ON PRAYER

A. STARTING THE CONVERSATION

November 3, 1991

8:30 and 11:00 a.n. Worship Services
John M. Buchanan

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
Job 23:1-7
Mark 10:46-52

“Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more
loudly, ‘Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on mer

-Mark 10:48 (NRSV)

The trouble with religion is that it is so predictable, so
familiar. Familiarity may breed contempt, as the old saying
goes, but it also breeds blindness. See something beautiful
every day, and if you are not careful, you will stop seeing the
beauty. It's not uncommon. People who live here don't stand
around gawking up at the Hancock Building, a striking architec-
tural accomplishment. wWetre used to it. People who live in the
mountains of New England forget how incredibly beautiful the
autumn leaves are until out-of-staters remind them. If you drive
by it every day on the way to work, the Grand Canyon, someone
Said, becomes just a very big hole in the ground. Familiarity
. Can breed blindness. :

And so in religion...

"Praise ye, the lord, the Almighty,...Hast thou
not seen how thy desires e'er have been, granted
in what he ordainth?

"Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all

desires known, and from whom no secrets are
hid..."

'"I believe in God the Father Almighty..."

We make these incredible assertions week after week; propo-
sitions which on the face of things are wildly improbable; ideas
which if true are the most important ideas around. But they are
so familiar, so ho-hum.

Professor Walter Brueggemann says that our religion is a
"truth widely held, but a truth greatly reduced." [Finally Comes

1

the Poet, p. 1] There is, he says, "a casual, indifferent readi-
ness, even in our increasingly~secularized society,>to-grant: the-
main claims of. the Gospel - not to grant them importance, but to
accept. them as premises of the religious life."

And so, as the music stops and the lights go down and the
holy hush descends in this place, my fervent prayer is always:
. "Startle.us O God!.. Startle.us.with.the wild improbability of

what we say we believe, Startle us with the incredible
beauty and goodness of the affirmations this place, and our being
in it, this morning represent."

Fred Craddock, one of the very best teachers of preaching,
and most astute analysts of public religion, talks a lot about
boredom,..."a product of over-familiarity."

"Some listeners in churches have accepted boredom
as one of the crosses that come with commitment,
but I cannot. Boredom is not just a condition
that prompts humorous stories about this stale
profession or that dull preacher. .Boredom is a
form of evil. Boredom is a preview of death if
not itself. a form of death and when trapped in
boredom, even the most saintly of us. will. hope
for, pray for, or even engineer relief however
demonic. Sincere Sunday worshipers will confess
to welcoming in muffled celebration any interrup-
tion of the funereal droning. Be honest, have you
ever quietly cheered when a child fell off.a pew
or a bird flew in a window or the--lights.went out
or the organ wheezed or the sound system picked up
police calls or a dog came down the aisle and
curled up to sleep below the pulpit?"

Craddock tells about a clergy friend of his, a gentle and
good man, who went to the Indianapolis 500, and after two hours
his boredom turned him into a degenerate sinner. "The demon of
boredom had transformed him." [Overhearing the Gospel, p. 13]

I've seen it happen. Behind many a school behavior problem
is simple boredom. Teachers have to learn the difficult art of
keeping everybody engaged ~- the slower ones on task and the
quicker ones not bored. If it doesn't work the quicker ones will
make life miserable. I've seen it. For years I sat in a pew
beside my father, a railroader who lived by a railroad time table
and a pocket watch on a chain, was easily bored, and when the
sermon went too long, took his railroader's. watch out of his
pocket a few times and looked at it and then finally wound it, a
sound easily audible all over the Sanctuary.-.My mother was morti-
fied. My brother and I thought it was hilarious which, in retro-

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spect, is surely most of why he did it. The demon of boredom had
transformed him!

Familiarity breeds boredom and. blindness in life... in human
relationships... in religion too.

Jesus of Nazareth had spent the last three years of his life
teaching a new way of relating to God, proclaiming God's incredi-
bly inclusive love to anyone who would listen, and in the name
and spirit of that love healing the sick. He had recruited a
small cadre of men and women to learn from him so that they could
carry on after he was gone. He spent most of his time, in fact,
telling them and showing them what to do. After three years he
decided to go to Jerusalem where his teaching and proclaiming and
healing would not be nearly as welcome as in his home territory
of Galilee. In fact, it will be dangerous. He knows that for
him, it may be the end.

