TAKE IT TO THE LORD IN PRAYER

November 1, 1992

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

Fourth Presbyterian Church, Chicago

Scripture
1 Thessalonians 5:12-18
Luke 18:1-8

"Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circun-
stances..." ~l Thessalonians 5:16-18 (NRSV)

What you believe about prayer is, I think, influenced by
your memory of prayerful occasions, memories of people you wit-
nessed praying.

Catholic Church, has written a wonderful account of a prayerful

In her memoir, An American Childhood, she remembers how it
was to be an adolescent, sitting in the balcony of a Presbyterian
Church in Pittsburgh with her Junior High classmates during
Communion. And in the process, she also manages to capture a lot
of what people feel but do not often verbalize about my topic
this morning.

"I passed up the Welch's grape juice, I passed up
the cubed bread, and sat back against my coat.
Was all this not absurd? I glanced at Linda
beside me. Apparently it was not. Her hands lay
folded in her lap. Both her father and her uncle
were elders.

"It was not surprising, really, that-I alone in
this church knew what the barefoot Christ, if
there had been such a person, would think about
things - grape juice, tailcoats, sable stoles,
After all, I was the intelligentsia around these
parts, single-handedly. The intelligentsia. I
knew why these people were in Church: to display
to each other their clothes. They were sophisti-
cated men and women, such as we children were
becoming. In church they made. business connec-
tions; they saw and were seen. The boys, who,

like me, were starting to come out for freedom and
truth, must be having fits, now that the charade
of Communion was in full swing.

"IT stole a glance at the.boys, -then looked at them
outright, for I had been wrong. The boys, if mine
eyes did not deceive me, were praying. Why? ‘The
intelligentsia, of course, described itself these
days as 'agnostic' - a most useful word. Around
me, in seeming earnest, the boys prayed their
unthinkable private prayers. To whom? It was
wrong to watch, but I watched.

"On the balcony's first row, to my right, big Dan
had pressed his ruddy cheeks into his palms.
Beside him, Jamie bent over his knees. When had
this praying developed?

"Below the balcony, in the crowded nave, men and
women were also concentrating, it seemed. Were
they perhaps pretending to pray? All heads were
bent; no one moved. [I began to doubt my own
omniscience. If I bowed my head, too, and shut my
eyes, would this be apostasy? No, I'd keep watch-
ing the people, in case I'd missed some clue that
they were actually doing something else - bidding
bridge hands. For I knew these people, didn't I?

"No one moved. The organist hushed. All the
people seemed scarcely to breathe.

"The .people had been praying,..praying.to God, just
as they seemed to be praying. That was the fact.
I didn't know what to make of it.

"I left Pittsburgh before I had a grain of sense.
I never learned what the strangers around me had
known and felt in their lives - those lithe,
Sarcastic boys in the balcony, those expensive men
and women in the pews below - but it was more than
I knew, after all."

Prayer has been called the universal human activity.
It has been observed that all people in all times have engaged in
it, some ritual behavior the purpose of which is to reach out and
in some way communicate with God, or if you prefer, with mystery,
the transcendent, the holy, what one scholar called the mysteri-
um tremendium"; and more than connect: praying to influence, to
have an effect upon God and the way things are going in life
generally; praying for the crops, for rain, for babies, for
healing, for victory. [Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy]

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When Christopher Columbus encountered indigenous people, he
reported that they had no religion. Columbus simply failed to
recognize their sacred rites and beliefs and practices. He was
wrong, of course. They had elaborate religion and they practiced
prayer - as have all people.

At the same time, many ~ if not most people - have decidedly
mixed feelings about prayer... Does it work? How does it work?
Is it private, public, or both, personal or corporate, verbal or
non-verbal? Is it all right to pray for a job, good health,
peace, a parking place? [Is it spontaneous and conversational, or
disciplined and literary? Should it happen at the dinner table
at home, and should it happen in a crowded restaurant, at lunch
time. And if not, why not?

Prayer, someone noted recently, is the bottom line for
religion. It is where the rubber hits the road, theologically.

Jesus talked about prayer; he provided a simple model prayer
for his disciples to follow in their own praying. We call it The
Lord's Prayer, but it's actually our Lord's example prayer. They
said, "Teach us to pray," and he said, "Pray like this..."

What followed was simple, brief, focused on God and God's will,
very modest in terms of petitions, asking only for today's food,
forgiveness and help in times of temptation. It is an example of
abandoning one's own personal agenda in order to conform to God's
agenda.

He himself prayed on occasion all night long, and one time
he told a story about a judge and a widow, and Luke, who conveys
the story to us, introduces it with this caveat. "Then Jesus
told them a parable about their need to pray and not to lose
heart."

The judge in the Story is a crusty old bird: he does not
fear God and does not respect men or women. This is a very
difficult man to whom a widow comes asking for justice, perhaps
for the adjudication of a dispute, or a judgment about a debt or
an inheritance. She is a person with absolutely no influence or
power or money, the easiest person to ignore, overlook; the last
person whose plight will mean anything to the heartless judge.

