In the book we’ve been dipping into over the past couple of months,. Barbara Taylor invites us to reflect on what she calls the Practice of Being Present to God, which is really a way of talking about prayer.
And I’ve spoken about prayer with you often on Sundays. I scanned back over the years and I’ve tackled the subject in lots of ways at Belhelvie. It was one of the first things I preached about when I came here nearly seven years ago. Prayer as asking, prayer as listening, prayer as companionship with God. Silent prayer, praying with the Bible, intercessory prayer, the problem of unanswered prayer. We’ve pretty much covered it all.
Anything I need to say about prayer, I’ve already said twice over, so here endeth the sermon. Amen. We will now take in your offerings!
I did think about changing tack, but I felt guilty about that. Prayer is so central to the Christian life, how could I possibly say there’s nothing more to say?
And then I found myself listening to that sentence I’ve just said. Prayer is so central to the Christian life.
Is it really? I know it should be. We all know it should be; but is it?
Is it central to yours? Is it central to mine?
Let me be honest here, without laying on the guilt because that’s not what this morning is about.
I’m pretty sure that most of us manage to get through our days just fine without much in the way of prayer. The sky doesn’t fall in, our lives don’t collapse, we don’t descend into anarchy. We continue to be nice people and model citizens, at least most of the time. On the surface, it looks like we can get by just fine without praying.
The scientists tell us we can manage without food for weeks, but we can’t last more than a couple of days without water. Whatever prayer is, it’s not of that order. We know from experience that we can do without prayer for as long as we like.
Sure, there are times when it feels more urgent – when some crisis comes along and we’re completely out of our depth. And so we pray and we plead with God for a resolution. But once the crisis has passed, and we’re back on a more even keel, the desire to pray quickly dissipates.
Take a straw poll in any church and ask if prayer should be central to a Christian’s life and 99 out of 100 respondents will say a hearty ‘yes’. Ask them how central it is to their lives, or suggest they pitch up to the midweek prayer meeting, and the majority will start studying their shoes.
Pushing guilt to the side, that’s where we need to begin today. We agree that prayer should be central to a Christian life; but in practice few of us are living as though it were.
Clergy are no exception to this, by the way – we’re the chief of sinners. We are often so busy talking about God, writing about God, arguing for God, working for God that we overlook the centrality of just being with God; which is what prayer is all about.
In our haste to be useful, and to be seen to be useful, we become – in Richard Lischer’s memorable phrase – “a quivering mass of availability”. Saying yes to everyone and everything, except the God who called us to this work in the first place.
So there’s the dichotomy. Prayer is central – we all agree. But much of the time we don’t live as though that were true.
I wonder why? Why do we find this so hard?
Part of it’s busyness, I guess. If you’re a young mum with three or four kids, a house to manage and maybe even a job to hold down, time’s at a premium. How can you find twenty quiet minutes to pray when you can’t even get to the bathroom on your own?
If you’re up with the larks to get to your work or out in the fields as the sun rises and not home ‘til the sun sets, a big slice of your time’s already accounted for. By the time you’re back home you just want to shut down for a while before it all kicks off again tomorrow.
Prayer can feel like having to make more effort, and you’ve already put enough effort into your day.
Maybe part of it is that we’re not sure what kind of reception we’d get if we tried to pray. Who is this God ? How does he think of us? If we’re worried he’s going to come down on us like a ton of bricks, that’s hardly going to act as an incentive.
And how do you pray anyway? How do you carry on a conversation with someone you can’t see and can barely sense? Is there a right language? Are there things you’re supposed to say? Ways you’re supposed to feel?
We learn our native tongue from the time we’re in our mother’s arms. But where do we learn how to pray, if we want to get beyond the set prayers that we were taught as children?
In church? Well, maybe, though I often wonder if you’d be better served if all of us threw away the prayers we craft for a Sunday morning and instead stumbled our way through whatever words come to mind and heart in that very moment. If nothing else, that would do away with the notion that all prayer to God has to be carefully crafted prose. It doesn’t.
But the last, and probably the biggest hindrance to prayer is the question everyone wants to ask- does prayer work? Does it change things?
And that’s a natural question to ask, but it betrays an inadequate view of what prayer is.
We ask if prayer ‘works’ as though it were just a matter of cause and effect. Say the right words, and you’ll get what you want.
Put the right coins in and the machine will deliver.
Do any of us think that way about our husbands or wives, or kids, or friends? Do we forget that even the simplest request we make of them reaches their ears through the vast network of associations that make up our relationship? Our loves, our dislikes, our history, our experience, our commitments, our desires, our obligations?
I ask my wife to lend me a tenner – no problem. I ask a stranger on Union Street and I get raised eyebrows.
And this is the heart of things.
Prayer, rightly understood, isn’t a duty, any more than having a friend or a spouse is a duty. Prayer is how we pursue and develop our own relationship with God, in all its marvellous uniqueness.
Sure, at times, that will mean asking for things. But that asking doesn’t happen in a void. It happens in the vast network of associations that make up our relationship with God. We’re dealing with a person, not a slot machine. The better we know the person, the more likely we are to understand how they think and how they answer us.
So how do we get to know God better?
Simple – by keeping company with him as and when we can. And today’s texts give us some good advice about how to do just that.
Jesus’ words this morning come to us in the context of a long and daring speech where he’s turning a lot of the religious conventions of his day on their heads.
“You have heard that it was said…” he begins, “But now I tell you”…..
Time and time again.
