Sunday Sermon May 21, 2017 2537 Lee Road Cleveland Heights, OH 44118 4198 Telephone: 216 321 8880 Website: www.chsaviour.org The P Word: Teach Us to Pray Luke 11:1 4, 9 10 Rev. Judy Wismar Claycomb, Lead Pastor The P Word is Prayer. As my preaching days here are numbered, teach us to pray emerges as one of the three last Words I m given to bring as Church of the Saviour goes forward in brilliant, vital ministry. I m not an expert on prayer, and I confess that I have caught myself, many times in my life, completely FORGETTING to pray, at times when prayer may have been the only response, or certainly the best response I could make in a troubled situation. Oh yeah! Pray! And, as with the E Word last week, (E vangelism), the P word is certainly in many ways a mystery to me. I offer this message this morning so that more of us and our church as a whole might open the door to experience more of what God I believe makes possible when we pray as I believe Jesus did. I want us to let ourselves off the hook. I wonder if part of why we don t pray is because we have unintentionally made it into work, or a performance, and you know how we are raised to perform here in the excellent Heights: Perfectly! At least competently. And we know well enough to leave performance to the experts in the field, Which might be why some of us may not think of ourselves as pray ers. Somebody else seems to have that down exquisitely. Let the professionals do it at least in public. And maybe the rest of us provide the fodder, the laundry list. How often preachers hear it: You have the hot line: call it in! when it comes to delivering good weather for the wedding or graduation party: So many of us, like Jesus followers, are just not sure our prayers will be done right. So we miss it. We miss out and our ministries are diminished in ways they don t need to be. There is so much more for us. Some years ago, a professor at one of our seminaries said, In the 16 years that I have taught in theological school the hardest question that a student ever asked was, 'Will you teach me to pray?' If (the student) had said, 'Tell me about prayer and praying,' or, 'Tell me how to prepare prayers for worship,' it would have been easier to respond concretely. If he had asked me to help him understand the meanings of the Our Father... but he asked the question which Harry Emerson Fosdick says is the only "teach us" request ever asked by the disciples. "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1). I d guess many of them had prayed all their lives, but there was something about Jesus' praying that made them hungry to understand more. 1
And with the prayer he gave them, Jesus, I believe, was instructing his disciples HOW to pray, not so much WHAT to pray. He wasn t concerned with crafting a beautiful, poetic, liturgically impressive statement that could be run off rotely in church service. He wasn t giving magic words to recite right Jesus gave his disciples this prayer so that they might live a life "wired in" to the Spirit. In the Lord's prayer he gave them and gives us a simple, understandable recipe for prayerfulness. He was not teaching a prayer. He was teaching prayer. I'm confident Jesus didn t want us to get bent out of shape with the way in which the Lord s Prayer is said or sung; whether we should use debts or sins or trespasses. He wanted us to find our way in to the heart of God (where he lived). So, briefly, very briefly he gave cues, clues, breadcrumbs to help lead us into God's presence not so that we could pray right, but so that we might access that relationship that place of the soul s rest, the heart s home Father, hallowed be your name. Your Kingdom come. This simple prayer, in Luke's account today, just 38 words, easy enough for children (like us!) to memorize, should release us from the hurdles and obstacles that keep us from praying. It is an invitation to relationship: heart to heart, truth to capital T truth. But, you know how we so often do: well meaning, but bumbling along in our religion, we take our best stuff, including this simple formula from Jesus, and wrap it up tightly, mummify it and encrypt it in concrete; make it into a rule, a legalism, a task, job, a performance (sort of like the way we do with Jesus himself, sometimes), rather than a doorway to relationship. So, that s the first teaching to pray I invite you to consider with me this morning: Prayer is not a test with a right answer, a right way and a wrong way; right words and wrong words; right length and wrong length; Prayer is a gift, an invitation, an opening, a grace of God, not a test. The second is that II. Prayer is given to us more for relationship than for results. I don t pray to get something or to persuade God to do something. I m indebted to my friend, South African Methodist pastor and leader, Peter Storey for much of this message today. Storey says this about prayer, Perhaps the most frequent misunderstanding of prayer is that we see it as a way of changing circumstances; frankly, manipulating circumstances by persuading God to do something. (As if we re assuming God would not have come up with this without our advice, or may not have done it, but for our prayers.) Too often we use prayers primarily as a tool, to attempt to get God to make some special effort on our behalf, or on behalf of somebody else, as if our prayers done right are going to twist God s arm to produce a desired result. You can see the theological dilemmas this raises: Why this one, and not that one? Were my prayers not right? Not enough? Not heard? 2
