July 29, 2007 - Prayer for grown-ups

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
29 July 2007
Luke 11.1-13
Prayer for Grownups
© J. Christy Wareham, 2007

Everyone here as been thirteen years old, so I know you’ll understand.

It was just over a mile and a half walk home from school. There would be half a dozen of us when we left the building, but my friends peeled off one by one to their homes, while I trudged on along Yosemite Drive. The last three, Kim, Lynn and Donna, all turned off on College View Avenue, and I continued on up a hill on my own. Maybe it was the loneliness of the last ¾ mile that got to me. At some point I realized that I kept thinking about Donna. Oh, Donna. There was even a song about it.

One night, I actually included in my prayers the very sincere request that God put it in Donna’s heart to like me, the kind of “like” that would involve holding hands on the way home from school. Well, it would start there, at any rate, but I wasn’t about to ruin the chance of a miracle by sharing my more extravagant romantic reveries with God. Very soon, it might have been the very next day, as we were nearing College View Avenue, Donna turned to me and shyly invited, “You can come to my house, if you want. My mom will have a snack for us.”

I was beside myself with glee. They called the avenue College View, but I could see more than Occidental College from there. I could see sunlit fields of tall grass and daisies. I could see to people in love sitting in the shade of a tree. I could see it all as plainly as I can see the anguished winces of embarrassment on your faces right now. My heart was full, and the world was alive with amorous wonder. Kim and Lynn turned off to their streets, and Donna and I went on to her house.

Donna’s mother fixed us a plate of cookies and some milk. We sat in the family room, where Donna probably turned on the TV. I don’t remember, I wasn’t paying attention. I should probably have paid attention—to the TV or to something, I have no idea what—because on the way home the next day, things had changed. The walk home was quiet and almost solemn. When we got to College View and I asked about escorting Donna home again, she shook her head. I don’t think she looked at me, but I remember the cold glare in Kim’s and Lynn’s eyes. Whatever test I was supposed to pass, I didn’t pass it. Donna was out of my life.

Over time, when I remember that awkward moment in life, what sets it apart for me from other moments in my life, many of them far more awkward, is that I had prayed to God for something that I dearly wanted, and then I got it. It would be the last time I treated prayer that way—the last time I treated God that way—and yet it took me years and years to realize why. Today, when I hear Jesus encourage us to ask for things in daily life, what I hear him teaching us is enlightened by my experiences with prayer, especially the prayer I made when I was thirteen years old.

Now, if a thirteen-year-old can pray, you would think praying must be almost automatic, but apparently it isn’t automatic for the disciples. They’ve noticed that the followers of John the Baptist have a visible prayer regimen. They’ve been watching Jesus go off alone for long periods of prayer with God. They want to be part of that. So they ask Jesus, “Teach us to pray,” and he does. He tells them to start off with the idea that all around God there is sacred space. He tells them to contemplate even the deep sacredness of God’s very name. “Father,” Jesus says, according to Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, “hallowed be your name.”

That’s major praying right there, if you think about it. First, you have to work out what it means to say God’s name is holy by understanding what it does not mean. The name as a human word, for instance, cannot be what Jesus means by holy, though Jesus may seem to suggest as much. The English word is God, and the German word is Gott, which is close but not exactly the same. Then there is the French word Dieu, which bears no similarity at all. Of course, there are also other religions with their words for God, by which they refer to a deity they describe in certain ways quite distinct from how we Christians think of God. How can God’s name be holy, when there are so many names and so many ideas about God represented by all those names? So what we use as a name for God, so far as it is a word, cannot be holy. It is just a human word, very provisional and indefinite, for the sound of something very deep and pervasive and incorruptible, and something intensely alive.

To say “hallowed be your name,” we must, if we really mean hallowed as in holy, shift our thinking. We have to step for the moment out of the narrowing affect of the insistent pressures of daily life. We have let go of immediate distractions and cast our sights off into the wide and far dimensions of The Holy, as the old German theologian Rudolf Otto used to call it. You cannot be sitting with your persistent worries tying knots in your heart and suppose you can say with honesty to God that you are contemplating what is holy. If you follow Jesus’ pattern for prayer, you begin by loosening the knots of constant anxious attention to the daily anxieties that have so far resisted your every effort to resolve them. If your child is obnoxious, you begin this prayer by letting her drift away into her own land of obnoxicity [don’t bother trying to look it up] and sail on to the hallowed place of God. If your coworker is a jerk and your boss is oblivious, you, in an almost dreamlike scene, introduce them to each other and politely adjourn to the parlor of God’s holy name, and you say to God, “Your kingdom come,” as if it were something that is just about to happen. Because, for all you know, it is.

When I was thirteen, of course, my operative assumption was that the kingdom of God was where Donna would fall in love with me. In other words, I believed that whatever perfect world I conjured for my happiness was what the kingdom of God must be.

The day after my kingdom of God was cancelled for lack of interest, I had to reconsider my assumptions. Let’s consider the options. I could’ve thought that God was playing a joke, as in: “Oh golly, Christy, you never said you wanted Donna to love you for more than a day.” Or I could’ve thought that God only had a day’s worth of influence on the heart of a girl. Or I could’ve thought that God thought to mock me for having an adolescent infatuation, as if an adolescent doesn’t already get more than enough mocking to make him crawl into a hole and die on a daily basis. There are a million things a thirteen year old can think, and I probably thought of all of them one night, all those years ago.

