Prayer

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth ;
Engine against th’ Almightie, sinner's towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.

As you can tell from this poem called Prayer, written by a minister and poet called George Herbert, with which I begin this talk, it is not at all easy to explain how Christians understand prayer. Prayer is communication between human beings and God, and this communication comes in many forms, whether spoken or silent, painted or danced or lived, and in the end is much more than I can possibly put into words.

Of course, prayer is not restricted to Christians, or even to people of faith. For many more people than would care to admit it in public, there are sudden moments in life, whether of joy or sorrow, where they may suddenly be impelled to exclaim to a greater power than themselves, ‘Thank you!’ or ‘Help me!’ For Christians, specific formal prayers are part of our public worship; there are also less formal prayers by which we express our own thoughts and feelings to God in the midst of ordinary life; and for some there are the raptures of the mystics, who experience God’s presence in a way words cannot describe.

But coming back from those dizzy heights of prayer, one of the most common understandings in the Hebrew Bible is that prayer is asking God for something we greatly desire to happen. Women with no children pray for a child; kings pray for a victory; the great king Solomon prays for wisdom. The technical word used for praying for something for oneself is supplication; if we ask on behalf of someone else, that is intercession. Because Christians believe that Jesus is perfectly human as well as perfectly God, and therefore understands human need from the inside, we believe he is constantly bringing human needs to God in prayer. It is therefore part of a Christian’s choice in following Jesus to remember before God all those in need: people who need food or shelter or work, who are sick and need healing, who are troubled and need peace, or who are oppressed and need justice. Sadly there is never any shortage of people and situations to pray for in this way, both in public worship and in our private prayers.

Maybe it’s part of human nature, but it’s often easier to ask God for things in prayer than to thank God for needs that have already been met, so Christians, like everyone else, need to practise being grateful to God. Recently I lived through a prolonged power cut, which has made me appreciate the running water, heating and light I normally take for granted. The beauties of nature, the joys of friendship and the pleasure of food also move people in general and Christians in particular to want to express gratitude to God. But while Jewish people have set prayer words for many different occasions, blessing God for God’s many gifts, Christians generally restrict themselves in formal prayer to thanksgiving before meals, which is known as ‘saying grace’, and to public worship, on Sundays and sometimes on other days.

Within that worship the greatest Christian prayer of thanksgiving is said by the minister celebrating Communion, the service in which Christians remember Jesus as he shared bread and wine with outcasts and with his friends before he was betrayed and killed, as well as with his friends after God raised him from death. Another word for that whole service is ‘eucharist’, which is a Greek word meaning ‘thanksgiving’, and the Eucharistic or thanksgiving prayer at the heart of that service thanks God for all God’s gifts and particularly for the gift of Jesus’ presence, experienced through God’s Holy Spirit. Some churches celebrate Communion daily or weekly, some every few months, but for all it is crucial.

But thinking about both intercession and thanksgiving has taken us right into the middle of that communication with God that is prayer. The beginning of every such conversation acknowledges the great difference between the almighty and perfect God and us limited and fallible human beings. And that takes us in two directions of prayer: adoration and confession. God, greater than the greatest we can imagine, is most worthy of praise and adoration, so formal Christian worship often begins, as we approach God in prayer, in describing who God is and the wonderful things God has done. But considering God’s greatness also helps us to remember our own need for God’s forgiveness.

When someone becomes a member of a Christian church for the first time, they are baptised: washed with water, to symbolise washing away all the spiritual dirt of the things they have done wrong and the things they have failed to do right. At that point, Christians will pray, asking for God’s Spirit to strengthen that person. But because we human beings are not yet perfect, even after we have been baptised we go on making mistakes, and we go on needing to admit those mistakes with sorrow in God’s presence, so that we can be forgiven and start again with God and with one another.

So every week in our formal worship prayers approaching God are followed by prayers of confession. In some Christian traditions these prayers have been handed down through generations and exactly the same words are said every week. In other traditions people speak spontaneously to tell God what is on their mind. Whichever way is chosen, though the spoken words of prayer in a service are aids to help worship, the real prayer, the real communication, is happening between each believer and God, and it must be honest. The Hebrew Bible gives us many examples of prayer, especially in the book of Psalms, many of which are addressed directly to God. They contain inspired words of praise, of confession, of thanksgiving and of intercession which we can use to fit our own need. But they also contain expressions of anger, frustration, lament and accusations of betrayal when God seems far away or uncaring. And this is also an important aspect of prayer: God is interested in the whole of our lives, not just the pious part of us, so our prayer should express what we really feel and believe, not what we think we should.

