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Mystic
Congregational Church, UCC The room was darkened because the shades were pulled
and the air was heavy and quiet. It
was a summer day, not unlike today, and a fan winds softly in the corner,
sweeping air from side to side, but bringing no relief from the heat or the mood
of the room. In an ancient hospital bed, Harry was curled up,
pretending to be asleep. Occasionally,
he would open his eyes. One time, I
caught him and he grunted, “What do you want?”
It was the beginning of a conversation that would wax and wane over six
or eight months as Harry made his peace with himself, with life and, finally,
with God. He tried hard not to like
me and, most days, he succeeded. It
would have been a lot easier to just skip that visit on the route that brought
me to see all of my other hospice patients.
Only once in all those moments did he ever call me by name.
Most of the time, I wouldn’t repeat from the pulpit what he called me. Harry had been a farmer all his life.
I think it was only because I had been a farmer that he tolerated my
presence. He ran a small dairy farm
and his days were long and filled with work.
He had little time for chit-chat, small talk, book-learning or religion.
He made it perfectly clear that he had no use for preachers.
That’s not to say that he wasn’t a man of faith.
He was deeply spiritual. He
had his own ideas about God, faith and religion.
For the most part, his theology was pretty good.
It all came through his passion for the land, through his passion for
farming. He knew his cows by name
and his fields by heart. He could
strip a tractor and rebuild it in his sleep.
There wasn’t one stone on any of those acres that Harry didn’t know.
But those days were over now and his days were spent looking out the
window at what used to be his life. On
days like that first one, when it was too painful, he simply drew the shades. I rarely asked Harry if he wanted to pray because it
usually got me a ticket to the door, but I always let him know that I prayed for
him and for his family. Usually,
what I heard in return was a grunt, if that.
So, I had all I could do to remember the words when, one day, out of the
blue, Harry asked if I would pray the Lord’s prayer with him.
After the Amen, he simply said, “It’s the only prayer I know.”
After a few moments of silence I replied, “At least with words.” It opened the door to a conversation about prayer
that led us to the verses that we heard from Paul’s letter to the church in
Rome, up here in the 8th Chapter of Romans:
“Likewise 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.” The 26th verse is the prelude to some of
the most familiar and comforting words in Christian Scripture.
Often read at funerals because of the assertion that we can never be cut
off from God’s love, the pericope actually concludes some of Paul’s most
chewy theological assertions, and forms the basis of some deeply held Christian
Doctrine, including the doctrine of predestination which most of us don’t hold
to. But planted in the middle of
all that heady stuff is this simple verse about us and our relationship with
God. Paul’s words about not knowing how to pray, as we
ought, are not intended to be judgment for not doing it right, but rather an
acknowledgement that prayer is more encompassing than what we might imagine.
The model of the Lord’s Prayer given in the Gospels is one that sticks
with us, as it did with Harry as the way
to pray: praise, confession, and
intercession—that three-fold formula is the basis for most pastoral prayers
and for what many of us do in the discipline of our personal devotional life.
We come to think that is the way
we are supposed to pray, but, here, something else is suggested and it has more
to do with the relationship we have with God than the words that we use to pray. The 25 verses that precede this wonderful verse lay
out Paul’s understanding of what it means to be in relationship with Christ,
so I will digress through a quick theology 101 to set the context. Through the Incarnation, the coming of Jesus into the
world in flesh and blood, God ceases to be “God out there, somewhere, far
away” and becomes God with us, among us, within us, around us; an active
participant in our life. I realize
that is probably not exactly a news flash to most of you, but as a context for
understanding prayer, it’s significant. In light of this new relationship that we have with
God and Christ, prayer becomes something more than just an event.
Prayer becomes a verb, not a noun. It
is a relationship and not an event, a process and not a formula, an attitude and
awareness, and not just a recitation of particular words.
This kind of perspective helps make sense of Paul’s admonition in
another of his letters, to “Pray without ceasing.” Unless we are getting some pretty hardy calluses on
our knees, we probably need to come to a different understanding of what it
means to pray. Prayer isn’t just
going to our room and closing the door, sitting in a pew and closing our eyes,
getting down on our knees and saying someone else’s words.
