American Church in Paris -Sermons

American Church in Paris - Sermons

ACP HOME - Sermon Archives - Past ACP Sermons

Sweet Hour of Prayer?
by Dr. Tina Blair

September 28, 2003 - Christian Education Sunday

TEXT: James 5:13-20

© 2003 Tina Blair

When I was a little girl, I learned to pray. I learned to pray because my mother always misplaced things, like her keys or her cigarettes, and there was no peace for any of us until all 6 of us were up and hunting. So I started praying, "Please, God, help us to find them!" And we would. If I didn't pray, it seemed to take a lot longer. So I started believing that God answered prayer. But, as an adult, I have to ask, "Was that prayer? Did God answer it?" (And I'm afraid that this is the kind of prayer our daughter may be learning, since Marvin and I lose our keys so often!)

I know of many children, who, when going through a period of terrible nightmares, comfort themselves and manage to sleep because of the nighttime prayer: "Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray thee Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray thee Lord my soul to take." The prayer becomes a good luck charm: If they say it, they believe, they won't have nightmares. If they don't say it, the nightmares will return. As an adult I have to ask: is this really prayer? Or is it a good luck charm?

A teenager in my church youth group in California, who had very active church parents, suddenly stopped going to worship and youth group. I found out eventually that he no longer believed in God. All his life he had been instructed that God answers prayers, so when his beloved grandfather was very ill, he prayed for Grandpa's recovery. But Grandpa died. This young man was hurt, angry and confused. As adults we need to ask: what do we believe about prayer? What are we teaching our children about prayer?

The text from James which we have heard this morning speaks to the power of prayer. What kind of power is it? Why do Christian communities center themselves through prayer? And what do we do with the troublesome questions raised by the experiences of the children I have just mentioned: does God answer some prayers and not others? Can God be made, through fervent prayer and faith, to heal some, save others, all while another set of people get sick, get killed in accidents, or die lingering deaths? We will need to go beyond this passage in James and look at the Gospels, Jesus' life, and the experience of the great saints who lived lives of prayer, in order to begin to delve into these deep questions -- questions we can only skim the surface of today.

James calls the community to pray: pray when you suffer, pray in praise when you are cheerful. Pray when you are sick, with the elders of the church. Pray, confess your sins, in order to forgive, be forgiven, and be healed. What is prayer in this text? It is a communal act: even when you are alone, you pray as part of a community. What is at the heart of Christian community? Confession of sin and forgiveness. This act of repentance and communal forgiveness is so powerful that it has the ability to heal to sick, in spirit and at times, in the body.

This understanding of confession, repentance and forgiveness comes from our Jewish roots. This weekend our Jewish sisters and brothers have begun their High Holy Days with the celebration of the New Year, Rosh Hashana. This marking of the new year, continues for 10 days until the most holiest of days, Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. On the Day of Atonement Jews ask God to forgive them and thereby grant them a new start for a new year. In order to prepare to ask for forgiveness, the people are given 10 days in which to be reconciled to all those with whom they have quarreled or to whom they have caused hurt. This is just what Jesus was talking about when he teaches his disciples to pray, "Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors." He then adds, "For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you." (Mt.5 12, 14). Several rabbis have told me, "We know God is loving and gracious and will forgive us so we only need one day to pray to God; ah but humans are much more difficult! So we need ten days, and more, for them!" For the Jewish people, as we see throughout our scriptures, confession is communal: the people gather together to confess individual sins and sins of the community and the nation.

The understanding of the centrality of confession and forgiveness is what leads us Christians in our worship to begin with the prayer of confession, the affirmation of forgiveness and the act of reconciliation in the passing of the peace. This is a central act of healing our souls and our bodies. It is the act that allows us to start anew with each other and with God and to become one family, one community of God. The prayer of confession and the acts of reconciliation restore relationships: recreating a healthy relationship with our loving Parent and with our sisters and brothers in the family of God and allowing us truly to be a covenant community, Christ's body, on earth.

Did our prayers of repentance change God's mind? Probably not: God is always eager to forgive, the Bible tells us. But it changed us, opening us up to God's grace and love that come to us before we love ourselves and each other. This love allows us to love and forgive. And some of us need forgiveness, love and grace so badly that when we are given these godly gifts, our sick bodies cry out in grateful relief and are healed.

The goal of prayer is to strengthen our relationship with God. You already know that, and therefore you understand why prayer must be at the heart of all that we do as a Christian community, especially at the heart of our Christian education with children, youth, and you adults. This goal is why our gifted Sunday School coordinator, Denise Dampierre, has organized ways for the teachers to pray and be prayed for. What does such prayer, set within the praying community do? It opens teachers and students to be in relationship with our loving and forgiving God.

One of the great Christian pray-ers of the 20^th century was the Catholic priest and Yale professor, Henri Nouwen. For him at the heart of prayer is the understanding that God is love. God gives us this gift of loving us, of calling us "Beloved." "You are my beloved," God says to us in a world that calls us ugly, incompetent, poor, unworthy. You are loved and cherished. And all God wants in return is for us to love God in return. Nouwen reminds us that every day God asks us, "Do you love me?" just at Jesus asked Peter, and we are given a chance over and over to say "yes" or to say "no."

