PRAY LIKE YOU MEAN IT
Who taught you to pray? Was it your mom or dad? Your Sunday School teacher? Your grandmother? All of the above? We all learned to pray somewhere from someone. For me, the earliest prayer I remember was saying bedtime prayers after I got tucked in at night. “Now I lay me down to sleep …” and the “God blesses” that went on forever, so that I could delay turning out the light, until I was including the neighbors and their pets. We said grace at the table before meals. We prayed in church.
As I got older, I learned more about prayer from people I knew and people I didn’t know. I paid attention to how the pastor prayed, how teachers prayed. And I read prayers. There have been many people who influenced my prayer life over the years. I like Howard Thurman, the former Dean Emeritus of Marsh Chapel, at Boston University School of Theology. One or his prayers goes like this:
When our minds are sick with frustration and division;
When fear eats away the foundations of our peace –
Be present, O, Our Father, to heal, to bless and make whole.
When our hearts are heavy with sorrow and misery;
When only heaviness is our daily portion –
Be present, O, Our Father, to heal, to bless and relieve.
When our friends are difficult because of misunderstanding and loss;
When the beauty of comradeship has wasted like the noon day –
Be present, O, Our Father, to restore, to bless and renew.
When the thread of our years unwinds near the end of the spool;
When the failing powers of mind and body accent the passing days –
Be present, O, Our Father, to reassure, to make steady and confirm.
When our well-ordered plans fall apart in our hands;
When hopes give up, having run their course –
Be present, O, Our Father, to replenish, to create and redeem.
When faith in our fellows wallows in the mud;
When through disappointment, through failure, through flattery, all seems lost –
Be present, O, Our Father, to revise, to renew and reassure.
I also find myself challenged by the prayers of Walter Brueggemann. One of his prayers is called “The God we would rather have”:
We are your people and mostly we don’t mind, except that you do not fit any of our categories.
We keep pushing and pulling and twisting and turning, trying to make you fit the God we would rather have, and every time we distort you that way we end up with an idol more congenial to us.
In our more honest moments of grief and pain we are very glad that you are who you are, and that you are toward us in all your freedom what you have been toward us.
So be your faithful self and by your very engagement in the suffering of the world, transform the world even as you are being changed.
We pray in the name of Jesus, who is the sign of your suffering love.
Some of the most honest and creative prayers I have read are those of Robert Jones, in his book, Prayers for Puppies, Aging Autos, and Sleepless Nights. One of his prayers is a prayer for a dead duck:
Bestower of wisdom, have special care for what we call dumb animals, for Dougie the Duck was certainly one of them. He was a duck who wanted to be a dog. He chased cars, and when he caught one he pecked at the rolling tires and quacked outrageously with a quack that tried to sound like a bark. The other day he chased a car and caught it just as it swerved, and it squished him flat. Now we are sad, and our children are sad, and the older people in our neighborhood are especially sad. Dougie was the life of our little party here on this shady bend of the road. He was a character among us, obviously weird, but lovable, and he helped us know that our own weirdness is part of loving and being loved. We ask you to receive him and to grant eternal rest to Dougie’s ducky-doggie soul, assuming such creatures have souls, which seems like a safe assumption given the way Dougie was. As you must know, in trying to be what he wasn’t, Dougie was a lot like us.
What I appreciate about all of these prayers is that they are spoken in the honest and sincere language that a person would use when talking to a friend. And God is certainly friend, our Father, someone we can be comfortable with. That is one of the things Jesus taught his disciples about prayer in this passage from the book of Luke.
Of all the things that the disciples might have asked Jesus to teach them, the only thing they ever asked is that Jesus teach them how to pray. I think that maybe that was because they saw how important prayer was in the Jesus’ own life. Jesus would often withdraw to deserted places to pray, or go out to the mountain to pray, sometimes spending the night in prayer or going out before dawn to pray. He prayed before every important decision in his life, including the night before he chose his twelve disciples. Jesus prayed before he fed the crowd of five thousand people; he prayed in the garden the night before he was arrested and put to death; and Jesus even prayed from the cross.
So the disciples came and asked Jesus, “Teach us to pray.” His answer became what we know as the Lord’s Prayer, the most prayed prayer in the world. In that prayer, Jesus told them how to pray and what to pray for. He made it clear that prayer is about a relationship when he told them to call God “Father.” God is someone who looks at us as his own children, and we can go to him as we would go to a good and loving parent. We are to say that God’s name is hallowed and to pray for his kingdom to come, which are ways of asking God to be in charge or our lives and to bring justice and peace to our world. And we are to ask God for three things: for food, for forgiveness, and for protection. When we pray, we cannot go wrong if we follow this simple and basic pattern.
But after this teaching, Jesus went on to tell them a parable about being persistent in prayer. The story is far-fetched at best: a man who has unexpected guests show up at his door at midnight, who goes to his neighbor to ask for food to feed them. And we might wonder at the neighbor who is at first reluctant to get up out of his own warm bed to help his friend, but who finally gives in because of his friend’s persistence in asking. The parable is not about the man who gives the food, as if to say that God is like that man. The parable is not about the character of God; it is about the character of the one who prays. We are to be persistent in prayer, as this man was persistent in asking for help. Persistence in prayer shows trust in God who answers our prayers. And persistence in prayer forces us to consider whether our prayers are the prayers we ought to be praying. It forces us to take prayer seriously. It pushes us to pray like we really mean it.
Prayer is a serious thing. And yet, too often we take it for granted, or take it too lightly. As one person commented, “Often we pray with our minds on hold and our mouths on automatic.” We pray almost without thinking about it. But we need to be very careful and intentional about our prayers. We have to think about what we are saying, what we are praying. We are, after all, talking to the God of the whole universe as well as our Father and friend. Honest, sincere, serious prayer will bring results when we are persistent in our prayers.
Let me tell you about the 100-year prayer meeting. In 1722, Count Nicholas Ludwig von Zinzendorf allowed Christian exiles from Bohemia and Moravia to establish a community on his estate in Germany. The center became known as Herrnhut, and it grew quickly. On August 27, 1727, twenty-four men and twenty-four women committed themselves to pray for one hour each day, praying in sequence around the clock. Soon other people joined their prayer chain. Prayer was lifted up to God twenty-four hours a day as at least one person prayed each hour of every day. After ten years, the prayer chain was still going. And then for another ten, and another ten. Until it had been one hundred years.
This prayer chain had incredible results. The Moravians began to send out missionaries to other countries, with the first two being commissioned in August of 1732 to go to the West Indies. At the service, one hundred hymns were sung. Soon others volunteered to be sent out, until 70 missionaries were commissioned out of the 600 residents at Herrnhut. The Moravians sparked the conversions of John and Charles Wesley, who encountered them on their trip to the colony of Georgia. And they also influenced the Great Awakening that swept through Europe and America, which brought thousands of people into the Christian faith.
Prayer is powerful. Prayer is effective. When you let Jesus teach you to pray, and then pray like you mean it, amazing things will happen.