When You Pray
July 29, 2007
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 85, Luke 11:1-13
In 1988, David Macauley published a book called The Way Things Work – it was a coffee table-sized book, with diagrams and narrative that detailed exactly that: the way things work. It was the sort of book that I would have enjoyed a lot as a child, and wish I had read more thoroughly before our copy was caught in a flood. Anyway, the new revised version not only explains things like zippers, fire extinguishers, and electricity, but also CD players and the internet. The ways things work tend to fascinate me, and is certainly a huge part of why I loved working as an electrician apprentice in a steel mill for three-plus years – I remember my last night in the mill, watching the red-hot steel rolling out, transformed in moments from slab to plate, and marveling that it still dazzled me, even after over three years of watching it. Even now every time I see that waffle-stamped steel floor plate in an elevator, on steps, or in a sidewalk, think, “I used to make that!” Twenty-seven years later I still get excited over having been part of that manufacturing process – making stuff, real stuff, and knowing a lot about how the process worked.
I’m incurably curious – and want to know (even more than I remember wanting to know as a kid) how things work. So I struggled for a number of years with prayer – the central question has never been answered for me: how does it work? And, I guess a precedent question would be: what does it mean for prayer to “work” anyway??
I think most of us here probably share an ambiguous response to that question – on the one hand, we feel that prayer works when we get what we pray for…and on the other hand, we recognize that it can’t be that simple. For we don’t always pray for noble things…and beyond that, experience teaches us that we don’t always get what we pray for, even when it seems like a good thing. And, I would point out, the teaching of Jesus in this passage is not that when we ask we will receive what we ask for; he says when we ask, seek and knock, we will receive the Holy Spirit.
I am reminded of two examples at this point – the first is the wonderful author Madeleine L’Engle, perhaps best known for her book A Wrinkle in Time, who wrote in an essay reflecting on prayer about the time she and many others were praying that a young friend with cancer would be healed. She writes, “Our prayers were answered, our friend was healed, although he died.”
And that story reminds me of the postscript that came on an email from a friend – it read: “God has three answers to prayer: ‘Yes, not yet, and….I have a better idea!’” That seems like another way of stating what country singer Garth Brooks pointed out in a song years ago, remembering what he had hoped and prayed for when younger: “Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers….”
And if prayer is as simple as: we ask for what we think best, and a loving, wiser God gives us what is really best… then those examples work just fine. But what are we praying for? Let me share the remarks of Methodist Bishop and former Dean of the Duke University Chapel William Willimon, who reflects in this week’s Christian Century blog: “Prayer is not whenever I spill my guts to God: prayer is when I obey Jesus and pray for the things that he teaches me to pray for and when I pray the way he prays. Prayer is bending my feelings, my desires, my thoughts and yearnings toward Jesus and what he wants me to feel, desire and think.
“In most churches I visit, a time of prayer is often preceded by a time of “Joys and Concerns.” I notice that in every congregation, the only concerns expressed are concerns for people in the congregation who are going through various health crises. Prayer becomes what we used to refer to as “Sick Call” in the army. Where on earth did we get this idea of prayer? Not from Jesus. He healed a few people from time to time, but he doesn’t pray for that. He prays for the coming of God’s kingdom, for bread (but only on a daily basis, not for a surplus) and for forgiveness for our trespasses. It’s curious that physical deterioration has become the contemporary North American church’s main concern in prayer. Jesus is most notable for teaching that we are to pray—not for recent gall bladder surgery—but for our enemies!”
Along those lines, author David James Duncan reminds us of the prayer of Mother Theresa: “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.”
I don’t mean by these observations to discourage anyone from praying for the sick – after all, we are also instructed in the Bible to pray for those who are ill. And Jesus seems to encourage us to bring our concerns to God in our prayers. But, should prayer be just about asking and receiving? Many of us will probably be somewhat sympathetic with sociologist David Martin, Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics, who wrote [in Christian Language in the Secular City (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), 88] : “Speaking only for myself I do not think prayer a way to prod lazy omnipotence and sleepy omniscience into proving itself by an unpredictable display of power; and moreover the God I believe in isn't some vacuous general explanation for the world tacked on where other more specific explanations stop.”
