Weekly Devotion
At a time when I very desperately needed some comfort and strength, someone told me, “I will pray for you.” It was a good things to hear. But her next words were, “and I’ll get my team of prayer warriors in place for you.”
Now, maybe it’s my liturgical background and my very laid-back disposition that makes me wary of that phrase. I have to admit, though, that I’ve never quite liked that phrase. “Prayer warrior” implies a kind of combat that seems foreign to the piety that’s shaped me, the piety that, truth be told, is part of my own daily practice. You see, I was raised in a household in which the classic painting of the elderly man seated at the dinner table leans over his simple bowl of soup, hands folded and eyes closed, saying a quiet prayer before dinner. That painting, incidentally, hangs in our congregation’s fellowship hall, and no doubt has shaped the piety of a lot of you, too.
That painting, and really, much Christian piety, teaches us to think of prayer as a kind of passive, reflective activity. Maybe it’s even more like a non-activity in which we simply rest in God’s peace. I want to stress that this idea of prayer certainly has Biblical foundations and theological coherence. Jesus does tend to go apart into places we can only assume were more peaceful and calm, in order to pray.
We, too, of course, need that peace, that calm center in the midst of our lives. Father Tom Francis, and Travis Bryan and Evelyn Brown, out at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit here in Conyers, certainly are mindful of this. They get together the first Tuesday of each month to practice “centering prayer,” in which they seek to quiet their minds and rest in the Triune God’s peace. In the midst of our the world’s uproarious frenzy, those of us who are often so complicit in its violent turbulence, ought to claim such peace.
However, I’m beginning to think that I myself might need a bit more military discipline in my own life of prayer. In the gospel lesson in this week’s lectionary, Luke 11:1-13, Jesus seems to advocate an almost ridiculous determination in our acts of prayer. Prayer, Jesus says, is like a midnight errand to borrow some bread from a neighbor. Assuming that, like most people, the friend is comfortable in bed and does not want to get up, especially for something as paltry as a loaf of whole wheat, Jesus tells us that the way to get it is to keep on knocking.
When I was in college, I lent a textbook to a friend of mine. It wasn’t a book I was particularly keen on studying. However, I did have an assignment to complete. As was my tendency as an undergraduate, I did not realize this fact until around midnight the night before the work was due.
Needless to say, I was determined to obtain my book. So I walked the staircase up to my friend’s room, just above my own room, which let out onto the dormitory porch. I knocked on his door for five solid minutes, but to no avail—he was definitely not in. In desperation, I looked out the dorm’s hallway window onto the sloped roof of the porch just outside. I climbed out onto the roof and crept across it and tested the window of my friend’s room. Open! All was well, and having retrieved my book, I was headed toward the door. Just then, I heard the sound of a key in the lock, and as the door swung open, there I was standing in the hallway’s shaft of light, red-handed in my desperate act of recovery. What followed is probably still one of the more embarrassing moments of my life.
But I think there’s an analogy here to the kind of bantam beggary, as a friend of mine puts it, that Jesus calls his disciples to have in prayer. It’s not so much that God is like the sleeping friend from whom we want to borrow some bread, and with whom we must beg in order to get what we want. Instead, I think that the point of Jesus’ story is that what God has is so good, and our need is so desperate, that prayer ought to be pitched in an embarrassingly insistent key. Think about it. A good many of the prayers recorded in scripture are shouted out franticly. Not because God wouldn’t hear them otherwise, but because they needed Him and they knew it. The prophets, the apostles, even Jesus himself, prayed with almost reckless need.
Why is that not the way we most often (or even more than occasionally) pray? Well, it’s awfully easy to forget our own failings and our own needs. With new means of communication springing up all the time—telephones, e-mail, instant messaging—it’s easy to get distracted. Television, radio, the internet, and our own restless hearts create a seemingly soothing cocoon into which we can retreat and ignore our spiritual hunger. In our own denomination, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), nearly two-thirds of our members are absent from worship each week. When we distance ourselves from the Word of God and the body of Christ, it’s not too far-fetched to imagine losing sight of our need.
I am becoming warily grateful for those occasions on which God brings me to my knees in full realization of just how needy I am for His grace. I am cautiously glad for the reminders of my sin, which convict me and drive me to search for relief. In my life of prayer, I am slowly becoming aware that my words always come up short in expressing the truest and deepest desires of my heart—I need the “Spirit, [Who] intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”
Prayer is a bold act—some might even say foolhardy. We can never know with absolute certainty (on this side of the last day, that is) whether God is listening. But thanks be to God for the confidence that Christ calls us to in prayer.
Though I will always be a liturgical Lutheran in my piety, I am grateful for those who teach me that prayer is indeed something to be approached with the same kind of determination a soldier must steel himself with before battle. Luther said it well: we are beggars. And our gracious God has promised to supply us with all we need. All we have to do is ask.
Peace & Grace,
Pastor Nathan Hilkert
