On the Gift of Prayer

Psalm 143:1-10; Luke 22:39-46

As we get ready to kick off the Capital Campaign for our church facility, we are organizing a Prayer Contact Team to gather your prayer requests and to pray for God’s blessing on the campaign. We should have the names of those leading the prayer group for you next Sunday.

As we begin our campaign, we want to focus our church family on prayer. The purpose of the Prayer Contact Team is to contact each active household in the church. They will ask people to pray for the church, the leadership, and, individually, our campaign prayer: “God, what do You want to do through me in my neighborhood?”  In addition, they will invite people to share any prayer requests.  We may even host a prayer vigil here at the church sometime in the next three months. Prayer is the lifeblood of any congregation, and we want to ensure we are praying continuously during this time.

You may recall that during the season of Lent, we increased our prayer efforts with our new Prayer Pouches. As you collect others' prayer requests and are encouraged to pray for them during the week, the hope is that prayer itself will increase in our congregation.

I want to share a prayer I received for the week at the end of last Sunday's service. The prayer I picked up last Sunday was a difficult one-“ Prayers for the safety and security of all children.” I spent a lot of time looking at that request after church. I asked, “God, what do you want to do through me for the children of the world?” That is a difficult prayer to pray. So many children are in harm’s way in the world. I decided to look online to see statistically how safe and secure children are in this world. Statistics from the World Health Organization paint a grim picture for children worldwide.

• 1 in 6 children face injury, death, displacement and violence due to war, doubling that number from the 1990s.
• Nearly 1 in 4 children under five (about 43 million) are acutely malnourished worldwide. 
• 90 million children alive today have experienced sexual violence in some form.
• 1.6 billion children (about 2 in 3) regularly face violent punishment at home.

I felt overwhelmed and asked God to help me focus on this prayer. What could I possibly do with these grim statistics staring me in the face? By Tuesday morning, I was still struggling with the plight of children in our world and wondering how I could make some tiny difference. I finally placed the prayer square behind my icon of Jesus in my office, along with those grim statistics, and asked for Christ to help me with this burdensome prayer—more on this prayer and how it worked in me later.

Prayer isn’t magic. We cannot just pray for something to happen and expect it to occur right then and there. How then, does prayer work? This morning, we will look at two stories from scripture that can give us some wisdom on the gift of prayer. I hope to provide you with tangible answers about how prayer works and some structure for approaching God in prayer.

We begin with another psalm of David, Psalm 143. Let’s set the context for this prayer. This is an earlier psalm of David, written during a time of great difficulty. Saul pursued David and wanted to kill him. David fled into the surrounding wilderness, hiding in caves, fearing for his life. He, who had been a popular figure in Saul’s court, was now a pariah. Verse 3 of the psalm reflects David’s situation. “The enemy (Saul) pursues my soul…he has crushed my life to the ground.” In fear for his life, having lost everything, David prays to God.

Let’s break down the structure of his prayer.

First, it appears David is praying at night, based on verse 8: “Let me hear in the morning of Thy steadfast love.” That may have been a prayer routine for him, praying before he went to sleep.

He begins with a Plea- hear my prayer, God. Listen to my requests.

In Your faithfulness (You who answer prayer), answer me in Your righteousness. David considers past prayers and how God has been there for him.

Please do not look at my lack of righteousness (that is, correct living in loving God, neighbor, and self) to determine whether or not You will hear me! No one is righteous before You. This sentence is one of humility.

Then David gets real with his feelings, letting God know that his enemies (Saul and Saul’s armies) have pursued and crushed his life to the ground. He sits in darkness and feels as if he were dead. His Spirit faints, and his heart is appalled.

Presbyterian Pastor Rev. Dr. Tara Bulger recounted a recent discussion with her daughter in the latest issue of Presbyterian Outlook. Her daughter questioned how God could let so much evil persist in our world, and that she was angry at God. Bulger responded to her daughter in part by encouraging her to let God know her feelings and to be honest about her anger towards God as she prayed.

She writes, “ In these difficult prayers, God can meet us and guide us back to the peace that comes from the knowledge that God abhors suffering and evil, too, and that God is with us in our grief and anger. Don’t we all struggle with the problem of evil in the world? Doesn’t every aware person grieve the horrid reality of this life at times? I know I do. And I am grateful to my daughter, who reminded me this week to take it all to God in prayer. God can handle it.”

Amid his catastrophizing, David remembers all that God has done for him in life. Then he reaches out to God for a connection! His soul thirsts for God like the Rogue Valley thirsts for rain as it continues in drought.

He is frightened, again showing his true feelings with God, and states, “ Hurry and answer! For my spirit is failing. Do not hide your face!”  (Has God’s face seemed hidden to David before?) He fights that sinking feeling of going down into despair. I have had times in my own life where I felt the same way, and I let God know.

