GOD IS NOT SANTA CLAUS:

A MODEST THEOLOGY OF PRAYER

A sermon delivered by The Rev. Dr. Thomas D. Wintle at The First Parish Church in Weston, Massachusetts, on March 18, 2007. The lessons were I Kings 19:4-13, Psalm 38, and Philippians 4:6-9.

“But the Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.” (I Kings 19:11f)

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It is amazing to me how much my sense of prayer is accompanied by visual images.

There is, first, my shoes. In the First Unitarian Church in Omaha, when it was time for prayer (actually, they called it meditation), I would bow my head, and look at my shoes. I did not close my eyes because, I thought, I did not believe in prayer. My shoes. Really should polish them sometime. That was in high school.

Next, the altar railing at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church when I was in college. Alone, troubled, frightened, I found that church unlocked very late one night, and went in and knelt in a pew. Uncertain of why or how, I prayed. Few words came to my lips or even formed in my mind. But I shivered, I cried, I knelt in spirit as well as in flesh, I surrendered. To my surprise, I was warmed, comforted, and I wanted to pray more. I wanted to put my jumbled thoughts together in a prayer of thanksgiving. But I didn’t know how.

Third image: a man in a pew at a church in England when I was on sabbatical at Oxford University sixteen years ago. It was during the first Gulf War. Church folk were preaching and debating about “just war” theory and whether it applied in this case. During a weekday service, when hardly anyone was attending, I noticed a man three rows down and a little to my left, hunched over during the prayers, his head down touching his hands, his eyes squeezed shut while the prayers were said for peace in all the world. That’s when it hit me: the congregation is not the audience during prayer, God is. We were not there to entertain, amuse, instruct or inspire each other; we were there to pour ourselves out to God. The direction is vertical, not horizontal, and yet one feels so very much a part of humankind standing naked before God.

T. S. Eliot was right: we are here to “kneel where prayer has been valid.” That man in the pew changed forever the way I understand prayer in church.

So what can we say about this month’s theme of prayer? I want to suggest two theological problems about prayer, and tell you why I pray.

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The first theological problem: does God do anything in response to our prayers? Specifically, does He do what we ask, give what we request?

I am troubled by the idea that God is like Santa Claus: “give me what I ask or you are not real.” Or worse: “if I am good, God will look favorably on my prayers.” Or much worse: “if God does not grant my prayer request, I am being punished for something.” What a sad view of God, and of prayer. God is not Santa Claus, keeping a list and checking it twice.

But what about disappointments in prayer?

I remember a parishioner who stopped going to church after her husband died: “why go to church? what’s the point of it?” She had prayed for her husband and yet he died.

You know, I did not want my brother to die, but the malignancy spread to his brain, they tried every treatment imaginable, he had these terrible delusions, he was ready to go. Sometimes life is very hard. The terms are this: we are given life and we have to die. I doubt that God would or should interfere with the natural order, delay maybe but not stop death. I also doubt that God would prevent the actions of our free will: if you choose to do something bad, something evil, according to our faith tradition God honors your free will. But God may try to talk you out of it. Imagine that prayer is two-way: just as we might plead to God for what we want, so also God pleads with us to be what God wants us to be. Thus God speaks to the heart, to the conscience.

What I am suggesting is that prayer is not just about speaking, but also about listening.

That leads to the second theological problem: does God need our advice? If one believes in a wise, all-knowing, God, who intervenes in human affairs, is it not presumptuous to advise Him? “God, you may have overlooked the case of my cousin Mary.” There is something that troubles my Puritan soul in the idea that if we just get enough people to pray for X, then God will be swayed by our majority opinion. “Forward this prayer to ten friends immediately.” (Do you know the email that said: bundle up your minister and send him to the church at the top of the list, add your church’s name to the bottom of the list and within a week you will receive twenty new ministers . . . but beware, one church broke the chain and got their old minister back!).

God will do what God thinks is right. We should too.

Imagine this: prayer is not about storming the gates of the Almighty with our opinions, but about our surrendering to God’s opinions.

So why do I pray?

My friend Terry Burke avoids the whole theological problem of whether prayer actually expects or advises God to do anything — by praying “we remember in our prayers X and Y and Z.” I like that, and use it myself sometimes. We remember. There is a song with the words “Somebody prayed for me, had me on their mind, took the time to pray for me; I’m so glad they prayed, I’m so glad they prayed for me.” We remember, before God, some one we care about and ask that God will remember them too.

Prayer to me is about relationship, about connection, with God, with others, with my own truest self. Prayer is a way of relating and connecting that slows us down, opens us up (enlarges our hearts, enables us to see more clearly, to see ourselves more honestly), and fills us (with insight, courage, patience, gratitude). Slows - opens - fills. Prayer is about not being alone. Prayer is conversation with God.

I pray because I need to pray. Sometimes I’m rushing so fast that I don’t know where I’m going: taking the time for prayer, on the busiest day, slows me down.

Sometimes I’m a mess: I don’t remember what the trouble was in college, but I still know the experience (as does the writer of this morning’s Psalm of despair [Psalm 38], and prayer opens me up to illuminate the dark corners of my soul.

Sometimes I’m running on empty, feeling a void inside: prayer fills me, not only with the insight or courage I need, but more with a feeling of connection, of oneness, of being loved.

Now some might think my vision of prayer is psychological, self-hypnosis perhaps. You may think that if it works for you. I think it’s God.

Does God answer prayer? Unitarian minister Wallace Robbins used to say that God always answers prayer, but sometimes the answer is “no.”

I think the answer to prayer, the yes answers, come after we finish praying. Maybe the next day something good happens, or the next week. Is it a coincidence? Perhaps. But William Temple used to say that “coincidences seem to happen more often when I pray.” But the answer also can come right after we finish praying: we might start with a great prayer of the Church, or a Psalm, or even the Parson’s pastoral prayer; then come our own personal prayers, when we “remember” those we love; and then, we stop talking, all the questions and pleading and worrying is done . . . and there is silence. Silence.

Two things may happen in that silence, and both are ways God answers prayer.

There can be a sharp, immediate, direct answer. Do you know that on every Monday morning at every staff meeting, we pray for the congregation, for you? One week it’s those whose last name begins with A, the following week Bs, and so on. It is a “remembering” before God, to be sure, but sometimes there’s a flash of insight: I really ought to call this person and see what’s up with them. And when we call, something significant has just happened in their life. Coincidence? To be sure. Happens all the time. It probably could happen more often, but we aren’t silent enough to hear, too much chatter going on in our own minds.

Something else can happen in the silence, in real silence: time stops, the past and the present are brought together (said T. S. Eliot) in an encounter with eternity. It’s a moment when you know, you know, that you are brushing up against God. Kathleen Norris, the author of Dakota and The Cloister Walk, puts it this way: “Prayer is not doing, but being. It is not words but the beyond-words experience of coming into the presence of something much greater than oneself. It is an invitation to recognize holiness, and to utter simple words – “Holy, Holy, Holy” – in response” [Amazing Grace, p. 350].

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So, my friends, look at your shoes if you must. If there is any one point I most want to emphasize about prayer these two Sundays, it is this: there are many ways to pray, even if you’re not sure about God. But be prepared, as Moses discovered before the burning bush: sometimes on holy ground it’s best to take off your shoes. I suspect that more good happens in response to prayer than we will ever know. Perhaps more than we need to know. But, for now, know this:

“The Lord was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the Lord was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of sheer silence.”

Sometimes the answer to prayer is simply knowing the presence of God.