From the perspective of discipleship and what it means to be
a follower of Jesus, it is the pivotal moment. We've been think-
ing about it on and off for two months, this moment when friends
of Jesus have to look deeply inside themselves and decide whether
to turn back to the safety and security of home or take the
fateful step of following to Jerusalem.

And just at this moment, the writer of..the first account,
Mark, tells two startling stories, which in fact, are really two
parts of one larger story.

The first is so human. it's embarrassing. Jesus has just
decided to go to Jerusalem.and. to confront. the .city,.-the power
structure, and to accept the outcome. The way to Jerusalem is
the way to the cross. He has told them that he is willing to
die. It is a powerful and defining moment, and at that very
moment two of them, James and John, ask him to give them places
of power and honor just in case he ends up in control of Jerusa-
lem. And it sets off a bitter argument among all his followers.
Familiarity had bred blindness.

And then the second story: the last incident before he
enters Jerusalem.

They were leaving Jericho and having demonstrated their
blindness to the significance of what he is doing and what they
are doing by following him, they walked by an authentically
blind man sitting beside the road begging, a man who had probably
been sitting there for years and was a familiar Sight to travel-
ers, situated as he was just. outside. the. gate... 0 -=

But this time, instead of asking for money, the man whose

name was Bartimaeus, shouts, "Jesus, son of David, have mercy on
me!"

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That's a-switch. It's. different,-a little frightening »
actually, and very presumptuous.-. After all, it's a high and holy
moment. And.there is always a.possibility. that -his. blindness
sugnifies God's judgement. And so everybody, indignant at his
rudeness, "sternly orders him to be quiet," tells him to shut up.
But Bartimaeus is not about to be put off, so he yells even
.ouder, "Son of David, have mercy on me." Unlike the.ones who
are familiar with Jesus, who know intellectually the gravity of
the moment but whose familiarity has blinded them to its signifi-
cance, Bartimaeus, to his everlasting credit, knows exactly what

this moment might mean for him and will not miss it. He will not
shut up.

And then the miracle happens. Jesus hears him. Calls him.
Asks him what he wants. "Let me see again," Bartimaeus says, and

Jesus responds: "Your faith has made you well," and Bartimaeus
saw.

"Your faith has made you well." That is, your impatience,
your presumptuousness, your. determination to.get a hearing, your
pushiness, has made you well.

It is a wonderful definition of faith. And, I am proposing
this morning that it is a good initial understanding of prayer,
starting the conversation, an insistent.expression of pain, anda
presumptuous demand for attention.

Our praying is so predictable, so polite and structured.
Some have said that it is trivial chatter, a recitation of euphe-
misms, not much of an improvement over the Silence that we nei-
ther believe nor understand.

Professor Brueggmann points out the great scriptural tradi-
tion that when the primal silence between God and human beings is
finally broken by praying, what is said first is impatience,
pain, anger. It's not the kind of praying we do but the Psalter
is full of human indignation.

"How long, O Lord? Will you
forget me forever?

"How long must I bear pain?
consider and answer me..." [Psalm 13]

Did you hear the impatience in that?
And Job, coming to God in his devastation... ...

"Today, also my complaint is bitter.
Oh, that I might know where I might find him." [23:1]

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.Do you hear the anger?
"Jesus son of David, have mercy.on- me!"
Do you hear the years of pain and rage?

Brueggemann points out that there is no communion without
communication, without speech... that silence between people is
deadening, and boring; and that healing happens only when pain is
spoken. Throughout the spirituality of the Psalms, reconcilia-
tion with God, peace, wholeness and healing happen only when

human frustration and rage and impatience are first fully ex-
pressed.

