with its fifteen gears.

It may be making me physically fit, or fitter, though I think the jury is still out on that. Weight loss, maybe a bit; cardiovascular health, how do you tell?; lower body strength, maybe yes.

But what this new fitness regime has done for me is to make me more mentally and spiritually alive, of that I have no doubt. Mentally, I know a good ride clears out the cobwebs in a remarkable effective fashion. Maybe it is the ever-changing views along the twisting canal, the light off the water, the wind rippling the surface, the nods to roller-bladers and walkers and fishermen with their coolers and rods and bikes outfitted with white fishing rod holders banded to the rear fender. Maybe it is the concentration required to keep on pumping into a strong headwind. Maybe it is just being away from church and family responsibilities for a set period. All I know is that I come back physically exhausted, but mentally refreshed.

But what has been surprising to me has been how these rides have fed my spirit. I have an IPod, so slip the tiny earplugs in, select from one of my custom playlists (New Wave, Alternative Rock, Bruce, Lyle, Rachmaninoff or Beethoven), set my front wheel towards Bourne, and soon find a different kind of spiritual renewal. My mind wanders where it will, my legs pump to the beat, my lungs fill with air and then release it only to begin the cycle again, the sun shines and the wind blows and a sense of peace comes,

something that might even be characterized as prayer,

if only we could let go of rigid ideas of what form prayer must take to be prayer.

“Teach Us To Pray” -- a sermon

Text: Luke 11:-13

            I have always been taken aback by the disciple’s request here – teach us to pray. I mean, these disciples have been traveling around with Jesus for quite a long time; they have been observing him 24/7; they have seen him at prayer time and again; he has just come from a time of prayer. And still they ask, teach us to pray.

            So I take some heart from their request, figuring if they needed some instruction on prayer, maybe it is okay that I feel that I do, as well.  And let me tell you, I have always felt that I needed LOTS of instruction on prayer.  I think part of that is because I was raised in the Episcopal Church, and we always read from the Book of Common Prayer, and, for those who know the difference, the 1928 version! It is basically full of the most beautiful, well-crafted, formal prayers ever written in the English language. Lots of “thee”s, “ye”s, “beseeches”, and so on.  Pretty intimidating stuff, so much so that I grew up thinking that if I were to pray to God, the only acceptable prayer was in similar, flowery form, and I just knew that I was not up to it. 

            But looking back, I think my uncomfortableness with the techniques of prayer masked something deeper, and that would be an uncomfortableness with my relationship with God. Because prayer is, at heart, all about relationship, not form, not technique, not frequency, not any of that stuff. It is about relationship.

            Folk often have lots of questions about prayer. In my experience, perhaps the most common question people have about prayer is, “Does prayer work?” These days I tend to ask in response, “Does friendship work?”

            Folk usually draw back at that question, because they recognize that the assumption underlying the question – that our friendships are about success, about getting something out of them, about them working – is false. We are friends with someone not because we calculate that we will get something out of it, that it will work to our advantage. True friendship is all about the relationship, about sharing the same deep desires, about giving of ourselves, about being able to open our self up to another, and finding that the other does the same with us. The moment the relationship is about one getting something, it dies.  Now this is not to say that we don’t benefit from friendships – of course we do – but that is not the reason for them.

            So what if we thought of prayer in this way?  What if we moved away from imagining God as like some sort of cosmic vending machine in the sky, ready to mechanically dispense whatever goodies we wanted – health, wealth, freedom from challenges, a bed of roses, clear skin or whiter teeth -- if only we would insert the right number and kind of prayers? What if, instead, we thought of God as a confidant, a companion, someone who walks the long trail with us, someone who always has our best interests at heart and will go to any length for us?

            Perhaps you think this comparison of prayer to friendship to be a bit far-fetched. But it was not far-fetched to Jesus. In our reading for today, immediately after Jesus is asked to teach his disciples to pray, he begins, “Imagine what would happen if you went to a friend in the middle of the night….” He asks the disciples to imagine that they went to the home of a friend in the middle of the night, seeking nourishment for unexpected late-night guests. Even if friendship was not enough reason for them to get out of bed, surely they would do so because of the persistent knocking at the door. In the same way, Jesus says, your Father in heaven, who is a much better friend than you will ever be, will answer you when you pray.

            Which brings us back to the disciple’s request – teach us to pray.  Because what I only recently got was that the question here is not, “teach us how to pray.” A question  about technique. No, the request is “teach us to pray” – a question which goes to the need to work on the relationship. A question just as relevant for us, of course.

            So, thinking of prayer in this way, as working on the relationship, what would that mean for us? Jesus follows up by telling the disciples: ask, search, knock. Keep the conversation going. Persist. Make the effort, and hang in there. You may have heard the saying, “95% of life is showing up”, so show up. Show up, even if it seems that your conversation partner is failing to make an appearance, at least on your time table.

Prayer is, at base, about relationship, but it is also what is known as a “spiritual practice.” A practice is the act of rehearsing a behavior over and over, or engaging in an activity again and again, for the purpose of improving or mastering it, as in the phrase "practice makes perfect". So prayer is something we need to be intentional about, if we hope for our relationship with the one to whom we pray to flourish. I read of one person who put a little pink dot on the rear-view mirror of his car – and every time he was in the car, this dot would remind him to pray.  Some people set a time aside each day, perhaps to read a psalm, or to meditate. Others pray at mealtime, or before bed. Others make sure to come to worship on Sundays.

But still, what of technique? Is there a right way to pray? If we think of prayer as relationship, then we also realize that it is something we already know how to do. We know how to be in relationship with another, to talk to them, to share our hopes and fears and deepest needs, to ask for something, to say thanks for something, to even endure the silence when our friend might not find anything to say. We know how to pray.

            The disciples come to Jesus asking to be taught to pray, and Jesus responds not by giving them magical words to say, but by teaching them about the nature of the one to whom they pray. God is, Jesus assures us, a father and a friend, one who loves us and attends to our needs not because of our cajoling or because we have found the right words, but because that is God’s nature. Friends, God cannot help himself, he’s just a big softie who has a tender spot right here for each of you.  

So who here today is standin’ in need of prayer? I know am. How about you?

In Solidarity with Jamie

Our avatars

In solidarity with, and in honor of, Jamie Bowe, a young man who is a member of the congregation I serve and who is having his FINAL treatment for brain and spinal cancer Sunday, I had a haircut today, and really got my money's worth. All gone.

Please join me in holding Jamie in your prayers or thoughts, as is your custom.