Hope Central Church

August 6, 2017

Year A, Pentecost 9

Psalm 145:8-9, 14-21 & Matthew 14:13-21

Rev. Laura Ruth Jarrett

The Disciple of Prayer

“ . . . the instinct for prayer and the sense of the divine arise simultaneously as immediate facts of consciousness, only later articulated as systems of belief.”

~Prayer, A History. Zaleski, Philip and Carol. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston, 2005, p. 31

Once or twice a week I get an email from someone, a call a text asking, please will you pray for me, my mom, my job, my health, our community. I love getting these requests, and I do immediately drop into prayer, I say, “God help this person, this situation.”

It’s so curious because I don’t even know if praying for someone actually compels God to intervene for that person, in that situation. I’m not sure if God is of such a nature to intercede at all, but still I pray with actual words or thought words, please give comfort to Neil and Kathleen, Bobby and Joan. Please help Sarah find a job. Please be present to J’s mom, and please be with J and she prays for her mom.

Then I go further, please protect Patti, David and Greg as they wield wild power tools, protect our parents as they raise children, and please protect the children.

I ask God to bring wisdom to the White House. I pray for Ruth Bader Ginsberg to live another 4 years. I ask God to make me beautiful for Meck, compassionate for our god kids. I pray for our congregation, for our leaders, our lay people. I praise God with exalted language for Vanessa, Bobby, Neil, Gillian. I ask God to give me the wisdom and resilience to be a spiritual leader, to be a good boss.

I pray all those things, but more than I pray, I worry. I panic. I let anxiety take me to the bad neighborhood in my mind and body. I get overwhelmed and start to go under. I get scared and start forcing solutions. I forget the goal and aim of my private life and my ministry life, and I think why do I do this work, live this way, why am I not happy, not serene? Why can’t I have what I want? Why don’t I even know what I want? Why won’t people do what I tell them to do? Why don’t people know what needs to be done? Why won’t anybody take care of me, know what I need. Why am I so tired, scared? Why can’t I stop crying, being mad, honking my horn in Harvard Sq., why am I losing my wallet and keys? Why can’t I find words to say how miserable I am? Why am I so lonely? This is mostly what I do, until I remember to pray, again - and that these questions are all prayers, anyway.

I forget over and over that when I pray for Courtney’s safe return, for Nina in the year of her mother’s death, for Ben as he prepares to be our sabbatical associate pastor, I do not fall down into my habitually, carefully crafted pit of despair, or perhaps, not as far.

Why don’t we pray?

I think we conceive as prayer as children’s play, just before bed time, a practice that allows a child to quiet down at the end of a busy day so they can sleep and we can finally think our own thoughts, or at best the opportunity to learn to recite, a necessary skill for a developing brain. “I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

I think we forget to grow up in prayer - and so we quit praying, if we ever did, because we don’t know how to pray grown up prayers. So we sit or lie down our our grown up bodies with our grown up complications and the habits we’ve accumulated with only child’s words to say. Before I came out, before I woke up, I used to pray to be good. After I came out, I prayed to not be condemned to hell, and now I pray to be courageous.

We think there’s a kind of etiquette for prayer, or proper grammar we should use, or we need to figure out how to pray when we need something but haven’t been in contact in a while? Will God be mad if I shout at God and will God smite me, shout louder at me? What if I cuss, say bad words? What if I haven’t prayed in 10 years and I’m only going there out of desperation. Will God shame me?

Some of us are afraid to use prayer words because we thought those words belonged to what and who did not love us - we thought God was white or the brutalizing father or mother, or a mirror of patriarchy - so we stopped praying for fear of betraying ourselves or tried to pray in language that felt tortured - “our Father/Mother” - and inelegant.

We forget our prayers are culturally bound or place specific - that in each place and in each bridging of culture, we get to, might have to learn how to pray in that place - and it might take a while. Before I was a pastor, my prayer life was deep, was profound. I prayed with my drum. I retreated. I would come into church, drop to my knees and almost instantly descend or ascend into trance. Now that I’m a pastor on call nearly 24-7, now that I lead worship, now that there is not yet any place to kneel in our sanctuary, now that I pray all day long, or nearly so, my prayers are shallower, but nearly constant, or I try for that. And it took a year after arriving at Hope Central to find that rhythm.

For some of us in this English speaking service, our prayer language is not English because our first language is something else. Can we pray in all our our languages here?

I’ve heard our people say that news and events can interrupt our prayers - we don’t not how to pray after the diagnosis, during the transition, after we’ve been laid off, after the miscarriage - we think God has left us - when I believe is happening is we are feeling the impulse for prayer but the meaning has changed and we don’t yet know the meaning.

