Howard W. Roberts
Glenview Community Church
August 9, 2009

Psalm 85:1-7
Luke 11:1-13

Throughout my years of work as a pastor, I have rambled through the Gospels stopping here and there along the way.  I have searched for what seemed to be important to the first followers of Jesus.  I have wondered if those same concerns and issues should be important to us.  I have wondered if those same issues are important to me personally.  Through the ramblings there have been some surprises. 
One of the surprises is what those first disciples asked Jesus to teach them. They only asked for instruction in one area.  They asked Jesus to teach them to pray.
   
Prayer is a subject of interest today.   What our attitude toward prayer is revealed by how we pray and the things for which we pray. We often disclose that we see prayer as some type of insurance policy that will keep some tragedy from happening to us.  All that insurance policies do is pay for the damages after the storm. Prayer can help us get our bearings and put out lives back together in the midst of some event threatening to destroy our lives.  

We pray when life isn’t going well, but seldom when life is clicking on all cylinders.  We pray when we are devastated and wiped out by tragedy but seldom when a dream comes true.  At times we pray because we think we should or ought or must.  When we pray, I suspect it is because at some level there is a hunger to hang out with God, a longing deep within our lives to be in touch with, connect with God.  We pray because we want to commune with God.  Which of these reasons is why you pray?  All of the above?

How do you pray?  Some babble on and on, words piled on top of words, never stopping to breathe.  Some write out their feelings and needs.  Some go to a quiet place and pour out their lives to God.  Some intersperse messages to God throughout the day.  Some develop an attitude of turning every day over to God and begin their day in some manner of turning their lives and the events of the day to God as the day begins.  I don’t know how you pray, when you pray, or why you pray, but I suspect that your desire is similar to that of the first followers of Jesus.  We know that somehow there is something to being connected with God and so we want to learn to pray because deep down, no matter what our needs, no matter what our circumstances, what we really need is God.
 Thomas Wray has observed:

One of the great mysteries of life is that often time it takes a great tragedy for us to be brought closer to God.   It is almost like the minister and taxi driver who appeared together at the pearly gates.  The minister knocked on the door and was greeted by St. Peter.  St. Peter told the minister there will be a brief wait before seeing God.  Next, the cab driver knocks on the door.  St. Peter invites the cab driver in to God.  When the minister sees what’s going on, she protests to St. Peter.  ‘I should get in right away because I have faithfully preached the word.’  ‘But,’ St. Peter replied, ‘I am sorry your preaching put everyone to sleep but the cab driver always had people praying.’  Like the cab driver’s passengers, we turn to God when we are vulnerable and feel most helpless. (Thomas C. Wray, Listening with God’s Ear, A Spiritual Discipline for Everyday Relationships, 1993.)
           
Prayer is communion with God.  It involves sending and receiving messages.  We are especially adept at sending but not so good on receiving.  Perhaps there is a parable in the way our bodies are made.  We have one mouth and two ears.  Perhaps we should listen twice as much as we speak in all relationships, especially in the area of communing with God.  Often, as Paul suggested, prayer is moanings and groanings too deep for words.  And the hymn writer captured the concept in the statement, “Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire, unuttered or expressed.” 
Frederick Buechner has noted:

The question is not whether the things that happen to you are chance things or God’s things because, of course, they are both at once.  There is no chance thing through which God cannot speak--even the walk from the house to the garage that you have walked ten thousand times before, even the moments when you cannot believe there is a God who speaks at all anywhere.  [God] speaks, I believe, and the words [God] speaks are incarnate in the flesh and blood of ourselves and of our own footsore and sacred journey.  We cannot live our lives constantly looking back, listening back, lest we be turned to pillars of longing and regret, but to live without listening at all is to live deaf to the fullness of the music.  Sometimes we avoid listening for fear of what we may hear, sometimes for fear that we may hear nothing at all but the empty rattle of our own feet on the pavement.  But be not affeard, says Caliban, nor is he the only one to say it.  ‘Be not afraid,’ says another, ‘for lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.’  He says he is with us on our journeys.  He says he has been with us since each of our journeys began.  Listen to him.  Listen to the sweet and bitter airs of your present and your past for the sound of him. (Frederick Buechner, Listening to Your Life, Harper San Francisco, 1992.)

