“At the Heart of Prayer”

A Sermon based upon Ephesians 3: 14-21

Dr. Charles J. Tomlin

Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership

July 29, 2012,  9^th Sunday after Pentecost.

I begin with a story told by Brent Younger, whom I must thank for most of this sermon.  

From the house on the top of the hill, you could see a field of ripe corn with the bean flowers that promise a good harvest. The one thing the land needed was rain.  All morning Manuel had been examining the sky, "The water will come." During dinner the rain started to fall. Great clouds came from the northeast. Manuel thought, "These aren’t just drops of water falling from the sky. The big drops are ten cents and the small drops are five." Then all of a sudden, a strong wind started to blow and giant hailstones began to fall. For an hour hail fell on the house and garden. The countryside was white, as though covered with salt. The beans were left without a single leaf. The corn was destroyed. Manuel’s heart dropped. "A swarm of locusts would have left more than this. We won’t have any corn or beans. All our work is lost. Our only hope is God."

The next morning, Manuel wrote a letter: "God, if you do not help me, my family will go hungry. Because of the hail you sent, I need one thousand dollars to replant and live until the next harvest." He wrote "God" on the envelope and put it in the mailbox.

Later that day, the mailman picked up the letter addressed to God. At first he laughed, but then he thought: "I wish I had the faith of the man who wrote this letter. To believe what he believes. To write a letter to God." So as to not disillusion Manuel, the mailman decided to answer the letter, but when he opened it, he discovered that responding would take more than good will, ink, and paper.

He couldn’t raise the thousand dollars Manuel had requested, but he gave more than half. He put the money in an envelope and addressed it to Manuel. He enclosed a letter with only a one-word signature—"God." When he delivered the letter the mailman smiled like someone who has done a good deed. He watched as Manuel opened the letter. Manuel didn’t show the slightest surprise upon seeing the money, but he became angry as he counted it. The next day the mailman opened another letter from Manuel and read: "God, I only got $600 of the money you sent. Please send the rest of it again, but don’t send it through the post office, because the mailman is a thief." (http://introtoliterature-d.wikispaces.com/A+Letter+to+God, A Letter to God, Gregory Lopez y Fuentes).

WHAT SENDS US TO OUR KNEES?

That story makes us smile.  Sending a letter to God is silly.  Believing that God will send a thousand dollars in the mail is even sillier still.   Sometimes simple prayers seem so naïve.   For some people, especially educated, sophisticated people, is hard to take time to pray at all.  Why pray for something when I’m doing well all by myself?  In a world where we have so much already, it’s getting harder for many people to pray.   Maybe, part of the problem is that we are praying for the wrong things.  Maybe we don’t really understand what prayer is supposed to be.

In our text for today, Paul is praying.   He begins this text telling us: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father” (3.14).   We know from Jewish tradition that “good Jews” pray standing up, with their hands out and palms up.  They only kneel to their knees in emergencies.  What kind of “emergency” will send you to your knees beside your bed?  When was the last time you kneeled in prayer?  What does it take drive you there?

Again, Paul says, “for this reason I bow my knees before the Father.”   What “reason” will get you to your knees.  Maybe someone you love gets sick and you start praying.   Even though there is no scientific evidence that cancer nor heart disease cares too much about how much we pray.  But we will pray, anyway.  Some of the most prayed for people die too soon.  Some people who wanted it too end, keep suffering.   We face a big decision and we know we should pray about it.  We pray about some things we must do, but not too hard.  If we pray too hard, we might have to “do” something about it… give our own time, money, or effort.  During times of national crisis we pray.  We often pray for peace in times of war, but the war goes on, and on, and on.

What sends you to your knees in prayer?  Many things might, but often we still don’t pray so much.  Some of us haven’t prayed in a while, and others of us realize that if we fall to our knees we might have to have help getting back up.  So, how is your prayer life?   Can it improve?   What would give you reasons to pray?

The apostle Paul has plenty of reasons to pray.  He has suffered five public whippings and three beatings.  He has been stoned once, shipwrecked three times, and imprisoned more often than he can remember.  Now, he’s own death row.  He knows he will be executed soon.  WOULD YOU PRAY IF YOU WERE ON DEATH ROW?  The only light in room is from a small square window above his head.  Paul sets a parchment on the floor in the middle of the light and writes a letter to his friends. 

What would you say if you were writing your very last letter?   How about: “Dear Church, Get me out of Here!

This is feeling like a movie, like Dead Man Walking.  But there is no Susan Sarandon coming, and I didn’t do anything!  I’m innocent.  Do you know a good lawyer?  I don’t belong here.  You have to help get me out! 

