I Kings 8:22-23, 27-30
Romans 8:18-27
I want to talk about prayer this morning. And because prayer is such a personal thing, I have to speak about myself. I hope that will not be too boring and ask that you bear with me. I speak in the hope that what is most personal might also be most universal.
A few years ago, Marilynne Robinson gave me a small book—a collection of Puritan prayers, most of them written in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
You may know that over the last twenty years or so—at least since the publication of her surprising essay, “Puritans and Prigs” in The Death of Adam—Marilynne has been trying to help people see the Puritans from a new perspective. They weren’t, she tells us, so, well, puritanical. “By the standards of the period in which they flourished, American Puritans were not harsh or intolerant,” she wrote. But we rarely judge them by those standards. And judge them we do.
I admit that I was a little leery of the book and its authors. I skimmed over some of the prayers and set the book aside.
And yet, I found myself returning again and again to one prayer, titled: “A Minister’s Prayer,” in part because, as you know, I’m a minister. The words spoke to me and for me when they said: “O my Lord, let not my ministry be approved only by men and women, or merely win the esteem and affections of people…” After all, out of my own broken humanity, I often find myself seeking just those things: your approval, esteem, and affection. At the same time, I also join in the part of the prayer that reads: “I beg pardon for my many sins, omissions, and infirmities, as a man, as a minister…Stay with your people, O God, and may your presence be their portion.”
While I used that prayer often, the other prayers went unread.
Then, at the start of this year, by some impulse of unknown origin, perhaps from myself, perhaps from the very Spirit of God—I don’t know—I decided to read one of the over 200 prayers in that book each day. No, I haven’t been completely faithful in this—and I didn’t take a solemn vow or anything. I’ve missed days here and there—sometimes entire weeks. But we’re some 210 days into this year, and I’ve prayed some 160 of those Puritan prayers—not too bad.
I’ve discovered, as Marilynne suggests, that our Puritan ancestors in Congregationalism were not as dour or sour as most of us so often think.
They suggest a desire for a spirit of gentleness in praying: “Help me to feel more of the purifying, softening influence of religion, its compassion, love, pity, courtesy, and employ me as your instrument in blessing others.”
They exhibit a simple delight in being alive in praying: “You, O God, are preparing joy for me and me for joy; I pray for joy, wait for joy, long for joy; give me more than I can hold, or desire, or think of.”
And while our words might not be quite the same, do we not pray something similar to the old divine who asks: “Give me a holy avarice to redeem the time, to awake every call to charity and piety, so that I may feed the hungry, clothe the naked, forgive the offender, and show neighborly love to all.”
We pray like that. We pray along with the Puritans like that.
Now, there is some irony in a book of Puritan prayers and in their daily use by a minister. The Puritans were suspicious of written prayers that were intended to be used on a regular basis. They want prayer to be Spirit driven, Spirit directed—not ordered by old dead letters.
John Milton disparagingly called the prayers in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer “cuckoo-notes.” I know—strong words.
John Bunyon and George Fox warned against the perils of printed prayers.
Some Puritans even objected to the Lord’s Prayer and its “vain repetition” in worship. That concern persisted for generations of Congregationalists: in 1889 out of 1,400 Congregational churches that responded to a survey, only 538 recited the Lord’s Prayer in unison during worship.
Still, whether it’s Jesus teaching us to pray or our Puritan ancestors providing some words, I’m willing to get some help with prayer—because, really, most of the time I don’t know what I’m doing.
That is, I mean I don’t know what I’m doing when I pray.
Let me be clear. I pray. I pray daily—and not just the prayers of long-dead Puritans. I pray for specific people—many of them members of our congregation or their family members and friends. When you ask me to pray for yourself or someone else, I do so. Daily. I take that pastoral privilege seriously. When I say, “I will keep you in my prayers,” it is not just idle, pious talk.
I pray. But I’m not sure I know what I’m doing.
I pray for specific things; for healing and health; for cure; for well-being; for insight and guidance. In doing this, I know I’m pushing the limits of what’s been acceptable for liberal, mainline Protestants in the last—what?—hundred years or so. We’re OK with prayer as a religious form of mindfulness meditation. We’re fine with taking time to be still before God. But prayer as intercession for others?
I think I’ve mentioned before that old M*A*S*H episode when a desperate Hawkeye called Father Mulcahy to pray for a soldier who was dying. Father Mucahy assessed the situation and said, “O.K., but I’m afraid it won’t do much good.” Then he took the soldier’s hand and prayed for him to recover.
The soldier revived.
Hawkeye asks, “What’s that you said about it not doing any good?”
