Our Sunday Message

Teach Us To Pray:Luke 11:1-13
Rev. Eyleen Farmer(Guest Preacher)
July 29, 2007
Ninth Sunday of Kingdomtide

  Sometimes you have to go around the world to get to the place you started from. That’s what it feels like for me to be here with you today. My family moved to Memphis in 1959. I was just a little girl, but I was the one who badgered my parents into coming to church. This church, First Baptist Church, is the place we came and later joined. Years later, when I was a young mom, I did volunteer work for an organization called International Friends. I helped teach a cooking class on Friday mornings somewhere in your education building. It was my first volunteer job and the beginning of the journey that eventually led me to seminary.
  So this place is an important part of my faith story. It was here that I felt the first stirrings of God’s life within me. It was here that being Baptist took hold of me. Since I have become an Episcopalian, people sometimes ask if I consider myself a “recovering Bapist.” I always say, “Heaven’s no! My Baptist upbringing is the best thing I have to offer the Episcopal church!” If they look surprised, I go on to explain that nobody knows and loves the Bible like a Baptist. And those foundational Baptist values like soul competency, priesthood of the believer, the questioning of authority—those are values dear to me still. One Calvary parishoner summed up my spiritual journey this way: “You can take the girl out of the Baptist Church, but you can’t take the Baptist out of the girl!” I cherish my Baptist roots and consider it a blessing to be here this morning.
  What, I wonder, is your first memory of prayer? Think back for a moment as far back as you can. For some of you, there will be no beginning point, for you have been enfolded in prayer since infancy. Perhaps you were held by your parents in front of the congregation as the pastor said prayers of blessing over you. Others of you may recall the absence of prayer in your childhood. Or even have negative connotations of long and boring prayers in church.
  My own first memory is of the classic children’s prayer:
   Now I lay me down to sleep
   I pray the Lord my soul to keep
   If I should die before I wake
   I pray the Lord my soul to take
   If I should live another day
   I pray thee Lord to guide my way.
  My mother cross-stitched this prayer on the back of one of my dad’s old shirts. The collar and cuffs had become so frayed that he couldn’t wear it anymore—it was early in their marriage and there wasn’t much money. But my Scotch-Irish mother salvaged the material from that old shirt, and on this she stitched the words of a prayer. She put it in a dime store frame and hung it over my bed. I don’t know what happened to it, but I would give anything to have that prayer now—a keepsake of my mother’s tenderness and my father’s protection. Their prayers for me when I could not pray for myself.
Years ago I cut an Ann Landers column out of the newspaper about children’s misinterpretations of the Lord’s Prayer. Things like, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, Howard be thy name.” Or, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, how didja know my name?” Or, “Forgive us our trash baskets as we forgive those who put trash in our baskets.” My personal favorite though comes not from the Lord’s Prayer, but from the Apostles’ Creed. The line that goes, “He suffered under Pontius Pilate” was heard by one six year old as “He suffered under a bunch of violets.”
  These misunderstandings are sweet and touching and they make us smile. But underneath the humor is this abiding truth: we grownups misunderstand prayer too. Sometimes we treat God like a vending machine—put in a prayer and the answer drops out. Or a genie—rub the lamp and the wish comes true. Or Santa Claus. Stand-up comic Flip Wilson said in one of his routines, “I’m going to pray now.   Anybody want anything?” We feel guilty because we don’t make time to pray, or get discouraged because it feels like no one is listening, or become angry when God doesn’t help us out of a bad patch. For many of us prayer is confusing—for some even painful.
  The truth is, we don’t know how to pray. Not really. Even if you have had a prayer discipline for years and have attended hundreds of prayer meetings, even if you have (as I do) a shelf full of books on prayer. Even if you are a monk or a mystic or a saint or a preacher. If we are honest, we are all children, all beginners, when it comes to prayer. And we all stand with those disciples who said to Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
  By the time the disciples got around to asking, they had been following Jesus for nearly three years. They had seen him at prayer many times; they had stood by as he went off to be alone with God. You would think that the habit would have rubbed off on them, that they would have “gotten it” through osmosis if nothing else.   Personally, I suspect that one of the reasons Jesus prayed so much is that he had to ask for God’s help in dealing with those dense disciples! In any case, Jesus returned from his prayers, and this time—finally, humbly, in recognition of their ignorance and their need—they came asking Jesus how to pray.
  Jesus doesn’t give them magic. The Lord’s Prayer, as we have come to call it, as beautiful and complete as it is, is not a pat formula. It is a teaching about what God is like. Saying it often enough or perfectly enough or fervently enough does not help us curry God’s favor. In fact, there is no combination of words, no matter how poetic or profound, that will make God pay attention to us. God is already paying attention.
