Rev. Cari Pattison
Woodstock Reformed Church
Sunday, July 24, 2022
“What’s the Point of Prayer?”
Opening scripture-
James 5:13-16
Is anyone among you in trouble? Let them pray. Is anyone happy? Let them sing songs of praise. Is anyone among you sick? … Pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.
Children’s sermon-
Becoming the answer to our prayers- “thoughts and prayers” – Angela at the Caffe
Prayers of the People-
If it matters to you it matters to God
***
Pray- Let your good news come, Lord, not only in word but in power, in the Holy Spirit and with full assurance. Amen.
***
Sometimes I’m a late adapter, to what’s best for me.
It wasn’t till my 30’s, that I really embraced eating vegetables.
It wasn’t till my mid 40’s, that I discovered the joys of having a dog.
And it wasn’t until last week, that I finally realized what my family has known all along- my mother is always right.
Specifically right now, about visors. For approximately two decades, she has been extolling the virtues of wearing a visor while you walk, especially in summer, to keep the glare off your face and protect you from sunburn and age spots.
But no, for years I insisted (to myself) that visors didn’t look cool and that I’d be fine with just sunglasses or a baseball cap, along with some sunscreen.
The cap, though, makes your head hot and sweaty, and doesn’t give as much shade. And the sunglasses do nothing for the overhead glare and the sunburn.
So this week, at CVS, I finally bit the bullet. And tried on some visors. Along with other variety of summer hats. As I tried this one on, one of the men who works at CVS- I kid you not- said, “That’s not a good look on you; I’d go with one of the other hats.”
And I knew I’d really channeled my mom when I laughed and said, “I don’t care; I need this.” My morning walks with my dog, especially lately, have me fighting that summer glare of the sun.
***
Sometimes it takes a while to figure out what’s good for you.
Sometimes we resist the very thing we most need.
And so it has been for me, with prayer.
I know it’s what Christians are supposed to do.
I know it’s especially what Christian ministers are supposed to do.
Why is it so hard, then, most of all when I’m alone and not praying in any official capacity as a pastor, to make myself pray?
Or do I have a too-limiting definition of what prayer is?
***
I learned a new word last month, from Kathryn Schulz’s beautiful new memoir, Lost and Found.
The word is circumjoviating, which literally means “orbiting around Jupiter.”
But when Schulz asked her dying father what the word meant, he defined it as “avoiding God.” Writes Schulz, “I have used it that way ever since then- for what other word so concisely describes the experience of ducking one’s deity or conscience or responsibilities?”
So lately I’ve been asking myself, “Am I avoiding prayer? Or avoiding God?”
***
I suspect I’m not alone.
So I want to offer my unofficial and unexhaustive list, of all the reasons we tend to avoid prayer-
In no particular order:
***
I wonder which reasons you can relate to.
What I love about Jesus is that he doesn’t model it, give us a formula, and then leave us with that.
He proceeds to tell a story. And an illustration.
And in these stories, he basically says, “Okay, start with the formula of the Lord’s prayer. But then go ahead and pray whatever’s on your heart. Beat the door down, like a friend at midnight who’s got an unexpected houseguest and needs more bread. Ask for what you want, like a little kid who asks her dad for a fish or some toast. Be assured that God is so much kinder than any annoyed friend or any earthly dad.”
Here Jesus is comparing the lesser to greater. He knows that most middle-eastern neighbors would be happy to offer hospitality to a friend in need. And he knows that most human fathers are way better than “evil,” as he describes them here. But he’s saying that even the worst friend and the most flawed father, would probably do their best- when asked- to provide in a pinch.
How much more, then, says Jesus, will your Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?
***
It’s the how much more that’s been my experience of God in prayer.
I avoid God all the time, like I avoided these pesky visors, because I forget how my heavenly parent knows some things.
I forget that in prayer, God doesn’t want to chastise or chide me, God wants to love me!
As one teacher of mine said, “Prayer isn’t some magic words or boring ritual. To pray is to stand in the way of a blessing.”
You know the way you avoid talking to someone you think might be mad at your or not like you? But you can’t wait to meet up with someone you know thinks the world of you? Someone who sees the best in you and is so incredibly attentive and encouraging about your life?
