Keep Praying

(Even when you don’t feel like it!)

Luke 11:1-13                                                  Rev. Todd B. Freeman

Bethany Presbyterian Church, Dallas                                           July 25, 2004

Last Sunday we looked at the two sides of the same coin of Christian discipleship, as modeled by sisters Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38-42).

One side, the Martha side, exemplifies discipleship marked by action, outreach and service to others – including the church. The other side of discipleship (which the story indicated was perhaps more often neglected) is the part Mary represented when she is found sitting at Jesus’ feet, the position of a disciple, listening and learning from him. This is the side of discipleship where we concentrate on contemplative things like worship, prayer, and reflection. So today’s Gospel Lesson, which includes Luke’s version of what is now known as The Lord’s Prayer, is an appropriate follow-up and next step to last Sunday’s lesson.

Knowing I was going to talk about the topic of prayer today, I began our monthly Session Meeting last Wednesday by asking our church elders to share about their prayer life when they were young, and how they approach prayer now. You may wish to think about this same question. We found there were remarkable similarities, and many mirrored my own experience of prayer.

Growing up in the late 50's and 60's, I came from a fairly typical Midwest suburban household - the kind that attended church every Sunday (whether we wanted to or not). We weren’t an overly religious family - not a lot of God-talk - but we always said grace before we ate the dinner meal together (that was back in the days when entire families actually ate dinner together). We rotated saying grace between the four of us kids. Being Presbyterian, we always prayed rote memory prayers, of course. There were two of them, and we had the option which one to recite. One of those was, "Father, bless us for this food we take, and bless us all for Jesus sake, Amen." And yes, it was usually said in that all-too-common sing-song sort of way.

On Sunday mornings, when Mom always fixed a nice breakfast before church, Dad would lead us all in The Lord's Prayer. The only other time I heard my Dad pray when I was young was at the Thanksgiving and Christmas meals.

Each night, until we got too cool to say our prayers with Mom at bedtime - it was mostly always with Mom - we each said the world famous, "Now I lay me down to sleep…" prayer. On rare occasions I'd follow that up with the "Bless Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa…" then list all the relatives I could think of. I always felt extra special when I added something to the prayer in my own words. Not to my surprise, my young nieces and nephews all pray the same way at bedtime today.

And except for prayers at church and listening to the always-too-long pastor’s prayer, that pretty much sums up my prayer life as a child.

Then came high school. I'll never forget a time at a Sr. High Youth Group meeting one of the older youth said we should say a prayer of thanks for the popcorn we were about to eat. I remember thinking how silly that was, after all it wasn't a meal or anything big like that - it was just a snack. Then everything really went tilt when one of our adult sponsors added that she even prayed when she ran the vacuum cleaner! I don’t remember her name, what she looked like, or anything else about her. But I’ll never forget that comment. I vividly remember thinking, Why in the world would anyone pray during an unreligious task like vacuuming?

Weren't prayers just for meals, bedtime, and at church - or maybe in an emergency like when really scared or in bad trouble?

That opened up for me the idea that any time is a good time for prayer. It also led me to see the difference from being religious and being spiritual.

Having moved from Chicago area to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, I got involved with that hyper-religious, evangelical group of high school choir friends that you have heard me talk about from time to time. I started attending morning prayer meetings in a small room off the school library. (I think they ban prayer meetings in schools these days.) Needless to say, my prayer life took on a totally different dimension. That was the beginning of a period in my life that lasted for many years. I call it the "name it and claim it" years. It wasn’t until I entered seminary that I realized that that kind of belief in prayer is both unbiblical and based on misguided theology.

How were you taught to pray? Do you still pray the same way today? If not, what's different? If you’re like myself and most of our elders, we pray differently than we did when we were young.

With countless thousands of books written on the subject of prayer, you'd think it would be easy for a preacher to come up with a sermon on this topic. But that's the problem, there are a million different approaches and things to say about prayer. So, in keeping with one of my favorite approaches to preaching, I plan to say something a bit beyond the traditional teaching.

For you don't need me spending too much time telling you what you already know. Things like:

• prayer is an important element in our journey of faith, for it reminds us of both our nearness to God, and our dependence on God;

• also, prayer is more about being in relationship with the Divine than it is about the precise language or the time or place of prayer;

Instead, I want to share with you this morning a story about a devout Christian whose prayer life went from being the focal high-point of her faith to near meaningless, and what she learned from that. The woman is Renita Weems, who grew up in what is still referred to as the Black Pentecostal tradition. She is a religious author, an Old Testament scholar and professor at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, and an ordained parish minister.