  When Jesus prays, when he tells us how to pray, he is telling us that God wants us to pay attention too. God is doing what anyone does who is in a real, live, relationship with us.
  Prayer is about relationship. I like Roberta Bondi’s simple definition of prayer as our “shared life with God.” (To Pray and To Love, p. 10) That’s what all relationships are—a shared life. And like any other relationship, our relationship with God needs time and attention if it is to flourish.
  Several years ago one of my dearest friends got a new job and moved away. I threw a going away party for her, helped her pack the moving van, and cried when she drove away. I thought about her often and would say to myself, “I really need to call Annie.” But I didn’t. My days were full doing important things, and I would make excuses to myself like, “I’ll wait until I have time for a nice long talk.” One day, many months later, Annie called me. She said, “Eyleen, we never talk except when I call you. My feelings are hurt and I need you to know.” I was shocked to realize that I had neglected a relationship I would have said was very important to me.
  We who take our faith seriously never intend to treat God this way, and yet we do it all the time. We live busy, demanding lives. We mean to pray, but the phone rings, the baby cries, the soup boils over, we’re running late, we’re over-scheduled, over-committed, stressed out, worn out. And we shove God to the sidelines. Even though a connection with God is the deepest and truest desire of our hearts.
As a deer longs for the flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. (Ps. 42:1) This longing, expressed so beautifully by the psalmist, is our desire to answer God’s longing for us. It is placed within every human heart by God, and is the beginning point of all our prayers. There is not anyone here who isn’t acquainted with this longing. And yet, we have so much trouble doing what we know is best for us, what in the deepest part of our being we most truly want. Why is that?
  Aside from all the excuses we can come up with, the real reason we avoid prayer is that prayer will change us, and we don’t want to change.
  Robert Wicks, a professor of pastoral counseling and a therapist to many pastors, says this about clergy and their prayer: “When I started seeing persons in therapy who are engaged in full-time ministry, I thought as a realist I would find out from them that prayer in silence and solitude each day would be a rarity. Much to my surprise the situation was even worse. Prayer for most of them—even though they claimed that God was at the center of their lives and hopes—was not a rarity, it was an oddity!”
  Wicks wondered why these good, compassionate, even holy people would avoid a life of prayer which would help them be more sensitive to God, to others, and to themselves. He came up with a list of ten reasons why clergy—or anyone else for that matter—might resist prayer. His list included boredom, fear, and the desire to control. Another was the “failure to see results in the usual ways.” As Wicks puts it, when we pray, we stand naked before God and need to prepare for the reality our nakedness reveals. Another way to put it would be to say that in prayer, we will eventually have to face—and deal with—the truth about ourselves.
  One of the Zen masters said the same thing in a slightly different way: “Face reality, and unwilled change will take place.” The secret – hidden, yet in plain view – is that we do not pray to change someone else or to make the universe fit our version of reality. We pray to face the ultimate reality which is God and to become willing, through that encounter, to be changed. In prayer, God will change us and heal us and make of us the persons God would have us be.
  Etty Hillesum was a young Dutch Jew. She kept a series of journals during the war years before her imprisonment and death at Auschwitz in 1943. In An Interrupted Life, the book her journals eventually became, Etty recorded her incredible spiritual journey. On page one she wrote of her fear: “Deep inside me something is still locked away . . . something like a tightly-wound ball of twine binds me relentlessly and at times I am nothing more or less than a miserable, frightened creature.”
  But listen to this entry that comes near the end of her journal: “I jumped out of bed at the crack of dawn and knelt down at my window. The tree stood motionless out there in the grey, still morning. And I prayed, ‘God, grant me the great and mighty calm that pervades all nature. If it is Your wish to let me suffer, then let it be one great, all-consuming suffering, not the thousand petty anxieties that can break a human being. Give me peace and confidence. Let every day be something more than the thousand everyday cares. All those worries about food, about clothing, about the cold, about our health—are they not so many denials of You, my God? . . . I would wish my life to turn into one great prayer.” (p.235)
  What happened between those two startling different entries was Etty Hillesum’s ever-deepening life of prayer. Prayer in which she gave herself—heart, mind, body, and soul—over to the gentle, compassionate, loving molding by God.
  Where are you in your prayer, right now? Is your heart joyful and full of praise? Are you weighted down by grief and sorrow? Are your prayers desperate pleas for a child in trouble? Or serene, wordless meditations? Are you unable to pray at all? According to Ann Lamott, there are really only two kinds of prayer: “Help me, help me, help me!” and “Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you!” There have certainly been times in my life when that was all I could manage; I suspect the same is true for many of you. But know this: wherever you are, it is an appropriate place to begin yet again. God, I am sure of it, is listening.