On Prayer

A Morning Prayer Sermon, 8th Sunday after Pentecost, Year B
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Holy Trinity Episcopal Church
Onancock, Virginia

Ephesians 4:1-7. 11-16
Mark 6:45-52

"And he went up on the mountain to pray."

Spirituality is in and religion is out. That’s the new trend these days. Stroll down the aisles of any bookstore and you will see many titles purporting to help your spiritual growth. We no longer need institutions such as the Church to bring us into a life of holiness; we can now do it alone. Spirituality, I believe, is a hyped up synonym for prayer, and prayer is something that we do not talk enough about in the Church. As a life-long Episcopalian, I cannot recall a single Christian Education class that even remotely came close to the topic of learning how to pray. Prayer is simply a given, so we believe, Jesus will teach you how to pray and your life will be prosperous. Ask and you shall receive! Knock and the door will be opened to you! That is prayer. . . come again? That simplicity fails to recognize the complexity and diversity of the human situation. How do we pray as a community? How do we pray privately? How do we know if we are doing it the "right way?" Unfortunately, there is no step-by-step numbered guide for instruction in prayer.

Building a rich life of prayer is more like an adventure, a journey to the heart. I sometimes wonder that the reason we neglect to seriously address this critical part of the Christian experience is because we are afraid that we will be found out—found that we cannot or do not pray or even believe that we lack the theological language to express our feelings and emotions, fearing our simple ways of the heart before the throne of the Almighty. I want to be a priest who prays. So often I see in parish profiles that parishes are searching for dynamic, visionary leaders—someone who can preach and help move a congregation to grow. We seem to take for granted that all of this should come automatically. It doesn’t. Only if it comes from a life deeply rooted in prayer.

Prayer is the essence of the Christian life, and we see that modeled in this morning’s gospel from Mark. Last week we heard the story of Our Lord feeding five thousand hungry souls, a miraculous action that still astonishes us today. And now this week we see the reflective side of
Jesus: “and he went up on the mountain to pray.” The model, we learn, is that of action and reflection—a paradigm of movement and rest. Which one comes first, well, that seems to be a chicken-and-egg question. The point is that Our Lord takes time in his earthly ministry to be alone and to pray. We see this pattern again and again. To go up to the mountain symbolizes a lot of the movement of the Gospel story—a movement of ascent, up to the heavens, the language of resurrection. Mark does not give us the content of the prayer and we can only presume that in that act of prayer there was more movement of descent, God indwelling in the recesses of the heart than could ever be reported. There is nothing wrong with the language of resurrection, for it’s a critical component to our story and our common life. However, we seem to have lost the language of Pentecost, the language of Incarnation—God descending to us, God desiring to be in an intimate relationship with God’s creation. The language of spirituality, and I would be willing to wager that most books on Spirituality, neglect this essential descending movement of prayer.

The problem is an old one and continues to plague the church even today. The problem in prayer is intellectual ascent. Culturally, we are hard-wired that education equals success, degrees equal security. Smart people are promoted, smart people make six figure salaries and have second homes. But when that logic is applied to the life of prayer it only reduces God to an object—an object that can be studied, measured, and ultimately contained. Prayer becomes like any another intellectual activity. But God is not an object, God is limitless and surpasses our human understanding.

So, we cannot climb mountains and think our way into heaven. God came down to us first, descending into our hearts and stirring us to work for the Kingdom. The action part of the model comes out of and is informed by, a rich life of prayer. The Christian life is not about doing good works in order to obtain heavenly salvation, the point is to be the hands of Christ, the mouth of Christ, and the visible and embodied love of Christ here and now. All this flows out from the totality of our life being consumed by Christ in prayer. I suspect this is what the Gospel passage is pointing us towards. “Speaking the truth in love,” as St. Paul says in today’s epistle, is only possible through intimacy with Christ in prayer—a total and complete dependency upon God as the strength and source of our action. Thus, prayer is at the very heart of all ministry—a piece of equipment that every saint and sinner needs.

If then prayer is at the heart of our common life in Christ, it must also be work. For this reason, we come up with a lot of reasons to avoid or put off praying. “There’s no time for praying, I am way too busy.” Believe it or not, this is heard more than you would imagine in our seminaries these days. There’s always a vestry or committee meeting to attend, a church fundraiser to organize, the altar brassware needs a good polishing, the Vacation Bible School needs my help—and these are just some of the more common Christian excuses. The call of God to prayer is deep and we need to get past our limitations that we place on God, for God is not interested in how pretty our altars look, how concise our bulletins are, or even how well we think we worship. God is interested in what is in our hearts, the very substance of our souls. When we descend with the mind into the heart, there we find God’s presence that was instilled in us from our creation. There we find our integrity and authenticity, there we see our sinfulness

surrounding by God’s gracious mercy and love.

If prayer is work, then prayer is also dancing. With each beat, each rhythm of the heart, God calls us onto the dance floor to be in intimate relationship. God’s love comes to us in prayer: we do not have to have a heightened vocabulary or even much experience of prayer, all we have to do is go out onto the floor and be guided in our footsteps.The dance is both vigorous and slow, close and yet far apart, strange and somehow very familiar. It is work and yet is also rest—it is the most intimate way in which God comes to us

So, then, we as church have our work and our fun cut out for us: we need to talk openly about our life of prayer—our struggles, our disappointments, and our breakthroughs. The community, the body of Christ, is the ultimate support group and is necessary in prayer. No book can offer you this, it is experiential and embodied in flesh, not paper. When we allow ourselves to be consumed by the risen Christ, we can with our minds descend into our hearts and find a wellspring of the living presence eternally inside of us. Prayer is the vehicle to wholeness, the means for us to remember that it is “not I, but Christ who lives inside of me.” Being spiritual or religious is completely meaningless unless it is dependent upon prayer. What ever your language, your style, or situation in life, pray. Pray and pray always that God is the source of your ministry and the foundation of your being. God can teach us to pray, we only need ears to listen. Amen.