PRAYER AND PRAYING

 Sermon preached by the Rev. Michael Anderson Bullock

[Genesis 18::20-32; Colossians 2:6-19; Luke 11:1-13]

In light of the strong, common thread that connects all of today’s scriptures, this sermon is about –-prayer and praying: What prayer is; and what prayer involves.

I took it as a compliment.  Tony was a financial and strategic planning consultant for the Diocese.  A large and thoughtful bequest to the Diocese provided for his services to any parish willing and able to receive them.  The South Carolina parish and I were precisely ready to do this.  We were ready to lay out some defined planning, by which we might significantly and continuously tend the trajectory of our numerical growth and at the same time provide for the deepening of our spiritual health and awareness.

In his consulting capacity, Tony spent a significant amount of time in our midst.  He was most definitely not one of those cookie-cutter-consultant types.  Rather, he gained our trust by taking the time to get to know us, hanging out with us, and by watching us and listening to us.  Appropriately and astutely, Tony joined us for a season of Sunday worship.  While he was familiar with the Episcopal Church and our traditions, he personally was a faithful Southern Baptist from Kentucky.  So it was that I was a bit surprised when (after one Sunday’s liturgy) he siddled up to me and said, “Do you realize that we just spent twenty minutes praying?”

I confess that my immediate emotional reaction to his comment was a bit defensive.  Was he going to tell me that the “Prayers of the People” took too long?  No, that was not Tony’s point at all -- rather the opposite.  He spoke with a bit of wonderment about being moved by the faithfulness of the congregation’s prayers.  To say the least, I was glad (and relieved) that the place of the “People’s Prayers” was so clear – especially to an observant guest: that our prayers were not rote “book-prayers” but expressions of trust, concern, and commitment.  As I say, I quickly took Tony’s assessment of our community’s corporate prayer life as a compliment.  Not a bad advertisement for that parish church.  Wouldn’t you say?  As a matter of fact, not a bad advertisement for this parish church, either.

The focus on prayer and what prayer entails is set quite clearly in our gospel lesson for today.  It begins with Luke describing the fact that Jesus was in a certain prayer setting, saying his prayers.  When he was finished, one of the disciples came up to him and made a request.  “Lord, teach us to pray, as John the Baptist taught his disciples.” [11:1].  I feel certain that Jesus was thrilled by the request and most eager to offer what turned out to be his prayer: what we refer to as “the Lord’s Prayer”.  The important fact is that any faithful Jew could and did offer such a prayer, but only Jesus (as it turns out) fully embodied the prayer.  I will come back to this point later.

For now, the evident hunger on the disciples’ parts for a deeper connection with what they were learning from Jesus and seeing in his example speaks to the place and meaning of prayer.  The Prayer Book’s “Catechism” identifies this issue directly with its opening inquiry about “Prayer and Worship”,[1] simply asking, “What is prayer?”  The answer given is: “Prayer is responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with or without words.”  Another, more expanded response speaks of prayer in terms of [humanity’s] “conscious relationship to God… which consists of mental and verbal fellowship with God.”[2]

Prayer is rooted in and is the expression of the relationship that exists between God and us.  As in any relationship, tending to what connects us is key.  Prayer (whether couched in verbal or non-verbal terms, experienced emotionally or with great reflective thought) is what keeps us connected to God; and this is prayer’s essential nature and purpose.

In terms of prayer signifying relationship, specifically an alternative to being in “fellowship” with God, I prefer to use the more poignant phrase, “being in Communion with God”.  And in this context of communion, I was curious to find a short reflection on what that author names and describes as “dialogue”.  Listen and see if inserting the word “prayer” whenever the term “dialogue” is used creates a helpful insight into prayer’s purpose and impact.

Dialogue demands of each participant that we try to lie into the other’s world, try to see things as another sees them. We do not enter into dialogue in order to persuade another to see things our way.  We enter into dialogue because we are open to change and are aware that our lives need correcting.  Dialogue requires a clear, radical, and arduous commitment to listening.  Essential to that listening is knowing in the deepest recesses of our being that we really know very little about most things, and that the truth may rest with some unlikely soul.[3]

From this, a significant part of the experience of prayer and praying has to do with seeing what God sees, knowing what God knows.  This is to say that prayer’s insight and recognition changes us and has the capacity to promote our continual transformation into what it means to be made in “God’s image” and called to be God’s partners.  A good example of this “dialogue” between partners emerges from the story we heard in our first reading from Genesis.

That story depicts Abraham approaching God, seemingly bargaining with God for the welfare of the dangerously flawed cities of Sodom and Gomorrah.  In this, we need to note the impact that this “dialogue” had on Abraham.  We also need to note how God was affected by this prayerful communion with Abraham.

With regard to Abraham, his bargaining with God is an attempt to negotiate a better deal for the woeful residents of Sodom and Gomorrah.  But with a closer look, can’t you also see how God is affected?  It is not that Abraham is informing God of anything the Holy One already does not know.  Rather, in his negotiations on behalf of the lost urbanites, I think one can catch God smiling.  I say this because behind the seriousness of the situation, what God sees is Abraham actually using his prerogative as God’s partner on behalf of the undeserving schmoes in the decadent cities.  This is to say, Abraham is not simply bargaining with God.  Abraham is seeking “mercy” for the wayward ones in Sodom and Gomorrah, and “mercy” is what God is all about and what God desires: Hence, the words of the Prophet Hosea (words Jesus refers to twice in Matthew’s gospel) “I desire mercy, not sacrifice”.[4]

In Abraham’s confrontation with God, he unwittingly absorbs and then demonstrates God’s own nature by negotiating for mercy for those who do not deserve such generous considerations.  In doing so, Abraham (eventually) “gets” God and God’s mysteriously wonderful nature: namely, God is love and the divine love entails both “grace” (that is, a gift that cannot be earned) and “mercy” (that is, NOT being given what is deserved).

