“About Prayer”

1^st Sermon in a Series

October 1, 2006

Scripture Reading:  Romans 8:26-27

Rev. Dr. Carol  L. Kerr

 Blue Point Congregational Church

I heard a story once about a cowboy.  He had just lassoed a steer and tied the rope to his horse’s saddle.  Suddenly he noticed a big tree in front of him, and the horse and the steer were headed for opposite sides of it.  Figuring it was time to say his prayer, the cowboy recited the only one he knew:  “Lord, make us grateful for these blessings we are about to receive.” 

For better or for worse,  this story brings me to the topic of prayer.   This is my first sermon in what is to be a series of sermons on prayer.   Rev.  George Arthur Buttrick, a renowned preacher, once said:  “Pastors think people come to church to hear sermons.  They don’t; they come to pray and learn to pray.”    I agree with him.  So,  I will be giving a sermon on prayer the first Sunday of the month throughout the year.  Hopefully, if you come each time by the end of the year you will have been able to deepened your connection with God through  prayer.  In the end we will hopefully end up with a lot more options of how to pray than the cowboy did.

Furthermore, I hope we as a congregation become a house of prayer. I know pretty much everyone here.  I know that pretty much everyone here is deeply committed to Christianity.  I don’t think there is a single soul here who is a light weight.  Given the depth of everyone here, wouldn’t it be great if we got good a sharing prayer with each other?  We could build on each other’s insights.  Moreover, often the Holy Spirit continues to work its inspiration when we learn about what  happened to someone else in prayer.

This won’t happen all at once.  But it will happen slowly and surely.  What is a praying congregation?  It is not a temple of people in togas sinking to their knees every time the show up to the church.  Rather, a praying congregation is a bunch of diverse people who take prayer seriously.   People who want to learn about prayer and learn from each other about prayer.  A praying congregation is a congregation of people who are not shy to ask the question about their prayer life and feel safe to share it with others.  We listen to each other with respect.  We are a bunch of separate dots.  If we connect the dots, all together will spell H-O-L-Y S-P-I-R-I-T. 

I think we have a uniquely advantageous position of being a small church in this regard.  I think we can deepen our prayer life as a whole congregation.  We all can participate in this spiritual journey together.  We don’t have to break off into small groups.  Or feel that only the people who are in the “Prayer Chain” do the praying for the church.  Or, only the people who go to the adult education groups learn about prayer.  I think we can all do it together.

 However, the one thing that we will have to get over is not talking about prayer with each other.  For some reason, most people in our congregations, and I am not talking about just this church, but in every church I have been in, don’t talk about prayer with each other.  Sure, we pray together in worship and we might listen to the pastor pray.  Someone may open a committee meeting with prayer, or say grace before a meal.  But, very few people actually talk about pray to each other.  Somehow it has ended up being awkward thing to talk about.  On the one hand, we feel like we are intruding on someone’s most private life if we ask about their prayer.  We might somehow horribly embarrass them.  It is easier asking about their finances, or even sex life, than prayer.

 On the other hand,  we are afraid to talk about our own prayer life, because many of us feel that somehow we are inadequate prayers.  We feel that somehow we don’t pray enough, or that we don’t really pray pray but just toss off flunky prayers sort of like the cowboy.  I had a friend who once told me that she felt like she somehow had missed that day in Sunday School when they taught about prayer.  Maybe she was at home with a stomach ach that day she wondered.  She vaguely felt like everyone else in the church knew about prayer so much, and took this knowledge for granted and they didn’t even have to talk about it.  It would be like talking about breathing or eating.  So she didn’t dare talk about it either because she didn’t want to appear stupid.   The irony is that probably everyone else felt the same way she did. 

Even though we feel very awkward talking about prayer with each other,  it can be  valuable and rich conversation.  This is true if we have had a rich prayer life.  It is true if we have had a barren prayer life.  Either way we are talking about finding God.   Church will be the one place in your life where conversation happens.   I tell you, it is not going to happen at work, or in the grocery store.  It is illegal to talk about it on the school grounds.  Even in counseling it will rarely be brought up.   

How to break the ice and start talking?  One easy conversation starter is asking how a person learned about prayer?  What are some of your earliest memories of prayer? 

For me, my family liked to go to church but they were not big on prayer.  They were very philosophical about God.  My father would get in long discussions with the minister.  Prayer, however,  was a kind of embarrassing step sister to the rational speculation my parents liked to dwell on.  Yet, I remember when I was very upset as a little girl, my mother would take me on her lap in the rocking chair and recite to me the Lord’s Prayer in Welsh.  Her grandmother, who raised my mother was from Wales, and her grandmother would take her in her lap when she was a little girl and say the prayer to her.  I didn’t know it was the Lord’s prayer or Welsh until years later.  I thought she was literally singing to me the song of the fairies.  It was very comforting. 

