I Kings 2:10 12, 3:3 14 David Telfort Des Moines, IA August 16, 2015 A Confounding Answer to a Prayer This morning we continue with the sermon series we ve been journeying through all month, That s a Good Question. We ve invited you to submit questions that you have, regarding almost anything that you would like to hear sermons about. A few were selected and you ve by now heard the sermons, and have probably seen the questions posted around the church and in bulletins. Today s question is, What about prayer? As we wrestle with that question this morning I invite you to meditate on the title of my sermon this morning, A Confounding Answer to a Prayer. Let Us Pray. Church, one of the things that often brings my family together are these amazing, elaborate Sunday afternoon meals that my grandmother cooks. I don t know how she does it, but after a full day of worship, prayer circles, and catching up with friends my grandmother is able to host a revolving door of children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, spouses, partners and everyone in between into her home for what seems like never ending plates of amazing food. I m talking rice and beans, jerk chicken, fried plantains, crab salad it is amazing what my grandmother can do in the kitchen. And whenever my family is seated around the table at her house or more likely scattered around her home because there s not quite enough room for everyone; we join hands to pray over the meal to come.
There used to be a tense moment it seemed to see who s going to bless the meal with a prayer. Tense, I think at least, because it sometimes felt awkward to pray out loud, it sometimes feels awkward to pray in front of a group even when that group is your family. It s funny because I come from a family of ministers and yet there was always prayer hot-potato that passed from one person to another via shifty eyeballs when it came time to pray. One Sunday afternoon a few years back when it was time to bless the meal, my then one-yearold or so niece Grace didn t wait for the task to be passed from one person to the next, little Grace belted out among other undecipherable sounds, I pray! We all smiled, half closed our eyes, and honed in little Grace s face, as she prayed sounds I won t dare to try to reproduce but sprinkled in-between them were, Food, God, and thank you. That s all I got that is all I got. We all didn t understand every word that Grace was trying to share, we didn t quite get the structure of her unformed sentences but we all said, Amen! emphatically affirming her courage, words, and her prayer. I look back on that moment when that one-year-old prayed that prayer and I realized that the reason why we said Amen, that declaration of affirmation, is because in that moment we wanted to let Grace and everyone present know is that prayer is all about communication with God. It doesn t have to have perfect subject and verb agreement. It doesn t have to be polished and eloquent. Prayer can have words or be a silent meditation, and in that moment Grace taught us that prayer can take any form you need it to, all you need to do is communicate with God. And early on in this sermon may I drop that in someone s spirit? That prayer can take any form you need it to? Prayer can be on your knees in the morning, just talking to God about whatever is on your mind. But prayer can also take the form of a morning run taking in the landscape of a trail, or being so in tune with your body s movements and breath that you can experience a word from the Divine. Prayer can take place while reading scripture, Matt told us a couple weeks ago on Saturday night that he starts his days off in the Psalms beautiful models of real, honest prayers if you ever want to take a look. Now those are a couple of examples, but part of what I d like someone to walk away excited to try out is to find the different forms of prayer that work for you. All it is communication with God, and it can take any form.
I almost could take my seat right there, but I believe that there s a word in our text today about prayer, may I set the scene? At first glance perhaps you might believe that prayer doesn t seem to show up in our text this morning. But I invite you to take a look beneath the surface. Because if you look beneath the surface you might see a group of disenfranchised, subjugated Jews living under the political regime of the Roman Empire being economically exploited and desperate for a change. If you look beneath the surface you might feel their pain as they try to hold on to the memory of a God who delivered them from Egypt, delivered them Babylonian captivity only to find themselves in a similar place again, desperate for a change. If you look beneath the surface of our text you might hear their real, frustrated, honest cries not for peace, not for calm but for revenge to be exacted against a military state that seems hell-bent on reminding them that their lives, their religion, their culture does not matter. And they meet Jesus desperate for a change. I don t know about you but that sounds that fertile ground for prayer; the type of prayer that not only comes in the private meditations of individuals but is also uttered collectively. Prayer can be a solitary act, but just like we do in worship on Sunday, like families sometimes do around meals, prayer can be to send a unified voice to the heavens and ask in a collective voice, Is there a word from the Lord? These Jews would have come from a lineage of ancestors who not only prayed in the synagogues standing, sitting, or on their knees but also took their prayers and frustrations to the streets; in the forms of rebellions and insurrections, the only thing that they felt they could do when they felt they had no other options at their disposal. And just in case we re tempted to shake our heads and believe that this could never happen in our land, in our nation, in our city the feeling of living with one s back against the wall as Howard Thurman put it is where many citizens in Ferguson, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and dare I say it Des Moines find themselves today. It is in this crucible of pain and anguish that prayer went up. The Jews prayed. Broken, but they prayed. Tears flowing but they prayed. Discouraged, but they prayed.
