Can We Really Pray All the Time? (What If Everything Is Prayer?, Week 1)

“Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.”  (Matthew 22:37).

“Pray all the time.” (I Thessalonians 5:17)

  

According to a 2014 Pew Research Center Survey, more than half (55%) of Americans say they pray every day, while 21% say they pray weekly or monthly and only 23% say they seldom or never pray. Even among those who are religiously unaffiliated, 20% say they pray daily.

So most of us pray, even though most of us aren’t really sure we’re doing it right (whatever that means).  We do it out of some sort of ravenous need to express ourselves and connect to some larger force-field.  But we don’t feel very good at it. 

 

This unease with prayer is what makes it funny to watch characters pray in movies.  In the movie Christmas Vacation, Aunt Grace is asked to say the blessing and begins, “I pledge allegiance to the flag . . .”.    In Meet the Parents, Ben Stiller’s character Greg launches nervously into a prayer that gets more awkward the further it goes, “O Lord, three things we ask of thee . . . “.  And in Talladega Nights, Will Ferrell prays to the “eight pound baby Jesus” and thanks him for his fast car, his two boys Walker and Texas Ranger, and his red-hot smoking wife.

Now we can laugh because these people are like us – they have trouble praying in a way that feels honest.  It might appear that these comedies are poking fun at people who pray.  But I think they offer a bit of honesty – that prayer is often hard for us.  So what makes them funny is our own unease with prayer. 

We’re going to be exploring our practices of prayer for the next month.  Some of you will respond with guilt and duty, “Yes, I guess I should be praying more.”  Some of you will politely think to yourself, “OMG, this is going to be an incredibly boring month!  The only thing more uninteresting than praying is TALKING about praying!”  There may be a few who will be excited, because you want to grow deeper in your praying, but you are feeling stuck or blocked.

I can’t promise you that this month’s sermons will be interesting or entertaining.  But I can promise you that if you go on this journey, you will never be able to think about prayer in the same way again.  You will never see it as duty or obligation.  You will never again worry about finding “time” to pray.  You will never again see prayer as something that a few “religious” people are good at.  You will never again experience prayer as if it were like wearing clothes that don’t fit.

But let’s start with a conversation.  I really want to hear from you.  What are some of the things that make praying hard?  What are some of the obstacles you face when you try to pray?

. . .

Okay, so we’ve given voice to some of our reservations, some of the difficulties we have with prayer.  Those are real.  I think some of the things we’re going to talk about in the next month are going to make a big difference in how you experience your life of prayer.

Our readings from Scripture were short.  We’ll keep these two little readings in front of ourselves for the whole month.  The remark from Jesus is an answer to a question he was asked about what’s most important in life.  And Jesus says that nothing is as important as loving God with heart, soul, mind and strength, and loving your neighbor as you love yourself. 

But here we’re using The Message translation, which reads, “Love the Lord your God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.”  And so I want you to catch how large and profound the practice of prayer can be.  The kind of praying we’re talking about this month has nothing to do with a few mumbled words said with eyes closed and head bowed.  Instead, we’re talking about “prayer” as a way of naming how you get all of your life into the way you love God.

Our reading from I Thessalonians 5:17 is usually translated, “Pray without ceasing.”  But I like the freshness and direct simplicity of The Message here too: “Pray all the time.”

I want to invite you to entertain the possibility that we really can “pray all the time.”  And I know it sounds ridiculous and impossible and maybe even undesirable.  So yes, I want us to be honest about that.  But here’s the thing – if “praying all the time” sounds to you like some kind of heavy obligation, then I want to try to change your mind about prayer.  I want to change how you imagine what prayer is.  I can’t spell all that out today, but we can at least begin. 

When we hear the invitation to prayer, perhaps we think of specific prayers we’ve heard.  Table prayers, “Lord Jesus be our guest . . . “  Bedtime prayers.  Prayers for safe travel.  Prayers for healing.  Prayers for deliverance from distress.  Maybe we’ve made use of the Serenity Prayer important to so many 12-Step programs: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”  In worship we pray in call and response; we pray in unison; we confess our sins; we pray the Lord’s prayer; we pray for others; we sing some of our prayers.  So our lives are dotted with lots of prayers, but still, there is no way these specific prayers can happen “all the time.”

So there must be some other form of prayer.  Something like a river of energy and love that runs through our lives in a very deep place – deeper even than our conscious minds and deeper even than what we can put into words.  And so it is quite possible that you and I, and everyone else, are already praying all the time.  Our lives get their energy from a reaching out, a seeking, a questioning, a desire to connect that happens at the very center of who we are.  The real challenge will be for us to allow this deep river of prayer to express itself openly and honestly and naturally in our ordinary rhythms of life.

