GENESIS 32:3-8,22-30

PSALM 121

2 TIMOTHY 3:14-4:5

LUKE 18:1-8a

 

Sermon – 10/21/01

 

      (A Prayer of self-dedication, p. 832 in the BCP):      “Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated to you; and then use us, we pray, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your people; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”  Amen.

      Prayer is the potent unifying theme in this morning’s Scriptures.  We joined the Psalmist in saying, “I lift up my eyes to the hills; from where is my help to come?  My help comes from the Lord, the maker of heaven and earth.”

The Psalmist is very clear about to whom he is praying: the real God has a name, the Lord, and a rather impressive resumé – including being ”the maker of heaven and earth.” (The hills, on the other hand, in ancient times in the land of Canaan were the places for pagan shrines, which were a snare and a delusion and the source of no hope at all.)

The fact that real prayer has to be addressed to Someone and that there is only one real Someone to whom people of biblical faith pray is one of the many reasons I am opposed to official prayers in public schools: there is absolutely no agreement in our multi-faith society about to whom one should pray if at all, including on the part of many teachers, who should not be teaching something they may not know how to do themselves.  There is no such thing as a “generic prayer” inoffensive to everyone; any watered-down platitudes addressed “to whom it may concern” are not worth a moment of anyone’s time.

No.  If we pray, we are to pray to Someone, and the only Someone Christians identify as “the real deal” is Almighty God.  “Christian Prayer”, the Book of Common Prayer declares in the Catechism, p.856, “is response to God the Father, through Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit.”

God is always open to our prayers.  No experience is needed in praying; first-timers are always welcome.  But – God invites people to have a regular relationship with God, which is created and maintained, like most relationships, by regular communication.  If we pray regularly – including listening quietly, and looking for responses in the course of our daily lives – we can expect to have a richer and deeper relationship with God.

Recognizing God’s answers to our prayers, even our unverbalized ones, can involve realizing when coincidences are far too coincidental to be coincidental.  I remember the Christmas after my mother died, my father came here to visit us.  After Christmas I took him back to the train station for his trip back to Boston.  When I came home no one else was in the house, and I realized my father would be coming home to a truly empty home for the first time at Christmas.  I felt really sad – for him, and for me.  Just then the phone rang, and it was the person in the parish, who had most recently been widowed, who was feeling her own pain – and well understood mine.  After we talked, I put the phone down and it rang again instantly.  It was my oldest friend, calling from Washington.  He “just had a feeling” I needed a phone call right then.  We had a long and good conversation, and after we hung up I cried – tears of thanksgiving.  I prayed, “O.K., boss, I know those two phone calls were way too coincidental to be coincidental.  Thank you.”

In my initial, non-verbal way, I had offered a prayer of petition – asking for help for my own needs – and intercession – praying on behalf of my father.  I finished, verbally, with that prayer of thanksgiving.

Part of a consistent discipline of prayer means offering spur-of-the-moment prayers like those – within a context of a regular, systematic habit.  We can offer the anguish or delight of our souls to God spontaneously – and we can regularly and systematically spend time reading God’s word in the Bible, offering up the seven different kinds of prayer, and “responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with or without words”, which is the Catechism’s definition of prayer.

The central human Sin is our essential human effort to be our own little gods instead of worshipping God as the true God.  Original Sin is rebelling against God’s rule and deciding, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, that we can be totally in charge, make our own rules, give ourselves permission to do what we want to do and not recognize any Higher Authority.

Prayer reminds us – or should remind us – that we are not in charge of the universe (nor should we be), that we don’t have all the answers (nor even all of the questions), that we sometimes do wrong (and need forgiveness): that we need God’s help.

So prayers of penitence (“I’m sorry, Lord”) and petition (“Please help, Lord”) are antidotes to our own grandiosity as well as valuable in their own right.

Two other crucial kinds of prayer need to be in our consistent disciplines of prayer just to keep our prayer times from being like a recitation of shopping lists.  They are adoration, and praise.  “Adoration”, the Catechism tells us, ”is the lifting up of the heart and mind to God, asking nothing but to enjoy God’s presence.”  Suppose you’ve had a rotten day, and so has someone else you care a lot about, and besides, the state of the world looks dismal, and you could really get cranked up for a bunch of prayers of petition and intercession which are (like many of the psalms) complaining prayers – maybe stop first.  Stop, and just this once, find a quiet place and time, close your eyes, take some slow, deep breaths and say, “God, You are God.  No matter what goes on in the world, you are God.  You are Love. You are Peace.  You are Hope.  You are God.

“Chill” like that for a while.  A prayer of adoration might be “just what the doctor ordered.”