Our praying and living are often inconsistent.  We pray for peace but work for war.  We pray for those who are hungry but continue distribution policies that make it impossible to get food to people who are hungry.  We pray for people in need but continue to enjoy, support, encourage, and benefit from policies and approaches that help the rich get richer and the poor become poorer.  The gap widens.  
What needs to happen is for our praying and our living move closer and closer to each other in an effort to become congruent.  Henry Ward Beecher observed, “It is not well for a man to pray cream and live skim milk.”  Another person said, “What people usually ask of God when they pray is that two and two not make four.”  Our praying and our living need to be consistent.  We must not pray for God’s will and then work against God’s will.  God’s will is for us to love God with all our heart, mind, and soul and to love others as we love ourselves.  Our living and our praying need to be in that direction.   

We pray for the healing of someone.  If healing doesn't happen, someone says it wasn’t God’s will.  Does that mean that the physicians and nurses who performed surgery and cared for this person were all working against God’s will?  If this death were God’s will, then, it would have been better for the medical team to spend their time, energy, and gifts with a patient who was God’s will to live.  God is always on the side of healing, mercy, justice, and forgiveness.  Our praying needs to be on that side as well.  We have no idea what resources God has available and to use Glenn Hinson’s phrase, we need to put our “love energy” alongside God’s resources and be a part of the healing process.  

Prayer is conversation with God about the state of our lives and the state of the world.  I once provided the transportation for William Hendricks to speak at a conference in Maryland.  As we were riding along in the car, I mentioned I was working on a book about prayer.  Hendricks said he thought prayer was a trilogue where his best self and his worst self talked to each other and God was an active listener and participant.  I like that because as my best self and my worst self converse with each other in the presence of God, God is able and willing to get my two selves together to love God with my heart, mind and soul and to love others as I love myself.

Do we at times approach prayer as a way to get what we want?  That mindset fits with our instant gratification culture.  But if there is any integrity at all in our praying privately and publicly, individually and in worship, means getting what God wants. 

One minister told about visiting a woman in the hospital whose body was inflamed with cancer.  Each day he and others prayed for her healing and each day the expression of disappointment at not being healed could be seen in her face.  One day she said to her pastor, “Today let’s not pray that I’ll be healed.  God knows that I hate this illness.  God knows I want to be healed.  Let’s pray that, whether I'm healed or not, I’ll feel close to God because even if I'm not healed, especially if I'm not healed, that’s what I really want--God.”

That’s what we all want, isn’t it?  Isn’t it God that we want when we pray?   Wasn’t this what those first disciples wanted when they asked Jesus to teach them to pray?  We want to know that God is there.  We want to know that God is with us.  We want to know the truth of the promise, “I will never leave you or forget about you.”  Does that apply to cancer?  Does that apply to starvation?  Does that apply to drought?  Does that apply to war?  Does that apply to unwanted pregnancy?  Does that apply if I have AIDS?  Does that apply if my best friend dies?  Does it apply in every circumstance in life--no matter what happens, no matter what occurs in our lives, God is there?  That’s what we really want.  That’s what prayer is all about--knowing, being assured, experiencing God with us, no matter what.  What transpires is amazing, surprising.

In a sermon, “Teach Us to Pray,” William Willimon notes,

The church that prays for healing is usually the one which is willing to change the bandages, empty the bedpans, keep the night vigils.  In our social concern and work for justice we are only doing what we asked for in prayer.  Our work is an extension of our prayer, not a substitute for it, and vice versa.  As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described the freedom march from Selma, Alabama:  “For many of us the march from Selma to Montgomery was both protest and prayer.  Legs are not lips, and walking is not kneeling.  And yet our legs uttered songs.  Even without words, our march was worship.  I felt my legs praying.”  (William Willimon, “Teach Us To Pray,” Pulpit Resource, St. Paul:  Logos Productions, June-August, 1995, vol. 23, no. 3, p. 21.)

We often conclude a prayer with the phrase “in Jesus’ name.”  Why do we do that?  Is this a magical phrase?  Is this a formula we add to a prayer to make it work?  This is not a required phrase we tack on to the end of a prayer to make it orthodox.   It is not a phrase we add to guarantee God will hear us or grant our requests.  To pray in Jesus’ name is a short-hand way of saying we want to look at life and live life like Jesus did.  It is to say we are not standing above those in need, those who are poor, those who are sick, those who are lonely.  It is to say we are standing beside them. 

The way that happens is to stay with it, keep at it.  The one thing Jesus taught about prayer is persistence.  That lesson is in the Model Prayer.  It is there in the parable in today’s lesson.  It is there is Jesus’ life when he went away to pray all night and when he prayed the same prayer repeatedly in the Garden of Gethsemane.  The instruction Jesus gave about prayer is to keep at it. As a result of persistent praying, prayer becomes living and living becomes a prayer.