But how can we hear God's question, how can we answer with a "yes," how do we know how to answer that "yes" if we are not in relationship with God? Can we have a conversation if we never talk or never listen? Or are we having a relationship where all we do is talk with a list of our wants, and never listen? Or perhaps the problem is the reverse: we wait around for a letter on God-stationery telling us what to do, but we do not engage in conversation?

Prayer, you see, is the ongoing conversation of two lovers, God and human being. And lovers communicate with more than words: they breathe each others names; they gaze into each other's face; they hold and squeeze hands. Oh but our lover, God in Jesus Christ, is not visible, we think. How can we communicate? The Christian tradition has found classical methods to strengthen prayer (which we do not have time to explore in depth at this time). And these methods grow out of an understanding of prayer that is even more complex.

You see, when we take time to be with God -- just as we would for a spouse or a child we love, be it for 5 or 50 or 500 minutes -- we not only enter into a conversation, we begin to be transformed by that conversation. In this focused time we enter into the silence of simply being, being ourselves, unmasked, as we truly are, recognizing for a short while the Holy Creator who has created us, listening to the human-divine One who redeems us, breathing with the Holy Spirit who guides and supports us. St. Ignatius tells us to "imagine the reality of the divine as fully as possible so that we can slowly be divinized by that reality." That is the goal of prayer, to be sanctified or divinized, in other words, to become remade into the image of Christ. St. Paul says it best: "I live now not with my own life but with the life of Christ who lives in me" (Gal 2:20).

A sweet and charming picture, is it not? You and God, in divine communion. Ah, but that is not how it really is. The "sweet hour of prayer," that many of us grew up singing about, can become an uncomfortable, uneasy time. For prayer, you will recall, begins with confession and repentance; it is always a practice within a community. And so the time of prayer, after the mind tries to escape by letting every stray thought take over, can become a ruthless time of self-examination, a vision of one's own inadequacies and faults. But remember, we are conversing with our Beloved, who can lead us forward to forgiveness and self-acceptance. Except then, watch out! Our Beloved will ask us The Christ Question, "Do you love me?" And if we say, like Peter, "Yes, Lord, you know I do," then we will be told "Feed my sheep." And there we are, called to do things we never expected or thought we were able to do: to teach, to clothe the naked, to invite the unacceptable, the homeless, the outcast into our lives; to be open to brothers and sisters in Christ who see Jesus differently from us, who pray and worship in a different way - sisters and brothers in Christ whom we do not even like, all gathered to worship and minister together. The answer,"Yes, my beloved, you know I love you," leads us out into places and events we never thought to be a part of, to work that will challenge us, scare us, sometimes exhaust us, but will ultimately honor and reward us with sanctifying, mature, and joyful faith.

So, back to our childhood prayers - was it wrong for us to pray them? To get help with keys or nightmares? No, we know that they were baby steps to better understanding. Yet we failed when it came to my young man who wanted God to let his Grandpa live. We failed to show him that God never abandoned either his Grandpa or him. We failed to teach him that Jesus descended to the dead so that each one of us might never die alone or unloved. We failed to teach him that God is the God of life, even in death. We failed to teach him the conversational and divinizing relationship that prayer gives us with our God. Our education was inadequate.

What then is Christian Education? As Greg reminded us last week, to educate means "to lead out." In religious education, we lead children, youth, and adults out into a deeper loving relationship with the Love at the heart of creation. This is the work of the whole educating community: of teachers who know themselves beloved and who risk a relationship with God through prayer; of parents and of believers in community who model a life of prayer as described by James; in other words, education is the work of a community that prays for and with the suffering, that praises God, that confesses and forgives, that heals.

The educating community shapes the mind by teaching the Bible, that all might know the stories of God's love for us and be challenged to the ministry Jesus calls us to.

The educating community learns from the experience of those who have gone before us, examining the teachings of the faithful gone before us for guidance today. The educating community risks listening to the Beloved in prayer and to be sent to show love, to do ministry, in places we never expected. This community teaches by showing our children and youth how to answer, "Yes I love you" to our loving God whom we know best in Jesus Christ.

Upon reading a book entitled, "The Secret Life of Bees" (by Sue Monk Kidd), I was struck by how much like a colony of honeybees is the church. Honeybee colonies are created around a queen bee, just as the Christian church is created around Jesus. Scientists are only beginning to understand how a bee colony can be so organized in its tasks, all of which seem to be coordinated by the queen. The queen produces a "chemical messenger" called "the queen substance," that stimulates the normal working behavior of the hive. Workers obtain it directly from the queen. Somehow it enables the fabric of bee society to be woven together, through an innate ability to send and receive messages and to decipher information. Isn't prayer like that? It enables us, worker bees, to receive God's love so that we can work together to weave the fabric of loving Christian community within which we teach our children. Go, therefore, and pray, not to have one sweet hour, although God may often grant you that, but to say "yes" to God and to change your life.