STONES IN PRAYER
Third Sunday in Lent
February 24, 2008
Dr. Stephen D. Jones, preaching
Text: Matthew 7:7-11
I’m afraid of
prayer. That’s being a lot more honest with you than I would like. Actually, I
constructed that sentence a dozen different ways. Would there be a way to say
the same thing without admitting half as much? Could I camouflage the truth, so
that you might draw several different conclusions and not know for certain what
I was saying?
Finally, in my
soul-with-self argument, I decided just to unmask the truth and say it: I’m
afraid of prayer. If I weren't, I’d engage in prayer in a much different way.
One of the things I
like about pastoral ministry is the unpredictability of it. I have a close
friend who enters his study every morning and instructs his staff not to
interrupt him and devotes twenty minutes to prayer and devotion. I admire
him. But that’s too structured for me.
Some people pray in
disciplined ways, but they also do so in a rote or contrived way. They say words
not their own. They pray prayers filled with “thees and thous,” they recite
prayers learned from childhood, but their prayers are absent of heart, a mere
recitation of pious words that often must seem empty to God. Jesus had real
issues with those who heaped up sanctimonious words in prayer (Mark 12:40).
My sister and mother
remember Brother Dinwiddie from our home church. Every time he was asked to pray
in church, Brother Dinwiddie would go on and on and on. And when our pastor
called on him it was usually to give the final prayer on a Sunday evening, just
after I had already sat through two services in one day and was ready for my
freedom. And Brother Dinwiddie, kindly though he be, would throw in every
sanctimonious word known to humankind as well as a few unknown to
humankind! Pious words, heaped upon each other. And I would moan and groan all
the way home, occasionally trapping my mother or father into admitting that
Brother Dinwiddie really hadn’t said anything in his prayer that made much sense
to them either. The best way to characterize him is to say that in his prayers,
Brother Dinwiddie was sincerely long!
Emilie Griffin in her
book on prayer says, “There is a moment between intending to pray, and actually
praying, that is as dark and silent as any moment in our lives. It is the split
second between thinking about prayer and really praying. For some of us, this
split second may last for decades” (Clinging, p. 1, Harper and Row).
For many of us there
is a problem in “getting around to prayer.” We pray only when in hysterics, at
the end of our wits. We may say grace before every meal and not actually pray.
And I suspect that it isn’t lack of discipline or time, but out of fear.
My fear of prayer has
to do with convincing myself of the limits of my control, my power. One of the
assumptions behind prayer is to recognize those limits.
The candor that
prayer requires, the unmasking, also causes me to hesitate. What if God actually
heard my heart-felt prayer? Would I then be ready for God to re-arrange my life?
Emilie Griffen says,
“Prayer is…a very dangerous business.” Do you believe that? Do you think prayer
is dangerous? Are you also afraid of prayer? Would you, could you, admit
that? Or am I alone in this? Griffen continues, “For all the benefits prayer
offers of growing closer to God, it carries with it one great element of risk:
the possibility of change. In prayer, we open ourselves to the chance that God
will do something with us that we had not intended.”
Many people avoid
this risk by using prayer to direct God. Listen to this traditional prayer: “O
God, direct our thoughts. Guide our paths. Grant us peace. Resolve our
differences. Be present among us. Do not leave us alone.” What if I came up to
you and began speaking this way? “Susan, resolve this problem.” “Hilda, be
present right now.” “Ernie, guide my path. Don’t leave me alone.” If you heard
this, wouldn’t you say, “Well, who do you think you are giving out all these
directives, these orders?” And yet, why do we talk to God like this? Does God
really need our directives?
I suspect we do this
because we’re afraid of prayer, and so we use far more directives in prayer than
we would ever do with one another. A prayer full of directives reminds God that
we’re the ones still in control. Of course, we mask all of this in pious,
sanctimonious language. Listen to your own prayers. Listen to the words of
prayer we speak in worship.
Sometimes we sing the
song, “Spirit of the Living God, fall afresh on me. Melt me, mold me, fill me,
use me.” Can you imagine how frightening that song would be if we really meant
it? If God took us seriously? “Now, hold on there a minute, God. I really
didn’t mean for you to mold me, fill me, use me. Those are just allegories. I
didn’t mean it literally.”