Back to the cowboy heading for the tree.  How did he learn that prayer?  Lord make us grateful for these blessings we are about to receive.   Perhaps it was just the way Robert Walsh learned it and probably some of us learned it.  Walsh describes his earliest experiences of prayer.  My earliest memory of prayer is the table grace my grandfather use to say. I associate it with holiday meals, with extended family crowded around a long dining room table.  I remember the smell of turkey gravey, the sight of bowed heads – then the gruff voice of this old man delivering the prayer as if it were one long word accented on the first and last syllables:  “Lordmakeusthankfulfortheseblessingsweareabouttorecieveweaskforhristsakeamen”  The last word sounded like “Gah-men.”  For a long time when he was a kid he thought that was the way one ended a prayer, gah-men. 

For years Walsh had no idea what his grandfather was saying.  However, the prayer’s meaning did not depend on knowing.  Its meaning was beyond language.  It had to do with bonds: his bond to the food, his parents and sister, his aunts and uncles and cousins and his grandfather, the warmth of the room, the celestial and human rhythms of the season. 

At coffee hour today, I suggest that we share a little of our childhoods and prayer with each other.  Now, even as I say that, I feel myself getting tense.  Like “Oh no!  I am asking people to do something too personal!”  If you are feeling that too, I think it is the old familiar taboo that we are not to talk about prayer with each other.  However, I think this question is simple and easy enough that it really is not threatening and will get the ball rolling. 

The question we can ask each other is about where we learned about prayer.  However, I want to make this last and very important point.  Where we learned about prayer is not how prayer begins.  Those are two different things.  We learned about prayer in our childhood, and probably continued to learn about prayer as adults.  However, prayer itself begins not with us, but with God.  This is surprising because we naturally think that prayer begins with us.  After all we are the ones that fold our hands together, get into a quiet state of mind and think up some words to utter.  We naturally think that we start the prayer and only then does God respond to our prayers.  But, that is not the case.  It is God himself that puts the longing in us to pray.  Paul says in his letter to the Romans (8:26-27)  The Spirit helps us in our weakness.  We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express.  And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints in accord with God’s will. 

In ancient India, when the sages sought a name for the infinite spirit behind all shifting forms they called it Brahman.  Brahman is a word which refers to the power that resides in prayer.  In other words, they think that God is prayer.  Prayer began the world and will sustain the world until its dissolution.  In an uncanny way, the beginning of the Gospel of John says the same thing.  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being.   Moreover, when we pray that Word that was in the beginning enters our words that we utter now, and in some deeply mysterious way, our prayers are thus part of the absolute and imperishable reality that the made the world and to which the world wants to return. 

It doesn’t matter what we say exactly there is something in the heart of the action of prayer that speaks beyond words.  Like in Psalm 42 deep calls to deep at the thunder of your waterfalls.  The deep in us calls to the deep in God. 

Once there was an man standing before God in prayer.  A scholar who stood next to him overheard his prayer.  He was simply reciting the alphabet over and over again.  “ABCDEFGHIJK….”  The scholar scoffed at him and asked, “What kind of prayer is that?”  And the man replied.  “I do not know how to read.  I was never taught any prayers.  The only thing I know is the alphabet from which all the words of all the prayers are formed.  So, I recite the alphabet to God and let him turn the letters into the things words which I need to pray.  For God knows far better than myself what I need.”

This man understood what Paul was saying.  Surely the Spirit intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express. 

In the end, perhaps the prayer that the cowboy uttered in desperation when the steer was heading one way and the horse was heading the other way around the tree, was the right prayer after all.  After all, it didn’t really matter what words the cowboy uttered as long as he flung his soul upon God in supplication. 

This is the first Sunday in which I hope we grow closer in prayer as a church.  To start with, ask people down in the coffee hour afterwards how they learned about prayer as a child.  Then sometime and somewhere turn your heart to God and pray that God teach you how to pray.  Something like “Lord, teach me to pray.  Help me to understand your purposes, to feel your burdens, to see what you see, to hear the groans you hear, so that my prayers may be pleasing to you and may accomplish your purposes.”  Or if you can’t remember all that just do like the cowboy and say, “Lord, make us grateful for these blessing I am about to receive.”

After all the prayer is not saying “thank you Lord.”  The prayer is really a prayer of petition.  It is asking God to initiate something in us.  It is acknowledging that prayer does begin with God who alone through the intercession of the Holy Spirit can make us truly thankful.   It is asking God to wake us up.  To bring us, somehow, to enough clarity of vision to see what a miracle is this creation in which we find ourselves.

Standing in your driveway say, “Lord make me grateful for these blessings I am about to receive.” And flock of geese pass overhead.  They are flying in formation, the grand V as if pointing to something higher and more important than all the little obstacles that you see on the ground.

Listening to the radio say, “Lord make me grateful for these blessings I am about to receive.”  And a song is played whose lyrics happen to have special meaning for you. 

Standing in your kitchen say, “Lord make me grateful for the blessings I am about to receive.”  And at that moment you hear the voice of your child call out to you.

Lets open ourselves up to prayer and see where God will lead us.  Maybe the cowboy was not so wrong after all.