To pray, is to sit in that love.
To believe, as Brennan Manning says, that God not only loves you- in some general way because he has to- but God likes you!
Like that Sally Field speech at the Oscars, “You like me, you really like me!”
That’s what I feel when I pray.
But how to deal with unanswered prayer? That one can sting. You see others get the very answers to a prayer you prayed. While yours seem to go unheard.
Jesus says, “Ask you and it will be given you; seek and you shall find; knock and the door will be opened…” but he doesn’t actually say what we’ll be given, or what we will find, or which door will be opened…
In my life I have asked for so many things, that I wasn’t given-
I prayed for clarity as to whether or not I should marry- the man who became my ex-husband;
I prayed for a successful pregnancy that led to the healthy birth of my baby boy;
And I’ve prayed for all manner of lesser prayers for certain love interests, job opportunities, and goals like finishing the Appalachian Trail in one year.
But when I stack these next to all the prayers that have been answered, there are way more of those:
My mom’s cancer healing over 15 years ago-
The chance to pastor a small church in a mountain town-
And my dog and I learning how to do life together.
And even in the pain of things like divorce and miscarriage and heartbreak, I don’t know how I would’ve survived them without prayer.
As my friend Jana says, “God never promised me a rose garden. Maybe all he promised was the Garden of Gethsemane.”
Gethsemane- where Jesus prayed with drops of sweat and blood, the night before his crucifixion. Gethsemane- where Jesus prayed, “Lord, if it be your will, take this cup [of suffering] from me. But not my will, but your will be done.”
In those Gardens of Gethsemane in my own life, God may not have given me what I wanted or lessened the blow.
But God did give me the Holy Spirit to survive it.
***
I started out telling you all the reasons people don’t pray.
But according to a Barna poll from 2020, people are much more likely to say a prayer than they are to attend a church service. While only 1 in 4 Americans claim to be practicing Christians, around 69% - that’s over two-thirds - say they pray once a week or more.
And in a Gallup poll taken just last month: 4 in 10 Americans say that God can hear prayers and intervene. Which isn’t bad for a pretty secular nation.
So yes, American religious practice in a traditional sense may be in decline, but the actual faith and beliefs may be stronger than we think.
As I mentioned last week about that Wishing Tree off Tannery Brook Road- where people write their wishes on tags of paper and tie them to the tree- maybe we pray more than we think we do.
Perhaps that’s why my friend Susan- who came up from Westchester to worship with us last Sunday- found herself joining a church for the first time in her 60’s.
She said, “Somehow in my searching, God snuck up on me, and now wouldn’t ya know it? Looks like I’m a lapsed atheist.”
A lapsed atheist. I like it.
God hears our prayers whether we’ve been churchy our whole lives or not.
***
Saint Therese of Liseux, centuries ago, said, “For me, prayer is an upward leap of the heart.”
I like that. It just means sitting or walking or kneeling- under the loving gaze of God who also really likes you.
And it can be so simple, you may scarcely know you’re praying.
You don’t have to conjure up the right words or think the right thoughts.
And while reading scripture, and reciting ancient prayers, and generating lots of words to God, may be of help at different points-
I find the older I get, and the longer I’ve known God, the less complexity I need.
***
So I want to share with you a practice of prayer that I’ve adopted recently, that’s helped me a great deal.
I went through a sad couple weeks recently- nothing earth shattering, but sad in my own world- the cycle of hope and dashed hopes that comes with being human.
And a teacher of mine pointed me to a practice by writer Liz Gilbert, who years ago established the habit of writing herself a daily letter from Love.
This is capital “L” love, which for her, and maybe for me, is the best name for God.
She journals by hand a short note to herself each day, signed by “Love.”
I started doing this several weeks back, and I can only tell you it feels like the gentlest kindest form of prayer for me right now.
***
Here are some of the things Liz Gilbert says, that Love has actually said to her, when she was alone and afraid-
And I think these sound a lot like the voice of God I know.
If you’d like, you may listen with your eyes closed:
Amen.