“We praise God”, the Catechism says, “not to obtain anything, but because God’s Being draws praise from us.”  Hymns like “How great Thou art” or the doxology speak to this.  The glories of Creation, the wonderful goodness in people, the marvel of a single life, can cause us to burst into praise of God.  Not a “shopping list” prayer at all.

Prayers of intercession are prayers we offer on behalf of others.  We aren’t telling God something God doesn’t know about; if that were true, God wouldn’t be worth praying to.  We are offering up that person or that concern and thereby opening ourselves up to change (again, reducing

 

our sinful self-centeredness), perhaps opening up the other person or people to change, and opening up the situation to change under the impact of God’s love, power and grace.

      Some intercessions we offer seem like real “long shots”.  Well, I’ve seen too many “unexplained spontaneous remissions” in medical health to think we, or the doctors, control all the possibilities.  I’ve seen too many quote-unquote “hopeless drunks” miraculously experience years of sobriety to think that their disease is the only power on earth.  And I’ve seen too many large-scale miracles to give up praying for peace.  Who would have imagined that the Berlin Wall – and the whole Soviet Empire! – would fall without a shot being fired?

      The final two prayers of the seven kinds are thanksgiving and oblation.  Here let me remind you of the Catechism’s definition of prayer: “responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with or without words.”

      Prayer is not only expressed in words read from a book, or recited from memory, or said aloud or silently spontaneously. Prayer can be actions, and this is especially true of prayers of thanksgiving to God, and prayers of oblation which are “offerings of ourselves, our lives and labors, in union with Christ, for the purposes of God.”

      You’ve heard the expression, “God is my co-pilot”?  Well, hopefully at some point people who believe that realize that it’s time to change seats.  It’s time to let God be our pilot, and steer us to where God wants us to go.  Anytime – even briefly – that we’re ready to “change seats” and let God be our pilot, we are making a prayer of oblation offering ourselves… for the purposes of God.”

      That means yielding a little more power over our own lives – and Oh, how hard that can be, especially at first.  Because making our lives into prayers or dedication to God means ending the pretense that our lives are all ours.  It means ending the enormous conceit that we’re in charge of our lives, the conceit that it’s really being tremendously generous to offer God an hour every once in a while on a Sunday morning and to offer whatever we happen to have left of our money after we’ve spent it on what we wanted.

     

      No, the systematic discipline of prayer has already reminded us repeatedly that we’re not in charge of the universe, that we don’t have all the answers, that sometimes we do wrong.  Prayer reminds us that we need God’s forgiveness, God’s guidance, and we need to put ourselves willingly under God’s authority.  Part of that involves remembering that God is not only, as this morning’s Psalm says, “The maker of heaven and earth”, but God is also the owner of heaven and earth.

      “Oh, preacher, now you’re talking about money!”  Darned right.  There are Christians who say, “Ask me for anything except for my money.”  If that’s their attitude, it isn’t hard to figure out who their real “god” is: their wallets.  And just doling ones money out in dribs and drabs isn’t acknowledging God’s lordship over the Creation any more than participating in congregational prayer just two or three times a year acknowledges God’s lordship over all the days of our lives, either.

      Nope.  Afraid we can’t get away with ignoring stewardship, because stewardship of our time, talent and treasure is one essential part of our prayer lives.  And this part of our prayer lives needs just as much self-discipline as any other part – perhaps more.

      So these little yellow cards in your service leaflets [display one] are, truly enough, prayer cards.  This is one of the ways we make our self-offering to God real.  Especially in a society like this one, where the de facto majority religion is materialism, pledging a meaningful percentage of our incomes as a self-offering to God for God’s glory and God’s purposes is an important way to declare we are Christians, not materialists, because we know that what we earn is not “ours” alone.  King David’s words are ours: “All things come of thee, O Lord; and of thine own have we have given thee.”

      Labeling this pledge card a prayer card means this church has to be held to a high standard of service and accountability, always examining ourselves in terms of our living out our purpose: “to bring people together in Jesus Christ, to know Him personally and to strengthen the love of God and man…”

      Pledges first and foremost represent systematic disciplined prayers of oblation on the part of every person, of whatever age or wealth, who signs one.  All of these prayers of self-offering also make possible and mandatory the parish’s collective self-offering, so each pledge card has a double effect.

      Wrestle with what you’re willing to commit yourself to, if you need to.  Commit yourself to being persistent in the life of prayer, including prayers of self-offering like this.   All this will enable you to obey the command in today’s Epistle to “carry out your ministry fully.”  And if each of us do that, by the grace of God together we will truly do wondrous things.

      “Almighty and eternal God, so draw our hearts to you, so guide our minds, so fill our imaginations, so control our wills, that we may be wholly yours, utterly dedicated to you; and then use us, we pray, as you will, and always to your glory and the welfare of your people; through our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Amen.

 

(The Rev.) Francis A. Hubbard

St. Barnabas Episcopal Church