However, prayer
really doesn’t have anything to do with directives. It isn’t the language of
command. And prayer isn’t just talking to God. It has more to do with being
silent before God and opening ourselves to God’s transforming presence. Please,
melt me, mold me, use me. . .and really meaning it. If you don’t find that
frightening, there may be something wrong with you.
Would there be any
person, including your parents, your spouse or partner, your best friend, to
whom you would say, “melt me, mold me, use me. . .”? I love my wife, and soon
we’ll be celebrating 38 years of marriage. But honestly, I wouldn’t say those
words to her, “melt me, mold me, use me. . .” Can you imagine? She’d have me
taking out the trash without having to be reminded? She’d have me eagerly get
out my appointment book to go over our daily schedules. She’d have me put down
the newspaper the minute she entered the room. I tell you, my life would be
ruined!!
So, if I’m not going
to say that to my wife, with whom I have a fairly good idea how she might
re-make me, how on earth am I going to say that to God, whom I’ve never seen,
but have an idea that God’s re-arranging would be anything but minor. And it
wouldn’t have much to do with taking the trash to the curb.
We sing the hymn,
“Have thine own way, Lord. Thou art the potter, I am the clay. Mold me and make
me, after thy will, while I am waiting, yielded and still.” We sing the old
hymn, but do we really mean it? Are you really ready to be clay in God’s
hands? Rather scary, don’t you think?
The word that best
describes prayer is a word we despise: SURRENDER. Nobody likes to surrender. In
business, we don’t surrender our terms, surrender our profits, surrender our
trade secrets, surrender our market position, surrender our customers. And if
you and I are caught in some kind of conflict, surrender is a really bad word. I
don’t want to surrender to you and you don’t want to surrender to me. Kosovo
declared its independence this past week. If they succeed, the Serbs lose. Right
now, it’s a stand-off. Someone has to surrender.
And yet, in prayer,
surrender becomes a holy word. It means to relinquish, to yield, to let go. When
you put something in God’s presence, when you surrender the outcome to God, you
can expect that God will place it back in your hands transformed and it will
never look the same and you may never be the same.
That’s kind of
frightening, isn’t it? Why would we do that?
Emilie Griffen says,
“God is the One who can tell us the reason of our existence, our place in the
scheme of things, our real identity. It is an identity we can’t discover for
ourselves, that others can’t discover in us –the mystery of who we really
are. How we have chased around the world for answers to that riddle, looked in
the eyes of others for some hint, some clue, hunted in the multiple worlds of
pleasure and experience and revelation, some wisdom, some authority to tell us
our right name and our true destination. But there was and is only One who can
tell us this. . .But it is a secret God will entrust to us only when we ask, and
then in God’s own way and time. God will whisper it to us not in the mad rush
and fever of our striving. . .but rather when we are content to. . .put
ourselves in God’s hands" (p. 11).
Huston Smith writes,
“There is within us—in even the blithest, most light-hearted among us—a
fundamental dis-ease. It acts like an unquenchable fire that renders the vast
majority of us incapable in this life or ever coming to full peace. This desire
lies in the marrow of our bones and the deep regions of our souls. All great
literature, poetry, art, philosophy, psychology and religion tries to name and
analyze this longing. . .But the longing is there, built into us like a
jack-in-the-box that presses for release. . .Whether we realize it or not,
simply to be human is to long for release from mundane existence, with its
confining walls of finitude and mortality” (p. 28, Why Religion Matters).
Think of God beyond a
personality. Think of God as that Ground of Love that permeates the entire
universe, purposeful love seeking to work its way wherever there are receptive
hearts. True prayer plants us into that Ground of Purposeful Love.
Jesus took prayer
seriously. He went off into the mountains by himself, early in the morning, to
pray. Jesus told this parable about prayer, “What father among you, if his son
asks for bread, would give him a stone? Or if his daughter asks for fish, would
give her a snake? Or if his child asks for an egg, would give that child a
scorpion?” Jesus concludes, “If a human father responds faithfully to the
request of his child, how much more will God in heaven respond to you?”
What could be more
wrenching than a mother who cannot feed her hungry child? What could be more
desperate than a starving mother who can no longer give milk to her baby? What
is more satisfying to parents than to watch their children eat their fill of
good nutritious food that has been set before them? What kind of parent gives a
child a stone, when she asks for bread? What kind of God would offer you pity
when you need encouragement? What kind of God would offer you shame when you
need forgiveness? What kind of God would offer you guilt when you need a new
beginning?
