PRAYER (AGAIN)

 In her book An Altar in the World Barbara Brown Taylor has a chapter on prayer she titles “The Practice of Being Present to God.” She begins her essay by stating that she dreads writing about it and that she is also a failure at it. Reading that was a great consolation for me because I often feel the same way. Clergy, after all, are supposed to be experts on prayer just as we are also expected to be great practitioners of it.

Supposed expert practitioner notwithstanding, prayer often eludes me and even leaves me high and dry. I have more questions about prayer than answers and the answers I have are hardly ever satisfying enough to allow me to be at peace. More often than not when I pray, words are spoken but it also seems as if I am only going through the motions of praying than really praying. But I dare not not pray.

Why not? If prayer seems so empty so often, why bother? Even more, since I know God hears my prayers and since I know God knows my thoughts and wants and needs before I ever open my mouth, why bother? Why bother God and just save my breath? After all, when I pray that God’s will be done, I am actually praying, if I am honest enough to admit it, that my will becomes God’s will.

God will or will not answer my prayers or most certainly God will answer them as God deems best for me and not as I deem best for myself. Because I know all that, understand all that, accept all that, all that is why I have a difficult time with prayer. All that is a reminder, as Taylor’s chapter title attests, why I/we pray: prayer is that practice of being present to God, realizing we are in God’s presence whenever we pray.

In the end it does not matter if we ever get the words right or feel at peace with our prayer. Whenever we pray, we learn more about ourselves than we learn about God, providing, of course, that we take some time to reflect on our prayer life in general and not on any prayer or prayer practice in particular. The greatest of saints had off-days when it came to prayer but they never ceased praying even when they felt nothing and their words seemed quite empty.

They continued praying because they knew those words kept them close to their God. It was a reminder that they needed God more than God needed them even though they also knew that God needed them as much as they needed God. They were – and each and every one of us is – created by God for a very specific purpose. We will only fully understand that purpose when we arrive in eternity.

In the meantime we continue to pray in words, in silence, in gestures, in simply trying to be present to ourselves so that we can come into closer presence with our God. As Taylor suggests, what we are doing is practicing being present with our God, knowing we will never get it perfectly right because that only comes when we arrive into the fullness of that presence in eternity. If there is any consolation in all this, it is, at least for me, that I should not care how I pray or when I pray or where I pray or how I feel afterwards and that God does not care either. All that matters is that I pray.

 

SKIP SUNDAY AT OUR OWN PERIL

One of the main excuses for skipping church on Sunday is that we claim we don’t get anything out of it. We don’t like the music. The Sunday School is too small. There are too many old people and not enough young ones. The list is endless or at least long enough for us to justify why we would rather either stay home in bed or be somewhere else Sunday morning other than at church.

The fact, the truth, is that when we skip church on Sunday, we do so at our own peril, whether we realize it or not. We don’t come to church on Sunday primarily because of what we can get out of being there even though we get more out of it than we realize and often more than we put into it. We come to give something of ourselves. We come primarily to worship God. No matter what hymns we sing, no matter how mundane the sermon, no matter how we feel, God is pleased and God is worshiped and that, in the grand scheme of things, is all that matters.

We come to church to tune into God. It’s not that we cannot do so somewhere else and perhaps do so much better somewhere else. We are supposed to be able to find God, see God, worship God anywhere we happen to be because everywhere and everyone and everything is God’s creation, is of God and should speak to us of God. Yes, there are often better places, more worshipful places to be on any Sunday morning than in the church building that is our parish home.

All that being undeniable, the fact is that we also come to church to tune into one another. Church is where we not only worship God but where we come to take care of one another. As others care for us, so we care for them, however that care happens to take place: a kind word, a smile, or simple just checking in. We take so much of this for granted, I think, that we often miss just how important it is that we do all of this, that we indeed need all of this.

The world is full of lonely people, people seeking someone, some ones, to care for them, to listen to them, to be there for them. They are looking for what we have but so often either overlook or assume that everyone has what we have. They don’t. Having a community that cares about us, truly cares about us, about our needs and our wants and is willing to help us fulfill them, all that is a blessing of inestimable value. That is why it is so important that we gather together regularly.

None of this is to denigrate the importance of worship and our being present to worship both individually and as a community of faith. It is to say, however, that community is the key word. God created us to be in community. Almost the first words out of God’s mouth in the Genesis story of creation is that God deemed it not good for wo/man to be alone. In order to be the person God created us to be, we need one another.

Whenever we become lax in our participation in our faith community, whenever we begin to take it for granted, whenever we make excuses why being somewhere else or doing something else is more fulfilling, we do so at our own peril and loss.

THE WORD AND WORDS

We communicate mostly in words. Yes, we get in touch with one another by a touch or a glance or a nod. We are able to communicate in non-verbal ways and sometimes words are simply inadequate to convey what is in our heart and mind. And when we attempt to put into words that cannot ever express what we mean, we can be heading for a heap of trouble. We know from experience whenever we try to tell the person we love how much we love that person, our words always come up short.

The same hold true about the words we use when we talk about the Word, Jesus, the Word of God. The Gospel and Epistle writers, theologians from Irenaeus to Augustine to Aquinas to Luther to Barth and Rahner have written volumes about the Word, about Jesus. They have come close in trying to explain him but, in the end, their words all fail.

Even worse, perhaps they as theologians and we as readers of their writings have become so seduced by the written word, by the depth of their thoughts and the soaring vocabulary they employ that we miss the Word from all the words. The person of Jesus, who he is and what he means for us as believers, is lost because the words themselves have become and are so impersonal.

The words we use to speak about Jesus may bring us close to understanding the Word but, in reality, we have it all backwards. Eugene Petersen in his Christ Plays in Ten Thousand Places (p. 103), says “Jesus is the dictionary in which we look up the meaning of words.” We don’t need a dictionary to explain Jesus as much as we need Jesus to be the dictionary to help us explain and understand what some words truly mean, words like love, forgiveness, compassion, service and many others.

Any dictionary can help explain these words; but for us as Christians, Jesus’ living explanation is all we need and what we need. If we want to know what it means to love another person, we do not need to read Rahner or Bultmann, we need to read the Gospels and read how Jesus loved. If we want to know what it means to forgive, we do not need to look up that word in a theological dictionary; we need to read the Gospels.

The same is true for any word that we might use to describe and explain what it means to be a follower of the Word. Jesus was and is that living dictionary that nails the meaning of that word for us. Jesus’ definition is always quite simple even if living out the meaning Jesus’ life conveys is not all that easy. In fact, sometimes we would rather have a neat theological definition of love, for instance, than Jesus’ living definition.

None of this is to denigrate the works of all the great theologians who, over the years, have tried to help us understand the Word of God in words that express the truth. It is only a reminder that we can get so lost in words that the deeds that are to be the fulfillment of those words never get done or not get done as well as they could. It’s like engaging in a bible study that helps us understand exactly what is expected of us and then having cake and coffee afterwards and doing nothing about it. Jesus is the word that is the way, our way, the only way.