Can We Talk?

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Genesis 18:20-32; Luke 11:1-13

Rev.Caroline Murphy

July 25, 2010

Every time they turned around, it seemed that Jesus was praying again. Not only at the big moments – like the time he named the twelve of them to be his disciples, or the time some of them saw him transfigured before their eyes on a mountaintop, or the time Peter blurted out that he was the Messiah. You could see how he might want to pray in moments such as those. But Jesus seemed to pray in all sorts of other, more ordinary moments as well. The disciples noticed that he would often take time apart for prayer; sometimes he would even pray through the night. They prayed, too, of course, as any faithful Jews would. But there was something different about the way Jesus prayed. It wasn't just the frequency of his prayers that caught their attention. There was something about the quality of his prayers – the intensity of them, perhaps, or the directness, or the intimacy with which he addressed God as "abba," using the same word of affection that a small child might use to talk with her father. This time, when they saw that Jesus had finished his latest session of prayer, they couldn't hold back any more. "Lord, teach us to pray," they asked. "Explain to us how this works."
There are all sorts of things we learn this way. If you know how to make a pie crust or iron a shirt or change a tire or use a power drill, I suspect it is because you have watched someone else do it – a parent, perhaps, or some other family member, or maybe a friend or teacher or mentor. You've leaned against the kitchen counter as someone deftly coaxed a mound of flour and shortening and a few drops of water into a ball of dough. Or you've stood by the side of the road as someone jacked up the car, loosened the bolts, pried off the old tire and wheeled over the spare. Perhaps, if you were really interested in what you saw, you said, "Hey, teach me how to do this." So the person started talking you through the process, showing you each step along the way. Maybe he or she even encouraged you to try your own hand at it: "Here, feel this dough; this is what the consistency should be like." Or, "Let me hand you the wrench, so that you can get a sense of how the tight the bolts need to be."
I imagine the dynamic was not all that different when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. They'd seen him do it, they could tell that he had a knack for it; but their own attempts at prayer probably felt as inadequate as my attempts at changing a tire, or at making a pie crust that you don't need a hacksaw to cut through.
I have a hunch that a lot of us may be in the same boat as the disciples when it comes to prayer. We know it's important in the life of faith, we figure that God values it, it seems to come to others naturally, but we ourselves may feel rather deficient at praying. Sometimes people imagine that ministers or other people whom we may deem to be particularly spiritual have it all figured out – but most clergy folks I talk with have some of the same questions about prayer as anyone else. Is there some especially good way to approach prayer? Are you supposed to pray sitting up or lying down, standing or kneeling? Should you fold your hands, or open them, or lift them up? Do you need special words, or is it better to empty yourself of specific words and thoughts and wait for the holy, numinous essence of God to enter in? And how do you focus your attention in prayer? How do you stay centered on God, rather than letting your mind wander to that stray item you meant to add to your grocery list, or the tune-up you keep meaning to schedule for your car, or the burning question of what you're going to wear tomorrow? Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us about this holy mystery.
It was kind of comforting to me, this week, to come across part of a sermon by John Donne, who was not only one of great poets of the English language but a devout Anglican priest. Back in 1626, he wrote this:
I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither; and when they are there, I ignore God and his angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door. . . . I forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget about it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterday's pleasures, a fear of tomorrow's dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in prayer. (quoted by Peter W. Marty in "Living by the Word," The Christian Century, July 13, 2010)
Or this, by the contemporary preacher and religious scholar Barbara Brown Taylor:
I have shelves of prayer books and books about prayer. I have file drawers full of notes from courses I have taught and taken on prayer. I have meditation benches I have used twice, prayer mantras I have intoned for as long as a week, notebooks with column after column of people in need of prayer (is writing them down enough?). I have a bowed psaltery – a biblical stringed instrument mentioned in the book of Psalms – that dates from the year I thought I might be able to sing prayers more than I could say them. I have invested a small fortune in icons, candles, monastic incense, coals, and incense burners. [But] I am a failure at prayer. . . . I would rather show someone my checkbook stubs than talk about my prayer life. I would rather confess that I am a rotten godmother . . . [and] that I struggle with my weight than confess that I am a prayer weakling. (from her book An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith [New York: HarperCollins, 2009], pp. 175-76)
I'm so glad to have these testimonies from the likes of Barbara Brown Taylor and John Donne. As the saying goes, I can relate!