After all that, however, after all the requests for help, David asks for instruction, for wisdom from God. That comes from listening during prayer. David asks God to teach him the way he should go.

Again, he requests: "Teach me to do Your will, God, for You are my God. Let your Spirit lead me on a level path.” This may have also been a request for God to lead him safely away from Saul. He completes his prayer, returning to a plea for help.

So, one format for prayer can be as follows:

1. Be real with your feelings. The one who made you knows what they are already.
2. David may have had a routine to pray at night. Make a pattern for prayer. I go into the sanctuary regularly, stand in the middle looking back over the balcony at the Alpha and Omega windows, and pray out loud to God.
3. Make your requests known
4. Ask for answers, help, in humility.
5. In the midst of your prayer, remember God’s faithfulness to you in times past.
6. Ask for God to teach you wisdom. Listen. Wait.
7. End your prayer, even circling back to your original fears if needed.

Next comes the passage from the Gospel of Luke, in which Jesus prays to God before dying on the cross. What can we learn from this prayer?

In verse 39, we read that Jesus goes to pray on the Mt of Olives, “as was his custom.”  Just as David may have prayed routinely at night, Jesus went to the olive grove to pray to God regularly. He tells those who are with him to pray not to come to a time of trial, or as the Lord’s Prayer says, “Lead us not into temptation.”

Then, in verse 41, Jesus kneels to pray, which brings me to this question for you to ponder. What posture do you use when you pray? And, have you ever knelt in prayer? I did that for the first time in quite a while on Saturday as I prayed here in the sanctuary. It felt quite different than how I normally pray, standing and looking at the windows. I was humbled. It was uncomfortable. It changed my sense of connection with God. And it was a bit hard to get up when I was done!

Presbyterian elder Brenda Monroe wrote a wonderful piece on the posture of prayer, also in Presbyterian Outlook. She mentions coming across a prayer by poet James Weldon, which says in part,

“O Lord, we come this morning, knee bowed and body bent, before Thy throne of grace.

O lord, this morning, bow our hearts beneath our knees, and our knees in some lonesome valley.”

She kept coming back to that prayer, and others from her childhood, writing, “ I keep returning to those prayers, because I want to know what those who went before me knew. They prayed in a position of humility. Body bent. Heart, as Weldon said, lower still…A position of humility in prayer is not about whether we kneel or stand or sit or lie face down on the floor. The Reformed tradition has never been rigid about posture. But it does insist that we live by grace alone, that every breath is a gift, and that we have nothing to bring to God except ourselves and the blood that, by mercy, is still running warm. I find that comforting. I also find it humbling — which may be the point.”

So perhaps you can try this posture sometime as well. Granted, you may need someone to help you up, but it might enable you to find that perfect place of humility as you pray to God.

Finally, I want to focus on how Jesus ended his prayer. “Take this cup from me, God, yet not what You will, but my will be done.” Oh wait, Jesus didn’t say that, did he? I don’t know about you, but there are times when I struggle with my will for a person or a situation versus what God’s will may be instead. When Jesus says to God, “not my will, but Yours be done,” this parallels David’s request to be taught which way to go, to be taught to do God’s will. This is a difficult thing to incorporate into your prayer practice. Yet I think it is an important thing to do regularly- Not my will, God, but Yours be done, to say that in all humility, and trust the Creator of all things, even when we do not understand the outcome of a prayer.

So, we can learn from Jesus’ prayer that:

1. A specific location and practice of prayer are important.
2. Posture can be significant
3. As with David’s prayer, humility is important.
4. We should ask for God’s will, not ours, to occur.

You may now be wondering, what was the result of my prayers for the safety and security of all children in the world?

• On Wednesday, after asking for some wisdom, some direction on what to do, I felt a call to do the following things. I committed to praying regularly for the protection of the incoming students at the soon-to-be-on-campus Butterfly Montessori School later this year, and hope to establish a scholarship through our congregation that could help families in need afford to attend.
• After learning about the stark realities for children in war zones all over the world, I chose to donate funds to UNICEF (The United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. After specifically praying for Israel to stop killing children in Gaza, I donated funds to World Central Kitchen, which is still feeding children and families there, as well as in the midst of the war in Ukraine. 
• And finally, I donated to the Ukrainian Family Support fundraiser this afternoon, looking for a tangible way to give children and youth who are now part of our community some help and some hope. My prayer for children all over the world shaped my focus for the week, as I kept asking, “God, what do you want to do through me for children of the world? How can I help? The need is so huge!”  In time, God answered that prayer, and I acted. Prayer changed my focus, changed me. That is one tangible way that prayer works. Prayer isn’t magic. It can motivate us to work for God’s justice and mercy, to make a difference where we can.

God be with us as we focus on the gift of prayer, which can change us and, in so many ways, bring change to a hurting and broken world. Alleluia! Amen.