Prayer

Seventeenth Sunday, 1995

Prayer

The first and third readings today, clearly, are directed to the same subject: namely, the matter of prayer. So I'd like to say something about prayer today and to say something that, in a sense, goes counter to what's implied in that bargaining between God and Abraham. The point of that is to make absolutely clear the absolute mercifulness of God and the persistence of Abraham, of course. But it is this "persistence" that I'd like to look at a little more because that seems to be the clear sense of what Luke is dealing with here too. You know: "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again" is kind of a folkloric translation of that. But I think there's a real misconstruction of what prayer is and, above all, how prayer actually functions ... And that model, it assumes that I have this thing that I want, you know, and here's God, so I keep appealing to God until I get what I want. And persistence means me keeping a steady eye on what it is I want and invoking God over and over again until I wear God out, basically, that seems to be the sense here, and God just sort of relents and says: "O.K., I give up ... And there are a couple of other places in the Gospel that would suggest this -remember "the importunate widow," the one of "justice and the unjust judge ... "

But I don't think that's what prayer really means. And I take as my rubric for every understanding of prayer that extraordinary passage in the Letter to the Romans ... Well, Paul says, shockingly: "Well, we don't know how to pray .... we don't know even what to pray for ... " But the Spirit, with what we phrase "unutterable groanings," speaks to us. And so I'd like to say it's within that understanding that we can start to talk about "persistence." In other words, Paul suggests a quite different model of what prayer is. It's not just me keeping my eyes, umm .... straight ahead on this goal in some kind of single minded fashion and holding on until I get what I want ... But, rather, I think what happens in the life of prayer is what I changes ... It's precisely in the process of seeking God, which is, of course, what prayer is really supposed to be: "Your Kingdom Come..." -if we take that as the absolute end of prayer... In the very process of seeking God there is a clarification ... of who I am..., of who God is .... and, therefore, what really is useful for me. What do I really need?

And so, I think you have a quite sharply different notion of prayer. It's not just a kind of exercise, you know -I go and lift weights for half an hour or forty-five minutes every day until the muscles get big enough, to the right size. Now it's rather in the very process of praying .... there is a transformation of who I am and what I want .... of the goal itself ... And I think that is really important because if you listen to a lot of Christian rhetoric, as opposed to, let us say Buddhist spirituality .... these guys have, or seem to have, by the way they talk, all kinds of clear and distinct ideas of the way things ought to be, how life ought to go, what I need .... you know, what it means even to love ... That's the ultimate thing that we're talking about, hunh? What does it mean to love? Well, I don't think it's all a sense of praying ... And that provides, probably, the best analogy for what I'm trying to say about prayer: that you only find out what loving is by loving and, in the process, your whole notion of what love is gets transformed ... So it's, you know .... we have totally wipe out this notion of some kind of mercantilism..., religious mercantilism .... you know .... like: "I get what I pay for from God." No, no, it's not like that at all. The issue is, rather, a transformation of what I think I need. A transformation, rather, of who I am ...

This brings us to the second reading, of course, wherein the disciple of Paul is talking about Baptism, we're going to have a Baptism momentarily .... and we might use that as a way of getting to this because -What's going on in Baptism? Presumably we are saying this child is being taken out of a world in which there are certain expectations, certain notions of what's real or what's valuable and put in a totally, or, if not totally, at least radically different world ... That's what we mean by "rebirth." That's what we mean by being "buried with Christ" and all that business. Initially, as some of you may remember, we've had Baptisms in which the baby was buried in a fish tank .... and the reason that people wanted it done that way is because that's how it was originally done .... you know, people were really submerged. Well .... we don't need to be quite so graphic or literal -we will not be today. But the significance is certainly true, we, not just Mike or Karen and their family, but we are to provide an alternate world .... alternate expectations .... alternate assessments of what's real and valuable .... and we initiate that process by this ritual. And we can back that up with the Baptism of this little girl which is going to happen right now ...

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