Perhaps prayer is more about desire – not so much that we want what we are praying for, but that we want God – this does seem to be part of what Jesus is indicating in his teaching about persistence in prayer. There's a story of a young disciple in India who left home and traveled in search of a spiritual master whom he at last found sitting in prayer beside a river. The young man begged the master to teach him. The master rose slowly and suddenly grabbed the younger man and dragged him into the river and under the water. Seconds passed, then a minute, then another minute. The young man struggled and kicked, but still the teacher held him down until at last he drew him coughing and gasping out of the water.
“While you were under the water, what was it you wanted?” the teacher asked, when he saw that the other was at last able to speak again.
“Air,” the young man said, still panting.
“And how badly did you want it?”
“All . . . it was all I wanted in the world. With my whole soul I longed only for air.”
“Good,” said the teacher. “When you long for God in the same way that you have just now longed for air, come back to me and you will become a disciple.”
That desire is the core of prayer…and is what David James Duncan describes as the sigh, when he writes, “…the sigh within the prayer is the same in the heart of the Christian, the Muslim, the Hindu and the Jew.”
Years ago, as I came to understand that God’s favorite working material is the human heart, I began to think in terms of God shaping our response to events through our prayers, instead of God changing the circumstances. I realized that I can’t control whether or not it rains, but I can usually control whether or not I get wet. In this sense, prayer is like an umbrella – through prayer, my experience of circumstances can be changed.
When I think about what it means for prayer to work, I think about Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, who was named archbishop of Chicago in 1982, and was installed the same weekend Carl and I were married. Bernardin wrote: “… as a busy person - and all of us are busy these days - that somehow I began thinking that my work was my prayer. I was too busy doing good things, frequently for other people, and for this reason I didn't have the time to step aside and enter into a prayerful relationship with the Lord. But I kept talking about the need for developing a deeper spirituality - a more intense prayer life - but I was too busy….” Bernardin later described what happened in the mid-1970’s as a turning point in his life – he was Archbishop of Cincinnati, almost 50 years old, when three younger priests urged him to give more quality time to prayer. “In very direct - even blunt - terms, they helped me realize that, as a priest and a bishop I was urging a spirituality on others that I was not fully practicing myself,''
“The first thing that I had to do was to make time for prayer. Time is one of our most precious commodities. And I started to make time by getting up earlier in the morning, because it's early in the morning that I have a little time to myself - I'm not bombarded by telephone calls or urgent visits of various kinds. And that's how I got started…to give God the first hour of each day, no matter what, to be with him in prayer and meditation where I would try to open the door even wider to his entrance….Sometimes people feel that they don't know how to pray well, they don't get a great deal of satisfaction out of prayer and they become discouraged. That happened to me, too; it still happens to me. But what I say is this, "Lord, this is your time, I'm not going to use it for myself and I'm not going to give it to anybody else. So even if I'm not all that successful, from a human point of view, in my prayer, none-the-less, you know that I love you, you know that I consider you the most important person in my life, and this time is yours." I think that when we look upon prayer in that way and when we make time for it, I think that helps a great deal.” [Bernardin’s words quoted from his book The Gift of Peace and from an interview to 30 Good Minutes, a Chicago PBS show.]
Bernardin became one of the most influential people in the Catholic Church in the 20th century. He was a figure of great humility, deep faith and discernment. He was someone whom many both within and outside the Catholic Church saw as a man of God…and knowing the commitment to prayer that shaped him, I can begin to see how prayer works.
But, perhaps we need to spend less time worrying about how prayer works, and less time working at understanding God, and more time just appreciating God –trusting that God is, that God cares, that God is active in the world, and delighting in what we can sense of that as the psalmist did in the psalm Bob read this morning.
