Your Life, A Prayer

Isaiah 55:6-11

Colossians 3:17-4:1

There are many problems facing us when we try to pray.  Most of us don’t feel very good at it.  Almost no one feels cut out for it.  We might imagine that others pray more easily than do we, but it’s probably not true.

We try to pray in the face of a host of hard to answer questions.  When do we pray?  How often?  For how long?  What should be included?  How regimented should I be?  Should prayer be more like a discipline or like a surge of thanksgiving that comes unbidden, a surprise?  Do I need to be in a certain mood to pray?  Do I need to feel something specific about God – thankful or joyful?  Do I need to believe in God?  What if I have serious doubts?  Or what if I’m angry at God – do I pray then?

 

These are good questions.  But I don’t plan to answer them today.  I raise them simply to point out that all of these questions assume that prayer is something that starts and stops.  It assumes that prayer is merely one of the many things we do each day.  One of the reasons we have trouble praying is that we imagine prayer as something we do here and there, now and then.  This makes it almost impossible to hear Paul’s encouragement to “pray without ceasing” (I Thess. 5:17).

But what if prayer isn’t so much about doing as being?  Could your whole life “be” a prayer?  Can you imagine gathering up all the different fragments of your day and seeing the whole thing as a kind of praying?  Well, that’s what our reading suggests.  This morning I want us to imagine our lives as a kind of prayer.

From the very beginning of the church, followers of Jesus end our prayers by saying, “In Jesus’ name,” or “in Christ’s name . . . “ or “in Christ we pray.”  That simple practice of ending our prayers “in Jesus’ name” is an acknowledgment that we pray as people gathered into good news and gladness by Jesus Christ himself.  So I want you to notice that In Colossians 3:17 we’re urged to do everything – in word or deed – “in the name” of the Lord Jesus.  This is the language of prayer. 

But many of you will wonder whether this image of your whole life as a prayer is even helpful.

First, we might object that “prayer” requires us to be conscious and alert that we’re praying.  It requires purpose and intentionality.  We only pray when we’re thinking about God, or when we’re articulating something to God or specifically opening ourselves to listen for God’s voice. 

Well, I think that conscious praying is one kind of praying.  But it’s not the only kind of praying.  After all, we are urged to “pray without ceasing”.  And “praying without ceasing” suggests that prayer is something that can flow across your whole life.  Romans 8 suggests that sometimes the Spirit prays within us with groans too deep for words.  That is precisely NOT articulate praying.  And our reading today urges us to let our whole lives – everything we say and everything we do – be done “in the name” of our Lord Jesus Christ.

But there’s a second worry that might block our efforts to imagine our whole lives as a kind of prayer.  And this worry is probably deeper and stronger than the first.  And here it is: much of what we say and do isn’t very prayerful.  That is – so much of what our lives require of us seems disconnected and unconcerned with the posture of prayer. 

Two large arenas of life that are hard to imagine as ways of praying are family life and work life.  And this is no small challenge.  Most of the time we’re either at home or at work (and for you students, school is your “work” right now!).  Most of our energy is devoted to family ties and relationships at work or school.  Family and work rarely seem to propel us to soaring heights of prayerful bliss and closeness to God.  More often, energies invested at home and work or school leave us exhausted, annoyed, confused, and resentful.  And these moods are not what we typically consider “prayerful.”

Consider family life.  To live well at home is a struggle.  And that’s true whether you’re a child or teenager, whether you’re a single adult, married without or with kids, empty nesters, or older and living alone.  To stay connected to those we live with – parents, children, spouses, extended family – and to stay connected with them in ways that are healthy – this is always a challenge.

Now you will have different challenges than I do right now.  But my life situation is that I’m married to a woman who also works full time, and we have three children.  Though there have been times during our marriage when we lingered long over dinner in a dimly lit restaurant, delighted in one another and free from concerns and worries – I cannot say that this is a good way to characterize our lives right now.  Having a family feels much more like running a challenging small business with a partner with whom you don’t always agree!  And the employees of this small business enterprise are fairly demanding.  They haven’t unionized yet, but I expect that in the near future.

We do find time to remember our dreams and to keep dreaming together.  But those times of delighted joy have to fight for space with balancing a checkbook and deciding what we can and can’t afford to do; with difficult decisions about how to give our children enough freedom that they can flourish with enough clear expectations that they can live wisely; with being kind and patient with each other as a family. 

There are times when our family is all laughter and delight with one another.  There are other times when we’re all at each other’s throats.  Often this happens during the same road trip or vacation.  Sometimes within the hour!  No doubt your challenges will be different than mine, but you will have your own versions of these problems.

Nor is it easy to live well and flourish at work and at school.  The obligations of our daily routines can press us into moods of boredom, indifference, or even anger.  Or sometimes our daily responsibilities might feel alienating to us.  Sometimes our work doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Like all of you, I have earned money in a wide variety of ways over the course of my life.  And I’ve enjoyed much of that work.  Mowing yards, rec department scoring softball and baseball, teaching tennis, teaching drum lessons, grocery store, working in admissions office at Yale – these all worked, made sense for me, paid enough for what I needed.