If we truly pray, we
center our hearts and souls, and open ourselves to God’s Holy Spirit. If we
truly pray, we empty ourselves of agenda, of directives, and allow God to write
across the pages of our lives the Word of Life.
I have opened myself
to God in prayer. I’ve surrendered to God. I have prayed the ultimate prayer,
that Jesus also taught, this time in Gethsemane, “Not my will, but thine.” But
every time, it sobers me and scares me half to death. Because once I surrender,
I’ve relinquished the outcome. I trust and wait to see how God’s Loving Purpose
will unfold. More typically, I surrender and then almost immediately snatch it
back. That Ground of Purposeful Love around me is too amorphous.
I can think of two
areas where I have genuinely yielded to God. One is my vocation. I felt God’s
call to pastoral vocation in college. It was the last thing I wanted to do with
my life, the opposite of every dream I had for myself. After the better part of
a year of struggle, I finally yielded to what God was calling me to
do. Forty-one years ago, and I can’t imagine now having done anything else. Not
because pastoral ministry is better than any other kind of ministry, but because
it was right for me.
And if there’s
another area where I’ve yielded control, that’s been in the churches where God
has called me to serve. I could easily have talked myself out of each of those
calls. Not one of them was logical. In a world enamored with size, I’ve just
moved from a church with 700 members to a church with 100 members. And I am
certain that God was in this call and every call, and that has made all the
difference.
But I could also
recite many more times when I have not yielded, when I’ve held control in my
hands.
And I would guess
that would describe most of us: we’ve yielded at one point or another in our
lives, but we’ve also stubbornly held on to the control most of the time. We
prefer the discomfort of remaining in control to the discomfort of yielding to
God. We may know in our heart of hearts that if we gave something over to God,
something beautiful can emerge.
Still, we fear. We
withhold. We know that if we ask God for a loaf of bread, if we give God our
hungers, God will not give us back a stone. God will meet our hunger. But we
pray as if we live back in the Stone Age.
I can think of no one
who more fervently believed in prayer than Walter Rauschenbusch, the great
Baptist theologian who ushered in the social gospel movement at the turn of the
last century. Rauschenbusch’s writings were read around the world, and the
reason that so many American Baptist churches have peace and justice sown into
the fabric of their cloaks is due to him. Second Baptist Church is
Rauschenbuschian in every sense of the word. We believe that we are called to
address the social evils of our day and to celebrate the signs of God’s Realm
breaking out around us.
And yet,
Rauschenbusch was so much more than an activist. Prayer was a centerpoint in his
life. He was much more fearless in prayer than most of us. He merged prayer and
activism in a way we would do well to emulate. He was completely deaf when he
wrote this prayer I want to share with you. He wrote it in 1918 just months
before his death from cancer:
THE LITTLE GATE TO
GOD
In the castle of my soul
Is a little postern gate
Whereat, when I enter,
I am in the presence of God.
In a moment, in the turning of a thought,
I am where God is.
This is a fact.
This world of ours
has length and breadth,
A superficial and horizontal world.
When I am with God
I look deep down and high up.
And all is changed.
Our world is made
of jangling noises.
With God it is a great silence.
But that silence is a melody
Sweet as the contentment of love,
Thrilling as a touch of flame.
In this world my
days are few
And full of trouble.
I strive and have not;
I seek and find not;
I ask and learn not.
Its joys are so fleeting.
Its pains are so enduring,
I am in doubt if life be worth living.
When I enter into
God,
All life has a meaning.
Without asking, I know
My desires are even now fulfilled,
My fever is gone
In the great quiet of God.
My troubles are but pebbles on the road
My joys like the everlasting hills.
So it is when I step through the gate of prayer
From time into eternity.
When I am in the
consciousness of God
My neighbors are not far off and forgotten,
But close and strangely near.
Those whom I love
Have a mystic value.
They shine, as if light were glowing within them.
Even those who frown on me and love me not
Seem part of the great scheme of good. . .
So it is when my
soul steps through the postern gate
Into the presence of God.
Big things become small.
Small things become great.
The near becomes far and the future is near. . .
When I am in God, I
am in the Kingdom of God
And in the (homeland) of my soul. . .”
(p. 47-48, Walter Rauschenbusch, Selected Writings,
edited by Winthrup Hundson)
Stones
or bread? Which will we receive from God? Who among us has the courage to pray,
and ask? Amen.
