On Prayer

Sometimes I really wish I had been one of the original disciples so I could ask Jesus all the questions I have. Especially about prayer. Yet I also know that Jesus often did not answer questions directly, and in the spiritual journey it is the questions that pull us forward.

Here are some of the questions that I ask: If God knows everything then why do we need to pray anyway? Do we really need to draw things to God’s attention? Does it make sense to keep repeating the same prayers? And how can we “pray without ceasing” as Paul tells us to?

I would love to know what questions you have about prayer so let’s take a couple of minutes to think, pair and share. Please find someone else to talk to even if it means changing seats and take a couple of minutes to share your questions and your wonderings about prayer…
 
There are hundreds of books written about prayer and within the time frame of a sermon I can’t cover much ground. But I have three observations I would like to share with you. 1. How you think about prayer depends on how you think about God. 2. There are many different ways to pray and 3. Its better together.

So #1 – how you think about prayer depends on how you think about God.

A friend of mine once said, “I’ll believe in God when he starts answering my prayers.” So her idea of God seems to be someone external to her who grants her wishes. That’s the genie in the bottle idea – that God manifests when we call on him to grant us three or more wishes.

Then there’s the vending machine model. We put our prayers in the slot and as long as we have the right change, the right words and so on, God will deliver our selected outcome. If we get something different then obviously we didn’t pray the right prayers or push the right button.

This is similar to the Santa Claus idea, where God keeps a list, a list of all our good deeds and our bad ones and answers our prayers depending on whether we’ve been naughty or nice.

All of these ways of thinking envision God as quite disconnected from our lives; a rather capricious authority figure whom we have to try to persuade to give us what we want. Someone who is watching us from a distance.

These are all transactional ways of thinking about our relationship with God; we do something and God does something in return. But we know from our lives that close friendships and intimate relationships are not built on transactions. They are built on mutual sharing and mutual enjoyment. They are built on self-disclosure in a relationship of love.

So we can think of God as a friend as the old hymn says,
What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and griefs to bear
What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.

This emphasizes the relationship – God is a good friend who will listen to all our woes and problems. God isn’t out there somewhere, God is right here next to us. But I wonder if that doesn’t domesticate God? -whether we imagine we are somehow taming the wild and totally free God; making the God who creates all things into little more than an invisible friend.

But what if God is both transcendent and immanent? In other words what if God is out there AND in here, closer than our breathing? And what if God loves us unconditionally and loves nothing more than to be in mutual relationship with us? What if we are called to be co-creators with God, together building the reign of God based on Jesus teaching?

How then shall we pray?

I think we pray both with awe and with intimacy. As we pray, we come to know God more fully and we are changed in the process. As we pray, we invite God into the joys and the tangles of our lives; our prayer is a form of self-disclosure – God, this is who I am, and it is a journey of self-discovery as we learn how God sees us. Prayer is no longer asking for something specific but inviting God with her power and love into the situations of our lives. Instead of asking for a red bike, we share with God the need we see for better transport and ask for solutions to unfold for the highest good of all beings. And who knows, that might be a red bike.

Onto my second reflection: there are many different ways to pray, and they complement one another.

Practicing the presence of God is foundational to all spiritual life, all prayer. This is intentionally reaching out to the divine and opening ourselves to him or her or them. I found an unexpected description of prayer in a novel I am reading. The protagonist is a woman who was brought up as a strict Moslem but has left her faith. She says,

I missed prayer. It had been a gift. Tilting my head toward the sky, luminescent as though backlit by God himself, silently unburdening myself, inhaling the expansiveness of his deliverance. It had been a relief to surrender, to accept my smallness, to merge into a sacred whole.[i]

I’m going to read that again, because I think it is a beautiful description of prayer which experiences God as both transcendent (out there) and immanent (in here).

I missed prayer. It had been a gift. Tilting my head toward the sky, luminescent as though backlit by God himself, silently unburdening myself, inhaling the expansiveness of his deliverance. It had been a relief to surrender, to accept my smallness, to merge into a sacred whole.

We may practice the presence of God in meditation or walking by the bay or gardening or even in the everyday work of housekeeping. Practicing means doing it with intention. Over a lifetime we may come to a place where we constantly know the presence of God but until then we need to practice.

That sense of being in God’s presence and the awareness of our smallness and yet our preciousness is the backdrop for all other forms of prayer – the arrow prayers when we quickly ask for help or for wisdom or to find the car keys; intercessory prayer when we pray for a friend or loved one – like the Snoopy cartoon in this week’s Pebble “When my arms can’t reach people I love, I hug them with my prayers.”; and intercessory prayer when we pray for people who we don’t love and people we have never met, and when we pray for our world and the planet itself.

These prayers are not like vending machine prayers because they are based in an ever growing and deepening relationship of intimacy which we nurture by consciously practicing the presence of God. And God uses those prayers to help bring about the best possible outcomes. Our goodwill, our desire for healing and for wholeness helps to move the world closer to reconciliation with God.

And my third and final observation – its better together. Jesus once said, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst of them.” (Matt 18:20) The power of prayer is multiplied exponentially when we pray together, when we combine our experiences of God and align our own wills and intentions.

We gather together on Sundays for liturgy – liturgy means the work of the people – in our prayers and in our hymns we are worshiping God, we are serving God and in the process we are ourselves formed. We are changed by the words and by the fellowship. And we are and are becoming the Body of Christ – the community of God, inspired and led by the Holy Spirit.

Sometimes it seems like we are just saying the same old words but our prayers join with the prayers of millions around the world, and together, together we are the light of the world, moving all beings closer to wholeness as we ourselves are transformed into the people we were created to be.
 
 
 the Rev. Dr. Caroline Hall
 
 
 
 


[i][i] Fundamentally, a novel, Nussaibah Younis, PenguinRandomHouse, 2025