This, Storey observes, is a particularly western perception of prayer; a utilitarian perception, which is absolutely understandable because we live in a utilitarian culture. Western culture is about using things, making things work, as means to an end. How hard it is for Westerners not to be goal oriented when it comes to our prayer life. But Storey says when we apply a goal orientation to the life of prayer, we miss the heart of it and we cheapen it into something to be used, rather than something to be experienced, And then find ourselves getting tied up in knots because we re applying the wrong kind of test all the time, to whether prayer is effective or not, and it ends up, by our measure, failing. And then, what do we do? We blame God for not doing what we had asked. Storey, colleague and confidant of Nelson Mandela in the anti apartheid movement in South Africa suggests an insight from his experience with the interface of Black culture and white culture, as a white native South African. He identifies a cultural difference. Peter Storey says, You see, white culture, my culture, is overwhelmingly western, and therefore it is goal oriented. We re all about getting things done. If we come to prayer with a mainly goal oriented outlook, we become obsessed with proving that it works. Or give it up. After all, if we can t show some solid result, then why pray? We think the time can be better used to be more productive, and, of course, how we spend our time and what is produced as a result are what western culture is all about. Black African culture, on the other hand, in spite of three centuries of western influence, is still far more what Storey calls texture oriented. This means, he says, that black people have a far greater interest in the feel of life than whites do. While goals are important, they are not allowed to be the most important. And time, which, he says, is a fetish with many white people, time is NOT money. Time is for relationships. So, time spent in prayer is not for production, for producing our desired results. It s for relationship. And prayer is not a means to an end but a means of grace. So, if we understand that prayer is given to us more for relationship than for results, then the character of the ask in Jesus prayer, is now quite different. Give us this day our daily bread, I no longer approach God in order that God will do something, achieve something, change something or even give something. I approach God because God is my parent and I am God s child. I share my concerns, my needs because this is the relationship between any child and a loving Parent. By talking to God about these things I am first and foremost not laying out a shopping list for God to attend to, but I am affirming a parent child relationship, which is absolute, in trust. 3
Think about it. If you re a grandparent Some of you are parents aunties and uncles, care givers. One of the most sacred moments that one can have with a child is when a little one jumps into your lap and begins babbling about all sorts of things they would love to have or to do. A lot of their babbling could be nonsense. Maybe there are things that they would want which aren t good for them. The content of their conversation is not the crucial thing in that moment is it? The crucial thing is the relationship, the trust, the willingness to leap into your lap and to tell you everything. To hold nothing back. Even the things that make them look silly, they don t hold them back because you are their grandpa, or their grandma or their dad or mom, their uncle or auntie or favorite neighbor, or as Doris Marbley s great granddaughter calls Doris, her BFF, best friend forever. The uniqueness and beauty of the moment lies not in the content of the conversation so much as in the relationship which it demonstrates of total trust and love. And so, when I come to God with the stuff on my mind. I m not coming with a shopping list and saying I hope you can check these boxes, Lord. What I m saying is You are my parent I am your child. And I m going to bend your ear for a while. You need to hear what s on my mind. Not all of it will be according to your will, but I still need to tell you. And I want to share it with you because we re us. I trust you. I love you. I need you. Look at the Psalms. Don t you love how the psalmists just tell God everything? And not everything God may have wanted to hear; some of it was pretty tough stuff they laid on God. Sometimes they were very angry with God, and they just let him have it all. But they had this amazing relationship, of trust. So I hope we ll feel free to share your hopes and dreams and needs with our heavenly parent. We re not not giving orders to God. Who could dare to do that? But in this we re coming to know how deeply we trust and how dependent our lives are on this great God: Hallowed be your name. Which leads to the next discovery in teaching us to pray: III. Prayer is about God s Activity: Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Will be Done (and not because we said so.) Is prayer an something we do at all? Of course, there is a sense in which it is. I make time for prayer, I ready my mind, I center down, I prepare to interact with God. But what if prayer is not primarily our activity at all? We call prayer a means of grace, and that means prayer is the activity of God, God s Spirit within our lives; Holy Spirit growing us and cleansing us and working within us and making us whole. The main actor in prayer is God. Our role is a minor one making ourselves ready to receive God opening ourselves to this relationship. But, even in that, our role is very minor because it is the Holy Spirit who makes us open to receive him. Some of us remember that Wesleyan concept of prevenient grace : God is the hunger, as well as the food. How much of prayer is my activity? Very little. So, once again, I like to think of prayer not so much as an activity, as a gift: God s gift of God self, of Jesus, of Holy Spirit, in relationship 4