Maybe when we give up on understanding God, we might come to realize that the most important dimensions of prayer are desire and trust – such as are found in the prayer by Father Thomas Merton:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself.
And the fact that I think I am following your will does not
mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe,
dear Father,
that the desire to please You does in fact please You,
and I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And so I believe that if I do this,
You will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore, I will trust You always:
though I may seem to be lost in the shadow of death,
I will not fear,
for You are with me and You will never leave me to face my peril alone."
And perhaps the most important ways we live out that trust and desire is simply through our presence – making ourselves present to God, trusting that God is present to us, opening ourselves to the Love that is God becoming the love that flows through us. Can it be that prayer could be more by being less? Perhaps the words are less important than the sigh that bears the words from us. As I began thinking about this sermon, I knew how much people wonder about prayer, and felt that I ought to, as your pastor, have some wise words about prayer. But I felt it was more important to be honest about my own not-knowing, and to share with you some of the not-knowing of other deeply faithful people – like Cardinal Bernardin and Father Thomas Merton – who both admitted their own lack of understanding prayer, even while they continued to be committed to a life of prayer themselves. And that, I think, is the real wisdom – to be present in prayer, to be willing to do it without understanding it, and to trust that in the act of prayer, prayer is working in us. Finally, let me share the wise words of Gerry May, who writes in The Awakened Heart: I think most people have redouble with prayer because prayer is really an act of love, and therefore demands vulnerability. As with love, the more we try to control prayer, the less prayer can happen….Prayer is where we most directly face the truth of ourselves and of the world: it is risky business indeed.”
Let us engage the risky business of prayer – let us allow ourselves to commit to it without fully understanding, let us acknowledge our own desire for God, and trust in God’s desire and love for us. Let us remember that Jesus prefaced his teaching not with the words, “if you pray,” but “when you pray….” Amen.
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Psalm 85, Luke 11:1-13
In 1988, David Macauley published a book called The Way Things Work – it was a coffee table-sized book, with diagrams and narrative that detailed exactly that: the way things work. It was the sort of book that I would have enjoyed a lot as a child, and wish I had read more thoroughly before our copy was caught in a flood. Anyway, the new revised version not only explains things like zippers, fire extinguishers, and electricity, but also CD players and the internet. The ways things work tend to fascinate me, and is certainly a huge part of why I loved working as an electrician apprentice in a steel mill for three-plus years – I remember my last night in the mill, watching the red-hot steel rolling out, transformed in moments from slab to plate, and marveling that it still dazzled me, even after over three years of watching it. Even now every time I see that waffle-stamped steel floor plate in an elevator, on steps, or in a sidewalk, think, “I used to make that!” Twenty-seven years later I still get excited over having been part of that manufacturing process – making stuff, real stuff, and knowing a lot about how the process worked.
I’m incurably curious – and want to know (even more than I remember wanting to know as a kid) how things work. So I struggled for a number of years with prayer – the central question has never been answered for me: how does it work? And, I guess a precedent question would be: what does it mean for prayer to “work” anyway??
I think most of us here probably share an ambiguous response to that question – on the one hand, we feel that prayer works when we get what we pray for…and on the other hand, we recognize that it can’t be that simple. For we don’t always pray for noble things…and beyond that, experience teaches us that we don’t always get what we pray for, even when it seems like a good thing. And, I would point out, the teaching of Jesus in this passage is not that when we ask we will receive what we ask for; he says when we ask, seek and knock, we will receive the Holy Spirit.
I am reminded of two examples at this point – the first is the wonderful author Madeleine L’Engle, perhaps best known for her book A Wrinkle in Time, who wrote in an essay reflecting on prayer about the time she and many others were praying that a young friend with cancer would be healed. She writes, “Our prayers were answered, our friend was healed, although he died.”
