SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
September 23, 2007
Rev. Sally Iberg, Minister for Mission and Ministry
Text:  Jeremiah 8:18-9:1 and 1 Timothy 2:1-7

         
“Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.  If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.”  This eighteenth century children’s prayer is the first prayer I learned.  It’s probably the first prayer that many of you learned.  The scene is etched in my memory.  As a 4 year old I knelt beside my bed at night.  My mother, sitting on the bed near me, taught me this prayer, as her mother had taught her.  She said the words and I repeated them, until I could say a line at a time and then took flight saying the whole prayer without my mother’s coaching. 
 
This prayer was a mystery to me.  I grew up in the Roman Catholic tradition before Vatican II when all masses were said in Latin.  Because of my age and the method of learning the prayer I was sure that I had learned it in Latin.  You might have thought so too, were you to have heard me reciting it by myself.  It went something like this:  NowIlaymedowntosleepIpraytheLordmysoultokeep. IfIdiebeforeIwakeIpraytheLordmysoultotake.  Like my grandson Sean learning the alphabet song, what I learned was sounds.  It was only over time that those sounds began to have meaning. 

From time to time I would notice that some of the sounds I was making reminded me of words I had heard in other contexts.  “Funny, isn’t it, that some of the words to this prayer would be in English while most of them were in Latin.”  Over time, I realized that I knew all of the sounds as words in English.  The mystery was solved.  Over time, I could say the prayer without running all the words together.

Preparing a sermon on prayer to focus on Paul’s words to Timothy, led me to remember other early prayers I had learned.  One of these prayers was written by Mary Dixon Thayer in the first half of the 20th century and popularized by
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen.  The first stanza goes like this:  “Lovely Lady, dressed in blue, teach me how to pray!  God was just your little boy, tell me what to say!”  I’m sure this is a prayer that I learned in first grade.  The poem prayer goes on to talk in a way that suggests that there was a great deal of similarity between Jesus as a boy and the child who is praying.  It’s a very comforting and humanizing prayer.

The third prayer I was able to resurrect from the catacombs of my childhood memories was actually from a hymn written by Father Faber in the late 19th or early 20th century.  The first verse goes like this, “Dear Angel, ever at my side.  How loving must thou be, to leave thy home in heaven to guide a little child like me.”  This offered such intimate and personal caring for a child looking for security in what felt like a very insecure world.

As a child, I prayed with my Mother and I prayed in church and parochial school.  I prayed with words and with music.  The landscape of prayer is much more varied now and I like that.  In this era of ecumenism and interfaith dialogue we have discovered a wide range of prayer practices.  Where once some of these prayer practices may have been eschewed as pagan or heretical, they are now embraced as effective means of prayer.  If we view prayer in the simplest, most modern terms we might say that prayer is a way of connecting with God.  A more apt term might be communing with God, which carries a sense of intimacy.

Worship itself is a type of prayer made up of many forms of prayer.  We pray responsively in the call to worship, corporately in the prayer of confession and in the Lord ’s Prayer.  We listen to and participate in prayers that the leader says.  We reflect in silence following the prayer of confession and the sermon.  We pray in song.  We pray standing and sitting.  We open ourselves to God’s presence and listen for a word of God in the reading of the scripture.  We explore our faith, our practice, our tradition through sermons.  And we dedicate our gifts and our lives to God’s realm through the offering and prayer of dedication.  Worship is a prayer of reflection and commitment as we connect our faith to our actions and prepare to go back out into the world refreshed, renewed, and ready for God’s work.

At GCC, beyond our regular worship services, we gather to pray in many different ways.  A prayer group meets here regularly and is open to anyone’s participation.  The Pastoral Care Board supports a prayer chain whose members spend time in each day praying for members and friends of the church.  Once a month, the parish nurse, Marilyn Belleau, and GCC member Philip Racette, lead a group in lectio divina, a way of praying the scriptures.  Each Holy Week for the past 3 years we have rented a Chartres labyrinth and made arrangements for walking meditation.   We often have small groups formed around contemplative prayer and meditation.  Right here at GCC we practice many forms of prayer.  The freedom to experience God through these various approaches is quite a gift. 

A cousin of mine who is in his 70’s still writes AMDG at the top of his letters.  When he was in grade school, the nuns taught him to write these letters which stand for the first letters in the Latin phrase meaning, “all for the honor and glory of God.”  With each letter he writes he begins with a simple prayer.  A friend of mine who is 90 begins and ends each day with prayer.  Prayer practices that stay fresh and don’t fall into the rut of routine can help us be more intentional about noticing God’s presence in our lives. 

