(Preached on Sunday, September 27, 2009)
Make this your common practice: Confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you can live together whole and healed. The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with. -James 5:16
In the midst of a Nebraska drought some years ago, some thirsty soul sent the following prayer to the Lincoln Journal and Star.
“O Lord, send us and our dusty neighbors around the world a good soaking rain of about 1.5 inches over a 15-hour period, at the rate of no more than a tenth of an inch per hour, preferably at night; and repeat once a week through April 15, with the exception of three weeks appropriate for spring planting; and thereafter once every two weeks until the soil-moisture deficit has been eliminated, or until the farmers wish it would stop, whichever comes first. Amen.”
Now that is a specific prayer!
There is probably no greater need we human beings have than the need to pray. We want to believe in prayer, but we struggle to do so. We look around us and see people who seem to have the ability to pray and they seem to enjoy fulfilling and secure lives. But many of us consider ourselves incapable of prayer; at least of having our prayers heard. And passages such as this from the Letter of James don’t help us. Sure, the author calls us to prayer, both for ourselves and for one another. But he also seems to play into our worst doubts and fears about our prayers. “The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.” Then why, after all my prayers and tears, is my child dying? Am I not good enough? Is it my fault? The passage seems to raise more questions than provide answers.
In truth those questions are already lingering in the hearts and minds of many of us who take prayer seriously. After all, it’s difficult to face the fact that maybe God won’t answer our prayers in the ways which we desire. Because if God is not going to do what we ask, especially in situations where we have nowhere else to turn, what’s the point of prayer? If prayer can’t guarantee a solution, why bother to pray? If my partner or my child or my best friend is seriously ill, but my prayer can’t guarantee their healing, if they might die anyway, why pray?
Part of the problem is our attitude toward prayer and our expectation of prayer. If we look upon prayer as existing in order to answer our desires, whatever those desires might be, sometimes we’re going to be doomed to disappointment. Sometimes of course, our prayers will be answered exactly as we wish them to be answered. But sometimes they won’t. There are no certainties when it comes to prayer.
After all, we are dealing with a living God. God is not a divine automaton nor a heavenly computer programmed in a certain manner. God is not our servant, standing ready at our beck and call. God is God. God is the Creator and the Source of life and the Cosmos. God is so far beyond us that we cannot even begin to comprehend the thought processes and the wisdom of God. Yet, human beings, since the dawn of time, have tried to bend the will and action of God to our wills and desires. We have created complicated processes, rituals, cults, sacrifices, incantations, formulas, in our efforts to influence God to meet and satisfy our desires for life. It will just never work.
This may sound harsh, but here is the good news. God, distant and totally other than we are, has also given us a great gift: the ability to communicate with God. Prayer is that gift. The prime reason for prayer is to communicate with God and to allow God to communicate with us. It is not the means by which we harangue God until God gives in and grants us our requests. Nor is it the way in which we let God know that we down here are on God’s side. Rather prayer is our side of a communication which has been initiated by God. This is a different, but very healthy and helpful, way of understanding the purpose of prayer.
Dr. Larry Dossey wrote a bestseller titled Healing Words: The Power of Prayer and the Practice of Medicine. In it he tells the story of a patient of his, a man of faith, who was dying of lung cancer. The day before his death, the doctor sat at the man’s bedside, and asked him what he usually prayed for. “I don’t pray for anything,” the patient responded. “How would I know what to ask for?” This surprised the doctor – who thought that, of all people, a dying patient would know what to ask for. “If prayer is not for asking, then what is it for?” “It isn’t ‘for’ anything,” responded the patient. “It mainly reminds me I am not alone.”
That is the crux of the matter. When we pray, we experience the reality that we are not alone. We discover anew that at the very core of the universe is not cold, unfeeling matter, but a heart of love. We discover that God is not some impersonal abstraction, impossibly distant from the joys and sorrows of our lives but one who took on human flesh, and endured horrible human suffering, even death.
When we being to view prayer not as the magical answer to all our desires but as the means of meeting with God and growing into an intimate relationship with God, most all of our problems over God’s failure to answer our prayers become resolved. We then engage in prayer not to get something out of God, but in order to share precious moments with God. Prayer’s reward is within the praying, not in some material benefit to be gained as a result of the prayer. As our relationship with God deepens, so our prayer becomes richer and more and more rewarding.
Prayer is natural for us. We have been hard-wired by God for it, because we are “enfleshed spirit.” In other words, we are not separate beings from God, but we are intimately and integrally connected to God. Through prayer we gradually become more and more aware of this connection and of the presence of God which is all around us and in us. The deeper our prayers become the more we realize we are not separate from God, nor is God separate from us. Prayer becomes for us then a way of life, lived daily in the presence of God.
How do we live fully in God’s presence? First, by being totally and brutally honest with God. As we open ourselves fully to God, exposing ourselves, laying before God all of our actions, all of our deepest thoughts and desires, our feelings and questions – we let God into the very center of our lives. As we do this we will experience a deep intimacy, love and acceptance by God in a powerful way. The truth is, God already knows us intimately; better than we know ourselves. And God still loves us!!! That is the amazing good news Jesus came to help us grasp. So when we become honest with God, in truth we are becoming honest with ourselves. And as we begin to understand that God knows us fully, and God still accepts and loves us, we can begin to more fully accept and love ourselves, as God does.
Second, as we become totally honest with God and with ourselves, we will eventually be able to move beyond speech into silence. We will begin to move beyond the need to blabber on in order to distract God from the truth and we will move beyond, eventually, having anything else to confess and reveal. As we grow silent before God, we will experience space being made within our beings to listen to God’s voice. Our prayers will deepen as we give God space to respond. And not just to respond, but allow God space to begin to direct us. The result will be an experience of the transforming love of God shaping and molding us into something amazing and wonderful, what God desires us to become – the image of Christ.
Finally, as our prayers deepen and God transforms us into the image of Jesus, the image of a servant, we will discover our prayer become less self-centered and more other-centered. Our prayers will become more and more filled with concern for others and for God’s world. They will be less and less about what we want and more and more about what God desires for us, and for the world. This is the primary form of prayer in the Bible. Most of the well-known prayers in scripture are prayers made on behalf of others. Abraham prayed for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah; Moses for the Israelites; Jesus for his followers and for the world. God’s purpose for us is to serve one another, not our own selfish desires. Even this teaching from James is primarily that we are to pray for one another, not for ourselves.
That is why God calls us into the community of the church. Because the life of faith is not exclusively personal and private, but primarily a responsibility we share with one another for prayer, praise, and mutual accountability. That is why prayers that are powerful and effective are prayers that focus on our connections with God and with one another. So let us make time in our lives for prayer. Let us make time in our lives for God. Let us begin by taking the risk to be fully open and honest with God and then take time to listen for and sit in the love of God. Let us then be sure to pray for others and to invite them to pray for us. As we do these things we will discover the truth that “The prayer of a person living right with God is something powerful to be reckoned with.”