And that story reminds me of the postscript that came on an email from a friend – it read: “God has three answers to prayer: ‘Yes, not yet, and….I have a better idea!’” That seems like another way of stating what country singer Garth Brooks pointed out in a song years ago, remembering what he had hoped and prayed for when younger: “Some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers….”
And if prayer is as simple as: we ask for what we think best, and a loving, wiser God gives us what is really best… then those examples work just fine. But what are we praying for? Let me share the remarks of Methodist Bishop and former Dean of the Duke University Chapel William Willimon, who reflects in this week’s Christian Century blog: “Prayer is not whenever I spill my guts to God: prayer is when I obey Jesus and pray for the things that he teaches me to pray for and when I pray the way he prays. Prayer is bending my feelings, my desires, my thoughts and yearnings toward Jesus and what he wants me to feel, desire and think.
“In most churches I visit, a time of prayer is often preceded by a time of “Joys and Concerns.” I notice that in every congregation, the only concerns expressed are concerns for people in the congregation who are going through various health crises. Prayer becomes what we used to refer to as “Sick Call” in the army. Where on earth did we get this idea of prayer? Not from Jesus. He healed a few people from time to time, but he doesn’t pray for that. He prays for the coming of God’s kingdom, for bread (but only on a daily basis, not for a surplus) and for forgiveness for our trespasses. It’s curious that physical deterioration has become the contemporary North American church’s main concern in prayer. Jesus is most notable for teaching that we are to pray—not for recent gall bladder surgery—but for our enemies!”
Along those lines, author David James Duncan reminds us of the prayer of Mother Theresa: “May God break my heart so completely that the whole world falls in.”
I don’t mean by these observations to discourage anyone from praying for the sick – after all, we are also instructed in the Bible to pray for those who are ill. And Jesus seems to encourage us to bring our concerns to God in our prayers. But, should prayer be just about asking and receiving? Many of us will probably be somewhat sympathetic with sociologist David Martin, Professor Emeritus at the London School of Economics, who wrote [in Christian Language in the Secular City (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2002), 88] : “Speaking only for myself I do not think prayer a way to prod lazy omnipotence and sleepy omniscience into proving itself by an unpredictable display of power; and moreover the God I believe in isn't some vacuous general explanation for the world tacked on where other more specific explanations stop.”
Perhaps prayer is more about desire – not so much that we want what we are praying for, but that we want God – this does seem to be part of what Jesus is indicating in his teaching about persistence in prayer. There's a story of a young disciple in India who left home and traveled in search of a spiritual master whom he at last found sitting in prayer beside a river. The young man begged the master to teach him. The master rose slowly and suddenly grabbed the younger man and dragged him into the river and under the water. Seconds passed, then a minute, then another minute. The young man struggled and kicked, but still the teacher held him down until at last he drew him coughing and gasping out of the water.
“While you were under the water, what was it you wanted?” the teacher asked, when he saw that the other was at last able to speak again.
“Air,” the young man said, still panting.
“And how badly did you want it?”
“All . . . it was all I wanted in the world. With my whole soul I longed only for air.”
“Good,” said the teacher. “When you long for God in the same way that you have just now longed for air, come back to me and you will become a disciple.”
That desire is the core of prayer…and is what David James Duncan describes as the sigh, when he writes, “…the sigh within the prayer is the same in the heart of the Christian, the Muslim, the Hindu and the Jew.”
Years ago, as I came to understand that God’s favorite working material is the human heart, I began to think in terms of God shaping our response to events through our prayers, instead of God changing the circumstances. I realized that I can’t control whether or not it rains, but I can usually control whether or not I get wet. In this sense, prayer is like an umbrella – through prayer, my experience of circumstances can be changed.