And Father Mulcahy, looking puzzled and disconcerted, said, “It’s not supposed to work that way!”[i]
And we know it doesn’t always work that way. Still, what is possible far transcends our conventional modern expectations.
I pray. But I’m not sure I know what I’m doing.
And, often, when I pray, I don’t think my prayers are answered. Or at least I’m sure that they weren’t answered in the way that I wanted or expected them to be. This, of course, means that I have some sense of what it means to say that God “hears” my prayers and some understanding of what it would look like if my prayers were answered.
But my imagination and my understanding are limited. So I’m helped when Frederick Buechner reminds us: “If God doesn’t seem to be giving you what you ask, maybe God’s giving you something else.”[ii]
I pray, but I’m not sure that I know what I’m doing.
So I find comfort in those words of Paul that we heard this morning: “We don’t know how to pray as we ought…” Maybe it’s not just me. Maybe you feel the same way at times.
We don’t know.
We don’t know how to pray as we ought.
Far better minds than mine have listened closely to those words.
John Calvin said that “Although there are…various explanations given of this passage, Paul, I think, simply means that we are blind to praying to God because…our minds are too disturbed and confused to make the right choice for what suits us, or what is expedient for us,” concluding: “No one of his or her own accord conceives devout and godly prayers.” You probably have some experience of that.
Nearly 100 years ago the great twentieth century theologian Karl Barth found Paul’s statement that we do not know how to pray as we ought both accurate and puzzling, and asked: “Are these words nothing else but one quite precise prayer? And where could we find a prayer so penetrating, so courageous, and so selfless? Yet, even while writing these words, Paul knew that he did not know what he should pray for as he ought. But why was he so ignorant? “Evidently,’ Barth concluded…“because even the most sincere, most heroic, most powerful prayers…only make clear that the person of prayer is a human being and no more.”
We pray. And we pray, always, as human beings and nothing more—those created in the image of God, yes, but also flesh and blood and separated from God, from one another, and from the best in ourselves.
So N.T. Wright reminds us that “human beings are weak and their bodies—our bodies—are still subject to decay and death. In this condition we do not even know what to pray for, how it is that God will work through us to bring about the redemption of the world. Paul assumes both that the church is called to the task of intercession and that the church finds this very puzzling—a double truth that most great teachers of prayer from that day to this would endorse.”
It’s not just me.
We don’t know how to pray as we ought.
There is, of course, good news that we hear this morning. God, who loves us as we are but does not leave us as we are, is with us when we pray—not just to hear our prayers, but, as Paul says, to intercede for us with sighs too deep for words.
Think about what was happening when Paul made this amazing claim. Paul writes about the “sufferings of this present time.” Although he doesn’t offer any specifics, some kind of ecological devastation and authoritarian oppression by the Roman Empire seem to lurk in the background. All creation—not just suffering human beings, but all creation, Paul tells us—is groaning.
It is any wonder then, that in our own time our prayers often sound more like groans of agony—or of birth pains—as we wait in hope for something new to come into being.
I just pray, without understanding what prayer is or how prayer “works” or if it does indeed “work.” I pray because I sense that the Triune God teaches us to pray and prays for us and hears our prayers.
I don’t know how to pray as I ought.
We don’t know how to pray as we ought.
So it helps to pray with Puritans.
And it helps to pray with anyone else.
For several years now a small and changing group of us have been meeting once a week to pray with each other. We’ve met here in the sanctuary. We’ve met downstairs in the chapel.
We read a short scripture lesson and then sit in silent pray for about 20 minutes.
We don’t know how to pray as we ought.
But we pray.
We’re taking a summer break right now. And this is where I need your help
What we’re doing is a good thing. But it doesn’t seem to meet the needs of many.
My sense is that we need to do something different, something more with this time in order to involve more people.
So I’m inviting you. Let me know if you’d be interested in finding new ways of learning to pray, new ways of praying together—even if we’re not quite sure about what it is we’re doing. Talk to me today, or give me a call during the week, or send me an email.
We may not know how to pray as we ought, but—and this is the good news—the Spirit of God prays for us, joining in our groaning with sighs too deep for words. As one person put it: “Precisely at the point where we are faced with the ruin and misery of the world, when we find that we have no words left to express in God’s presence our sense of futility and our longing for redemption—just then the Spirit of the Living God intercedes when all we can do is groan, all we can do is sigh. In our weakness and uncertainty, in our inability and struggle God is present and becomes known in prayer.”
This is my hope.
This is my faith.
And so, I pray.
[i] Kamila Blessing, It Was a Miracle, pg. 39
[ii] Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking, pg. 37.