Prayer, Between Heaven and Earth

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.

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.

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.