“Prayers Beautiful and Otherwise”
Romans 8:26-39
Rev. Désirée H. Gold
St. Mark’s United Church of Christ, Baltimore, MD
Sunday, 27 July, 2008
Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
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 You know, I realized the other day that I have been a little too easy on you this past year and a half. So, here it is: Time for a pop quiz! How many of you know how to pray? I want a detailed description of the proper way to pray, a listing of the “perfect prayers” that you use on a daily basis...and you’d better be using all the right words! ...Or else!
...Alright, I’m teasing. Any minister who claims to know the “right” way to pray, and says that her or his parishioners do not, has an ego problem, in my opinion. So, no pop quiz today. That said, let’s talk about prayer.
There are numerous examples of “proper praying,” prayers we have come to admire, and even books on “how to pray correctly.” Of course, we start with scripture: prayers we find in the Psalms and the words we have come to know as the Lord’s Prayer. We have the mystics and theologians of history, such as Teresa of Avila, St. Augustine, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr’s famous “Serenity Prayer” (“God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed,” etc.) has become world-famous.
Then there are the books. I have a book of women’s prayers. I have a book called _Earth Prayers_1, another book called _Prayers for Healing_2, and a number of other books that contain beautifully-worded prayers from the Christian tradition and other faiths. When one enters the religion section of any bookstore, one comes across many books on prayer: how to do it, what to say, why we pray, etc. There’s even a book called _Christian Prayer for Dummies_3!
The prayers of our religious ancestors, some of our modern-day religious leaders, the beautiful words of our scriptures, and the plethora of books and articles that tell us the “right” way to pray (and sometimes what will happen if we don’t pray the “right” way) all add up to a rather daunting deterrent to prayer. “I don’t know how to pray!” we fear. “I can’t think of any pretty words to say to God, so God won’t bother to listen to my prayers. I’d better start just repeating all those pretty prayers I’ve heard...or maybe I shouldn’t bother praying at all. What’s the use? I’m never going to get it right!”
Those of you who maintain active prayer lives might scoff at what I have just said. But these fears are real -- among children, among people new to faith, and perhaps especially among those who are in the middle of a life crisis, who feel their once-deep faith is being shaken by the world that appears to be crumbling down around them.
In preparation for this Sunday, I read an article by a woman who is currently a UCC pastor. She spoke about her Catholic childhood, how she longed to be spiritual and prayed every night, but nothing ever seemed to happen. It seemed to her that God never responded, so she figured she was just praying wrong.4
Sometimes it does seem that way. In the midst of crisis, after bad news or personal struggle, we have difficulty hearing the voice of God. Sometimes we blame that on the ineffectiveness of our prayers. But, as we learn from this morning’s lesson from Romans, God is there.
"The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit..."
In other words, God hears our prayers even when we cannot speak them. The Spirit embraces us, even when we are too weak to embrace the Spirit.
I find these to be some of the most comforting words of scripture. They remind me that, while prayer life is important, and while there certainly are beautiful examples of word-filled prayers, the words of prayer that we speak are less important than the response of God. That response will be present even when words fail us, even when we are so shaken that our prayers get no further than “Oh, God....”
These wordless prayers are the kind that the dying can utter when their minds are no longer coherent. These wordless prayers are the kind that our own shocked selves can utter when we are unable to form words in the midst of crisis. These wordless prayers are the kind that those in the latter stages of dementia can utter when they can no longer find words. They do not, perhaps, carry the poetic language of the mystics. They are not, perhaps, “the right way to pray,” according to some of the books. But the Spirit still intercedes, knowing our prayers before we know them ourselves.
How does this “Spirit intercede” for us? Like that Catholic-child-turned-UCC-minister wrote in the article I read, when we pray we often wait for something tangible to happen.5 Sometimes our prayers are as frivolous as wanting our favorite sports team to win -- in which case we long for God to intercede by helping our team to win! As children (maybe even as adults) we pray that we won’t have to eat brussels sprouts for dinner again! ...So, we expect that we will have a sumptuous meal of all our favorite foods placed before us, in response to our plaintive prayer to God. But (hopefully) more often, our prayers are made out of a deep need for the presence of God. “Gracious God, please help my loved one to get well again.” “Dear God, please be with my friend as she travels. Bring her safely home.” “O God, bring peace to our torn world. Let the war be over.” “Loving God, please let me be able to find food and shelter this week.”
Whether we are praying for the Orioles to win or an end to the war in Iraq, we know that God does not always respond the way we want God to. As we are well aware, the Orioles don’t always win (sigh), we still have to eat our vegetables... and our loved ones do not always get well. Our friends do not always make it safely home. The economy is getting worse. The war isn’t over yet.
If God hears our prayers even when we do not speak them, then how is God responding?! There are those who will say that God has some deeper purpose in not making those we love well again, in making us eat our vegetables, in improving the economy this second, in “causing” the real tragedies that break our hearts. I have difficulty believing that. But what I do believe is that the key to the Spirit’s intercessions for us, in response to our unspoken prayers, lies in the last words of this morning’s scripture passage:
"For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."
Our God does not always respond tangibly to our prayers. Our God does not always respond with the cure for cancer, the end to violence, a Willy-Wonka-magical way of getting vitamins without “leafy greens” -- as much as God might want those things too. But God responds by never leaving us, by ever embracing us, by loving us like no other.
When we are alone, we know that love is the most important thing there is. Knowing that God will not leave us when we are in the midst of our loneliest moments, when we are having “bad thoughts,” when we are shaking with illness or pain. Knowing that God is present with the alcoholic homeless man just as God is there with the alcoholic executive. Knowing that God is present with the ailing family man, just as God is there with the healthy woman who has no family. God intercedes for us, God responds to us, by embracing us with the most important healing implement we know: the kind of love that will not fail no matter who we are no matter what we do, no matter where we are in life, no matter how we pray. Nothing can separate us from that love, from the Spirit’s presence.
Now, let us pray, however we are led to do so.
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1. Elizabeth Roberts and Elias Amidon, ed., _Earth Prayers From Around the World: 365 Prayers, Poems, and Invocations for Honoring the Earth_ (New York: Harper Collins, 1991).
2. Maggie Oman, ed., _Prayers for Healing: 365 Blessings, Poems, and Meditations from Around the World_ (Berkeley: Conari Press, 1997).
3. Richard Wagner, _Christian Prayer for Dummies_ (Indianapolis: Wiley Publishing, 2003).
4. Rachel M. Srubas, “Pray As You Can,” Christian Century, July 12, 2005: 19.
5. Ibid.
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