We know the psychological truth of that. We know that
unspoken resentment and anger between two people who want to love
each other is destructive and can be fatal. Marriage counselors
know about a kind of silence which itself is an eloquent expres-—
sion of hostility. "What's wrong?". -"Nothing. Absolutely noth-
ing!" "Can we talk about it?" "There's. nothing to talk about,"
is a litany of deep anger and hurt that will not quickly dissi-
pate or maybe ever dissipate until it is acknowledged and spoken,

The whole culture is suddenly learning..an unwelcome but
necessary lesson about sexual..abuse-andusexual. harassment: not
only that it happens, happens a lot, has happened - in the case
of abuse - to perhaps one out of four girls and young women, in
the case of harassment - to perhaps two-thirds of all women.
What we're learning is that it happens and then it is repressed
because it cannot be spoken. It will not be. believed, or.it-will
be blamed on its victim. "She was asking for it, wasn't she?" And
so it is internalized, buried deep in psychic memory where it
lives on, year after year, often with devasting effects on the
person's ability to trust and relate wholly to others until it

insists on being spoken, and then and only then is healing possi-
ble.

Absolutely essential to our relationships with people we
love, and with God, is the ability to bring to speech our deepest
pain, our deepest fear, our deepest need.

It takes nerve. It takes courage. It is easier with one
you love to gloss over hurt and anger, to leave it unexpressed.

It is far easier in our praying to use the safe euphemisms and
familiar formulas.

There are a lot of reasons modern. Christians have trouble
with praying, and we'll think about some more of them next week,
but chief among them is the simple fact that it takes courage to
speak about your hurt, your pain, your need. Beyond all the
empirical, logical, cause and effect barriers to prayer, there is

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this human propensity to play it safe, to keep it light and
pleasant.

Blind Bartimaeus had done that.all_his.life, sat. by the
roadside begging, shuffling home to his filthy~hovel every night
with enough coins for a loaf of bread and then to bed and up
again in the morning for another day of humiliation, sitting
there in the isolation of his blindless, begging. "alms? alms? God
-. bless. you sir." And then one day, he had had enough. There was
a chance that this man, this rabbi from Nazareth, the one people
were calling Messiah, might by God's grace hear him, notice him
and change him. So he threw caution to the wind, threw off his
secure pattern of begging and then deferring to the social stand-

ards of polite society by shutting up when told to and stood up
and demanded a hearing -

"Jesus, Son of David, have mercy."

John Updike, talking about his own spiritual pilgrimage,

--tells about the famous painters, Picasso and. Matisse, both self-

proclaimed atheists. Matisse had designed and decorated a chap-
el. Picasso had chided him. Matisse said: "Yes, I do pray:
and you pray too, and you know it all too well: when everything
goes badly, we throw ourselves into prayer... And you do it toa.
It's no good saying 'no.'" [Self Consciousness, p.. 228]

I think that the most familiar words in the Bible, not so
much the words themselves as the thought they represent, the
human appearances they describe, are these:

"How long, O Lord? Will you
forget me forever?"

I think far deeper than any physical condition, any illness,
any blindness or incapacity, you and I experience deep in our
souls that abandonment which is present in the ancient words,
"How long, O Lord?"

We feel spiritually inadequate in the presence of friends
who seem to have an open hot-line to God.

We feel like spiritual impostors when we hear about the
vivid religious experiences other people have had.

The story of Blind Bartimaeus is an invitation to say that
/to God, to stop repressing the feelings of hurt and anger, to
start the conversation with the same determined insistence as the

blind man which.got:.Jesus' .attention.‘and» which Jesus called
faith.

What his insistence got him, was a hearing, and then his
sight, the ability to see again... to see the world in all its

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magnificence, to see the one you love again in all her beauty, to
see your.children,. your friends, your dear ones, again,. clearly; ..

and to see.him -.the one who hears your cry, hears your pain and
your anger.

It could happen. But you will have to start the conversa-
tion somehow. Somehow, in some way, in some act and some words
that are personally and uniquely your own. You will have to
insist on a hearing, have to bring to speech the content -of your

heart. Maybe that's what your being here means. Maybe that's
why you can't forget about him.

"Jesus, Son of David, Have mercy on me!" a blind man
cried out one day.

And Jesus heard him. And restored his sight.

Amen.

+ + + + + +

Hear us, O God. Hear our stylized praying..in church and

hear the inarticulate praying that goes on.win.the depth of our
souls.

Have mercy on us... heal us... forgive us... let us see
again. Amen.

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