(Preached on Sunday, July 25, 2010)
And he said to them, “When you pray, say: Father…”
-Luke 11:2a
In one of the most famous sermons ever delivered, poet & priest John Donne described the challenge of retaining concentration during prayer. The year was 1626. The occasion was the funeral sermon for Sir William Cockayne, a cloth merchant and one-time mayor of London. Donne said: I throw myself down in my chamber, and I call in and invite God and his angels thither; and when they are there, I ignore God and his angels for the noise of a fly, for the rattling of a coach, for the whining of a door; I talk on … sometimes I find that I forgot what I was about, but when I began to forget it, I cannot tell. A memory of yesterday’s pleasures, a fear of tomorrow’s dangers, a straw under my knee, a noise in mine ear, a light in mine eye, an any thing, a nothing, a fancy, a chimera in my brain, troubles me in my prayer.
I find this quote fascinating, don’t you? To think that someone over 400 years ago struggled with distractions during his prayer time! I suddenly feel in very good company, to count myself with John Donne! Today it is more likely to be a mosquito instead of a fly, (or in my house those dreaded grass moths with which we live!), or the rumble of a Harley instead of a stagecoach. It will probably be the chime of a text message arriving on my cell phone rather than a squeaky door. But clearly, distraction is an issue for us when we pray. How do we hold our concentration in prayer when our multisensory world and multitasking brains keep creating new strains of attention deficit?
When his disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray their request quite likely had nothing to do with learning some revolutionary technique. These Jews had undoubtedly been taught since young boys and girls, by their parents and their rabbis, how to pray. They knew the postures and practices, the words and habits passed along by their ancestors in the faith. No, I imagine they were struggling with feeble concentration just as we do today. They, too, had lives to lead, worries to forget and preoccupations that nagged.
They must have witnessed Jesus not sharing in these struggles. They must have witnessed his special attachment to God – a relational bond strong enough to welcome even the most intimate of expression – Abba, Daddy, Papi. They must have witnessed such intimacy and yearned for similar closeness in their own prayer relationship, an intimacy they struggled to find.
So, Jesus teaches them how to pray. He begins by giving them a brief prayer they can use. He probably never expected it would become a model prayer set in concrete when he shared it. He most likely made it a brief prayer to illustrate the simplicity of attitude and trust. It is not flowery with poetic turns of phrase. It is simple and basic. It is not a prayer of private piety, although we can say it alone, in our room. It is a “we” and “us” prayer though, even when said solo, in which we remember that we are always part of the wider community of God’s children. Never are we totally alone, even in our private prayer closet. It is a prayer which gives voice to our most vital human needs: for bread, forgiveness, and escape from the trials we cannot bear. But first and foremost, it affirms the sovereignty and the holiness of God. All told, it takes about 15 seconds to recite this version of the prayer, though it took me about 2 minutes just now to recall it with you.
After he shares the prayer, Jesus does not stop the lesson, but proceeds with the brief story of the friend pounding on his neighbor’s door at midnight to ask a favor. Perhaps one of the disciples still looked puzzled after Jesus taught them the brief prayer. So he offers instruction on the importance of persistence. He wants them to understand it is not as important what they say as it is that they spend time in prayer and that they do so regularly and persistently. This story of the persistent friend does just that, illustrating that even when we are not inclined to help, we will get up and answer a friend’s plea when they are persistent. How much more will God be there for us.
Let me be clear. Jesus is not suggesting to his followers that God requires some sort of groveling, begging, “ask me a hundred times and I’ll think about it” attitude from us. Jesus has always been clear that God loves us and accepts us. Our relationship with God is based in grace, God’s grace and acceptance and love. That is solid. God’s side of our relationship is solid. No, Jesus’ teaching about persistence in prayer is about our part of the deal. There are a lot of people who say God is distant from them. They say that when they pray, they feel like they are just talking to themselves. We all, in fact, struggle with distractions in our prayer lives and in our lives with God in general, just like John Donne. But the problem is not from God’s side, Jesus insists. If we feel distant; if we struggle with concentration; if we are beset by distractions – then pray more. Then make sure we participate in worship, more often. Then spend more time in God’s word, the Bible.