Philip and Carol Zaleski, in their wonderful book, Prayer: A history

“Theorists often contend that the prayers of primitive people were founded on naïve conceptual error; on the contrary, we are inclined to think that the instinct for prayers is primary, running ahead of any conceptual motions. Or perhaps it's better to say that the instinct for prayer and the sense of the divine arise simultaneously as immediate facts of consciousness, only later the articulated as systems of belief. All human beings long for the beautiful cost of the true, the good, and every desire - for better crops or greater wisdom, for world peace or a good night kiss - participates in this longing.”

If this is true, then the instinct for prayer and the sense of the divine arise first, the rest is interpretation and commentary.

In our scripture today, Jesus performs a miracle, and perhaps all the sermons we’ve heard of the feeding of the thousands are about the meaning of the miracle, but I want to notice that when Jesus got his hands on the five loaves and three fishes, he prayed - maybe it was the prayer that caused the miracle, or maybe the five loaves and two fish represent divine consciousness - being woke, and Jesus by his being and spiritual practices helped make abundantly compassionately available the consciousness that is big, and is ours to have if we will only sit down and notice. But Jesus prayed. His life was oriented to prayer, in the desert, changing water into wine, when feeding the people, and the night before he died, he’d gone to pray.

This, beloved, is my sermon - if we, at least we here have a instinct for pray and a sense of the divine, then the doing of it, the following the longing for it is a primary discipline, and can actually be a simple, orienting, deepening, practice for wisdom, for serenity, for repairing the world.

Then teaching our children to pray is to orient them to the primary longing in them, and to help them articulate their longings for the divine. To teach our children to pray is to give them a foundational place of serenity, of retreat and rest, of knowing and trusting whom they are, to whom they belong regardless of the nightmare, the bully, the pop quiz, the danger - teaching our children to pray gives them a life long divine place to which they can return all the days of their lives - and it can teach us too.

Then how do we express this primary instinct for prayer and divine presence?

Annie Lamott said at first there are two kinds of prayers: Help me, help me, and thank you, thank you, and now she’s added wow! and sorry.

In Prayer: A history, the Zalenskis outline these kinds of prayer:

Prayers for Magic and in Judaism and Christianity are made not by conjuring any power, but God’s power and specifically in Christianity, Jesus. We pray the sacred name so as to adhere to our monotheism, but also so that we are careful not to all on just any power, and there are other powers, but a power with whom we have a covenant.

Moses prayed for the waters of the Red Sea to be parted so the people of Israel could escape slavery. Jesus prayed a magic prayer and wrought the miracle of the five loaves and two fish. We pray in our congregation for healing, and if we visit you in the hospital, we sometimes anoint you with oil for healing and comfort.

There are the prayers of the Refugee - those in extreme trouble, for example

Psalm 130 starts this way:

Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord.

Lord, hear my voice!

Let your ears be attentive

to the voice of my supplications!

Or Psalm 6:6-7

I am weary with my moaning;

every night I flood my bed with tears;

I drench my couch with my weeping.

My eyes waste away because of grief;

they grow weak because of all my foes.

There are the prayers of the Devotee - the one who surrenders to the impulse and to the wisdom of divine presence - Moses at the burning bush surrenders what he thought he was and what he thought he was going to do to enter the actions and direction of the divine. His prayer was Henini, Here I Am, and Samuel’s, too who answer Here I am, and every person who’s been ordained, and every person who’s sung the song which is a pray, Here I am lord. This is the kind of every prayer of any person in a 12-step program. I have found that I am powerless, Here I Am.

There are the prayers of the Ecstatic - those who drum or sing or twirl or speak in tongues - who clap or shout - or sob or paint or dance, or are silent prayers that are responses to the movement and presence of the divine - and these prayers are, in our culture, classed and made

Lastly for today, though I could preach a thousand times on prayer, prayer is contemplation - defined by Richard Rohr - A contemplative practice is any act, habitually entered into with your whole heart, as a way of awakening, deepening, and sustaining a contemplative experience of the inherent holiness of the present moment. Your practice might be some form of meditation, such as sitting motionless in silence, attentive and awake to the abyss-like nature of each breath. Your practice might be simple, heartfelt prayer, slowly reading the scriptures, gardening, baking bread, writing or reading poetry, drawing or painting, or perhaps running or taking long, slow walks to no place in particular. Your practice may be to be alone . . . or your practice may be that of being with that person in whose presence you are called to a deeper place.

Some of us in our congregation practice Centering Prayer - a period of time, nearly every day, sitting quietly and comfortably in the presence of the divine. And every time we are distracted, we return again to the presence of the divine, even if in 20 minutes, we are distracted 10,000 times, 10,000 times we get to return to the presence of God.

The practice of prayer, as any spiritual practice is, is iterative. We begin again all the time. We dare to shake our fist at God, we wrestle with God, we say child’s prayers until we can begin to say adult prayers. We pray for magic, we pray in our despair and in our delight, we dance, drum, speak and sing with ecstasy, we fall into silence, we pull our thoughts again and again to the presence of God. And we we forget the words to pray, we pray as Jesus taught us to pray.

This is my prayer for Hope Central Church.