Praying as We Ought

Romans 8:18-27, Matthew 6:5-13

September 28, 2008

Rochelle A. Stackhouse

I am departing from the lectionary readings this week because of a little note I received a few weeks ago in the offering plate, a note from one of you asking me to talk about how to pray. Given all the turmoil in our nation right now, I was tempted to move in a different direction than I had planned for this sermon, but perhaps we need to talk more than ever about prayer, about not only how to pray, but why to pray, and not only praying for ourselves and those we love, but the kind of prayer that includes the nation and the world.

Let me begin by saying what prayer is not. It is not a magic spell to get God to do what we want. It is not a Christmas list. As I occasionally remind a sports-loving teenager I know, it is not a way to ensure that our favorite baseball team gets over its annual September slump and actually makes it to the playoffs this year, or that, as I need to remind adults occasionally, my political party be triumphant in any given election. As Jesus said, it is not an opportunity to impress either God or other people with our individual skills as poets or orators. And, actually, it is not telling God anything God does not already know.

What prayer is, simply, is communication with God, communion with God. Prayer is the opening of a channel between earth and heaven, between individuals and communities and their Creator. Prayer connects us with God, and when we pray for or with others, prayer connects us with other people.

If the point of prayer is connection and communication, then prayer can happen in lots of ways. It can involve words, spoken, sung or even written, and the words can be our own or come from someone else or the Bible. The words can be many or few. It can happen in church, in your home, at work or school or at the beach or anywhere. I think I’ve told you before one of my favorite Anne Lamott quotes that her two most common prayers, often said while driving, are “Thank you; thank you; thank you” and “Help me; help me; help me.” My favorite prayers are the book of Psalms, prayers which people have said and sung for thousands of years and which address every situation of life we could imagine.

There are some traditional prayer components, and they are included in the template for prayer Jesus gave us in what we have come to call the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus actually did not mean that to be a prayer as it has become, but to be a model for prayer. Within that prayer are four important themes of prayer: Praise, Intercession, Supplication and Confession, and I find it helpful when I pray to remember these themes as I connect with God. Let me say a brief word about each.

I don’t praise God to butter God up so God will do what I want. I praise God at the beginning of prayer because it opens wide my heart in wonder and so creates a space in me for the Spirit to work. I praise God even if the main theme of my prayer is one of despair or fear or sadness. When the soprano section of the choir is tending to go flat, Maggie reminds us to raise our eyebrows, which, believe it or not, does help bring the pitch up. Praise in prayer does the same thing; as we raise our eyes and spirits, we find the pitch of our life coming out of flatness and into something altogether more wonderful.

Confession, perhaps the hardest prayer for most of us, is the way we really can open that connection with God, by being brutally honest about what we would rather pretend God doesn’t see in us. It’s like removing a blockage from a heart valve and allowing circulation to be free again. The block doesn’t come from God, but from us. As long as we are hiding, like Adam and Eve in the garden after the apple incident, we cannot communicate fully and openly with God. Confessions can remove blocks to prayer.

Then there are supplication and intercession which are related. Supplication is prayer for myself and my needs, worries, fears, hurts. Intercession is prayer for others. Note, by the way, that the Lord’s Prayer has all the pronouns in the plural; it is not “Give me this day my daily bread,” but “give us.” Whatever is going on in my life surely is going on in other lives as well, and we are joined together as a people needing God. So when I pray for healing from whatever my particular illness is, I join with others who similarly suffer and lift all of us to God. This kind of thinking, I believe, is critical for us as human beings, plural thinking. Much of the economic turmoil in our country now has come because people have not seen themselves connected to others but have sought whatever they can get for themselves. A strong sense of community, forged in prayer in plural pronouns, can make a difference in how we do everything in our lives.

As I said before, we do not pray in supplication and intercession to tell God something God does not already know. We pray in order to take this burden off of our shoulders and give it to one who already bears it, to connect with one who can ease our fears and open up in us a channel for healing and hope. It’s like how we talk to a spouse or our dearest friend about how we are feeling at any given time; if they are close to us, they already know, but the sharing of our deepest fears, joys, hopes, anxieties with them eases our burden and makes our relationship closer and stronger. A central reason for prayer is to strengthen relationships.

All of that, of course, is important, but there is something so much more important about prayer that Paul tries to explain to us in his beautiful words in Romans. I have a piece of music I want you to listen to. (A recording of a bagpipe is played) Do you know how a bagpipe works? Did you hear that single tone at the beginning, the drone? That sound continues as the piper plays the melodic line on the chanter. That sound underneath makes the whole piece hold together, that brings depth and fullness to the sound. After a while, you don’t even hear it as you pay attention to the melody, but it is always there, or the bagpipe doesn’t play. Paul says that this is what happens in prayer as well. When we have words, or when we have no words, the Spirit “intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.” The undertone in our prayer, the music that lifts us to God even when we do not know what to say or how to say it, is the Holy Spirit. Phoebe and Noah do not have the words for prayer, but in their baptisms today we proclaimed that they and God are in communion, connected by the Holy Spirit with sighs, with songs, too deep for human words. Sometimes the only way to pray is to sit and be quiet and allow the Spirit in us to sigh, and therefore open the place where God can know what we cannot say.

Ultimately, prayer is about making space in our lives to be present with God. One of my favorite devotional books says, “It is not so much our ability God has need of, but our availability.” (Celtic Daily Prayer, 313) That doesn’t have to mean taking a day long retreat or an hour a day for prayer, though it could. It mostly means a mindset where God is always part of our thinking, feeling, being, that sound under all the other sounds.

Coming to church is one way of being available to God and to each other. Prayer is a central part of what we do here. Today we’re going to change a little bit how we pray. As usual I invite you to lift up your concerns and I will share mine. Then, instead of me shaping those concerns into words on your behalf, we will sit for a time of silence. In that time, I know there will be distractions, noises both outside and inside our heads. Try to filter out those noises and let the concerns you have heard from others and our own float to the top. Sit with them without trying to put into words for God what you hope is done about them. Just sit and let them be in you and give space for the undertone of Spirit sighs to move in you and open a connection with God and each other. You may “feel” something or you may not; but that doesn’t mean something is not happening, which is often how healing works. When it seems the time is right, I will invite you to say with me the prayer that Jesus taught.