Always Being Made New
NW MN Synod Assembly
June 9, 2013
Luke 7:11-17
Preach the gospel always and if necessary, use
words.
This famous line, attributed to St Francis of
Assisi,[1] could also be applied to prayer, I think.
Pray always and if necessary, use words.
In truth, prayer is all about words, except--when
it’s not.
Prayer is most assuredly about living life in the
presence of God, walking always coram Deo—before
God, aware that all of our days are in God’s hands.
And in that respect, sometimes, indeed often-times,
no words are necessary for prayer to erupt, to permeate a slice of our lives.
Take this poignant gospel story from Luke 7.
This heart-wrenching scene unfolds in the absence of
words. Two large crowds approach the
village of Nain, in Galilee. Two young
men are leading these intersecting crowds.
The crowd approaching Nain is led by Jesus; the crowd departing from
Nain is led by a nameless young man who has died.
Two crowds, representing two powerful forces,
encounter one another outside the gates of the village.
The crowd heading out of town is a funeral
entourage. It is a crowd enthralled by
the inexorable finality of death.
The crowd heading into town is following Someone who
is bringing boundless hope, wherever he goes—seeking out the lost, unbinding
sinners, healing the sick, raising the dead.
They meet in a moment in time, seemingly wordless,
and yet the whole episode is wrapped up in prayer….because some prayers, maybe
some of the most powerful and memorable prayers, need no words.
The mourners, led by the young man’s mother, a widow
now bereft of her only son, her only chance at a future that would not be
marked by destitution….
The mourners’ sheer presence constitutes a praying,
a crying out to the heavens, for redress, for divine intervention, for a fresh
future somehow to miraculously appear.
This must have been a powerful prayer
experience—though Luke mentions no request being articulated—but it was not
needed. The mourners and the grieving
mother didn’t need to SAY what was on their minds for Jesus to know what they
longed for and to respond to their prayer.
Sometimes, I think, words may just get in the way of
the prayer that bubbles up from the depths of our souls.
Sometimes all it takes is a sigh, or a tear, or a
shout of joy, or a moan, or a roar.
In the 11th chapter of St John’s gospel,
when Jesus finally arrives at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, we’re told twice
that he was “greatly disturbed,” that Jesus wept, and that he “cried with a
loud voice.” Barbara Brown Taylor puts
it this way: Jesus in his grief “roared
so loud at death that he scared death away.”[2]
Sometimes words get in the way of the praying. And sometimes not. Here outside the village of Nain, the prayer
of the people comes through loud and clear—as loudly and clearly as Jesus
answers their prayers with just seven words:
“Young man, I say to you, rise!”
What these seven words accomplished brought life
back, not only to the dead son, but to the whole community that had been
carrying him to his grave. The great
crowd from Nain knew once again, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that God was in
their midst, doing what God always does best, snatching victory out of the jaws
of defeat, beating back death, opening a fresh future in which we are always being
made new in Jesus Christ.
I have a confession to make now. I have known some congregational prayer
chain members who drive me nuts. This
is a terrible thing for a pastor to admit, publicly….because people on prayer
chains offer themselves for some of the most holy work any of us ever
undertakes—the work of interceding for others before God’s throne of grace.
But what happens all too often in my experience, is
that prayer chain folks are tempted to let their words get in the way of their
praying.
More than once I have informed a parish prayer chain
about a situation or a person in need of prayer….and more than once I have been
asked: “So, Pastor, what shall we pray
for?”
In other words:
what shall we write down on our prayer chain clipboard—and how will we
know when we can put a big red check mark in our “answered prayers” column on
that clipboard?
I have wanted to say: pray, just pray, please, just pray.
Friends, it’s not that hard. Anne Lamott in a splendid little book (Anne Lamott, Help Thanks Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, Riverhead Books, 2012) she
wrote last year, suggests that all prayer can be boiled down to just three
words: Help. Thanks.
Wow.
If your prayer vocabulary included nothing more than
these three monosyllabic words, it would be enough.
The first and most foundational prayer is: Help!
Here in our gospel lesson, the whole pathetic scene
that meets us fairly screams: Help! A widow’s only son has died. This is not just the loss of a mother-son
relationship. It is the loss of the
woman’s whole future—her retirement plan, on a bier, about to be buried. The pathos of this scene is so thick you can
cut it with a knife.
Help! The whole community wails…
…little realizing that they were being met by the
Helper par excellence, the only Helper who actually deals with death.
Anne Lamott says, “If I were going to begin
practicing the presence of God for the first time today, it would help to begin
by admitting the three most terrible truths of our existence: that we are so ruined, and so loved, and in
charge of so little.”
Out of such deep awareness, the foundational prayer
springs forth: Help! This prayer, writes Lamott, takes “ourselves
off the hook and put(s) God on the hook, where God belongs.” We pray Help! In the confidence that there
is a Helper who hears and acts graciously, on our behalf and on behalf of those
for whom we pray.
The second great prayer is: Thanks!
“Thanks!” (as Ms. Lamott points out) is a prayer
that even atheists and agnostics pray when they aren’t paying attention to what
they’re saying. Gratitude springs
forth—even if you don’t believe there is Someone to thank!
Here in Luke 7, there is no holding back the
flood-gates of gratitude. As soon as the
crowd of mourners gets over their initial shock, they move swiftly to gratitude
to God, giving thanks that “A great prophet has arisen among us!”
And their gratitude erupts in action, as is almost
always the case. Again, Anne
Lamott: “Gratitude begins in our hearts
and then dove-tails into behavior. It
almost always makes you willing to be of service, which is where the joy
resides….God’s idea of a good time is to see us picking up litter…serving food
at the soup kitchen…or hear us calling our meth-head cousin just to check
in….You breathe in gratitude, and you breathe it out too. Once you learn how to do that, then you can
bear someone who is unbearable.”
What ties the first two great prayers together is
the third prayer: Wow!
“Wow!” means” we are not dulled to wonder,”
according to Anne Lamott. She goes on
to add that the “words ‘wow’ and ‘awe’ are the same height and width, all w’s
and short vowels. They could dance
together. Even when, maybe especially
when, we don’t cooperate, this energy—the breath, the glory, the goodness of
God—is given.”
Here in Luke 7, the “wow” actually precedes the
“thanks.” Because, Luke tells us, when
the young man sits up and speaks “fear seized them all.”
Wow has its way with the citizens of Nain, because
it’s so clear that they have a living God on their hands—not a past-tense God
we can hold at arm’s length, but a here-and-now God who is right in our faces,
waking us up, making us new.
Which is where prayer is always leading us, is it
not? Prayer—however it happens in our
lives—ushers us into the presence of the living God who is always making us
new.
That’s why prayer is never “wasted breath.” Even a groaned “Help!,” even a reflex-action
“Wow!” even a routine “Thanks!”…..any of these three tiny words cracks the door
open once again, places us smack dab in the hands of an alive-and-well-God, who
in Jesus Christ continually throws open possibilities we forgot were available
to us.
God invites us into a prayer-shaped life that opens
us up to God’s re-creating, renewing presence among us.
God invites us, all our beloved congregations, our Northwestern
Minnesota Synod, and our whole Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and indeed
all the faithful everywhere to pray always—and use words if necessary.
And if adequate words for prayer come hard for
you—feel free to fall back on these three syllables:
Help!
Thanks!
Wow!
In the name of Jesus. Amen.
[2] “The
Prophet Mary,” a sermon by Barbara Brown Taylor on March 21, 2010 (accessed at
http://day1.org/1760-the_prophet_mary.print).
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