But what I did think at thirteen about God and prayer—and what it means for me to pray—was that getting favors from God is not what prayer is for. I realized that God did not make Donna invite me to her house for a snack and to meet her mother, and certainly not for Donna to fall in love with me. I realized that whatever I was doing in prayer, and however God was responding to my prayers, it was going to matter more that God and I were coming closer together than that I get relief from my pining. What I didn’t have was a way to pray that would let my prayers become what matters more than my pining, or any of my longings. If Jesus had appeared before me, I might have had the presence of mind to ask, “Lord, teach me to pray.” The point is, I didn’t want to decide the prayer was just stupid, but I didn’t know what to do with it.

What I had been taught about prayer was an acronym: A.C.T.S.. Adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication. A: Say how wonderful God is. C: Tell God you’ve sinned. T: Thank God for the good things. S: Ask God for what you want. It was a good way of explaining that prayer is more than begging, and in the process of adoring, confessing and thanking, you acknowledge more facets of your spiritual life than base needs. A lot of the time, this sort of fill-in-the-blank form of prayer, though it may sound a bit wooden, has met the need well enough.

It’s just that, whenever I’ve needed the transforming power of prayer most, filling in the blanks came and went like a long night train of empty boxcars. As the whistle’s low moan faded into the darkness, the prayers seemed to ride off with it. But if I could have prayed in some other way, I might have felt the holiness of the night alive around me. Prayer has come to have a nighttime quality for me. Maybe that’s why when the shepherds were abiding in the fields, it was while they were keeping watch over their flock "by night" that they were able to see an angel. Maybe it was when they had stopped trying to get favors from God, when they’d given up filling in the blanks of their prayers, that something so holy happened one night that the glory of the Lord shone around them.

It was many years before I came to know prayer this way—prayer that stills the constant prattling on of my mind about how God could improve my world, prayer that opens the door to what is holy about God’s name, God’s glory, God’s peace and God’s love. Once I got that, prayer, even when it was an expression of all in my life that is wanting and broken and confusing and discouraging, even then, prayer became an outpouring of the stirrings of my heart in the presence of God who listens to all I have to say, who embraces me in all I have so far become, who stands alongside me wherever yet I have to go. I am aware in such prayers of descending ever more deeply into the holy and of rising ever more hopefully into the coming kingdom.

There are still people who teach thirteen-year-old prayer, seeking favors from God, as the primary model even for grownups. It shouldn’t surprise me. For goodness sake, look at this teaching of Jesus in Luke. He tells people precisely that prayer is in fact the relentless pestering of a friend for a piece of bread. And I can actually imagine that if I were a Sudanese refugee with a child that is mostly distended belly in my arms, it would be the lack of a piece of bread that is the main fact of my life which I would take to God again and again. I would bang on God’s door all night long, if that’s what I was dealing with. Indeed, this is nearly the situation of the friend at the neighbor’s door. The friend is not only lacking any bread for himself, but a hungry visitor has arrived at his door, tired from a journey, also needing something to eat. In that situation, if God isn’t with you in your hunger, what kind of God would you pray to? And what else would there be to say? Asking for bread would be a prayer.

But a prayer is not a middle-class thirteen-year-old banging on God’s door all night to satisfy the perpetual yearnings of the adolescent psyche. A lot of what people seem to expect from God looks like the adolescent expectations of an impatient child who wants to be indulged. There are, for instance, very pious people who have finally accepted the reality of human caused climate change, but they explain away their own adult responsibility with the immature reassurance that “God will provide.” That is not faith. That’s dependency. I really can’t imagine what God must feel like listening to irresponsible adults who leave their mess for God to clean up and then expect God to indulge them with more comforts and easier happiness. I would be embarrassed to tell people I believed in a God I would pray to that way.

And maybe the immature prayers and beliefs of so many boisterously vocal Christians today are what have made so many people not only lose their belief in prayer but even reject a belief in God. They see how childish prayer like that is, and they reject the God that goes with it. I don’t blame them. If I hadn’t had an intuition that there is a kind of prayer more rich and alive than what I understood at age thirteen, I might have given up on prayer myself. If I hadn’t had an intuition for a God more profound than an overindulgent parent, I might even have given up on faith.

The prayers I have to pray are sometimes very hard, but to pray them is all I have to do. When Jesus said the hardest prayer he ever prayed, he didn’t ask God for a favor. His prayer was, “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” He was suspended in darkness at three in the afternoon on Calvary hill, and that was his prayer. Jesus was about to die, of course, but his prayer from the cross is, all the same, a good prayer for me any day of my life. What I really want to do with my prayer is commit my spirit into the hands of God. Whatever else I say in prayer—whatever I ask of God—what will finally matter most about my prayer will be what God will have done with me when I have fully committed my spirit to God. I know I am safe in surrendering myself into Gods hands, when I have descended deeply into God’s holiness, so that I can rise daily into God’s kingdom. I look forward to seeing you there. Amen.