But this is not what Paul writes.  Instead, Paul writes this letter from prison to his friends in Ephesus and he says, I’m paraphrasing:  "When I think of everything that is going on I get down on my knees before God,

AND I BEG GOD TO GIVE YOU, out of God’s glorious abundance, THE POWER TO LIVE BY THE SPIRIT (16). God grant THAT CHRIST MIGHT BE IN YOUR HEARTS (17). May you have the strength to grasp the width and length and height and depth of the love of Christ (18) that surpasses our understanding. Let God’s fullness fill you (19)." 

PRAYING FOR SOMETHING MORE

 While waiting for the warden to call his number, Paul prays for the people, not for himself.  Paul prays for the people to have the same sense of God’s presence that Paul feels.  Paul’s life is coming to a violent end, but it doesn’t diminish his sense of God’s goodness and grace.  Paul’s own experience of the world’s evil, pain and struggle does not matter the most.   Trying to get his body out of pain is not his subject of prayer.  All that counts for Paul is that he feels the Spirit of God billowing through his body when he speaks about Jesus.  Having the presence of Christ in his life, Paul has no doubt that God loves him.  He has no need to be relieved of his suffering and pain.

Even while going through “Hell” on earth Paul feels like he is already in “Heaven”.  God is with him.  Paul feels God’s presence and he wants his friends to fell God’s presence too.   Interestingly, we seldom pray for what Paul is praying for.  We pray for all kinds of things: We pray for things to happen, we want or need to happen.  We pray that evil people will get what’s coming to them.  We pray for situations to change, for the stuff we need or want.  We pray when we are frustrated and want people to hear us.  We pray so life won’t be so hard.  We pray when everything else won’t work.  “O.K. folks, we say, since we don’t know what to do or we can’t do anything else, let’s pray.”   Sometimes we simply pray to find happiness, through the right job, the right car, the right ideas, the right kids; while even admitting we don’t ever get it all “right”.  Sometimes, like Manuel, we just need some extra cash in an unmarked envelope or to have the winning numbers at the lottery. 

There is a story about journalist who was looking for a story.  A journalist is assigned to the Jerusalem bureau of his newspaper. He gets an apartment overlooking the Wailing Wall.   After several weeks he realizes that whenever he looks at the wall he sees the same old Jewish man praying vigorously. The journalist wonders whether there’s a publishable story here. He goes down to the wall, introduces himself and says: "You come every day to the wall. What are you praying for?"

The old man replies: "In the morning I pray for world peace, then I pray for the brotherhood of man. I go home, have a glass of tea, and I come back to the wall to pray for the eradication of illness and disease from the earth."

The journalist is taken by the old man’s persistence. "How long have you been coming to the wall to pray for these things?"

The old man thinks for a minute: "Twenty, twenty-five years."

The amazed journalist asks: "How does it feel to come and pray every day for over twenty years for these things?"

            "It feels like I’m talking to a wall."

WHAT WE MOST NEED TO PRAY FOR

What we need to pray for, more than health, more than wealth, more than an easier or better life on earth, is a bigger vision of God for our lives.  We need to pray what Paul prayed for.  We need to pray to feel God’s presence, to be filled with God’s spirit and with the love of Christ, and to recognize that God is with us right now in our “inner being” (16). 

Unfortunately, praying for God’s presence and for the gift of God’s spirit is seldom what we pray for, but we should.  It is the prayer God always answers.   I had a lady come up to me once who was very troubled about those passages in the gospels where Jesus says plainly: “Ask and it shall be given to you” (Luk 11: 9) and the other in John, where Jesus says thrice, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it” (John 14:14), and “whatever you ask in my name, the Father will give it to you”(John 15:16) and finally, “Very truly I tell you, my Father will give you whatever you ask in my name” (16:23).  These passages were driving that lady crazy, for she said she and prayed and prayed, and prayed and it just did not happen.  I then told her to take a close look at those passages again and find out what “anything” and “whatever” meant and she could find her answer.  If she needed a clue Luke gives it.   John has the same answer written all around.   Luke’s Jesus plainly answer that the “anything” and “whatever” Jesus is talking about is not “things”, but the things of God.  Luke’s Jesus concludes his discussion about prayer with this clarification of what the heart of true prayer is all about:  13 If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Luk 11:13 NIV).   Prayer is about praying for the gift and awareness of God’s spiritual presence.

