Need for Prayer

Homily by Susan Whitlow

Collect for July 21, 2024
 
Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

If you ask Episcopalians what we like most about our denomination, many of us would say it’s the liturgy. Whether we’re cradle Episcopalians or just got here last Sunday, whether it’s Rite I or Rite II, we love the Service. Week after week – or if you’re really good – day by day, we turn to the Book of Common Prayer for familiar words that draw us into a space of comfort and stability. When we gather together, we sing hymns and recite creeds, listen to the readings and the homily, but throughout our worship, the thread that holds our tradition together is prayer. No wonder we have a prayer book.

I have to say that my favorite prayer is the one we pray post communion. It has so many inspirational phrases: you have graciously accepted us as living members … you have fed us with spiritual food … send us into the world … grant us strength and courage … to love and serve … with gladness and singleness of heart. Boy, they just don’t write ‘em like that anymore.

But it’s a good thing they did (they being Thomas Cranmer and others) because I can’t make this stuff up. The disciples couldn’t either. You may recall that the Lord’s Prayer in Luke is preceded by one of the disciples asking, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And so, Jesus did. And we continue to say the prayer he taught, as if it were our own. We have made it our own and we know it by heart.

A friend of mine who is a deacon in his Baptist church was charged with giving the offertory prayer one Sunday. Before the service began, one of the matrons of the congregation checked on him. “William, you got your prayer ready?” “Yes, ma’am, I’ve got it right here,” he said, patting the left side of his chest. “That’s good. That’s where it should be – in your heart.” Of course, William exactly wasn’t patting his heart. He was patting his jacket pocket that held a 3X5 card with the words to his prayer on it.

I’m kind of like William – I like my prayers written down. Even my prayer list is really a list. In fact, it’s a two-column list, so that when I pray, I can use this mnemonic device to remember the names better by which column they’re in. This may be too much information, but in case your prayer list is imaginary, it might make you feel better if I tell you I didn’t use to have one. Friends would tell me their troubles and I would tell them I would put them on my prayer list. There was no list, but I justified saying it because I rationalized that it was a figure of speech that meant, I’m sorry about what you’re going through and I care about you.

Then someone thanked me for praying for him! Victor Vula was a prospective student from Myanmar when I worked in the Admissions Office at Union Presbyterian Seminary. We had a lengthy period of correspondence by email because he had a lot of trouble getting his visa approved and each email would end with his asking me to pray for him and my replying that I would. Finally, he got to Richmond and he gave me the credit for pleading his case to God. I didn’t even plead his case to the State Department! So it was that shame that caused me to actually start praying for people. By the way, Victor went back to Myanmar after his study and began a Christian school with next to no resources and it is thriving today. I still pray for him.

You don’t actually want to be on my prayer list. It’s hard to get off. For years I told my friend Hazel Byrd that she was the first name on my prayer list. Then when she died, after 100 years of a life that blessed many, many people, I couldn’t start my prayer without saying her name first. So now I just thank God for Hazel’s life and if there are other people on the list who don’t need my prayers anymore, I do the same for them.

You see how a prepared prayer can be a help. Today, like most Sundays, Kaki began with prayer and then followed with another, the Collect. A collect collects us, the congregation, in prayer; the priest speaks the words but we all pray collectively. It also collects other parts of the service in prayer. There are themes in today’s collect that you find in today’s readings. In the Old Testament, God wisely argues against needing a temple, in contrast with David’s shortsighted desire to build one. In the Epistle, God has already reconciled Jews and Gentiles but the Ephesians fuss about their differences anyway. In the Gospel, Jesus is shepherd to those in need of protection, teacher to those in need of instruction, and healer to the sick. In each case, God’s wisdom and compassion are distinct from human ignorance and weakness.

If you look at today’s collect – go ahead, you can really look at it (I’ll give you a minute) – you’ll see it begins with an Address or Invocation, followed by a Divine Attribute. “Almighty God” is the invocation. The divine attribute is “fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking.” Next is a Petition: “have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask.” Notice the connection. The petition contrasts our frailty to the wisdom that knows more about what we need than we do. The petition further reflects on God’s nature, by praying that God show compassion and mercy in giving us what we need. The petition doesn’t ask just for our sake, but rather it goes on to describe God’s wisdom as a fountain, showering compassion and mercy on us petitioners. The end of the collect is a Doxology that fits the tenor of the preceding plea: “through the worthiness of your son….” In other words, we are not worthy, but Jesus our intercessor is.

Between the petition and the doxology, another element in a typical collect is the Aspiration or the Result of the Petition. It’s a formula that I hear as, so that. For example, two collects for Easter read, “grant us so to die daily to sin [so] that we may evermore live with him;” or, “stir up your church [so] that we may worship you in sincerity and truth.” The aspiration in today’s collect is not voiced, but one can make a case that it is implied. “Give us those things for … which we dare not … cannot ask” so that we may rely on you and not on ourselves.

Why do we pray so much? Or why do we pray so little? Why do we pray? We could be here all day answering those questions. Sunday School teachers tell young children that we talk to God when we pray. Sages say God talks to us, especially when we’re silent and listening. One of the revisers of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, Leonel L. Mitchell, proposed that we don’t pray because we believe, but rather we believe because we pray. His 1991 book entitled, Praying Shapes Believing, develops the thesis that our thoughts, feelings, and behavior are formed by our prayer life. We do, of course, pray as a function of what we think and feel and how we live, but his point is that our thoughts, feelings, and actions are influenced by our prayer life. Practicing prayer, like practicing anything else, improves proficiency.

Consider the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. The two went up to the temple to pray and “the Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner!’” Luke says that Jesus “told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt,” and Jesus concluded that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” [Luke 18: 9-14]

Now I’m not trying to improve on Jesus, but it’s possible to look at this parable from the viewpoint of what we’ve been considering about the benefit of prayer. Perhaps the Pharisee’s prayer does not so much reflect his arrogance as his arrogance reflects his poor prayer life. Indeed, Jesus says that the tax collector, the one who acknowledged his sinfulness in his prayer, “went down to his home justified.” He went home after his prayer, righteous in God’s sight.

There’s a podcast called This American Life by Ira Glass. It’s also a radio program, which is good, since I’m old-school. Recently one of his producers told the story about his Chinese father who had come to the U.S. to study at the University of Oklahoma. He was met at the airport by the campus chaplain who showed him great kindness. Long-story-short, the young student became a Christian, married, and reared his children as Christian. He stayed on at the university as a professor and his welcome to a new country was a salient part of their family background. Then the young man learned this important prelude to his father’s life in the United States.

The night the father had celebrated his acceptance to the university was the same night that the protests at Tienanmen Square had taken place. He had gone to bed without participating in the protests but he woke up to a different world that required he procure a new passport. That process needed to be initiated by his employer, but he was no longer employed because he had quit his job in anticipation of his move. In his frustration and anguish, he prayed naturally and spontaneously to a god he didn’t believe in. When things worked out for him to travel as planned, it’s easy to see how he was open to the influence of the kind chaplain. What had been an act of last resort eventually became a way of life.

This anecdote illustrates how prayer seems to be an essential human quality. We are inclined to pray. We want to send our voice out into the universe and hear resonance. We need our prayer to be our own, yet it’s important to know that we are part of a collective group in this desire and practice. When we pray from our hearts, from a 3X5 card, or from the prayer book, our praying shapes believing, and living. Amen