I'm also glad for the models of prayer that Scripture gives us – both the sample prayer that Jesus gave his disciples, which has come down to us as the Lord's Prayer, and the exchange we heard from the book of Genesis between Abraham and God. That exchange may not fit our usual notions about prayer, but if prayer is a practice that seeks to open the channels of communication between human beings and the divine, it doesn't get much more open than this quick-witted conversation that Abraham has with God, a conversation that you could almost describe as a kind of playful tug-of-war, if the subject matter weren't so serious. I love Abraham's boldness, the freedom he feels to throw out a challenge and even to ask God to change God's mind. Abraham is not alone in this; Moses will do something similar, and Jesus himself will plead with God, "If it is possible, take this cup away from me – yet, not my will be done, but yours."
There's a refreshing directness to the prayer that Jesus teaches his disciples, too. Have you ever noticed how many requests there are in the Lord's Prayer? You could even call them demands. Give us the bread that we need daily! Forgive us our sins! Spare us from the time of trial! Even the opening portion of the prayer – the part that we normally pray as "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done" – is really an urgent plea as well. Let your rule of justice and peace become living reality here on earth! The words of the Lord's Prayer are so familiar to most of us that we may tend to let them simply wash over us. But what if we were to pray this prayer with the kind of bold directness that Jesus seems to be talking about, when he encourages his disciples to ask in the expectation of receiving an answer, to knock in the expectation of a door being opened, to seek in the expectation of finding? What if we were to engage God as an active partner in our prayers? What if, instead of worrying about finding the right words, or the right posture, or the right setting for prayer, we simply turned to God in the way that both Abraham and Jesus did, and said, "Can we talk?" Or, what if we simply sat companionably with God in the silence?
Years ago, when I was first beginning to feel my way into Christianity, I started going to a weekly potluck supper and Bible study at what would become my home church. It was a huge leap of faith for someone like me, who had not grown up in the church, to go to something as distinctly Christian as a Bible study. I worried at first that I would be the only one who wouldn't know where all the different books of the Bible were, or who wouldn't quite know what to make of what we read there. And I was quite convinced that I was the only person in the room who did not know how to pray. We used to end every gathering with what we called a circle prayer – a simple approach to prayer in which one person would offer a few words of prayer, then hand it off to the person sitting beside them, and so on through each person until the prayer had come full circle. To my immense relief, the facilitator of the group made it clear that it was perfectly fine for any of us in the circle simply to take a few moments of silence when it was our turn, rather than offering a spoken prayer. That certainly was more comfortable for me, and so for a long time – a year or two, maybe three – that's exactly what I did. Week after week, when it was my turn in the circle prayer, I would observe a small interval of silence. At first I wouldn't have called it prayer exactly; it was more a matter of showing respect for a practice that belonged to others, not to me. But gradually, almost imperceptibly, that space of silence started feeling prayerful to me. I knew that everyone else in the circle was praying supportively with me through the silence, and over time I began to feel the power of those prayers. At some point, it felt natural for me to give voice to the prayers that had been forming in my heart, and so I started participating through spoken prayer as well. The beauty of it was that both were valued in that setting, both the words and the silence.
Can we talk? Or can we sit together in silence? In a real, living relationship, both are fine. When I was visiting a dear friend in the nursing home as she was nearing the end of life, she would sometimes say to me, "Shall we just sit together for a little while, holding hands?" And so that's exactly what we would do. Oftentimes, after a little while, we'd end up talking together again. I imagine that God, too, is pleased to sit companionably with us in the silence, or to talk, or to be with us when we are praying through music or dance or a walk in the woods. What matters is not the eloquence of our prayers, or getting the technique right. One of my favorite pieces of advice about prayer is, "Pray as you can, not as you can't."
As for those times that will probably come sooner or later for all of us – those times when our focus wanders, or when the silence feels empty rather than prayerful, or when we ask God if we can talk but are not sure if we really have a conversation partner on the other end – for all those times when we feel like "prayer weaklings," we have one another. We have one another's prayers supporting and upholding us. In my few shorts weeks here, I have already heard a number of you describe something that I, too, discovered during my year of cancer treatment: what a comfort it is, what a source of strength, to know that you are surrounded and held by the prayers of others. And we have something even more – for, as the apostle Paul assures us, even when our own prayers seem to fall short, the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words (Romans 8:26). May it be so! Amen.

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