Text: Romans 8:26-27 et
al
Focus: Prayer
Function: To help people comprehend the difference
between pagan and Christian prayer.
Form:
Intro:
Adapted from N.T. Wright, Simply Christian, pages
161-172
Christian prayer is simple, in the sense that a
small child can pray the prayer Jesus taught. But it's hard in the demands it
makes as we go on with it.
For example, in Psalm 22, King David is pouring
out His heart to God and cries: “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?”
The prayer is so intense, and so real that Jesus
shouts it from the cross: (SHOUT)
“Eli, Eli, Lama Sabachthani!”
Prayer bridges Heaven and Earth.
King David was not exempt. Jesus was not exempt.
And maybe some of us here are not exempt. Prayer is an honest, heartfelt cry to
God.
David's prayer was real for him at the time, and
also a prophecy about Jesus.
We too are called to live at the overlap both of
heaven and earth—the earth that is yet to be fully redeemed as one day it will
be—and of God's future in this world's present.
We are caught on a small island near the point
where those tectonic plates—heaven and earth, teacher and president—are
scrunching themselves together. Be ready for earthquakes!
When Paul writes his greatest chapter about life
in the spirit in the coming renewal of the whole cosmos, he points out the
heart of all that, but we don't know how to pray as we ought, the Spirit—God's
own Spirit.--intercedes for us according to God's will. It's a small passage
(Romans 8:26-27), but it's extremely important because of what it says and
where it says it.
Here's the context: God creation is groaning in
labor pains, says Paul, and it is waiting for the new world to be born from its
womb. The church, God's people in the Messiah, find themselves caught up in
this, as we, also groan in longing for redemption.
Because the Holy Spirit dwells in us, our nature
is changed. God's Spirit and His nature have taken up residence in us. We are
being transformed. We want justice to be done. It was the Church that made
slavery illegal across the world. And we hate conflict. We even love our
enemies. We groan inside for the times when the world is made right, when the
Lion and the Lamb lay down together. When the entire creation is born again and
men beat their swords into plowshares.
Christian prayer is at its most characteristic
when we find ourselves caught in the overlap of the agents, part of the
creation that aches for the new birth.
Christian prayer is different than pagan prayer.
And to understand this, let me paint a shallow but
necessary picture of different and competing views of God.
Officially, the Christian Faith is a belief in
Theism. Theists believe that God is alive and active in the realm of humanity
and that He does indeed know what is going on and He cares for us.
We will contrast it with two other views about
God. Pantheism and Deism.
Pantheists believe that God is in everything and
that reaching God is a form of somehow becoming one with all that exists.
Deism, is the belief that yes, there is a God and
God created everything, but then God left it go to see how it plays out. It is
called the watchmaker theory, God made a watch, wound it up and is now watching
it unwind.
N.T. Wright says it this way: “For the Pantheist,
God and the world are basically the same thing: the world is, if you like,
God's self—expression. For the Deist, the world may indeed have been made by
God (or the gods), but there is now no contact between divine and human.
In the strange new promise, the point at which
Christian prayer is marked out over Pantheism in Deism is that, by the Spirit,
God himself is groaning from within the heart of the world, because God
himself, by the spirit, dwells in our hearts as we resonate with the pain of
the world.
The Pantheist gets in-touch-with-the-heart-of-things.
The Christian gets-in-touch-with-the-living-God, who is doing a new thing, who
has come to the heart of the world in Jesus Christ because all is not well (a
point that the pantheist would deny), and it needs to be put right. God, who
now comes by his Spirit to the place where the world is in pain (a point where
the Deist can never contemplate) in order that, in and through us—those who
pray in Christ and by the spirit—the groaning of all creation may come
before the Father himself, the hard searcher (8:27), the one who works all
things together for good for those who love Him (8:28).
Let me make that simple. The Pantheist would deny
that they world is broken, the Deist would deny that God cares. Christian
prayer addresses the God whose heart is also broken about the Creation and is
groaning about the state of the world.
It is good to groan in prayer. It is good to long
for things to be made right. Jesus himself said it, blessed are those who
hunger and thirst for justice. (Matthew 5:6,
NLT)
This is what it means to be “conformed to the
image of his Son” (8:29). This is what it means, within the present age, to
share his glory (8:18, 30).
This explains why specifically Christian prayer
makes the sense that it does within the world where heaven and earth belong
together. It is worth developing the picture to show how prayer within the
Christian world-view was significantly different from prayer as seen with from
within the two other my options.
For the Pantheists, prayer is simply getting in
tune with the deepest realities of the world and of oneself. Divinity is
everywhere, including within me. Prayer is therefore not so much addressing
someone else, who lives somewhere else, but rather discovering and getting in
tune with an inner truth and life that are to be found deep within my own heart
and within the silent rhythms of the world around.
That is Pantheistic prayer. It is (in my
judgment) a lot healthier than pagan prayer, or human beings trying to invoke,
placate, control, or bribe the sea-god, the war-god, the river-god, or the
marriage-God to get special favors or avoid particular dangers. Compared with
that, Pantheistic prayer has a certain stately nobility about. But it isn't
Christian prayer.
For the Deist, prayer is calling across the void
to a distant deity. This lofty figure may or may not be listening. He, or it,
may or may not be inclined, or even able, to do very much about us and our
world, even if he (or it) wanted to.
So, at the extreme, all you can do is send out a
message, like a marooned sailor scribbling a note and putting it in a bottle,
on the off-chance that someone out there might pick it up. That kind of prayer
takes a good deal of faith and hope. But it isn't Christian prayer.
Sometimes, of course, prayer within the Jewish
and Christian tradition feels exactly like the prayer of the Deist, as the
Psalms themselves bear witness. But, for the Psalmist, the sense of a void, and
emptiness where there ought to be a Presence, isn't something to accept calmly
as the way things simply are.
