1 Timothy 2:1-3 (MSG)
During the pandemic, many things changed. Some changed for the better. Some changed for the worse. Some changes are still being evaluated as to whether they were good or bad. Some of the changes were temporary; others may be more permanent. But hardly any area of our lives was not impacted in some way by the COVID pandemic.
Certainly, the last 2½ years have seen changes in how we do church. When we were unable to meet in person, we learned some skills in order to have Zoom services, or at least post worship materials on our web pages. We have been able to gather for worship for awhile, and then had to enter another stage of virtual church. It looks like we are finally going to be able to count on in-person worship for the long-term, and I don’t know about you, but that makes me very happy! It is so good to be present with one another, and not just looking at little squares on a screen!
On the one hand, it was disheartening during the quarantine to realize that church was considered non-essential. People could still go to the liquor stores, which were deemed essential. But they could not gather as congregations indoors for worship. On the other hand, people found other ways to do and be the church. We found ways to stay connected to each other and to our communities. And one area in which I believe we all participated was in lifting prayers to God for ourselves and others. We knew that we needed divine assistance to find our way through this terrifying, frustrating, lonely experience. We prayed for our loved ones who caught COVID. We prayed for the economic realities that some people faced as millions of people lost their jobs. We prayed for all those who were lonely, grieving, or depressed. And we prayed for healthcare professionals and first responders, educators and students.
Prayer all of a sudden became not just a mere formality or a routine; it was a priority and a lifeline. We knew how much we needed to communicate with God. In his book, The Post-Quarantine Church, Thom Rainer introduces us to a woman named Maureen, who described what happened when her fellowship group at church began to pray for their church and to share their prayer concerns with each other. They even formed a Facebook group, which really began to grow. Maureen said, “The Facebook group was the vehicle to get us praying for our community. It was pretty basic. When people saw we were praying, they asked us to pray for them. We prayed for a lot of people … Somehow, the mayor found out about our prayer ministry … When she came to our Facebook page, requested prayer for different needs in the community, the response was awesome. It was like our church became the prayer arm of the town. More and more people joined our Facebook page and either requested prayer or prayed for others.”
We shouldn’t be surprised at the fact that prayer is such an essential part of our lives. Prayer connects us with God, with each other, and with the world. And people may be praying even if they are not aware of it. Frederick Buechner writes in his book, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC, “Everybody prays whether [they think] of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fell into when something very beautiful happens or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else’s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way. These are all spoken not just to yourself, but to something even more familiar than yourself …”
That something – that someone – is God. Marcus Borg states that “prayer is primarily about paying attention to God.” And Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian, says, “It matters little what forms of prayer we adopt or how many words we use, what matters is the faith which lays hold on God and touches the heart of the Father who knew us long before we came to him.” Prayer is a means of intimacy with God, a way to share our lives with God and to listen as God shares with us. God is interested in the details of our lives, God cares about the things and people that matter to us. And as we pray, we develop a deep relationship with the Creator.
Prayer is a priority – or at least it should be – for all of us. As Paul wrote to the young pastor Timothy, the first thing we are to do is pray. Why is this a top priority? For one thing, prayer is a practice that was modeled for us by Jesus. Jesus prayed often. Jesus prayed both in public and in private. Jesus prayed at every key moment in his life. Even when he was in agony on the cross, Jesus prayed. And the words he prayed, “Father, into thy hand I commit my spirit,” were probably the words of the first prayer he ever prayed. William Barclay said, “That was the first prayer which every Jewish mother taught her child to say, when he lay down to sleep at night …”
Secondly, prayer is a priority because the early church viewed prayer as a basic necessity for the community. We are reminded of this in the early chapters of the book of Acts. After Jesus had been raised from the dead and ascended into heaven, the believers gathered in Jerusalem waiting for the coming of the Holy Spirit. The scripture says that they all met together and were constantly in prayer. Clearly, prayer was important to them. In Acts 2:42, after Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came to all the believers, it says that they devoted themselves to prayer.
Paul told Timothy to “pray every way you know how.” There are different ways to pray. We pray in private and we pray in public, in church. We pray in silence, or we pray with words spoken either aloud or to oneself. We pray using the words of others, such as through Psalms or poems or prayers written by other people. Or we pray our own words, spoken with heartfelt emotion. And, as Paul mentioned in Romans, sometimes we don’t know how to pray, and so the Holy Spirit prays for us with groans too deep for words. It doesn’t matter how we pray; it just matters that we pray.
Second, Paul said that we should “pray for everyone you know.” Intercessory prayer is almost always a part of our Sunday worship services. And we share our prayer concerns with each other in other settings, as well. We pray for our loved ones and our friends. We pray for events taking place in the world, like floods or wildfires or war. And we are also to pray for our enemies, according to Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in Matthew 5. This is perhaps the hardest prayer to pray. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “This is the supreme demand. Through the medium of prayer we go to our enemy, stand by his side, and plead for him to God. Jesus does not promise that when we bless our enemies and do good to them they will not despitefully use and persecute us. They certainly will. But not even that can hurt or overcome us, so long as we pray for them. For if we pray for them, we are taking their distress and poverty, their guilt and perdition, upon ourselves, and pleading to God for them. We are doing vicariously for them what they cannot do for themselves. Every insult they utter only serves to bind us more closely to God and them. Their persecution of us only serves to bring them nearer to reconciliation with God and to further the triumphs of love.”
And finally, Paul told Timothy that he should “pray especially for rulers and their governments to rule well.” That was so the church could go on about its business and avoiding any conflict with governing authorities. While Christians in the Roman Empire often had to pray for protection and safety from attacks and persecutions of the government, they still were instructed to pray for those who governed them. It is not necessary to agree with those governing with you on any issue or platform; but it is required that we pray for them anyway.
I wonder how many of us pray for those who govern us? I know that I sometimes pray about them, or about their views, hoping that God will change them to be aligned with my beliefs and views. But do I really pray for them? What difference might it make in America if every Christian prayed for those who are in elected government positions, for those who are supposed to be our leaders? Would it change the way they do their jobs? Would it change the way we see them?
One last word. I am often asked by people to explain the reason why prayers have not been answered, or at least in the way that they wanted or expected them to be answered. I am not always exactly sure now to answer them. But I do like what Frederick Buechner had to say about it. He wrote that “the God you call upon will finally come, and even if he does not bring you the answer you want, he will bring you himself. And maybe at the secret heart of all our prayer that is what we are truly praying for.”
