WHAT IS PRAYER?

Copyright, ©Thomas D. Wintle, 2009

A sermon delivered by The Rev. Dr. Thomas D. Wintle

at The First Parish Church in Weston, Massachusetts, on March 8, 2009.

The scripture lessons were Acts 3:17-26 and Matthew 6:5-15.

“Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out, so that times of refreshing may come from the presence of God” (Acts 3:19f)

I

‘Tis the season of Lent, that period before Easter when the Christian Church urges us to take 40 days to look at ourselves, the ways in which we travel on our journey through life,  to find the excesses and simplify them (that is, "giving up" something for Lent), and to find the barren places and enrich them (that is, "taking up" something for Lent). A good and holy Lent, we are reminded, makes for a more joyous Easter.

In this economy some of us have already thought about giving up excesses! But what about “taking up” something new, some new spiritual practice? The spiritual practice your ministers are encouraging this month is the most basic: prayer.

Do you pray? Do you pray at times other than church? Do you, or did you, pray with your children before meals, before bedtime? Have you prayed for a loved one at some moment of danger, in that moment of uncertainty when the next news could be good news or bad news, news of relief or of disaster?

We are all, of course, people of reason here. Unitarians like to think of themselves as the intellectuals of the spiritual life. So many of us want to understand a religious practice before we jump into it. So, this morning I want to ask: what is prayer? And, more specifically, I want to ask: who is praying, who is listening, and lastly, who cares?

II

First, who is praying? This is the preliminary question. If you talk to one praying person, prayer may be meditation: prayer is a time to focus the mind, to eliminate the distractions of daily life, to practice contemplation perhaps by centering one’s thoughts on a particular phrase or sound or concept. Dr. Herbert Benson taught that you could calm your mind by repeating one phrase, even one word.

For some, prayer is poetry, meditation to calm our souls.

If you talk to another, prayer may be a way to sort through the anxieties of daily life: “Here are my worries, God, here are my fears, here are the loved ones about whom I worry.” Help them, we pray. One of the most helpful suggestions I’ve heard about prayer is this: “God, I need some help with this concern. Please take it off my shoulders for awhile, even just for this one night, so that I might rest.”

And there are some who think, who hope, that prayer may solve some problems they have not been able to solve themselves. There are four kinds of prayer, you know: prayers of petition, confession, thanksgiving, and praise (or to use the technical terms: prayers of help, oops, thanks, and wow).

It has been said that there are no atheists in foxholes, the idea that when we are in mortal danger, everyone hopes for divine help. That leads to the next question: when we pray for divine help . . .

Who is listening?, the second question. Did you read about the interview with Mother Teresa of Calcutta when she was asked about her prayer life? What do you say to God in your prayers? “I mostly listen,” she said. And what does God say to you? “He mostly listens,” she said.

We’ve learned since her death that Mother Teresa had moments of doubt, times of uncertainty about faith. Thanks be to God! She was one of us! It proves the brilliance of her comments about prayer as listening. Prayer, finally, is about the time when we STOP talking and learn to listen. We pour out our complaints and our worries and our fears, and then when we’ve said it all, we have nothing else to say . . . and we can be silent, and we can listen. That is a very rare condition for many people. Can we learn to listen to the braggart but hear the lack of self-esteem behind his braggadocia? Can we listen to the hospital patient’s questions and hear the fear behind the questions?

Who is listening to our prayers? I like the idea that God listens to all our prayers, just as parents listen to the fears of their child. You take the fears seriously, and you understand your child’s anxiety, but should you promise that all will go well? Perhaps, but that might be a lie. What you DO promise is that you will be with them, for them, behind them, through the hard times.

I think God hears our prayers, and promises to be with us, for us, behind us, through the hard times of life.

Third question, the hard one: WHO CARES? That is, why should we pray at all?

I don’t like the idea that prayer is a way to change God’s will, to change the way that events will happen. That’s magical thinking, the idea that OUR will should or could influence the way God runs the world. Sometimes we just need to trust God and let go. Of course, it doesn’t hurt to ask – the key, of course, is to end with “thy will be done.”

But I DO like the idea that prayer could change OUR ways, change the way WE think that events should happen.

Here’s the thing: sometimes God speaks to US. That’s a pretty bold statement. Yet we are such earth-bound, practical, this-worldly people, that God’s words are too other-worldly, even too-subtle, to be heard, to be received. We have also learned to be suspicious of those charlatans who claim too much to have heard God speaking to them, usually telling them to do what they already wanted to do. We’ve learned to be cautious about hearing God.

So how does God speak to us, how does God break through to our earth-bound consciousness? I think God uses the medium we can understand: to one God speaks through nature, to another through art, through music, dreams, intuitions, through friends, through scripture. Have you ever heard or read a portion of scripture when a particular word or sentence seems to jump right off the page and grab you by the throat? Have there been times that a sentence in a sermon or a song seems to have been directed specifically at you? I know, and so does every preacher, that there are often times when someone in the receiving line says “you wrote that sermon for me, didn’t you?” Yes, sometimes.

Sometimes, I believe, God uses our words to speak to someone who needs to hear.

But how do you know it’s God, and not just your subconscious, or your indigestion? In a sense, you never know with complete certainty, so it’s probably best to not start a war because God told you to do so. It’s also best to test what you heard next to other reliable sources; that’s why churches teach what Jesus taught as a reliable source of knowledge about God. But there’s also this. David Vryhof is a monk in Cambridge who has taught extensively about prayer and “discernment” -- how do we know what’s right, what is the voice of God. Vryhof says that the voice of God is persistent: “it’s a voice that comes to us not just once (lest we should miss it) but again and again, until at last we are ready to grasp its meaning and respond.” There are indeed times when people can say, with clarity, “This is what I believe God is calling me to do.” But so often when that happens, he writes: “We recognize that this call has not come to us in an instant -- usually not -- but has been gradually growing inside us and has finally come to its fullness. It is as if God speaks a word to us in the deepest place of our heart, and that word is gently but persistently repeated over and over again until we finally wake up to its full meaning and impact.” [Cowley, Winter 2009, 6]. Persistence.

III

So there you are, my friends. Who is praying?: you! Who is listening?: God first, then us. And who cares?, does prayer really do anything?: it does if we listen, if we hear, if we discover something we didn’t know before, if we are inspired to do something we didn’t care about before, if our imperfect lives are transformed by insights and challenges we could not envision before!

I remember hearing a sermon where the preacher said that there are three ways God answers prayer: Yes, No, and Surprise. Kathleen Norris writes that she learned from a Benedictine monk that “prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine. To be made more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been” [Amazing Grace, 60].

The third way of Surprise is what I think our reading from the Book of the Acts of the Apostles was about this morning. It’s a difficult passage: Peter heals a person who was lame, he preaches about the death of Jesus and how so many of us misunderstood what Jesus was all about – that’s a pretty persistent theme in the gospels (we just didn’t quite get it right about Jesus). But then there is this phrase that just jumped off the page for me: “Repent therefore” (that means: turn around, stop doing what you’ve been doing), “and turn to God . . . so that times of refreshing may come to you.” That’s what prayer is to me: times of refreshing . . . new ideas, new ways of thinking, thinking outside the box, hearts turned from stone to love, a foretaste of the coming of the Kingdom of God. Maybe that’s the way God changes the world, improves the world, brings the kingdom of God to earth.

My friends, may you find some moment this season when you are refreshed, reinvigorated, renewed.

But know this: you need to look for it, you need to listen for it.