Poolesville Presbyterian Church
01.11.15; Rev. David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Matthew 6: 5-15
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Though it’s hard to admit to myself, and harder still to admit publicly, I’m still going to say it: I don’t feel like I’m a particularly great pray-er. Thinking and writing and discussing, sure. That I can manage.
But praying, the act itself? Even after forty plus years of doing my best follow Jesus, I often feel fumbly at it, uncertain about it. This is, of course, not supposed to be the case. We pastors are supposed to be magically amazing at praying, radiant with our capacity for mystic incantations that summon the very angels to our beck and call. We’re supposed to be radiantly confident, so pray-ey that we’ll pray at the drop of a hat.
Stillness and walking meditations I do. I’ll go over the list of prayer requests when they come to me at the end of the week, remembering those who I know personally, asking God’s grace on those who I do not. I’ll sing as prayer. But my spoken prayers often feel so small, so inadequate. Here I am, a tiny, ephemeral lump of life, humming the air around me with vibrations that serve as symbolic referents for those who live in my culture. This is supposed to impress the Creator of the Universe? It’s so tiny.
I do pray, every single day. It’s how I begin my mornings, while I’m lying there and the snooze timer’s counting down my minutes. I pray while walking, while driving, and a whole bunch when I’m on the Beltway or tiptoeing my motorcycle over patches of ice on River Road.
The question is: how? How to go about it?
There are many ways to pray, almost as many as there are human beings. So there are countless books on the subject, some of which I perused this last week at the library. There were several shelves of books, books from mystics, books from pastors, pastel covered hardback books from tee vee preachers eager to sell you a prayer that’ll make you prosper. It’s sure done good fer them.
I was searching for one in particular, and though it was supposed to be right there on the shelf, it wasn’t. Huh, I thought. I went back and checked the system. Yup. It was supposed to be there. “Lord, help me find that book,” I said, smiling to myself, and then went back. It still wasn’t there. But like Inigo Montoya guided by his sword in the woods, I was not to be denied. I looked behind the neat row. There it was, lying flat on its back, shoved back to where no-one could read it.
I was finally getting around to reading what had been a runaway best-selling book on prayer from a few years back: “The Prayer of Jabez.” Anyone remember this book? This was quite the thing, back around the turn of the millennia, so fifteen years later I finally got around to reading it. I guess I never realized just how short it was. Ninety pages and change. Very small pages. Very large print. I started in, and it was, well, it was interesting.
There is a lot of talk about Jabez and his faith and his motivations, which struck me as odd, given that the only place in the whole Bible this guy is mentioned is in those two verses. And the prayer itself? One verse, squirrelled away in one chapter of the book of Chronicles. The author of the book prayed it every day, and credited it with all sorts of amazing supernatural events in his life.
It’s a super-secret prayer, one that no one had noticed. Why, you may ask, was it secret? Because it was hidden away in a huge and agonizingly boring list of utterly unpronounceable names. Chapter after chapter of names. Seriously. That hiddenness, I think, was part of the appeal. Here, a thing of mystery, buried away, like a mystic rune you find in a cryptic book. This is what humans want. We want that one easy trick that will magically solve all of our problems.
“If you pray it every day, it’ll work,” he proclaims, with utter and earnest confidence. “Be unafraid to pray selfishly,” he also proclaims, which struck me as a little odd. But most of the rest of the book was kindhearted, simple, and earnest, and the prayer itself was easy to remember. How much do we want that? For this little prayer, we wanted it to the tune of over nine million copies sold, number one on the New York Times Bestseller List for months and months.
Back then, and even now, it struck me as bizarre that so many Christians would seek out simplicity in a secret magic Jesus prayer, one found a justifiably obscure corner of the Bible. Because if you follow Jesus of Nazareth, he tells you how to pray. Not in a secret way, not in a hidden way, but right up front, in front of a crowd and where every last person can see it. We hear about it today, right there in Matthew. It’s not buried away in some corner of the Bible we never read for perfectly good reasons. It’s in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, at the core of the spiritual and ethical teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
We also find it in Luke, in chapter 11. It’s a slightly different form there, but the basic thrust of the prayer is the same.
It could not be more obvious. It is intended to be that way, intended to be both simple and comprehensible. This prayer is the one I pray, every day. It’s the prayer I pray on waking, and into the inside of my helmet as I ride.
It’s also a prayer we say, in one of its forms, pretty much every Sunday. The liturgist figures out how to make the transition. “So we’ve just been talking about other stuff, and praying for our friends and the world, but Jesus taught us this thing we have to always say, so let us now say it, saying,” and then we all intone it together, a shared incantation, so long burned into memory that it almost prays itself.
The has always struck me as strange, given that the whole point Jesus is making is that prayer is something best done simply and in private.
“The Lord’s Prayer,” we call it, and if you’re churchy folk, you learn it early and often. It’s so well known to us that it almost becomes sounds, just the vibrations of the air around us, which we make because we know how to make them.
It can become like those prayers I used to sing every Hanukkah as my little family lit the candles. I knew the words, of course I did, because you sing ‘em eight days in a row whilst simultaneously trying to keep your kids from setting things other than the candles on fire. Singing in the midst of fire prevention is a great way to remember prayer. And so I would sing it:
Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, asher kid'shanu b'mitzvotav v'tsivanu l'hadlik ner shel Chanukah.
Baruch atah, Adonai Eloheinu, Melech haolam, she-asah nisim laavoteinu v'imoteinu bayamim hahaeim baz'man hazeh.
The words would tumble out, familiar from decades of repetition, woven up with music. But for years, though I sang them, I didn’t always exactly know what I was singing. Learning Hebrew a little bit helped, as did asking, which I’d do now and again. Holding on to the meaning of a thing becomes harder still when it becomes familiar, the meaning lost.
That, for us now, is the challenge with this simple, perfect prayer. It can become a tumble of vowels and consonants, a jumbled mass of sounds. We can pray it on autopilot while our mind wanders far afield.
These next few weeks, as the new year unfolds before us, we’re going to take a walk through this little prayer, sense unit by sense unit, concept by concept. We’re going to slow down, and pay attention.
Because simple things are magic. The miracle of our existence is magic. The faces of our loved ones and our friends are magic. But we can become so used to them that we forget to slow down and appreciate them, to attend to the reality of what we are saying and doing.
Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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