And he takes this tack with prayer. Don’t pray for show, he says. Don’t be like the Pharisees, who do it all in public to be seen and make a name for themselves.
No. When you pray – go to your room, shut the door, and pray to your Father. You don’t need to use lots of fancy words. He already knows what you need. Just take the time to be with him and ask him for what you need.
And that’s the basis for a prayer life. Make the time, find a place, say what’s on your heart in as many words as you need. If there’s nothing in your heart, bring that to God in prayer. Remember to spend a little time listening as well as talking. What does God want you to take with you into the day?
At its simplest that’s all there is to it.
You alone know how feasible that is for you, given the realities of your day, but what’s being asked here needn’t take more than 10 or 15 minutes. If you can get into a rhythm and find a regular place to sit where you feel at ease and aren’t distracted, so much the better.
Now that’s the kind of prayer practice I was inducted into as a young Christian, and those times really helped.
But what I wasn’t taught was the other way of praying that Paul speaks about in 1st Thessalonians. “Pray at all times” he says. Pray continually. What’s he on about?
Well some in the Christian tradtion have taken that very literally. There’s an ancient form of prayer called hesychasm where folk repeat a short prayer of a few lines thousands and thousands of times, building up the repetitions until the words themselves enter their consciousness and become as much a part of them as their breathing or their hearbeat. The folk who’ve gone down this line of praying speak of it as a great blessing.
But I’m not sure how practical that is for most of us, or even if that’s what Paul had in mind.
Instead, I think he’s urging us to find ways to use the ordinary stuff of our day as occasions for prayer.
Brother Lawrence, the 17th century monk who wrote the classic work “The Practice of the Presence of God” put it this way:
“A little lifting of the heart suffices; a little remembrance of God, or one act of inward worship are prayers which, however short, are nevertheless acceptable to God”.
Our Celtic forebears knew this too – they found ways to faith even the most mundane practices in life – like this one for lighting the morning fire:
I will kindle my fire this morning
In the presence of the holy angels of heaven
Without malice, without jealousy, without envy,
But the Holy Son of God to shield me.
God, kindle Thou in my heart within
A flame of love to my neighbor,
To my foe, to my friend, to my kindred all
There are prayers for the farmer going out to sow the seeds, the weaver at the loom, the fisherman, and the crofter. Even the milkmaid recognizes and claims the sacredness of her work.
Bless, O God, my little cow,
Bless, O god, my desire;
Bless thou my partnership
And the handling of my hand
The homemaker gets a look in too.
I make this bed
In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit
In the name of the night we were conceived,
In the name of the night we were born,
In the name of the day we shall die,
In the name of each night, each day,
Each angel that is in the heavens.
And I quote these examples only to encourage you to reflect on your own life and how you could faith your own practices – making them occasions to turn to God in prayer.
Could you pray before you step into the classroom or the byre? As you sit in traffic? Before you lift the phone, or put on a washing, or change a nappy, or plant the flowers?
“A little lifting of the heart suffices” says brother Lawrence. That’s enough. A way of staying in tune with God that even the busiest of us can learn to do.
This morning, as I’ve said, is not about guilt. It’s about honesty. Most of us, at least to some degree, want to pray or feel we ought to pray. Most of us struggle to do so for a host of reasons.
The most important thing to remember is that prayer is personal – it’s between you and God. You have to pray as you can, not as you can’t. If the sitting still in a room thing doesn’t work for you just now, don’t feel guilty and don’t give up. Find another way that does work. The main thing is not how you pray – it’s that you pray.
Mike Yaconelli is one of my heroes purely for the common-sense honesty of his book Messy Spirituality. In one of the early chapters he talks about going to visit a woman who was known as a person of real depth when it came to prayer. He writes:
“This woman had spent most of her life resisting the noise and activity of the world to seek God in silence and solitude. She had spent literally hundreds of weeks in silent retreat. This was a woman saturated with her faith. You could almost smell God when she came into the room.
We were talking about prayer. “It’s embarrassing to be sitting with you, “ I blurted out. “You spend days, weeks, even months in prayer. I’m lucky if I spend ten minutes in prayer. Compared to you, I’m not very spiritual I’m afraid”.
Her eyes caught mine, flashing with anger, and she fired back – “Oh Mike – knock it off. First of all, you don’t spend every day with me. You don’t know me at all. You are comparing what you know about yourself to what you don’t know about me. Secondly, I battle depression daily and it has won during several periods of my life. I never told you about it. I don’t have a family – I like to be alone and silent. Trust me – I am no more spiritual than you are”.
Then she said “you think about God all the time, right?”
“Well, sort of”, I said.
“Thinking about God is being with God. Being with God is spirituality. Thinking about God is praying. So shut up with this guilt stuff! You’ve been praying most of your life. You are a spiritual person!”
I was shocked. I had no idea that spirituality came in unlimited shapes and sizes.
(What I learned from her that day is that) spirituality looks like whatever you and I look like when we’re thinking about Jesus. when we’re trying to find Jesus, when we’re trying to figure out what real Christianity looks like in the real world.
That, my friends, is a liberating insight. You don’t have to feel intimidated by anyone else in prayer, you don’t have to be anyone else in prayer. You don’t have to feel guilty.
Set your heart, mind and soul to that, and I know that God will bless you.
We close with a prayer from the Celtic Tradition.
Even though the day be laden
and my tasks dreary
and my strength small,
a song keeps singing
in my heart.
For I know that I am Thine.
I am part of Thee.
Thou art kin to me,
and all my times
are in Thy hand.
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