Nevertheless, she gets his attention, and she does it by her
relentless pleading, her nagging, essentially. He finally gives
in - not out of a noble sense of justice for a poor woman. He
does it to shut her up - to get her to go away. So, says Jesus,
if a cruel judge grants justice to a persistent old woman, will

not God be just to those who cry day and night?

This is not a portrait of God. What Jesus is saying here
about prayer is that by nature praying demands persistence: that

it is not particularly easy and that God pays attention to it.

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New Testament scholar, Fred Craddock, tells a dramatic
incident that happened in a worship service during a particularly
stressful time in the Civil Rights Movement. ‘The minister of a
Black church read the parable..in..Luke.18..and gave a one-sentence
sermon.

"Until you have stood for years, knocking at a
locked door, knuckles bleeding, you do not really
Know what prayer.is!" [Interpretation, p. 210]
Craddock editorializes, "The life of prayer is
asking, seeking, knocking and waiting, trust
sometimes faltering, sometimes growing angry.
Persons of such a prayer life can only wonder at
those who speak of prayer with the smiling facili-
ty of someone drawing answers from a hat."

The real problem is just this. To pray at all is to know
that prayer doesn't work oftentimes: you don't always get what
you want. Sometimes desired results occur. Sometimes not. And
furthermore, if the results desired happen because you prayed for
them, you are left with more and more serious theological prob-
lems than you had to begin with. When a hurricane was headed
Girectly for his television facilities, Pat Robertson asked the
faithful to pray to God to change the hurricane's direction.
Prayers were offered; the hurricane dramatically veered north and
slammed into New York City...So. what do you do with that, theo-
logically?

‘John Boykin is a witty and slightly irreverent theologian
who has written a book, The Gospel of Coincidence. In a recent
interview in the Wittenburg Door, Boykin says he knows many
Christians who seem to believe that God exists to solve all their
problems.

"If you need a job, God will get it for you. Need
a date for Friday night? No problem, God will
take care of it. Lost your car keys? God will
find them. God, the cosmic bellhop waiting to
find you a parking space when you need one."

If the utilitarian does-it-really-work test is the only way
here of thinking about prayer, we will inevitably create some
very significant theological problems for ourselves.

But, may I suggest, the utilitarian test may not be the
appropriate one. In fact, may I suggest that there is a sense in
which prayer always works.

The model prayer, our Lord's Prayer, has been characterized

as abandoning oneself, one's will, to God and God's will. "Thy
Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven," the

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strongest phrase in the prayer. I don't know about you, but I
have a hard time praying that phrase because you can't pray it
without obligating yourself to get up and do something. To pray
for God's Kingdom to come is not to pray for the end of the
world. It is to pray for a.reign..of. justice and peace and com-
passion and freedom on earth, in-the United States of America, in
Chicago, Illinois. To pray "thy Kingdom come" with an ounce of
integrity is to be distressed with how little interest we seem to
be able to generate, politically and economically, to bringing
about that Kingdom. This prayer is a call to action, to work, to
advocate, to give. So maybe the first purpose of prayer is to
change the one praying. Maybe prayer is not a rearrangement of
external realities but a rearrangement in the heart and soul of
the one praying, and then the behavior.

John Boykin said it.

"The purpose of prayer is not to give God a list
of assignments. The purpose of prayer is to
change us —- to align our wills, our attitudes, our
perspectives, with God."

This I do know: to pray for someone is to be in a new and
different alignment with that person. It is in some way perhaps

mystical, to connect with that person. Prayer changes relation-—
ships.

Members of this congregation know that the staff and whoever
wishes to join them, meet for prayers every morning at 9:00 a.m.;
that the sick, hospitalized and people in special need are prayed
for by name, and so is a Short list of church members every day,
until we get through the list and then we start all over again.
Sometimes we are asked to pray for people we don't know, but who
know us and who will know they have been prayed for. Does it make
a difference? vou bet it does. Does it always work in terms of
affecting a change in circumstance? Not always. Perhaps not
often. But to be prayed for, to know that others are praying for
you, is somehow to reconnect with the human family; it is to be
not quite so alone and isolated: it is to have a little company
facing whatever it is you are facing - surgery, unemployment,
difficult relationships, pain, loneliness, dying. To be prayed
for is to be made more whole,

We are also learning that prayer changes people who pray in
remarkably physical ways. Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard Medical
School did some now famous experiments with people who practiced
Transcendental Meditation and discovered that it worked: that
meditation was effectively lowering stress Signals such as pulse,
heart rate, blood pressure. Benson noted that TM trainers were
charging people two hundred dollars to learn a "mantra," a single
Syllable which is repeated in meditation. He experimented with
Simple words like "one," and discovered that the same results

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occurred. Benson wrote his observations in a best-selling book,
The Relaxation Response and observed that religious people have
always practiced a kind of disciplined meditation form of pray-
ing. In the Eastern Church it was called "The. Prayer of the
Heart," or "the Jesus Prayer, ">assingle=phrase repeated over and
over. "Lord Jesus Christ have mercy on me." St. Francis of
Assissi used this, "My God and my all, my God and my all, my God
and my all." A journal I read and use calls it breath prayer,
one phrase as you inhale, another as you exhale. This week it
is: "breathe new life" - "into my being." Benson suggests that
short phrases repeated, actually force a kind of stable, rhythmic
breathing and that itself brings an experience of centering and
peace.

