What we get wrong V

[Ukraine is in great turmoil.  Things are moving very quickly and people are often scared and tense.  We have vowed to continue worshiping and we are beginning to think about how we can best serve the student-protesters.  This is an interesting environment in which to think and talk about prayer.  Prayer is hard sometimes, or sometimes it is all we have or sometimes it is both at the same time.]

Let's talk honestly about prayer for a bit.  Prayer doesn't always come naturally or easily.  Sometimes prayer is difficult.  Many people have a hard time praying out loud, or at all.

For some people, prayer comes very easily.

We say the Lor'd Prayer all the time.  It is part of our culture to repeat it together.  It is good to remember these beautiful words.  But, we must listen carefully to Jesus in these verses.  Jesus asks those listening not to use fancy words - he gives us this prayer as a model of simplicity.  Jesus doesn't want our empty words.  If this prayer is meaningless to us, we should stop praying it until we get the meaning.

The Lord's prayer is an opening and a closing and six requests

For God's
                       name
                      reign
                     will
For our
                      bread
                      debts
            deliverance/enemies

It's really simple and beautiful.  It shows that God and God's role in our lives is more important than us and our desires.  It lifts up the greatness and glory of God and asks only for our most basic needs and the needs of those around us.

When I was a pastor in the states - everywhere that I went I was asked to pray.  I was asked to pray at funerals and church services like I would expect, but also at sporting events and barbecues.  At every meal I ate with friends from church, I was asked to pray for it.

And this was funny to me, because I'm not good at prayer.

It seems that my mother is always at the business of prayer.  I remember as a child, I would be running around the church while mom was practicing the pipe organ - and I would come up behind her and say,
"mom, mom, mom, mom, mummy, mummy, mummy, mom, mom, mother, mom" and she would quietly say, "not now, Michael, I'm praying"  It wasn't that a massive pipe organ was flying under her control and each pipe was blasting loud music and she couldn't hear me - it was that in the depth of her soul, she was quite and still.  When life was hard, she would kneel at the altar at the front of our church and sob in prayer.  When we were poor as could be, she would cook enough food for me and Rebecca and say a prayer of thanksgiving to God that rang out so perfectly, even when there wasn't enough for her to eat as well.  Mom would pray for us at night, and I always knew I was safe.

One day we were at the church searching for something - and we had been searching for hours - and mom said, "alright, Lord" and reached her hand into the same closet I had searched for over an hour, and pulled out exactly what we had been looking for!  We always teased her that if we ever  needed anything, we would ask her to pray for it - because apparently God listens to her more than God listens to us.  And still to this day, when I'm in trouble, I always call my mom first and ask her to pray.

I didn't inherit this from my mom.

Prayer is a struggle for me.  I forget to pray sometimes when I know that I should, and sometimes - when things are really difficult - I don't want to pray and I really have to struggle to get even basic words out.
I have some times when prayer is easier, but usually prayer is hard.  For a long time, I thought that I needed to have the right words and to say things in the right way.  This made prayer much too hard.  

Now, when I pray, I sit and have a conversation with God.  I think this is what Jesus asks us to do.  I'm honest with Jesus, I share my anger and my frustration.  I share when I'm thankful, but not as often as I should.

These last few weeks, we've talked about different ways that Jesus wants us to share our faith.  We are salt and light and we shouldn't put ourselves under a jar.  A lot of these have been very external, but with prayer - with prayer Jesus asks us to do the opposite.  He asks us NOT to use prayer as an external evidence of our faith.  Jesus reminds us that prayer is about helping us to connect with God.

I asked one of the women from the little church I served if she would pray one day, and she looked down at her hands and she said, "Oh, Michael, I can't do any nice prayers like you..."

And I remember all the pastors who ever served and they all had such nice prayers.  A few even wrote their prayers before the service to make sure that they were perfect.  And, honestly, when you have to pray in public a lot, you get better at making the words sound nicer

But, you don't get better at prayer:        


"Prayer is largely just being silent: holding the tension instead of even talking it through, offering the moment instead of fixing it by words and ideas, loving reality as it is instead of understanding it fully. Prayer is commonly a willingness to say “I don’t know.” We must not push the river, we must just trust that we are already in the river, and God is the certain flow and current." - Richard Rohr

This is a beautiful image of prayer.  When you pray, you are in a river trusting God to do the rest.

We have much to pray about here.  Sometimes there is so much going on around us and we feel so helpless and sometimes it is even hard to pray.

Did you know that couples in love, when they sit near to each other, that their heartbeats and breathing become synchronized.  When strangers sit side by side, this doesn't happen - but when a couple is in love, just being together brings their pulse and breathing together.

There is nothing so wonderful as feeling the pulse of a loved one while holding their hand or in an embrace.

This is how I understand prayer.  When we pray, we sit next to the God that we love.  We have a conversation and we say what we need to say - and God can take our harshest criticism, so don't hold back ... God doesn't want you to lie! - but at the same time, our heartbeat matches up to God's.  Our heart beats in the same way that God's does.  Our heart breaks for what breaks God's heart.  We see things in God's way - slowly but surely.  It takes time, but the longer we sit by God's side and talk with God, the more our hearts line up.

It is not the length of our prayers or the words that we pray that make our prayers valuable.  The Pagans felt like they had to say everything and explain their side of the situation so that their gods would take their side.  Jesus asks us not to do this.  God is already on our side.  God already knows the situation much better than we ever will.  Don't be afraid to tell God everything, but don't think that you're giving God any new information.

  In some Christian circles some people talk about praying in a specific way and they say that this way is a "stronger" way to pray than praying in some other way - and we might all like to know some secret way to pray that will totally make our prayer better - people write books all the time with some secret prayer or some secret way to pray ... but this is nonsense.  The thing that matters in our prayers is the One to whom we are praying.

Jesus asks us, for our part, not to focus on our words, but to focus on our sincerity.

Think of the way that a child talks to a parent.  Not the way that we talk to our parents - the way that it can be awkward or hard, but think about the way you talked to your parents as a child.  The way that you could say anything and ask anything and everything was right.  When we pray, we must be sincere with God.  

Over the years, I've learned that the only wrong way to pray is to not pray.  When we choose to hold onto our problems and our challenges and our praise - we get lost.  When we try to find the answers in ourselves, we find that we don't have the answers.

When we pray, we give everything over to God.  We are going to break up into our small groups now and talk about prayer and then we will end in prayer.  It's just us and God tonight.  When Jesus talked about going into a separate room to pray, Jesus was talking to people who lived in one room houses.  Jesus meant that we should never show off our prayers.  We should never boast about our prayers.  Tonight, I want to challenge each of you to pray out loud in your small group.  Even if you don't have beautiful words.  Even if you don't like the way your voice sounds.  Even if you're not as good a Christian as you think everyone else it.  If you don't know what to say, You can just say "Hi God. Thank you."