Relationships require time, energy, and commitment. Dianne and I just returned from a week of vacation, half of which was spent reconnecting with several old friends. We have not seen these people for several years and we would have had trouble connecting with their lives if we had not spent time over those years on telephone calls and with letters. Facebook and other social media are great tools for staying connected with friends and family, but only if you take the time to share some of your life and thoughts on them and to read the postings of your friends. Friendship takes time. It requires persistence. A true friendship develops over hours, years, of being with one another, hanging out together, hearing stories about life, and exploring the richness of another human being. You can’t have a really good friend overnight. The same is true in regard to our friendship with God. God is totally available to us. Be we, due to our distractions, our human self-centeredness, the numerous other cares of the world, are not totally available to God. Therefore we must keep at it. We must keep focusing, listening, and tuning our souls to God’s gracious incursions among us. We must keep at it Sunday after Sunday, day after day, prayer time after prayer time.
Persistence. Repetition. These disciplines are so important, not just for our own personal feel good, fuzzy warm personal relationship with God. They are also important for developing in us the ability to lean forward, falling gently, trustingly, into the sovereignty of God. One of the difficult steps in learning to swim is learning to trust the water to bear you up. Once you can move past your fear of sinking like a rock, letting go of your tendency to tense up and struggle against the water, you can learn to fill your body with air, relax and let go into the natural buoyancy of the water. The same is true with learning to trust God and to trust that God is sovereign, always in charge, and slowly, steadily, continuing to shape and mold the earth to match God’s desire for a world of justice, fairness, and compassion for all creatures.
As we learn to trust this truth about God we are better able to embrace our role in the partnership with God in building God’s world. This is such a difficult step for us. The needs of the world are so vast and for most of us our resources, especially measured against those needs, are so limited. We so easily grow discouraged and lose heart. That is why it is important we remember what God’s role is in reshaping the world and what our role is. Making big changes, changing hearts and minds, that is primarily God’s role. We can help, but our primary role is in helping our neighbors. Our primary job is to do what we can, when we can, where we are, and to keep at it – to persist. Jesus said: “In as much as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me.”
Tom Long, one of my former Seminary professors, tells a story about the time that this church in Princeton, New Jersey became concerned about the problem of hunger in Trenton, New Jersey. A number of members from the church had worked in an intercity ministry there and made the rest of the church aware of the huge problem of hunger in Trenton. The church decided to reach out. Every Sunday, during the worship, as the hymn was sung, people were invited to come up and place an offering of money into the plate, all to be used to work for the alleviation of hunger in Trenton. As the Sundays wore on, and as they learned more about the problem, the congregation became overwhelmed by the problem of hunger in Trenton. The problem was growing, and the offering could not keep up with the need. Gradually, it dawned on the congregation that they didn’t have the resources to solve the problem of hunger in Trenton.
Then there came that Sunday when, as they were receiving the offering for hunger in Trenton, that an older woman, one of the town’s “bag ladies,” who had shown up that morning, with everything that she owned in a shopping bag, dressed in an old hand-me-down coat, came forward when the offering was received for those in need. The congregation watched her shuffle down to the front, many of them probably thinking that she was going to take something out of the offering plate rather than put it in, knowing that she had nothing to offer. When she got down to the front, the congregation watched. She put nothing in the plate. She did not file past the plate; rather, she folded her hands, knelt before the plate, and prayed.
Professor Long says that for him, that woman became an eloquent parable of Christian compassion. We, despite our good efforts, are not going to solve the problem of hunger. But we do not lose heart. We give, and we do what we can. And then we pray. We ask God to take our meager efforts and use them. We ask God to do for us that which we cannot fully do for ourselves. We persist.
Jesus taught us that prayer is an intimate conversation with God. Spending time with God in prayer, in regular, intimate conversation, and opening ourselves to the Holy Spirit, will lead us on the way of compassion, and it will lead us to transformation, not just as individuals, but as a community. With persistence on our part, God will change us, and God will change the world.