Are you interested? Try it quietly. You can do it while

you walk, for instance. Use the ancient Jesus prayer, "Lord
Jesus Christ, have mercy on me." or try a variation on that
theme: "Christ, have mercy, Lord, have mercy." Runners pray

while they run, swimmers pray. If you are seated quietly, learn
from Henri Nouwen who Says you can never pray with clenched
fists, that your hands must be open and empty.

So, if prayer's first focus is us, the ones doing the pray-
ing, and if prayer is not solely utilitarian, if it is in some
Sense conversing with God - getting our will aligned with God -
then equal attention must be paid to listening - silent, empty,
attention - one of the most difficult.assignments for us. We are
doers. We are obsessively active. We can, some of us, barely
sit still for a worship service. When a worship leader risks
asking a congregation to pray silently, we know from experience
that one minute of silence is a very long time, that twenty
seconds is about right, and that afterward about an equal number
of people will tell us that they appreciated it or that it made
them crazy.

The people who know people who practice a disciplined
prayer life, all say that before prayer is anything it is si-
lence. And that sometimes that is all it has to be, or can be.
Tt is intentionally doing nothing and simply being in God's
presence. My favorite definition of prayer is Henri Nouwen's.
"To pray," he said, "is to be useless in God's presence." And I
was delighted to discover an ancient story of an old peasant who
every day at noon went into the village church and knelt in
prayer. One day the priest spoke to him. "My son, may I ask
whether something is troubling you?" "Oh no, Father, everything
is fine," the man replied. The priest still stood there, and the
peasant, feeling that more explanation was needed, said, "I just
look at God, and God looks at me." {Weavings, Avery Brooke,
July/August, 1992]

Praying is God looking at us and us looking at God. Praying
is reaching out to that which is beyond touch and sight, reaching

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to mystery and holy love. Praying is doing something we only
partially understand. Praying is hoping, aspiring, and ultimate-
ly trusting that we are not alone, that there is one who is
trustworthy.

And so, finally prayer comes out of the depths of our souls,
sometimes almost involuntarily, at the limits of life, at those
times and places when we know we are not in control, when we know
all too well how fragile our lives are.

"My God, why?" Jesus prayed.
And who among us has not prayed that most human of prayers?
"My God, why?"
"Christ, don't take him from me."
"Dear Lord, do I have to do this?"
"Good God, can't there be another way?"
"Thank you, Jesus, for bringing her home."

There is a wonderful Latin formula from the ancient church
which says in effect, "How we pray is how we believe. Prayer
first... belief later." Our truest theology I sometimes think,
is written in those prayers.

We pray as Christians through Jesus Christ our Lord. In
Jesus' name... Christian prayer is distinct because it is prayer
in the name of Jesus the Christ. Not as a rote formula. It is
not as if you must attach the proper postscript in order for it
to get through. "In Jesus' name" or "through Jesus Christ our
Lord" is a reminder that the God to whom we pray is not an imper-
sonal creator, or an abstraction; our prayers are not addressed
"To whom it may concern," but to one revealed by Jesus Christ.

Somewhere deep in the spiritual psyche of many of us is an
image of God as a judge, stern, sometimes angry, sometimes pun-
ishing, always demanding. And perhaps our ambiguity about prayer
is precisely that our basic theology is a theology of fear.

And so we pray in Jesus' name because it was he who told
about a God who welcomes the wandering child home, and goes after
one lost sheep; a God who leans down to cradle and nurse her
babies; a God who wipes away tears and renews strength and helps
exhausted men and women to their feet so’that they can walk and =
run and not be weary.

To pray in Jesus' name is to know that you do not have to
censor your prayers. You can bring them to God; you can ask for

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whatever you want. To pray in Jesus' name is to know that there
is a parental God who cares and who can and does say no to our
requests in the same way parents say no sometimes not because

they are mean, ungenerous or spiteful, but precisely because they
love their children so very much.

We pray in Jesus' name because the God he revealed

promises always, in all circumstances, to hear our prayers, to be
with us.

"Take it to the Lord in prayer," the old Gospel hymn says.
And it's true - you can do that — because there is one who is.
there for you, who loves you, who welcomes your hopes and aspira-
tions, your deepest yearning and fear and anxiety.

"Take it to the Lord in prayer."
The promise is this:

"In His arms He'll take and shield you,
You will find a solace there."

QO God of holy and mysterious love, hear our prayers, spoken and
unspoken. Hear the silence of our hearts. Hear our cries of

need and our cries of gratitude. Hear us, through Jesus Christ
our Lord. Amen.

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