I do want to at least help you begin to move past one roadblock to praying this morning.  This teaching about prayer is very plain and clear in Scripture, and yet most of us overlook it.  It’s obvious, and yet when I tell you, it might just blow your minds.  Many of you won’t believe me.  You’ll walk away from here saying, “That can’t be true.  That can’t be what praying is.”

OK, so here it goes.  Prayer isn’t a normal conversation between you and God.  Prayer isn’t – as we’ve often heard - like “talking to God”.  I realize that I am challenging one of our most basic assumptions, the model of praying that most of us have used for our entire lives.  But look at the metaphor for a moment.  For a conversation, we need two people on two different sides of the conversation.  I’m on this side of the conversation, and you’re on that side of the conversation.  It’s a back and forth. 

But in prayer, at least as it’s described in Scripture, God is on both sides of the conversation.  God is both “in you” doing the praying and God is the one “to whom” we pray.  And so here is a great mystery: prayer happens in you and you’re caught up in the middle of that praying.  Prayer is the river of energy, of love, of reaching out, that flows through you like a vessel.  You let it flow, let it happen.

In Romans 8, the Apostle Paul writes, “We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit intercedes for us through wordless groans” (v. 26).  Paul’s point is that there is prayer happening in your life at a level deeper than your own consciousness.  This teaching is nothing peculiar.  It is the broad witness of Scripture.  Colossians speaks of the glorious riches of God’s mystery now made known to the whole world: “which is Christ in you, the hope of glory” (1:27).  When Paul was preaching in Athens, he argues that God creates us in a way that makes it easy for us to reach out for God.  And then he quotes a Greek poet, “For in God we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). 

You are not someone who needs to strain your voice trying to get God’s attention.  When you pray you are not starting a conversation with a God who is absent.  God is already nearby, your secret life.  God’s Spirit is always praying in the depths of your life, all day long every day, and every night while you sleep.  And every once in awhile, you become awake and alert to this river of prayer, and you might say “Yes . . . “  Or you might try to put some words to it, to join your own voice to the chorus of praying that is the basic music of your life.  But if prayer is like an unceasing river of our lives, we’ll have to protect it.

There was a time in my life when I lost touch with something that was important to me.  And it had the effect of making my prayers feel obligatory, brittle and untrue. 

When I was young, I played the drums.  And I had dreams of playing in a rock band, with thousands of people cheering as I played.  I got a black Pearl drum set when I was in 5^th grade.  And we formed a band.  My friend John Bennett was the bassist.  We listened to all kinds of music but our favorite band by far was the prog-Rock Canadian Trio known as RUSH.  As far as John and I were concerned, Geddy Lee was the best bassist in the world and Neil Peart was the best drummer in the world.

By the time I reached the 8^th grade, I had spent the lion’s share of my hard-earned lawn mowing money assembling every single one of the twelve Rush albums on cassette (yes, cassette tapes!).  I was paying around $7.99 for each cassette.  So my total investment was $95.88, not including tax.  Do you realize what a profound investment this is for a thirteen-year-old kid?

I don’t remember much about church camp that summer.  But the theme must have been something like “kids who listen to secular rock music rather than uplifting Christian music are probably going to hell.”  In the car on the way back from camp, John and I knew what we needed to do.

Back at home, we laid all our Rush cassettes out on the driveway, took a deep breath, and smashed them with a hammer.  I was hoping that giving up the music I loved was going to turbo-charge my young faith and bring me “closer to the heart” of God (that was a Rush reference, by the way).  Things didn’t quite work out that way.  I was a backslider.  The very next week, I began buying back all the Rush albums.  By then, cassette prices had risen to $8.99.  And so I spent $107.88 (not including tax) buying them all a second time.

Now while I would love to increase your appreciation for Rush, that’s not really the point.  The point is that there is a good chance that at some point in your life some authority figure convinced you that the life of faith and the life of prayer cannot be connected in a natural and organic way to the things you love.  Someone probably taught you that praying has to be hard, has to feel uncomfortable.  And I want to invite you to reclaim who you are, to reclaim the way the river flows through your own life.

If you want to learn to pray, you have to stay connected to yourself.  Because God’s Spirit is in you.  And you are in Christ.  You have to learn to let your prayer connect you ever more deeply to who you are and what you want.  You have to listen to your own life, to your own desires, to your own delights and pleasures.  You have to re-open yourself to those areas of beauty and enjoyment that emerged for you in childhood but that you have since given up.  The first step towards a renewal of prayer is to let God gently lead you to those beautiful places down in your own soul that can sustain you over the course of a life.  Then it’s rather easy.  You’re praying all the time.