But there were other work experiences where I earned a check but without much enjoyment.  Pizza hut during college, Sears hardware during college.  These work experiences were ill-fitting.  They didn’t work for me.  Pizza Hut was chaotic and poorly run, apathy and indifference.  Sears hardware required me to talk about tools and fixing things – not my sweet spot.  Now I made very good money for a part-time job, and even transferred to a position in CT when we moved there.  But it didn’t suit me.  There are parts of our work week we enjoy and parts we don’t.

These conundrums of family life and work life might seem far-afield or foreign to the ways we pray.  But they can become rhythms of prayer.

Our text for today - on first reading - doesn’t seem very promising.  Our reading is a set of instructions for what home life and work life look like in the light of the newness we’ve experienced in Christ.  It suggests this – if you want to imagine your whole life as a prayer, it will involve allowing your family life and work life to be a response to the love of God. 

Now notice what a revolutionary breakthrough this entails.  No longer are we parceling out or cutting up our lives into religious and not-as-religious, important and not as important, sacred and worldly.  No, when we grow up in the faith we learn that there aren’t really any divisions in life.  There aren’t any tight boundaries or separate containers.  God claims and loves every square inch of who you are and where you’ve been.  And God invites us to respond in a wholistic way, across all the different parts of who we are.

So three kinds of relationships receive attention: wives and husbands, children and parents, slaves and masters.  Now let’s stop right there for a minute.  What do you notice?  Is every kind of relationship included?  No.  Is this list of relationships exhaustive?  No.  (Friendships, for example, are not specifically mentioned).  But on the other hand, these relationships cover a considerably broad part of our social lives – they include our relationships in the home (our family life); and they include our relationships in the marketplace (our economic lives).  There is more to us than family and work, of course.  But if we can hear some good news for our families and for our work lives, then that’s worth it.

But some of you are already thinking – wait, Jared.  It’s not the range or number of relationships I’m worried about here.  It’s the stuff that’s actually said about these relationships that’s troubling!  It uses language to describe these relationships that make us uncomfortable.  What is set out here as ideal – “submissive” wives and “obedient” children and slaves – this doesn’t exactly sound like something we want for ourselves or for our broader social lives.

On a first reading, this passage from Colossians sounds old-fashioned, antiquated, conservative, and oppressive.  It appears to load all of us with burdensome, suffocating obligations.  It appears to counsel a rigid hierarchy of differences of power – husbands over wives, parents over children, masters over slaves.

The passage sounds “conservative,” in the sense of “conserving” traditional social roles.  It sounds like a blessing on the way things are.  It sounds like Christians are being urged to simply mirror whatever social roles are prevalent at the time.  But to read the passage that way would be to read it uncritically, in a flat-footed way.  Let me point out three angles of interpretation that can help us hear this text as instruction for how to make of our whole lives a prayer.

First, these instructions about household rules and economic relationships were required because the message about Jesus Christ is a message of radical freedom. 

Remember, the letter opens (1:15-20) with a hymn of praise to the risen Christ.  We live and prosper in peace not because of Caesar or the empire, not because of the political or economic systems of the day.  We live and prosper because of the risen Christ. 

And we are wearing the risen Christ as a new set of clothes.  This new way of seeing ourselves and others removes all the old divisions and boundaries.  “There is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all” (3:11).

And so these instructions about relationships are given to help us understand that in spite of all this newfound freedom, we are not released from the struggles of all our social roles in the home and the workplace.  These ordinary arenas of life have not been erased.  They still matter.  They will continue to be the primary ways we express our new identities.

Second, the letter surprises readers by naming traditional social roles but then by immediately setting them in a framework of mutuality. 

Yes, the letter imagines the world as hierarchical – that is, as a top down arrangement of power and importance: God is on top, then men, then women, then children, then slaves.

But that’s not all it says.  It urges those with social privileges to take up new responsibilities.  Husbands are to love their wives sacrificially.  Fathers – seen as the disciplinarians – are not to make life difficult for their children.  Masters cannot do what they wish with their slaves, but are to treat them “justly and fairly.”  These instructions are not a blessing on the injustice of how societies have arranged things.  Instead, they signal a new movement towards fairness, equality, and justice among the followers of Jesus.

Third, the letter reminds us that the social differences between human persons are puny compared to the difference between all human beings and God.

Any attempt by Christians to claim privileges, or status, or power over others will always amount to a betrayal of the good news.  The good news is that God – who is infinitely glorious, whose ways are “far above our ways” (Isaiah 55) – this God has come to us in humility and has freely entered our suffering to the point of death in order to free us from harm.  And now if God has come to be with us from so great a distance, how can we not travel the much smaller distances that divide us from one another?

So now you have been given a little help, I hope.  I pray that it is a bit easier for you to imagine your life as a prayer, your life as a kind of praying.  When you give voice to specific prayers – the prayers of the Psalms, or the Lord’s Prayer, or your own deep cries for help – you are not beginning to pray.  You are continuing to pray.  You are praying without ceasing.  You are simply bringing to the surface the deep undercurrent of prayer that is your life.  And our struggles to live well at home, at work and school – these too are folded into our life-prayers.  Yes, Christ is the fullness of God.  Yes, Christ is our fullness.  But what that looks like for all of us remains the struggle and the joy of prayer.