No media available

Reference

Romans 8: 26-27; Luke 11: 9-13
The Mystery of Prayer

The Mystery of Prayer 

As minister, I sometimes get asked very interesting questions and I have to confess, I don't always have answers. Some questions can seem simple, but are actually quite complex theological issues.

One question that has stuck with me is when a woman in a previous church told me about an Evangelical friend of hers who swore that if you had enough faith, God would answer all your prayers. The example the friend gave was when she was shopping, couldn't find a parking space, prayed, and then one miraculously opened up right in front of her.

This bothered the woman from my church. “ You can't tell me God really cares about parking spaces, can you?” she said. But then she took it a step further and asked, “But is that any different from me praying for patience with my kids? How much can God do? How much does God control?”

I have to say, I think that is the only time I have gone from parking spaces to the ontological nature of God in a five minute conversation. I don't remember how I answered, other than of course I said that I don't think God really controls parking spaces, but those larger questions stayed with me.

In the United Church we don't generally believe in a vending machine God, put in your prayer and out comes the response, preferably exactly the result you wanted. But what about those verses from Luke we heard today?

Ask and you shall receive, seek and you will find, knock and door will be opened.

It certainly sounds like Jesus is saying, ask for whatever you want and God will give it. Or is he?

As we know from Jesus' own life and from other Biblical stories, we can ask, but what we receive may not match up with what we asked for, we can knock, but door that opens may not be one we were waiting at. We can seek, but what we find may not be what we thought were looking for.

I tried to find out more on those verses and on prayer, but most resources didn't go any further than saying we should be persistent when we pray. Some went as far as I got on my own, that Jesus isn't actually saying you'll get exactly what you pray for, but that was it. It was actually rather frustrating. Lots of material and resources on how to pray and on what prayer is. Not so much on how prayer works, on that whole theological question of how much does God intervene in our lives and in the world.

And here I have to note that what we are talking about today are prayers of petition, where we ask God for support in a particular situation. Prayer is of course much broader than that, but given that petitions are big part of our prayers, especially as a congregation, I think it's important to explore that type of prayer.

So getting back to the resources I used, one told the story of a minister who lived in a town where some miners had become trapped in mine. The minister led the congregation in praying that the miners would be freed, and miraculously, they were.

At the service the following Sunday the minister gave thanks that their prayers had been answered and one of miners walked out. He said that if God could free them, why had God let them be trapped in the first place?

I thought that was a very understandable question, yet the resource didn't address it! It just went on to talk about prayer in general.

That's huge question for us though, isn't it? If we don't believe God causes bad things, can we still believe that God causes the good things?

I think an answer of sorts may lie in a totally different direction. Spiritual writer James Finley says this about prayer:

Our practice is to become present to that infinite flow of compassion and love and bring it to bear in a tender-hearted and sincere manner in our very presence to the painful situation. We do this knowing that God is sustaining and guiding us all in unexplainable ways that are not dependent on how the painful situation might turn out.

There is so much to explore in that quote. I love the way Finley describes God as “that infinite flow of compassion and love.” For Finley, prayer is opening ourselves to that flow of compassion and love and “bringing it to bear”, directing it through our own love to the painful situation we have in mind.

We do this knowing that God sustains us and guides us through whole process and will sustain and guide all others in the painful situation, even though things may not turn out way we hoped. Prayer is a part of helping everyone in a situation be more open to that infinite flow of compassion and love, no matter the outcome of the situation.

So if we look at the story of the trapped miners, I think Finley would say not so much that God rescued the miners, but rather that prayer was part of God's spirit of love and compassion sustaining and guiding the miners, rescuers, families and the whole community. And that would have been the case even if they weren't rescued.

Writer Anne Lamott puts it another way, she says, “Grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on.”

This doesn't mean we can't ask for a specific result, of course we often have a preference, especially in situations of illness, it just means we're open to the fact that God is still present and healing can still happen even if we don't get the result prayed for.

Now I have to say, as I did all my research for today, I found it quite fascinating that so much was based on the idea of prayer being asking God for something specific. Because goodness knows, half the time when I pray, I don't have a clue what I want or what is needed! How often do we feel that way, we have no idea what result we are looking for, we just know we have to pray.

The apostle Paul understood that, it's why he was able to write those beautiful lines in today's reading from Romans: we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.

We don't have to figure everything out, we can just pray and simply hold the situations or people or feelings in our hearts, and God will know what we mean.

That's why prayer in response to the 215 children whose remains were found in Kamloops is very important at many levels. Firstly, prayer helps us deal with the grief and anger and guilt that we feel in response to that tragedy. It gives us a way to express how we are feeling, it opens us to God's healing and guidance. Through prayer God's spirit of love and compassion connects us to the people who are impacted directly by this tragedy.

Finally, by praying as a congregation, we are expressing the importance of this issue to us and opening ourselves as a community of faith to being led to respond. Prayer helps us to focus on where and how God is calling to us in this painful situation.

I'll be talking more about that on Indigenous Sunday in two weeks, what's our long term response to this tragedy, as individuals and as a community of faith? There are no easy answers, it will take us not weeks, but months and even years, but prayer is an essential part of how we discern our response.

I also believe that there is positive energy created by our prayers. That may sound kind of out there, but if we believe God is love, then why can't prayer be a way of directing our love through God to others?

That's essentially what James Finley is saying when he talks about prayer being about us being open to God's flow of love and compassion and bringing that love and compassion to bear on a painful situation. When people in our congregation are ill or going through hard time, or when there is a difficult situation in the wider world, we pray that people will have a sense of being surrounded by God's love and our love.

There was a doctor in Whitehorse who talked to me about how he saw the physical effects of prayer on patients. He said that often people who were prayed for had better results, even if they didn't heal or recover, their illness wasn't as debilitating, the patient and family weren't as distressed. He believed that prayer had positive energy and had done some research and talked to other health professionals about it as well. Many felt the same way even if they didn't talk about it often..

In talking about prayer Douglas Hall, a well known United Church theologian, said: “The Judeo- Christian picture of the divine is of One who is with us, just as we humans are never separable from God – however persistently we may attempt it!”