A frustrated doctoral student
at Princeton once threw up his hands in despair and cried out, “What is there
left in the world about which to write an original dissertation?” Albert Einstein
answered him. “Prayer,” he said. “Somebody must find out about prayer.”
Hans Küng is a Swiss Catholic priest, theologian, and
author notable for his rejection of the doctrine of papal infallibility. He wrote a 702-page book on
theology called “On being a Christian.” Not once did he mention prayer. The
word appears nowhere in his classic book. Asked about why, he said that while
writing the book he was under so much pressure from Vatican censors and his
publisher’s deadlines…that he simply forgot about prayer.
I get
it. Prayer takes time, time we don’t have. And besides that, between medical
science providing the healing and
technology making our lives simpler and political decisions taken out of our
hands…prayer can seem to be what theologian George Buttrick called it, “a spasm
of words lost in a cosmic indifference.”
I mean
really…if God knows what we need even before we do…why bother to ask, right? If
we want to bare our souls, we have therapists. And they give us the kind of
immediate feedback that we don’t get when we pray. Feedback is important to us
and we can never be sure we are getting it when we pray. Philip Yancey in his
book Prayer: Does it Make Any Difference,” likened it to Ernestine, the
telephone operator played by Lily Tomlin, “Hello, have I reached the party to
whom I am speaking?”
And
yet…we do it. We pray. Yancey says it’s because prayer is the place where God
and human beings meet. What creates the crisis is the sense that God doesn’t
respond the way we expect. Now, if that’s where you start, expecting God to
give you the answer you’re hoping for, you are likely to get more frustrated
than when you started to pray.
The
question I am asked on occasion is, “How should we pray?” Paul’s answer to that
question is “unceasing.” Pray always. It reminds me of a professor I had in
seminary who said that prayer is not something limited to those times when you
bow your head but that everything you do, every thought you have, every action
you take or fail to take…every one of them is your prayer.
Celeste
Yacoboni, a curator of spiritual practices, reached out to dozens of
theologians and religion writers and asked them a question that became the
title of her book. “How do you pray?” The responses were as varied as they were
inspiring and reassuring.
One
responded, “I pray with my feet. I walk the farm between the cedar trees. I
cross the creek on the flat rocks and look back across the water where I have
been.”
Another
said she had never had QUOTE a relationship with prayer until in a dark time of
her life, she discovered “the power of speaking a poem that I love.”
One told
that she prays by recalling the places where the Earth is unstable, out of
balance and in need of healing. The environmental and spiritual writer Terry
Tempest Williams said, “I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry
the message of my heart upwards, because the birds remind me of wat I love rather
than what I fear.”
Ganga White is the
founder of the White Lotus Foundation and is recognized one of the “architects
of American yoga.” When asked “How do you pray,” Ganga White replied with a set
of questions.
What if our religion
was each other? If our prayer practice was our life? If prayer was our words.
What if our temple was the earth? If forests were our church? If holy water was
our rivers, lakes and oceans? What of meditation was our relationships? If the
teacher was life? If wisdom was self-knowledge? What if love was the center of
our being?
Yacaboni didn’t ask
Bart Simpson how to pray but if she had, she would have gotten a primer on
bargaining. When faced with a test that would decide whether he passed the 4th
grade, attest for which he had not studied, Bart begged God for one more day
even providing God with a list of alternatives for engineering the delay; a
teacher’s strike, a power outage, a blizzard. That night it snowed so much that
school was called off the next day. Bart used the day to study and passed the
test and thus the 4th grade, though barely. Giving thanks, he
prayed, “Part of this D minus belongs to you God.”
I am not much on
using prayer to bargain or cut a deal with God…though “bargaining-prayer” is
biblical. When God told Abraham that God intended to punish Sodom and Gomorrah,
Abraham bargained with God. His opening bid got God to agree that if he could
find 50 righteous people in those cities God would not destroy them. Abraham
then suggested saving the cities if there were 45 righteous folk … agreed …how
about 40…well, okay…suppose there are 30, 20…how about 10, if there are 10
righteous folks, will you agree not to destroy the cities? and God agreed. "For the sake of ten I will not destroy
it."
When you watch film of
wildfires destroying peoples’ homes or hurricanes ruining entire cities or
floods wiping out communities…do you give thanks that it is not your home, pray
to God to end it or do you pray for the strength to demand your government act
against climate change?
When you see homeless people
on the streets or addicts begging for treatment or children abused or soldiers
marching off to war or…the list is so long…when you see these sorts of things…do
you ask God to intervene or do you ask God to give you the strength to do so.
What we should be asking is
whether the time we spend in prayer causes us to respond the way God wants us
to respond. A Zen master was once invited
to a monastery for the purpose of instructing the monks who resided there in
the practice of Zen. The holy man
exhorted the monks to meditate constantly. You really must put your hearts into
it," he stressed. The monks listened attentively and smiled politely.
Finally, one old monk raised his hand and said, "Master,
our way of prayer is a little different than yours. We spend our time in prayer
asking God to intervene and solve the problems of our world. We beseech God to
save people from the travails of life.
The Zen master laughed and said, "My dear fellow,
the reason we Buddhists put so much effort into prayer for our own
enlightenment is because we believe God has already done enough! Now it’s our
turn."
Maybe
we’re asking the wrong question. Instead of asking whether God answers our
prayers, we should ask whether we answer God’s prayers.
How should you pray? There are as many answers to
that question as there are those who might ask it. Whether you pray over a meal
or at your bedside before sleep, or by looking upon the natural beauty of the
earth or through a poem that moves your heart, or while meditating or by giving
thanks for another day of life…whether you are bargaining or simply expressing
gratitude or hope or despair…
…know this. Our whole life…how we live it, what we
do with our days and our spiritual and worldly gifts…how and whether we use our
voices, where our feet take us and what we do once we arrive, what our eyes see
or refuse to see…who we love and who we don’t, the way in which we choose to
live in the times in which God has placed us…our whole life and all that we do
with it…is our prayer as this sermon is a prayer that we each do what we can to
answer God’s prayers for the world.
AMEN
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