Speak Up!
A sermon on prayer
St. Thérèse of Lisieux once wrote,
“Prayer means launching out of the heart towards God; it means lifting up one’s eyes, quite simply, to Heaven, a cry of grateful love from the crest of joy or the trough of despair; it’s a vast supernatural force which opens out my heart, and binds me close to Jesus.”
Prayer is central to the life of the Church because as she says, it “binds us close to Jesus.” Prayer is the language of faith. To follow Christ and to practice the Christian faith most faithfully, is to pray. Prayer is not an optional extra, nor is it something for the select few, prayer is essential, and it is for all.
We pray because we have hope. As St Gregory of Nyssa put it,
“Hope always draws the soul from the beauty that is seen to what is beyond, always kindles the desire for the hidden through what is perceived”
The work of the Church is to be a people whose hope draws them into prayer. That is, we are not to be a church that just prays its prayers on a Sunday, but a praying church, a church that believes in and is animated by prayer.
We can only believe in prayer because of what we believe about the one to whom our prayers are addressed.
This might sound obvious, but we all too easily side-line the fact that the starting point for thinking about prayer is God Himself. The one to whom our prayers are addressed is a gracious God. Everything we do – including our prayers – stems from this fact, that the God we believe in, the God attested to by the history of the Church and the traditions we have received, the God revealed in Jesus Christ, and experienced through the Holy Spirit is a God of grace.
God’s grace is an unmerited gift, it is unearned favour, it is one way love with no strings attached, it is unconditional benevolence. Grace – as David Zahl puts it in his book of the same title – is “The Big Relief.” Because God’s grace precedes everything, all of our prayers, and our striving; all of our weak attempts at piety and most especially our boldest and most brazen sinning; because as St Paul puts it, “Christ died for us while we were still sinners…”; because God doesn’t need anything from us; we are relieved by His grace from the compulsion to pretend that we have it all together. We are relieved from the ever-present temptation to “fake it till you make it.”
And many Christians have a terrible habit of trying to pretend they have it all together. They endeavour to give off the impression that everything is peachy because being a Christian somehow makes them a superior human being who should be the epitome of security, happiness, fulfilment, and contentedness. But when faith becomes synonymous with pride in one’s own piety, then Jesus rightly labels us hypocrites. These are the ones who have not learnt to pray in the hidden solitude of their room.
And turning to God in prayer is relief, because when you live in a culture like ours, a culture of false self-sufficiency, a culture which is constantly expecting something from you, God is the one person who expects nothing from you. His grace goes before all else. He doesn’t need anything from you, and he’s given everything for you.
Prayer must begin in hiddenness and solitude because that is where we are most exposed.
Not in public, but on our own, with nowhere to hide. Alone in the solitude of our “rooms” wherever that may be; alone and without pretence before God; without the temptation to publicly perform our piety before others; bare naked, vulnerable and exposed warts and all, that is the place where prayer is forged.
Jesus doesn’t intend for us to think however that prayer can never be public or corporate. After all, He himself is a good Jew who routinely prayed in the Temple with his fellow believers. But prayer must begin from this place of vulnerability and an acceptance of one’s need of God.
Prayer happens not because it’s what we’re “supposed to do”, but because we need it.
Prayer begins in the same way that an alcoholic might begin the 12 steps of recovery. The first three steps alone offer a pretty decent model:
1. We admit our powerlessness, and that our lives cannot be managed,
2. We come to believe in a power greater than ourselves that can restore us, and
3. We decide to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God.
Prayer begins with the assumption that we are beggars in need God, that we are parched from wandering through the arid deserts of this life, and sucked dry by the demands of this world, and only the vast oasis of God’s grace can slake our thirst. And our need of God, gets to the core of what prayer is.
At its simplest, prayer is just asking God for things.
And I know that some of you might be thinking that prayer shouldn’t be all about just asking for things, that it should be more about praise and adoration of God. While I admire the sentiment, and there is some truth to it, that isn’t what we see when Jesus teaches us to pray. In fact, the meaning of asking for something is baked into our English word ‘prayer’ itself. Prayer comes from the French for ‘petition’ as in to ask earnestly for something, which in turn comes from the Latin word ‘precarius’ and the Greek word Jesus uses in our passage, ‘proseuchomai’, which means supplication, to obtain something by humbly asking for it. While prayer shouldn’t be reduced to petition alone, it is primarily about asking God for things.
This point cannot be emphasised enough. When Jesus teaches His disciples to pray, it is mostly petition. He instructs them to ask God for their “daily bread”, to ask God forgive their “debts”, to ask God to deliver them from “trials” and “temptations”, and to ask God to rescue them from “the evil one.” The theological crux of all this is essential, God wants us to ask Him for things. At its simplest, prayer is asking God for things. As the poet George Herbert once prayed,
“Lord heare! Shall he that made the eare, not heare?”
At a deeper level though, prayer is God allowing us to participate in the divine conversation between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We must always recall in our prayers who it is that we’re dealing with, this is a God of superabundant grace. He doesn’t just want us to sit in on the divine conversation, like an extra in the background of the Trinitarian drama. No, God wants us to speak up! Prayer is God’s way of saying “Make your voice heard – tell me what it is that you desire.” And perhaps most scandalously, prayer is God’s way of inviting us to tell Him what we think He should do. God wants to hear what you have to say.
At its deepest, prayer is God’s way of getting us to participate in providence.
Too often, prayer is reduced to a kind of therapeutic sentimentality, as though it is just something good to do, and might be good for us. But it is so much more than that.
To participate in divine providence through prayer is the mightiest and grandest vocation. But we shouldn’t be afraid of this of invitation to pray. In my short time in ministry, I’ve come across many people who say things like, “Well I don’t really pray out loud.” Prayer is awesome and resplendent, yes, but it’s also profoundly simple. At it’s deepest prayer is participation in providence, but at its simplest, prayer is asking for things. Which is why Jesus insists that we don’t need to be eloquent, or well-spoken, we needn’t use grand words or reel off great passages of Scripture (which is often used as a way of showing off how much we know). Again, as St Thérèse of Lisieux put it,
“I say very simply to God what I wish to say, without composing beautiful sentences, and he always understands me.”
I had the privilege of sitting down for a cup of tea with someone from our parish the other day and listening to them share some of their story. This is someone who has gone through tremendous turmoil and pain these last few years. They told me that in their darkest moments, the only prayer they could muster was,
“Be with me God”
Four words. Four of the simplest, most beautiful and profound words one can pray.
Prayer is simple and holy, beautiful and mundane, sublime and ordinary, completely majestic and totally natural. And the Good News, the Gospel about prayer, is that we have a gracious God who always hears us, always listens, a God who desires us, who cares for us, and who wants us to speak up.
Amen.
Thank you Toby, a really helpful reminder to me. Although I do ask for things, my prayer life has become mostly contemplative and I think your thoughts here are spot on.