When I think about what it means for prayer to work, I think about Joseph Cardinal Bernardin, who was named archbishop of Chicago in 1982, and was installed the same weekend Carl and I were married. Bernardin wrote: “… as a busy person - and all of us are busy these days - that somehow I began thinking that my work was my prayer. I was too busy doing good things, frequently for other people, and for this reason I didn't have the time to step aside and enter into a prayerful relationship with the Lord. But I kept talking about the need for developing a deeper spirituality - a more intense prayer life - but I was too busy….” Bernardin later described what happened in the mid-1970’s as a turning point in his life – he was Archbishop of Cincinnati, almost 50 years old, when three younger priests urged him to give more quality time to prayer. “In very direct - even blunt - terms, they helped me realize that, as a priest and a bishop I was urging a spirituality on others that I was not fully practicing myself,''
“The first thing that I had to do was to make time for prayer. Time is one of our most precious commodities. And I started to make time by getting up earlier in the morning, because it's early in the morning that I have a little time to myself - I'm not bombarded by telephone calls or urgent visits of various kinds. And that's how I got started…to give God the first hour of each day, no matter what, to be with him in prayer and meditation where I would try to open the door even wider to his entrance….Sometimes people feel that they don't know how to pray well, they don't get a great deal of satisfaction out of prayer and they become discouraged. That happened to me, too; it still happens to me. But what I say is this, "Lord, this is your time, I'm not going to use it for myself and I'm not going to give it to anybody else. So even if I'm not all that successful, from a human point of view, in my prayer, none-the-less, you know that I love you, you know that I consider you the most important person in my life, and this time is yours." I think that when we look upon prayer in that way and when we make time for it, I think that helps a great deal.” [Bernardin’s words quoted from his book The Gift of Peace and from an interview to 30 Good Minutes, a Chicago PBS show.]
Bernardin became one of the most influential people in the Catholic Church in the 20th century. He was a figure of great humility, deep faith and discernment. He was someone whom many both within and outside the Catholic Church saw as a man of God…and knowing the commitment to prayer that shaped him, I can begin to see how prayer works.
But, perhaps we need to spend less time worrying about how prayer works, and less time working at understanding God, and more time just appreciating God –trusting that God is, that God cares, that God is active in the world, and delighting in what we can sense of that as the psalmist did in the psalm Bob read this morning.
Maybe when we give up on understanding God, we might come to realize that the most important dimensions of prayer are desire and trust – such as are found in the prayer by Father Thomas Merton:
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself.
And the fact that I think I am following your will does not
mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe,
dear Father,
that the desire to please You does in fact please You,
and I hope that I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire.
And so I believe that if I do this,
You will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore, I will trust You always:
though I may seem to be lost in the shadow of death,
I will not fear,
for You are with me and You will never leave me to face my peril alone."
And perhaps the most important ways we live out that trust and desire is simply through our presence – making ourselves present to God, trusting that God is present to us, opening ourselves to the Love that is God becoming the love that flows through us. Can it be that prayer could be more by being less? Perhaps the words are less important than the sigh that bears the words from us. As I began thinking about this sermon, I knew how much people wonder about prayer, and felt that I ought to, as your pastor, have some wise words about prayer. But I felt it was more important to be honest about my own not-knowing, and to share with you some of the not-knowing of other deeply faithful people – like Cardinal Bernardin and Father Thomas Merton – who both admitted their own lack of understanding prayer, even while they continued to be committed to a life of prayer themselves. And that, I think, is the real wisdom – to be present in prayer, to be willing to do it without understanding it, and to trust that in the act of prayer, prayer is working in us. Finally, let me share the wise words of Gerry May, who writes in The Awakened Heart: I think most people have redouble with prayer because prayer is really an act of love, and therefore demands vulnerability. As with love, the more we try to control prayer, the less prayer can happen….Prayer is where we most directly face the truth of ourselves and of the world: it is risky business indeed.”
Let us engage the risky business of prayer – let us allow ourselves to commit to it without fully understanding, let us acknowledge our own desire for God, and trust in God’s desire and love for us. Let us remember that Jesus prefaced his teaching not with the words, “if you pray,” but “when you pray….” Amen.