We could be bold to say that in prayer there is another incarnation, another coming into the world of God; that, whenever we pray, the gift of Christ potentially happens in us and among us. We could even be even more bold and say that Jesus is living among us and in us, in a special way when we are in prayer; that prayer is where he meets us most intimately. You can begin to understand why the mystics and monks spend so much time in prayer. I realize that prayer is not me doing something. It is Jesus giving himself to me. Prayer is the celebration of Jesus happening in me. I don t pray to get something or to persuade God to do something. I pray to celebrate Jesus happening in me and with me, And I am not doing something so much as allowing him to do his thing in me, celebrating being grasped and met and occupied by one who comes even to me Suddenly, prayer is no longer a chore but a party; a joyful reunion, just as in that moment when Jesus appeared amidst the disciples and said, Peace. I am with you and they were filled with joy. And in that relationship. In that Jesus appearing; Jesus meeting, Jesus coming, there, I believe God s power is unleashed and made available in the Church. That s what I pray for this church. Finally, how does this actually work? What s happening when we pray? Peter Storey s thought has helped me here too. In a moment, Danny Reiman will lead us into prayer with a beautiful rendition of Malotte s Lord s Prayer) Think about what happens to you when you listen to great music. (We ll not have a debate now about what great music is.) Just think about the music that moves you most. As the music gets to you, you bathe yourself in it. You lose yourself in it, and it begins to call out of you responses that you didn t know were there. That s what music does to us. The music touches places inside of you where you cannot go yourself. And it evokes feelings that are too deep for words that can only somehow arrive in you through music. That s the glory of music in every culture in the world Music moves us by passing through our conscious emotions to another deeper place where we resonate most personally and profoundly. I might call it the place of our souls. Prayer is like that. It is the conscious door to my unconscious self. It begins in that part of me of which I am fully aware, and then it penetrates to the hidden reaches of my soul, to places in me that can only be touched by the activity of God s Spirit, and nothing else. When I pray, God reveals more of himself to more and more of me. And most of us have very tightly guarded selves; which are hidden, even from ourselves. That tightly guarded self begins to open, under the pressure of God s Spirit and something sacred is enabled to happen. The Spirit not only moves me, as music moves me; Spirit changes me. And as I soak myself in the presence of Jesus and allow him to happen in me, his Spirit gets to work within my personality and the image of God in me, which can be pretty distorted a lot of the time is restored by this encounter. 5
Here is the place where I meet and receive the forgiveness I need; And it is here in this communion that I am made capable of forgiving; Here I am empowered to overcome temptation. In this relationship. And this is something that happens beyond my control. It s given by God, in prayer. Romans 8: and verse 4: For all who are moved by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The spirit you have received is not a spirit of slavery, leading you back into a life of fear, but a spirit that makes us sons and daughters, enabling us to cry, Abba, Father. And in that cry the Spirit of God joins with our spirit in testifying that we are the children of God; And then, In the same way, the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness. We do not even know how to pray, but through our inarticulate groans, the Spirit himself is pleading for us, and God who searches our inmost being knows what the Spirit means because he pleads for God s people in God s own way. And Paul goes on to talk about being shaped in the likeness of his Son. Does this make sense? The implications of these words are tremendous: that beyond the words that we utter, deeper than the thoughts that we think, God prays the prayers we cannot pray. If this is so, then in a wonderful way God s activity in our praying hearts transforms us and brings us more into harmony with himself. When I pray, I think in a wonderful way not only does Jesus happen in me, but I believe that the Kingdom, or the reign of God happens. If one of the meanings of what Jesus called the Kingdom of God is the reign or the rule of God in this world, then when we surrender our personalities to Christ in the process of prayer, Then, surely in that moment, we are allowing God to be God. And when we allow God to be God, God shows up in God s world. You could say that in that moment, God s kingdom has come on earth. 6