The Path of Discipleship - When the Answer is "No"

                I know a number of people who maintain some sort of prayer journal or prayer list.  Every time they meet someone who expresses a concern or desire for prayer, they write it in the book.  Over time, I think this becomes their version of fulfilling Paul’s exhortation to pray without ceasing.  They will go through the list, page after page, in prayer.  You know that if you are in the book, prayers are being extended for you.  You know when this person says, “I’ll be praying for you,” that there is weight behind it, often keeping you in prayer until you say “Stop.”

                I have mentioned other communities and people who measure the power of prayer by numbers.  They feel that if thousands of people are praying for an outcome, then God has to be affected.  God cannot ignore the sheer volume of many and frequent prayers.

                Yet for all those who are dedicated to intercessory prayer in many forms, sometimes the answer is “No.”  Sometimes, in spite of our best wishes, thoughts and prayers, treatments don’t work, peace does not abound and famine continues.

                In her book on the history of the Christian prosperity movement, Blessed, author and historian Kate Bowler points to how traditions steeped in the power of positive thinking or “Name it and claim it” philosophies can struggle with this reality.  She tells the story of a member of such a congregation who was diagnosed with brain cancer.  Initially people lifted her up strongly in prayer and supported her.  Over time, as reports did not approve, her supporters in the congregation drifted away from her.  Her continued illness did not match up with a theology that expected God’s blessings and health for the faithful.  Either she had done something to deserve this illness or the bedrock idea of their faith was not secure.

                In some ways the Bible gives the church a mixed message on the power of prayer.  On the one hand, a number of the Psalms are written from the perspective of someone who has “cried to Lord” and had a positive outcome.  James talks about the power of the prayers of the faithful.  On the other hand, when asked to provide instruction in prayer, Jesus offers the Christian standard of the Lord’s Prayer which involves praying for basic needs and that God’s will be done.  It is a prayer that reconciles us to God’s will in the world rather than inspiring us to change or affect that will.  We pray to be part of God’s solution; God’s answer to cries for peace, healing and grief.

                I think it is important that we lift up others in prayer.  This action is a starting point that shines a divine light on our relationships.  In such prayer, I am connected to the one I am concerned about through God’s presence, the One who is the source of love.  Yet years of watching people struggle through illness, illnesses that are often the natural part of aging, inform me that not everyone I pray for will get better.  You cannot pray away our mortality.  Years of listening to the anger toward God expressed by people who feel like prayer has failed, who cannot understand why their addicted child overdosed or why a random tragedy took their loved one away, have challenged me to see that prayer is not an if/then conditional.  The belief that, “If you pray hard enough, things will get better,” sets people up for disappointment.

                I pray as a means to remind myself and the person for whom I am praying of God’s loving presence in all the moments of life, both joyful and tragic.  In the same breath that I pray for the health of a loved one, I also pray for their comfort in the midst of illness.  In prayers that question seemingly needless tragedy, I also pray that God’s love might support those who are left in the wake of such tragedy. 

                Sometimes the answer to prayer is, “No.”  But as Christians we can take comfort and celebrate that ultimately God’s answer is, “Yes.”  The No’s of life are temporary.  The final Yes is forever.

The Path of Discipleship - Answers to Prayer

As mentioned in previous articles, much of my personal focus in prayer is about deepening my relationship with God.  I wish to cultivate an attitude of prayer that sustains me throughout the day, whether I am preaching or doing chores or sitting in an intentional time of prayer.  I don’t spend as much time as I used to asking for God’s action or attention.  I spend most of the time seeking to sit in that loving presence.

                Yet there are a number of different traditions around prayer that do involve seeking answers to problems and concerns.  People might think of Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount.  “Ask and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. ”(Matthew 7:7-8)  Another example is Abraham arguing with God about the demise of Sodom in Genesis 18.  Abraham questions God about the justice of destroying the good along with the evil in wiping out the whole city.  He gets God to agree to spare the city for the sake of fifty righteous people and eventually talks God down to ten.