One formal prayer that all Christians hold in common is the Lord’s Prayer, so called because when Jesus’ friends asked him how to pray, this is what he told them to say: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done on earth as in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Save us from the time of trial and deliver us from evil. Ironically, while Jesus warned people against saying prayers for the sake of it, this prayer is so familiar to most Christians that we can be in danger of repeating it without thinking what we are saying.

Much of what Jesus said about prayer is not easy, even for Christians, to follow. He told us we should pray not just for those who love us, but also for those who hurt us; for God is generous in giving sun and rain to wicked as much as to good people, and we should imitate God’s goodness. He also advised his friends not to make a great show of praying in public so everyone would admire them for being so holy. Instead, he said, we should go into our rooms alone and pray, and God, who sees what we do when we’re alone, will know about it if no one else does.

Much of Jesus’ advice about how to pray came in the stories or parables he told. He talked about a family all settled for the night when someone turns up at midnight, asking for a loaf of bread, because a friend of his has suddenly turned up. This visitor won’t take no for an answer and makes the poor householder disturb the whole household in order to give him what he needs and make him go away again. Jesus talked about a crooked judge who didn’t want to settle a poor widow’s law case in her favour, but was persuaded to do so in the end, because she wouldn’t stop nagging. Isn’t God more fair than that judge? he asks. Isn’t God more ready to give us good things than that sleepy householder? Isn’t God more like a good father, someone who will give his children bread and eggs, not stones and scorpions? So don’t give up, Jesus urges us, don’t lose heart – go on praying!

But Jesus also followed the prophets of the Hebrew Bible in reminding Christians that prayer has to be truthful. We can pray in the most beautiful words possible, but if there is injustice outside the church, and particularly if we are involved in it, our prayer is worse than useless. Jesus underlined this with a story about a religious man who’d kept all God’s laws praying alongside a tax collector who’d broken most of them. Because the tax collector was honest and admitted what he’d done wrong, God heard his prayer; but the religious man wasn’t really praying at all, just patting himself on the back for being so good, and he went away unheard. That’s something we religious people, whether we’re Muslim or Christian, need to take into account if we are tempted to think God likes us more than the people outside our communities who don’t do all the things we think they should!

For himself Jesus found prayer vitally important. He went off on his own in the early morning to pray, though his friends or the crowds usually found him before long. But he also prayed to God in public, when he was about to heal someone, when he was thanking God for food and when he blessed children people brought to him. Maybe his own most difficult prayer came the day before his crucifixion, when, seeing what was going to happen to him, he asked God, if it were possible, to take this painful death from him. But having been honest with God, he ended his prayer by submitting his own will to God’s will.

So Christians use the prayers of the Hebrew Bible, follow Jesus’ example and teaching in prayer, and ask for God’s Spirit to pray in them when they don’t know what or how to pray. Since the time of Jesus, however, though Jews and Muslims have kept to regular prayer times, there is no one way, beyond regular Sunday worship, that most Christians have been expected to regulate their prayer life. Monks and nuns, Christians who have chosen to live in community and centre their lives on God, have developed patterns of spoken and silent prayer at set times throughout the day, and ministers from some Christian churches have followed that tradition. But going back to my original definition of prayer as communication with God, prayer is not only a matter of words.

Imagination can be a form of prayer, as we listen to one of the stories about Jesus and wonder what our part in the story might might have been, if we had been there. Painting can be a form of prayer: the ikons of the Orthodox Church are meant to be windows onto heaven. Even dance can be a form of prayer – as I do not need to tell Muslims, from whose tradition whirling dervishes come! St Benedict, the founder of one worldwide community of monks, who lived in the sixth century of the Common Era, believed that all human work, when it is done to please God, can be prayer. The Benedictine monks and nuns who still live by the rule of life he wrote spend their days working in the fields and praying in the chapel, and see both as part of their prayer.

I should like to end this talk by sharing with you again the poem with which I began, with its pile of images trying to describe what prayer is all about. For prayer is so much more than I or anyone can express; but maybe poets like George Herbert get close.

St. Andrew's United Reformed Church, Sheffield