This sermon was preached at First Congregational Church of Tallmadge on July 29, 2007. I am indebted to Richard Wing and Tony Campolo for their work on this subject.
Luke 11:1-13
Dedicated to the members of the Adult Mission Tour, who are on their way to Kentucky this morning; and always to the glory of God.
I remember the movie “Oh God,” in which John Denver played an unassuming grocery manager who was unexpectedly visited by God in the form of George Burns, which is probably about what a lot of people thought God looked like anyway. It’s kind of an old movie now, but it had some good theology in it. God is asks John Denver’s character to be a sort of messenger, and in one scene God asks him to go to a church where there is one of these television evangelist types. The service he walks into is very slick, very glitzy. John Denver walks up to him right at the pulpit and says “I have a message for you from God.”
Well the preacher says real loud to everyone “this man has a message for God just for me! Go ahead son.”
And so he gives him the message: “Shut up! You are embarrassing God!”
Sometimes I think that God must cringe at some of the things that are said in God’s name. Even when we mean well, we can end up saying things that make God look pretty bad. Especially when it comes to prayer.
Tony Campolo wrote a book called Following Jesus Without Embarrassing God, which is partly the inspiration for this sermon. In it he talks about a woman who came to him once and said “my washing machine broke the other day, and I prayed for it, and God made it work again!” OK So she is saying that God heard her prayer and caused her washing machine to be fixed, and that this is apparently the same God who has not done anything for people like the woman who is dying of cancer with three young children, even though hundreds of people are praying for her. When we say that about God, it makes God look bad. If this were a parent who was fixing one child’s broken toy instead of taking a dying child to the hospital, we would find that parent negligent! And yet that’s what we seem to be saying about God.
What is prayer all about? There was a study some years ago involving a number of heart surgery patients who were divided into two groups. One group was prayed for by others without them knowing about it. The other group was not prayed for, and the results showed that the group who was prayed for did better. Wow! That was good news for those who want to talk about prayer getting results. So then there was the follow-up study. Using a much larger group of heart patients, and done over the course of ten years with two million dollars spent, they finally concluded that the prayed for group showed no significant difference in health. The headline in the New York Times read "Prayer Fails Major Medical Test."
That headline makes sense because of the image that most people have about prayer, which is that prayer consists of asking for the things that we want or hope for, whether for ourselves or someone else, and then either God grants us what we prayed for, or we call the prayer unanswered. Now sometimes we’ll get a little sophisticated and say that perhaps God answered our prayer in a different way, and we need to figure that out, but the image remains: we ask, God delivers. I think the headline should have read "Prayer-As-Supernatural-ATM-Machine Fails Medical Test."
Real prayer is our conversational connection with God. That’s what it is, and it is a gift beyond our understanding, which most of the time we don’t recognize, myself included.
I think if we can begin to clear away some of these misguided notions of prayer, then we will be on the way to recovering prayer as a sacred practice in our lives.
#1 Prayer is not magic. The anthropologist Bronislav Malinowski, who studied religious traditions across cultures, gave the classic definition.
“Magic, he wrote, is an attempt to control supernatural powers so that people get what they want. Prayer, on the other hand, is a process wherein people spiritually surrender so that they might become instruments through whom the supernatural powers do their work.”
Another way to think about it is that too often we pray like the man who goes to the doctor, spends five minutes talking about everything that hurts, and then leaves before the doctor can say a word. And we expect God to answer the prayer we have asked for without otherwise having to changer our lives at all. In truth, prayer is a place where we surrender ourselves that God might work through us, so that God might help us to give up our focus on what we want for ourselves, and look instead to what God’s will is for us and for others.
Prayer is not magic.
#2 Prayer is not something that works if you are extra good or spiritual. There are too many places, too many churches, where someone will come in tears about the prayer that has gone unanswered, and will be told “I’m sorry, buy you just didn’t pray enough.” Or, “you didn’t pray in the right way.” Or, worst of all, “you haven’t been faithful enough in your giving to the church. God will bless you when you give.” As if God is like the power company, shutting off the lights until getting paid. The book of Job should have cleared up this rotten theology a long time ago. God does not sit up above blessing the good and cursing the bad. Sometimes bad people enjoy health and wealth, and good people suffer greatly. Prayer doesn’t work by merit.
#3 Prayer is not to be understood. Tony Campolo writes, and see if this sounds like you: “I do it every morning, but I don’t have it figured out yet. The more I’m blessed by it, the less I understand just what it is. The more God fails to give me what I desperately beg for, the more assurance I have that God understands me, suffers with me, and will carry me through.”
The truth is that if prayer were just getting whatever we ask for, it would soon becomes very shallow, and we would ache and long for a bigger God.
So, we’ve cleared away some bad images for prayer. But how do we get started?
I believe that prayer begins with being truthful. When we pray, in is our conversational relationship with God, and so we tell God things about our lives, but of course these are things that God already knows. We don’t think that when we pray for our sister Mary who is in the hospital that God says “Whoa! When did this happen, which hospital?”
We do it because we need to be truthful. We need to speak the truth about our lives and the things we care about to someone who is listening.
And doesn’t it already begin to change us? Lifting names in worship calls our attention to specific acts, and it reminds us that everyone in this room carries burdens and when we remember that then we are more likely to meet everyone with kindness, to be slow to take offense, knowing how much each other person is going through already.
These prayers help us to reach out in comfort, support, and healing. We pray for those at war, and then we show our support in packages sent oversea, and a new ministry for veterans. We pray for peace and then we seek ways to understand our enemies and we take our prayers to the voting booth. We pray for those who are sick, and then we give blood, or join the Relay for Life to help with treatment and research. When we are truthful about ourselves, then we are well on our way to surrendering ourselves to God’s will for us, and God’s will for the world. “Your will be done on earth” is what Jesus taught us to pray.
Prayer also involves listening, and a willingness to change.
The movie Shadowlands tells the story of C.S. Lewis, author of the Narnia books, Oxford professor, and a great writer on the Christian faith. The movie focuses on his marriage to Joy Greshem at a later age, and the cancer that afflicts her and finally takes her life. At one point during her struggle, he comes to a colleague and tells him that the cancer has gone into remission. He says to him
“I know how hard you've been praying; and now God is answering your prayers.”
But Lewis tells him: “That's not why I pray, Harry. I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn't change God, it changes me.”
Finally, you don’t need to know how to pray to begin praying. Anne Lamott suggests that there are really only two kinds of prayers:
God, thank you.
And, God, help!
When Paul wrote to the Romans about prayer, he told them that “the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
Even when we don’t know what to say, just begin by saying “My God,” and let God’s spirit do the rest.
“My God… a child is hurt.”
“My God…more of our children died in Iraq.”
“My God…my friend is very ill. She’s had a long life and suffers so. I don’t know whether to ask for another five years or for a peaceful death. Help.”
“My God…I don’t know what to do.”
“My God.” That’s all you need to get started. And then listen, for the grace of God which passes understanding. Listen to be made new, to know that God will see us through, to know that God has the last word, and that word is love.
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