                What, then, should be our expectations of the power of prayer?  Here I think we enter the realm of the anecdote.  I have heard stories of people who have seen God’s intervention in response to their prayer or the prayers of others.  I have heard stories of people who struggle when it seems that the answer to their prayer is, “No,” or “Not yet.”  There does not seem to be a definite rule where the answer to prayer comes as the one praying expects.

                Prayer should not be a matter of sending our wish list to God, assuming that we have some sort of power over God.  While Jesus does say, “Ask and it will be given to you,” he also seems to indicate in the Lord’s Prayer that a deeper faith might limit the things that we are asking for.  In Lord’s Prayer we don’t pray for healing or better relationships or world peace.  We pray that God’s will be done.  We pray for bread for the day (to have enough, not more than enough).  We pray for forgiveness and the avoidance of temptation.

                I would suggest that the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus’ other teaching on prayer are about challenging us to become God’s intervention in the world.  We pray for world peace so that we might be people who seek peace in the world.  We pray for an end to hunger so that we might work God’s will and share so that none would be hungry.  We pray for healing and reconciliation so that we might be a source of healing and reconciliation for the world.

                I do not write this to take away anyone’s hope in the miraculous.  However, it has been my experience that often the miraculous involves the miracle of other people open to being part of God’s miracle.  When we embrace our part in God’s will and our role in God’s kingdom, miracles happen.  The hungry are fed; the sick are healed; the poor receive good news. 

                In prayer God changes the world by changing who we are.  Every encounter with the love of God has an effect and we are not the same people as before.  Prayer helps us grow into our role as the children of God; as saints of God.  Prayer takes us into the depths of God’s love and sends us as God’s good news for the world.

The Path of Discipleship - The Need to Pray

There was time when I wondered about the need to pray.  As I thought about the nature of God, prayer, as I understood it, seemed a superfluous.  If God knows everything about me, then God already knows my needs and concerns.  God knows about the people I am praying for at a much deeper level than I ever will.  Why not just trust God to handle the world as God sees fit rather than bothering God with information that God already knows.

                Some will argue that it is a matter of obedience.  We may not know why we pray but we certainly know that Jesus was an example of prayer.  In Matthew, he does not teach the Lord’s Prayer with an “if you pray” but “pray then this way…”  Jesus calls us to prayer.  The Psalms call us to prayer.  Paul calls us to “pray without ceasing.” (1 Thessalonians 5:17).  Prayer can be listed as one of those activities of discipleship that Christians are just supposed to do.

                Some might argue that it is a matter affecting the will of God.  In my last article I talked about folks who attach power to the number of people who are praying for God’s intervention or the intensity of those prayers.  In the book of James, the author writes, “The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up…The prayer of the righteous is powerful and effective.”(James  5: 15, 17)  For me personally, this can fall into somewhat magical thinking, seeking God to change the laws of matter and physics, almost treating God as a genie granting wishes.  At the same time, there is a long tradition of valuing intercessory prayer.

                In my own understanding of prayer, I would say that we need to pray more than God needs our prayers.  One purpose of prayer is to come into acceptance of the will of God.  In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that God’s kingdom/reign would come and God’s will be done.  In this most basic form of prayer, we are not praying to change the will of God but to accept the will of God and become part of that will, participating in God’s reign.  In essence, we are praying that we might be part of the answer to our own prayer.  As Martin Luther wrote in the Small Catechism, “In fact, God’s good and gracious will comes about without our prayer, but we ask in this prayer that it may also come about in and among us.”

                A second purpose for prayer is taking the time to encounter God’s presence.  In the contemplative view, we are never far from the love of God; God’s grace is constantly with us; peace is always near.  Yet we go about our lives distracted, always seeking that which we cannot quite find and thinking the next shiny object will make us whole and satisfied.  Prayer provides us with an opportunity to realize that we are already whole and complete in the love of God.  It is the celebration of the way things already are.  God already loves you.  Salvation has already happened.  Everything necessary has already been accomplished so that you can be acceptable to God.  This is the essence of the good news that is the story of Jesus.