It is all those things as well but it is also so much more. Frederick Buechner writes of prayer saying, it is
“the odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or
something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of
you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water.
The stammer of pain at somebody else’s pain.
The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy.
Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. I would add to that the prayers we shed when there are no
words, and the laughter that
escapes our lips in moments of unbridled joy.
These are all prayers in their own way.” It is here in this place beyond words that we are met
by the Spirit, a Spirit who intercedes for us in sighs too deep for words.
English is not the only language that God understands.
God understand the language of the heart, the language of the body, the
language of our own spirits beyond words and it is received by the Spirit whose
own intercessions are beyond words but not beyond God’s knowing. So every moment is an occasion for prayer.
Every moment can be a prayer when we acknowledge God’s presence in our
midst. The content of prayer is largely about acknowledging God’s presence.
The basis of Christian tradition about prayer lies in Hebrew spirituality
which is first about recalling the presence of God and then about asking God for
something. Jesus reflected that
spirituality in his prayers when he spoke of God as a loving Father and a
friend. His prayers were often an
acknowledgement of God’s presence as much as they were a request to do
something. That is the heart of intercessory prayer—an
acknowledgement of God’s presence in the midst of that which we name.
God is already there. Intercession
is an expression of trust in that truth, an expectation that God can and will
transform whatever it is that we name—whatever sadness or pain or agony or
joy—into something holy because of God’s presence. When I was nineteen, my best friend was diagnosed
with cancer. From the day she was
diagnosed, I prayed for her to be cured. I
went to healing services at the Pentecostal church.
I went to prayer meetings. I
lit candles in the Roman Catholic church. I
was the most ecumenical person I knew. Any
place where I could go to pray for her to be healed, I went there.
You name it, I did it. Less than 18 months after she was diagnosed, she
died. I was devastated—not only
had I lost my best friend, but I also felt that my prayers hadn’t been
answered; that they weren’t good enough, somehow; that I didn’t have enough
faith; that I didn’t do it right. I
listened to that Pentecostal preacher who told me that if I prayed hard enough,
believed enough, and claimed all of God’s promises, that she would get well.
There was nothing left to think except that I had somehow failed.
It was my first adult crisis of faith. Through the years, I have come to understand that if
I failed at anything, it was in understanding that prayer doesn’t change God;
it changes us. I can’t tell God
what to do, though all these years later I still try, I must admit. Looking back, I realize that intercession would have
been the recognition of God’s comfort and presence with her in the journey,
acknowledging God’s presence not to change what ultimately would not be
changed, but to recognize the holiness of even those difficult moments as life
ebbed, too soon, toward an end.
God who suffered on the cross with Jesus is the same God who suffers with
us in those wrenching and terrible moments of our lives.
Looking back, I realize that while she was not cured, there were moments
of healing and grace that I just wasn’t able to see because I wanted a
different ending. Matthew Fox writes, “The adult question to put to
prayer is ‘Who is asking what of whom’?”
There is ample evidence, in the gospels as well as in the deeds of
believers from Abraham to today, to suggest that it is not we who ask for
God’s action in prayer, but rather God who waits for us to become what we
already are, to act with the New spirit, with the new vision and with the new
worship through his son who made all things new and prays that the same may be
accomplished in us.” I don’t believe it is coincidence that Paul’s
theologically heady chapter ends with a profound statement about God’s
capacity to companion us through anything that life can heave our way.
In all those things, we are more than conquerors—not because we win and
have things go our way, not because things turn out the way we hope.
God knows that, so often, does not happen, but rather, we are conquerors
because God’s presence transforms those moments into something bearable,
because God’s love finally pulls us out, finally pulls us through, or finally
boots us over the mountains of pain that spike up out of the earth of our days. Buechner concludes, “Keep on beating a path to
God’s door, because the one thing you can be sure of is that, down the path
you beat with even your most half-cocked and halting prayer, the God you call
upon will finally come, and even if God does not bring you the answer you want,
God will bring you God’s self. And,
maybe, at the secret heart of all our prayers, that is what we are really
praying for.” Prayer doesn’t change God. It changes us as the Spirit intercedes for us in sighs too
deep for words, as we acknowledge the presence of God, and, remember, nothing
can separate us from God’s love. Amen. |