And what we find in our text today is the last thing that I d like to share today about prayer: that as much as prayer is about our communicating with God about our lives, the ups and the downs, our joys and concerns prayer is also about intentional listening. Part of prayer is about learning how to look out for the answers God may send even when they come in forms and answers we don t expect. The Jews have been oppressed, in this moment in history it is at the hands of the Roman Empire, and as Paulo Freire, that Brazilian philosopher and academic, teaches in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed 1, this generation of Jews only knows power to be in the hands of the person with the most swords. Don t miss that, when the Jews prayed for relief they weren t praying for peace no they were praying for revenge. Their models for learning had come in part from their oppressors, so they could only conceive of relief from their subjugation coming in the form of a militarized leader and after seeing generations of failed attempts they saw and heard about the signs of Jesus and they thought He s finally here, it s about to get good. And Jesus messes them up, because Beloved he comes as an answer to their prayer just not in the form they were expecting. Jesus challenges them, to rethink what true power is. Jesus discourse on bread is a discourse not of inflicting pain, not on exacting revenge, not of turning hands into weapons of death but vessels of life. Jesus doesn t discount their hurt. He doesn t discount their needs. He doesn t walk past their wounds, but he challenges them because if the only terms of engagement are terms of war then nobody lives. The text speaks a word of challenge but a word of life to us this morning, that part of prayer is not only that it can come in different forms, that it can be an individual discipline or a collective cry, but that prayer also means being still enough to hear a word from God even if that answer may not be what we expected or in the form we expected to hear it in. If you re anything like me, 1 Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the oppressed. [New York]: Herder and Herder, 1970.
prayer tends to be so one-sided, an encounter with the Divine all too often missing open space to just hear what the Spirit may be saying. I heard a beautiful illustration of this very idea a few weeks ago. I was listening to a sermon by one of my homiletical heroes Jeremiah Wright 2. He told a story about a guest preacher who came to Trinity UCC in Chicago. Part of this preacher s morning ritual was to take some time for prayer by a body of water, and it happened to be that his option in Chicago was Lake Michigan. So here he goes, walking along and while he s on his walk he notices a crane, playing with a fish. The crane had caught a fish and the tides were coming in and receding. The crane made a game out this and when the tide would come in he would pick the fish up and when it receded would drop it on the sand and watch the fish flip and flop for dear life. Eventually the crane got tired of this game, and scarfed down its breakfast only to discover what you probably already know that when the tide is moving back and forth in the manner it was that morning that your legs and feet tend to sink in the compromised sand. The crane is full from breakfast, but stuck in the sand. This preacher, sees what s happened and runs over to help the crane hearing its squeals and cries for freedom. Now this preacher was a large man, about 6 5, 325 pounds, and the crane must not have been expecting its aid to come in the form of an NFL linebacker because the minute he tried to free it from its predicament it took its razor like beak and cut his hand wide open. As blood flowed down from his hand and onto the sand he said to himself, I wish I could speak crane If I could only speak crane, I could let the crane know I m not here to hurt it but free it. And I just believe that God looked down at the people of Israel, looked at the non- Israelites, even looked at the Romans and saw their pain, heard their cries, inclined Her ears to their prayers and said to Herself, I know I raised up the judges, I know I that I groomed kings, I know I sent the prophets, but I wish I could speak humankind wait a minute I can. 2 Wright, Jeremiah. The good shepherd. [Louisville]: Black Church Studies Consultation at Louisville Seminary, 2013.
And so God walked down and through forty and two generations and came to speak a word of hope, a word of liberation, a word of peace that brought life and not death. God came born to a poor Palestinian teenager, walked with the poor, communed with marginalized in their pain. And when the time came offered a paradigm shift, a shift in seeing what power is even if it was unlike anything they had ever seen or conceived. I come to speak that same word today Beloved. To encourage us to pray in whatever form we might see fit and to listen, even for a confounding answer to a prayer. Amen. Plymouth Congregational Church United Church of Christ 4126 Ingersoll Avenue Des Moines, Iowa 50312 Phone: (515) 255-3149 Fax: (515) 255-8667 E-mail: dtelfort@plymouthchurch.com