Those times when you feel like the heavens are
brass and God isn't listening are times to jump up and down and shout: “Wake
up, Yahweh!” We get that idea many times in the book of Psalms, It is like
someone standing at the foot of the bed, hands on hips, looking crossly in the
sleeping form. (That is of course how the disciples address Jesus, asleep in
the boat during the storm.) “It's time to get up and do something about
this mess!”
But the whole point of the Christian story, at
the climax of the Jewish story, is that the curtain has been pulled back, the
door has been opened from the other side, and like Jacob we have glimpsed the
ladder between heaven and earth with messengers going to and fro upon it.
“The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” says Jesus in
Matthew's Gospel. He is not offering a new way of getting to heaven hereafter,
but announcing that the will of heaven, the very life of heaven, is now
overlapping with Earth in a new way—a way which leaves together all the moments
from Jacob's ladder to Isaiah's vision, all the patriarchal insights and
prophetic dreams, and turns them into a human form, the human voice, a human
life, a human death.
Jesus is the reason for believing in Theism; and,
with that, prayer has come of age. Heaven and earth overlap permanently where
Jesus stands, where Jesus hung, where Jesus rises, wherever the fresh wind of
his Spirit blows.
Living as a Christian means living in the world
as it's been reshaped by and around Jesus and his Spirit. That means that
Christian prayer is a different kind of thing—different both from the prayer of
the Pagans who are only getting in touch with the inwardness of nature, and
that of a Deist, sending out messages across the lonely emptiness.
Christian prayer is about standing at the fault
line, being shaped by the Jesus who knelt in Gethsemane, groaning in travail,
holding heaven and earth together like someone trying to tie two pieces of rope
with people tugging at the other end to pull them apart.
In the garden of Gethsemane, we see the work that
prayer is. No wonder we give up so easily. No wonder we need help.
Fortunately there is plenty available.
Discovering Helping Prayer
Last week, we looked at The Lord's Prayer.
I remember a course I took in Pastoral Theology.
The Professor was discussing prayer and he focused on the words before the
Lord's prayer. When you pray, do not use vain repetition as the pagans do. The
call for us was to not say the same thing over and over as if the prayer itself
was magic.
Prayer is the heartfelt communication between us
and God. When it comes from the heart, it is open, honest, genuine and sincere.
There is no proper formula for prayer. Guess
what? You do not have to address God in King James English with “Thees'” and
“Thous'!”
So, my professor suggested that we be spontaneous
in prayer. But then, The Lord's Prayer itself isn't a spontaneous prayer.
People say, written prayers are not genuine
because they are not created by the person who is making the prayer.
I am afraid that that is like saying, unless I
personally constructed every single part of my car, it isn't mine, and I cannot
drive it. It wouldn't be authentic.
So, when Jesus' followers asked him to teach them
to pray, he didn't tell them to divide the focus groups and look deep within
their own hearts. He didn't begin by getting them to think slowly through their
life experiences to discover what types of personality each of them have, to
spend time getting in touch with their buried feelings.
He and I both understood the question they had
asked: they wanted, and needed, a form of words which they could
learn and use.
There's nothing wrong with having a form
of words composed by somebody else. Indeed, this probably something wrong with
not using such a form. Some Christians some of the time, can sustain a life
of prayer were entirely out of their own internal resources. When I was a kid,
a block from my house was the shop where my daddy worked. The parking lot was
stone. By the middle of the summer, I had no problem running across that stone
lot. But most people need shoes to walk on stone.
This is aimed in one particular direction: at the
growing number of Christians in many countries who, without realizing, are
absorbing an element of late modern culture
as though it were Christianity itself. To them I want to say: there is
nothing wrong, nothing sub Christian, nothing to do with “works-righteousness,”
about using words, even forms, prayers, and sequences of prayers written by
other people and other centuries.
Indeed the idea that I must always find my own
words, that I must generate my own devotion from scratch every morning, that
unless I think of new words that must be spiritually lazy are deficient—that
has the all-too-familiar sign of human pride, of “doing it my way”: of, yes,
works-righteousness.
Good liturgy—other people's prayers, whether for
corporate or individual use—can be, should be, a sign and means of
grace, an indication of humility (accepting that someone else has said, better
than I can but I deeply want to express) and gratitude. How many times have
I can't tell you how many times I am grateful for
the old prayer, set to music that goes:
Precious Lord, Take My hand,
Lead me on, Let me stand...
...through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on, to the Light,
Precious Lo' rd take my hand.
Lead me on, Let me stand...
...through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on, to the Light,
Precious Lo' rd take my hand.
Or, when feeling left out of the world and its
games I pray, again with music, but to God:
I've Got a Mansion, just over the hilltop,
In the bright land where, we'll never grow old,
And Someday yonder,
We will never more Wander,
But walk the streets that,
Are purest gold.
In the bright land where, we'll never grow old,
And Someday yonder,
We will never more Wander,
But walk the streets that,
Are purest gold.
I didn't write it, but whoever did has my undying
gratitude. It's just what I wanted. And when we read those things, or listen to
them and they strike a cord inside of us that just makes us want to shout them
out. It is a good thing.
That doesn't mean that spontaneous prayer is
wrong either.
Form can be restricting. David, before he faced
Goliath was given the best form that money could buy. Saul gave him his own
armor. And David couldn't use it. Instead, he choose his own method. He had to
use a simpler weapon that was just right for him.
So, if, in worship we read a liturgy, you share a
prayer or something that someone else did that has meaning to you. Don't be
offended because it is form. At the same time, if someone has something new,
fresh or just a time of heartfelt crying out to God. It is okay.
Because prayer is where we bring heaven and earth
together. And it pleases God.
