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Bible Reading 101b
We are continuing our FaithWork series – our look at the spiritual assignments for the students of Jesus.
Last week, we explored Bible Reading 101 and took the time to practice Lectio Divina, a prayerful way to read Scripture and be formed by it.
Today, we’re looking at Prayer 101. Why do we pray? How do we pray? When do we pray? And our Faith Work for this week, the spiritual practice we try each week, is creating a Breathe Prayer.
If the Bible is the root and foundation of our faith, prayer is the reach of long arms that connects us to God. We stand on Scripture and reach up and out to God and the world through prayer.
Prayer has been the way we as humans have communicated with God from even before the Bible was written. The first books of the Bible, starting with Genesis, were written down hundreds of years after the events described in them would have occurred. But even in that earliest recorded history of God’s interaction with the world, prayer was a main part of what, Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob did with God. It’s how our earliest fathers and mothers of the faith communicated their praise and thanksgiving, their confusion and anger, their grief, and their desires. Prayer is how they listened to God speaking and how they spoke all that was a part of their hearts to God.
What is prayer? At its most basic, prayer is relationship – a relationship that is based in love. It’s a time to share with God, to rest in God’s presence, to seek God’s love, to be renewed. Prayer takes place in private and in public, by yourself, with a partner, or in a group that fills a football stadium. Sometimes prayer involves words and speech; other times, it involves a time of rest and awareness of God’s presence.
Prayer is the way we nurture our relationship with God. Think of your important relationships, the ones that have lasted the most years or that have been the most meaningful to you. How were they built? They were built with time – time in both listening and time spent talking
Richard Foster, one of the foremost experts on prayer from personal experience, shares the story of a father and his toddler son in the mall together. The little boy is cranky and tired, and his whining soon turns to crying which quickly escalates into shrieking. The father tries everything he can think of to calm the child down, but nothing is working. The father then picks up the little boy, holds him tightly, and starts to sing a made-up love song to child. The words don’t rhyme and the song is out of key, but slowly, the song begins to work and the child calms down. By the time they get to the car, they little boy is happy and cries out, “Again, Daddy, again!”
This is what our prayer life with God is like – a love song, made up just for us, as individuals, a family, a worshipping community or our world. God is like the father in the story, full of love, desiring to bring us from a place of pain and frustration and anger to one of joy and happiness and light. God does this through prayer.
How we view God will in large part determine how we approach prayer.
In the comic strip “Blondie” on Friday, Blondie, the wife chastises her husband, Dagwood, for praying for a good golf game the next day. She says, “You should ask for more important things than a round of golf, you know.” He immediately gets back down on his knees and begins to pray for the office bowling league the next week. The God depicted in this comic strip is one who only has time for “important” things, whatever they may be, a God who doesn’t sweat the small stuff. This God doesn’t want to be bothered with the minutia of our daily lives. But our experience with God reveals a different God – if we truly believe that God is all-loving and all-powerful and all-forgiving, and that God desires nothing more than to be in intimate, loving relationship with us, then God does care about our golf games and our bowling leagues. The little things are important in our prayer life, but so are the big things.
But so often, we don’t take all that we are to our lives of prayer, either as individuals or as a community. We get stuck on an idea of a “right” way to pray, and when we can’t meet that ideal, we may feel like our prayer lives are inadequate and our prayers ineffective. One theologian called this a “stained-glass image” of prayer. When we become locked in to an image and idea of prayer that is rigid, that takes place only when we are in a certain posture and only when we are saying the right words, we miss out on the variety of ways that God speaks to us and sings a love song to us through prayer.
There are as many different ways to pray as there are people. As individuals, we can pray at a set time each day, using a printed guide like the Upper Room daily reflections magazine or another book of written prayers. We can pray a list of intercessions while driving in the car. We can carefully work our way through a prayer list of people, groups and situations that we desperately want to see God move and act within. We can walk and mediate on God’s presence in nature. We can sit quietly and silently in God’s presence, mediating on a single word, such as love or peace. We can offer up quick prayers of need throughout our day. Sometimes, all we can muster is an “I’m here” to God, and we rely on the Holy Spirit to pray with and for us, as the Spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words. (Romans 8:26). In our own congregation, we can deepen our prayer life by being a part of the prayer chain and lifting up the cares and concerns of our congregation’s loved ones to God. We also can use the prayer room, here off the sanctuary for quiet reflection.
As a group, we pray in so many ways. Our songs and hymns are prayers of worship. Our children pray together after the Moment for All Ages. By repeating after us, they are learning to pray. We pray during the Gathered Prayers of the People. We pray during services of Healing and blessing. A group of us is praying as we continue our second week of the Daniel’s Fast.
Prayer is not an activity that can be scheduled and checked off our to-do list while we move on to the next task of our lives. Special time set aside for intent listening and sharing prayer is critical in growing our faith, of course – think of how your relationship with your spouse or parent would be if you only spoke when you needed something and didn’t take time to listen for the response. But prayer should permeate our life - our life should be one long, continuous prayer, lived seeking submission to God’s will, turning over our worries to God’s care, seeking direction in even the smallest of decisions.
Breath prayer is one way to try and live that life of absolute love and devotion. Included in the bulletin this week is an outline on how to create and use a breathe prayer. I encourage you to set aside a few minutes and try the breathe prayer yourself and see how God uses it to sing a love song to your heart. Amen.