She tells her remarkable story in her 1999 book, Listening for God: A Minister's Journey Through Silence and Doubt (Simon & Schuster). A comment from the inside cover of the book jacket states:

How does one who is supposedly an expert on prayer and spiritual disciplines admit that there are times when her own heart is unable to get through to the God she recommends to others? How does a minister admit that she hasn't heard from God in a very long time?…

Her experience is universal; she speaks to all who are beyond the first blush of the spiritual journey, who after a period of dramatic awakening feel as though they have hit a brick wall and their prayers have been met with silence.

I will admit that I have been where Rev. Weems has been. And a bit to my surprise, some of our elders shared somewhat similar experiences. As it turns out, it’s not at all uncommon.

There are several of us in this congregation with either evangelical or conservative theological roots who have found that our way of communicating with God has changed over the years, especially as our own theology and spirituality has become more progressive. If you fit into this category, then this sermon is especially for you. In the Preface to her book, Rev. Weems begins:

Some years ago when, as a minister, I was feeling that God had withdrawn from me and I was going through what I can only describe now as a spiritual breakdown - questioning seriously my belief in God, prayer, religious texts, and rituals to such a degree that I couldn't bear to talk or read about anything having to do with the sacred - it never dawned upon me to retire my clergy stole and leave the ministry. Even though I couldn't recall the last time I'd felt anything faintly resembling religious awe or spiritual ecstasy, I never stopped praying… I continued to be a minister…

Two things kept me afloat during that period in my life. One was my own honesty. I tried at first to lie about what was going on inside my heart, acting as though everything was fine, pretending as a minister and writer that I had an active prayer life and enjoyed intimacy with God. That lie went on for far longer than it should have…

Eventually I gave up pretending, however, and confessed to God - loudly, bitterly, sometimes in blasphemous tones - that it felt as though I had been seduced out into waters where God knew I couldn't swim, and had been left abandoned, without a life jacket, to flail about and figure out for myself how not to drown. After what felt like years of flailing about, when I saw that I wasn't going to drown, I began to calm down and stop fighting the waters. I continued to protest to God that things weren't the same between us, but by now my complaints were less bellicose. I accepted the silence as a new way of communicating with the divine and learned to perceive God in my life in new, amusing, laughable, glorious ways. I am convinced that my honesty is what kept me available to the miracles of grace that began popping up all around me.

The second thing that kept me from walking away from God was the honesty of others who'd survived similar periods in their spiritual journey. Had it not been for the stories of other women and men who have endured seasons of silence between God and themselves, I would have felt hopelessly alone…

[My journey acts] as proof that even seasoned explorers of the soul can get lost and disconsolate along the way. But no matter how lonely, quiet, and unpredictable the journey, with patient listening holy silence can become music. Retracing my painful steps along this journey helps to remind us all of the ups and downs of intimacy with God and to encourage us along the way each time we feel we should be further along in the journey and have been thinking about turning back…

I have been reluctant at times to admit out loud that mine was a journey of growth spurts followed by what felt like long periods of hushed decay. For years I thought something was wrong with me… I didn't know that just because I'd lost my enthusiasm for the spiritual journey didn't mean that I'd lost my way on the spiritual journey.

I had to fall in and out of love with God a thousand times before I finally figured out that it was all right to fall in and out of love a thousand times, that just because God is silent doesn't mean that God is absent. I had grown so accustomed to believing in a God who spoke thunderously and in spectacular ways that I didn't think I could survive when it came time to stumble in divine silence. Just as noise cannot always be helped, neither is God's silence always our fault. It is just part of the journey. I had to learn how to pay attention. I had to learn how to perceive the divine in new ways and in new places. I had to stop peeping behind altars for epiphanies and learn to let the lull between epiphanies teach me new ways for communicating with God, for reverencing the holy, and for listening for God.

Well, for all of you who may be struggling with your prayer life, or are experiencing a similar case of divine silence, I hope that these words bring some comfort, hope and understanding. If that is the case for you, I echo Renita Weems’ advise to keep on praying anyway.

For even if we don’t have a good handle on what communicating with God is all about, I think we all can say that we instinctively believe that there is something to this thing called prayer.

And let me make a special request of each of you, as I did to our elders. Pray for this congregation and our ministry efforts. For deep in my soul, I believe that our future depends on those prayers!

Amen.