Are you disappointed?  Did you think there was more to prayer than this?  I recall how disappointed Mark Twain’s Huck Finn was when he thought prayer was about getting “fish hooks”, but he didn’t get none so he quit praying altogether.  Bad mistake.  Huck Finn missed the whole point of prayer.    Instead, in his writings Paul speaks about “praying without ceasing” (Rom. 1.9; 1 Thess. 1.3; 2: 13, 5.17: and 2 Tim. 1.3) and praying in ways of the Spirit that are “beyond words” (8.26).   Our spoken prayers are not all there is to prayer.  We pray her at church, so we can be “prayerful” in every other part of our lives.  One of the oldest definitions of prayer is “bowing our heads so we can lift our hearts up to God.”  Prayer is closing our eyes so we can see God’s holy presence that surrounds us.  Prayer is the feeling about the moment that just happened, but you can’t explain what has just happened.  Prayer is the pain we feel when someone else is hurting and the gladness we feel when another person is filled with joy.  The Christian understanding is that every bit of our lives is a “prayer” given to God.   Listen to what the great G.K. Chesterton once said:  You say grace before meals.  All right.   /But I say grace before the play and the opera,  And grace before the concert and the pantomime,  And grace before I open a book,  And grace before sketching, painting, swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing,  And grace before I dip the pen in the ink. (http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/show/12207).

More than anything else, the heart of true prayer is about opening and offering our lives up to God.  When we ask for health, wealth, and everything in between, we ask for too little.  The most audacious prayer is to ask  that God will surround us and fill us with the knowledge of his presence.   As Martin Luther once said, we come to church to “ask for silver” and God wants to give us “gold”.  The Olympic style prayer is to go for the “gold” in prayer, and it is to ask God for nothing less than….God.

What happens when we get the spiritual presence of God as the answer to our prayers?  When we get the understanding that God is present, everything that is around us changes.   First we lose the delusion that everything is about us---we are no longer the center of the universe.  Second, we start seeing others differently.  In Manuel’s case, we no longer look at the mailman as a thief.  In our case, the person who is sick might be the person who needs a visit from us.  The person we don’t like is no longer a stranger, but is someone we want to help.  And what about that jerk in traffic, who has just cut you off; they made a mistake, perhaps.  Because God is present you give them a break, even though they didn’t break for you.   Now, that tattooed person you just met is no longer a punk, but is someone’s child with feelings.  And what about that scary homeless person at the traffic stop, begging at the same light every day?  Could they be a human person who is helplessly enslaved to addictions we can’t imagine for reason’s we ought to thank God we’ve never known?  Could we be thankful enough to toss out a dollar to help them make their quoted for the day?  If Jesus were in that car with you, everyone and everything would be different.

This is what prayer is about more than anything else.  If we see God surrounding us, we might also see Jesus within us, and we might even begin seeing ourselves to be much different than we are.  Sometimes we can’t see that vision God gave us when we gave our hearts to him.  When we are weary with all kinds of responsibilities of everyday life; with family, work, and also church, we need a fresh vision of God to lead us back to a life that matters.  When the hard realities of life crash down, when we feel depressed, broken, overwhelmed, we pray and gain the knowledge that God is present to help us put the pieces back together.

It’s even interestingly what might happen differently now, if we knew that God was near.  We might stop watching that T.V program, put down the cell phone, and have a family dinner together, tell our children a story, take them on a hike, spend our time differently, our money differently, sing louder at church, read a poem, take time to be in a Sunday School class or a small group.  We might even walk up to someone and ask, “Well, how are you?” And really wait and listen carefully for a reply.  If we know that God is with us, we will tell the truth, even if someone doesn’t want to hear it.  We might challenge the prejudices or the negative spirit around us.  We might do something adventurous, maybe even work in a soup kitchen, work on a mission project, or go on a mission trip instead of the same ole vacation.

When we pray for God, God gives us all that he has; the courage we need, the trust we been missing, the vision that life is much bigger than just what we want.  One picture I keep in my mind is the one of Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane.  We were studying this just the other night, how in the gospel of Mark, Jesus prays to the Father, “If it be possible let this cup of death be taken away from me, never the less, not my will, buy thy will be done.”  Three times Jesus prayed, but no answer.  The disciples all feel asleep.  He had no support from them.  But after Jesus finishes praying, suddenly he tells them “Enough, the hour has come….Rise up, he that betrays me is at hand” (Mark 14: 41-42).  Amazingly, Jesus stands up full of energy, confidence and courage, even though God does not give him and answer.  What does give him is himself.  That makes all the difference.

This is the heart of prayer.  We must pray, as Paul teaches us, for a bigger vision of who God is.  We must pray that our lives are in the center of his will and work.  We must pray that Christ dwells in our hearts by the power of the Holy Spirit and in the power of love and grace.    Pray, knowing that at the heart of every genuine prayer, what we are praying for is God.   Amen.