                We need to pray because we are distracted and because there are many conflicting message in the world, voices that say we are not good enough or healthy enough or smart enough.  In prayer we turn down the volume of the voices around us, even the voice of our own self-doubt, and listen for the constant whisper of a loving God.  This kind of prayer is God’s gift to us.  It asks for nothing but our attention.   It reminds us only of what we already have:  God’s love, God’s promise and God’s peace.

                A helpful way to carry out this kind of prayer is through the use of a version of what is known as the Jesus Prayer.  Commit to sitting still for five to ten minutes.  Sit comfortably away from any distractions like televisions, computers or phones.  Each time you breath in, say in your head, “Lord Jesus Christ.”  As you breath out, say, “have mercy on me.”  As with any contemplative practice, you will have thoughts roaming around your mind.  Acknowledge them and then turn back toward the prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”  As being still becomes more comfortable, you might try extending this time to twenty minutes.  It is a beautiful way of prayer to begin or end (or both) your day.

The Path of Discipleship - The Attitude of Prayer

When I was a child, I was taught that prayer equaled words.  Specifically, I was taught official words of prayer: the Lord’s prayer, prayers at bedtime, prayers at mealtime.  As I grew older, I learned a couple of psalms, especially Psalm 23 and 121.  These were psalms of comfort and assurance, words that were and still are often helpful when other words fail.

                As helpful as these collections of words can be, they can also be limiting.  When prayer is taught as verbiage, there can be great discomfort in straying from the prescribed words.  Pity the council member who forgets that he or she has devotions and now feels obligated to make up a prayer on the spot.  Will the words be right?  Will they be holy and proper?  Am I worthy to do so without an advanced degree or letter of ordination?

                As a student of prayer I have come to find that, first and foremost, prayer is an attitude.  I often describe prayer as the simple act of paying attention to God.  The anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing used the image of prayer as an arrow seeking to pierce the mystery, if only briefly, that separates God from the one who is praying.  Others have described prayer as gazing back lovingly at the loving gaze of Jesus.   Prayer becomes much more about focus and intent than finding proper words. 

                Various schools of prayer have encouraged as few words as possible, using a repeated phrase as a means to focus.  The author of The Cloud suggested simply, “God” or “love,” ideally something with one syllable.  There is a long and ancient tradition of focusing on the name of Jesus or, in the Eastern Church, what has become known as the Jesus prayer: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me.”   A longer version reads, “Lord Jesus Christ, son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

                This line of thinking also gets into some differing ideas about the purpose of prayer.  For some, prayer is primarily about making things happen.  You may hear people talking about the number of people who are praying for something or the intensity at which they are praying for something to stop or something to happen.  In this type of prayer, we are often praying for things that haven’t happened yet but we wish could.

                The more ancient tradition of prayer is about connecting to God as God already is, accepting the world and our situation as it already is.  We don’t need to pray for God’s love to come into our lives.  When we pay attention, we will discover that it is already there.  We don’t need to pray for God’s attention, but instead need to practice turning our attention toward God who is always lovingly aware of us.

                This understanding is not meant to discourage you from praying for other people or being moved to prayer in reaction to tragedy.  Such intercessory prayer has a long tradition in the Christian faith.  Instead, I would encourage you to consider how and why you are praying for other people.   Are you looking to make God change the world?  Are you looking to bring God’s love into a difficult situation?  Are you looking to be empowered to be God’s answer to your own prayer?

                For this article I would ask, are the many words we pray allowing God to encounter us in prayer?  When you pray, take the time to focus on the God to whom you praying.  Offer God the space to speak to you so that you might listen.  Allow a sacred moment where you dwell in the love of God that is already around you.  Pray the prayers you learned as a child.  Pray a psalm or two.  Pray for others.  But always take time to be still; always take time to listen.