As a child, I would not have known to pray for comfort, and yet I was drawn to prayers and hymns that offered comfort.  Having the audacity to pray each night that God tend to me, conversing with Mary as if there is a similarity between me and her child, calling on a particular angel that chooses to watch over me – these are all prayers of comfort.  So I am led to explore the notion of what we pray for.

This past week I spent a lot of time with ice packs and heating pads and Advil, recovering from a back injury.  It gave me a lot of time to think about this sermon, but limited the time to actually write.  Pain can be such a distraction.  I was struck by my unwillingness to pray about this situation.  I am not big on prayers of supplication.  But each morning as I tried my first tentative steps of the day, noticing that yes, my back was improving, and no, it wasn’t yet healed, that what I really needed was patience with this healing process.  And in my impatience, with my teeth gritted, I would say, “OK, God, pass some patience this way.”  Fortunately for me, God hears through the angst.  So I pray for patience. 

In Barack Obama’s book, Dreams from my Father, Obama describes attending Trinity United Church of Christ, on Chicago’s south side, for the first time.  He was an organizer in the city and had been directed by several people to meet Jeremiah Wright.  After a conversation with Rev. Wright, Obama shows up at church.  He exquisitely describes the prayer/sermon that Wright delivered that day – the Audacity of Hope.  Wright draws a picture of the challenges that people face each day, from worrying about paying the bills, to experiencing disrespect and abuse, from being homeless to being dismissed and then connects them vividly to the role of hope in the most hopeless lives.  Jeremiah Wright prays about hope.

In our Hebrew Scripture text today, another Jeremiah laments about the distance between God and the people of Israel.  He is longing for a balm in Gilead, to ease the suffering.  At the same time, Jeremiah is calling the people of Israel to account for not attending to their relationship with God.  To Jeremiah, they are acting as if this is a one-way relationship.  Jeremiah prays for healing.

In Paul’s first letter to Timothy at the church in Ephesus, Paul is addressing a question on the minds of those in the church who have been listening to other prophets.  They want to know for whom they should pray.  Paul tells them to pray for everyone, especially those in power, that peace and justice may prevail.  Paul prays for everyone.

When I was four and my mother was teaching me to pray, neither she nor I were thinking of Paul’s letter to Timothy and yet at the end of the prayer, we always added these words:  “God bless Daddy, Mommy, Jean, Sally, and George.  God bless everyone.”  This was a very simple and very powerful addition.  Even when I am unable or unwilling to pray for everyone, I am deeply aware that I should.

What does it mean to pray for everyone?  I don’t think we’re being asked to recreate some of the more violent psalms in which we pray to God to smote the enemy.  I don’t think we have the spirit of the message if we pray that God would make the other person see how we are right or lose the next election.

There’s a story that travels the fund raising circuit about the President of a religiously affiliated college who is calling on a prospect for a significant gift.  The President suggests that they open their conversation with prayer.  In that prayer the President asks that God help the prospect experience the spirit of generosity and commit a million dollars to the school’s current campaign.  While this may have been an effective fund raising tactic, it misses the point of praying for everyone.

In order to pray for everyone, we really need to see how each person has been created in the image of God and therefore is someone whom God loves.  We know that in the Hebrew Scriptures and in the New Testament we are told that the most important commandments are to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves.  As Christian’s we have that further instruction from Jesus to love our enemy.  Ouch!  It may be helpful to make a distinction between loving and praying for everyone and letting anyone disrespect or abuse us.  Intentional communion with God helps us find our center.  It helps us find our strength.  It helps us find our words.  Praying for everyone helps us see each person as a child of God.  It helps us explore how we are alike and how we are different.  It helps us find a way to interact with everyone. 

There is a significant relationship between how we pray and how we act.  Our prayer life builds a solid foundation for our life in the world.  Our prayer life helps us define and clarify our convictions and commitments.  Our prayer life keeps us connected to God in a way that helps us live our life as an expression of our love for God, for our neighbor, for ourselves, and for our enemies.

The September issue of Smithsonian magazine, includes an intriguing article on “the Amazing Albatross.”  These birds “fly 50 miles per hour. Go years without touching land. Predict the weather.  Mate for life.  And they’re among the world’s most endangered birds” (Smithsonian, September 2007, pp 46-47).  It’s a wonderful story about the challenges these birds face.  I can’t read a story about the albatross without remembering Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”  The article ends with a few lines from this work.  And it seems an apt ending for this sermon about praying for everyone:

Farewell, farewell! But this I tell
To thee, thou wedding-Guest!
He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Let us be in silent prayer for everyone.