This is to say that Abraham is shaped and matured by the “dialogue”, the prayerful exposure to God and to God’s life.  And for the Holy One’s part, God can smile at Abraham’s spiritual transformation and development as Abraham discovers what the covenanted partnership is all about: in this case by asking for mercy for the lost souls, a merciful request which just might include Abraham someday.

It is, I believe, the reality of “dialogue” in the living example of Jesus that causes the disciples to ask for a prayer from Jesus.  After all, they have witnessed Jesus praying regularly, and they have witnessed the stunning impact of the God-life demonstrated in all that Jesus did.  “Teach us to pray” is the disciples’ request for direction in living and receiving what they see in Jesus.  And so, Jesus (I think) gladly accedes to this request, and he offers a prayer that we have for ages known as “the Lord’s Prayer”.

Yet, as I said briefly a moment ago, the content of Jesus’ prayer is not new, not original with him.  Any faithful Jew could and would pray the sense of these words; but it is the fact that Jesus is the living reality, the full embodiment of both the prayer’s words and it’s meaning that is new to the point of being unique.

This, I think, is what St. Paul is getting at with his words to the Colossians: namely, Jesus is the “whole fullness of [God] dwelling bodily” in our midst.[5]  So it is that the “Lord’s Prayer” conveys two crucial and challenging aspects of this particular prayer.  The first is that God is addressed as “Father”.  The other image, presented in the parable at the end of today’s gospel, is that of seeing God as “neighborly friend”.  And the point is that God as “Father” and “friend” have something significant to teach us about God, about prayer, and about the life of prayer.[6]

In a time when masculine images of God, specifically of God as “Father”, raise some important challenges to faithfulness (and I personally do not dismiss either the importance or the challenge), perhaps in looking closer to what it means for God to be “friend” we might also gain important (and slightly less conflictual) insight into what it means about God’s “fatherhood”.  At least, please bear with me on this.

Many of us already are aware of the fact that the term in Aramaic that Jesus uses for “Father” is the tender term a child would call his or her loving parent.  The point here is that irrespective of the limits of gender language about God, what Jesus establishes from the start of his prayer is to give to his followers a level of astounding intimacy with the Maker of heaven and earth.  He gives us permission to enter into the intimacy he, himself, has with the “Father”; and, therefore, we enter into the intimacy of calling the Holy One “daddy” or “dad” or “papa” -- or “momma”.

I submit that this is the point at which God’s “Fatherhood” overlaps with God’s being a “friend”: from intimate “dad” to obligated neighbor and friend and back again from neighborly “friend” to revealing “Father”.

Personally, as the father of three adult children, I think I recognize this “fatherhood/friendship” imagery in terms of being connected to God in prayer and by prayer.

In particular, I have firmly believed that my kids will have and do have many loving, life-saving friends; and this is a testimony both to our kids’ character and the character of those they call “friends”.  Yet, having said this and in apparent distinction from much of what I experience as “modern” parenting, my goal in being the best father I could be is to know and trust that they will have many friends but only one father, only one mother.  This distinction speaks to the responsibility of a parent’s need to embody “first things first”.  I need to be a “father” first and foremost.

Using gardening images, parents are first and foremost to tend and grow their kids.  Such tending seems inevitably to create a tension between parent and child that often reminds one of what Mark Twain said about his own father.

Samuel Clemens, Mark Twain, spoke to the fact that as a young man he had reached that point in his life where he realized that his father was [quote] “the dumbest S.O.B. in the world”; and that as a result of this recognition, the young buck Twain left home in a huff.  Yet, Twain concluded this tale by saying that four years later he returned home, and to his amazement was stunned by how much his father had learned.

As our children grow into the fruitful and hearty “plants” that Godly love desires, something quite marvelous can happen.  Faithfull and cultivating parents can become colleagues in their children’s lives.  No longer sharing contested arguments about curfews, both generations can mutually commiserate about sharing in life’s demands and (more importantly) how much we need each other as helpers in this.  And out of this maturity and mutuality, parenting (in my case, fathering) increasingly involves being friends, collaborators, teammates – yet with the unique and ongoing distinction of being “father” or “mother”.  Eventually – and ironically, this transforming parent/friendship moves toward a reversal of roles, where children tend and support the parent as they were tended and supported.

The life of prayer involves these two intertwining elements and the transformation such a living relationship produces.  God is friend, giving us what we need and cannot provide for ourselves – at all times and at all hours.  But God is also “Father”/parent, loving us through our disappointment and even rejection of the parent over our petulant desire to have what we want to the denial of what we need.

This is the reason I frequently conclude the “Prayers of the People” with the request that the tending, enduring God grant us the grace to live more nearly as we pray”.[7]  Prayer provides a relationship with God, a relationship of communion that transforms us with the reality of God’s love, grace, and redeeming mercy.

As such, it clearly pays to be careful what we pray for.  Amen.

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[1] Book of Common Prayer: “An Outline of Faith”, p. 856.

[2] The Westminster Dictionary of Worship. p. 318.

[3] Elizabeth O’Connor. Plough: Daily Dig: “Dialogue in Christian Community”, 7/24/25.

[4] Matthew 9:13; 12:7.

[5] Colossians 2:10.

[6] N. T. Wright. Luke for Everyone. p 133.

[7] Hymnal 1982. Hymn 10; verse 4.