26^th Sunday in Ordinary Time
September 27, 2009
James 5:13-20

Why Pray?

The seminary course was called "Introduction to Pastoral Care." In order to pass the course, each student had to spend several hours a week working as a chaplain in some kind of institution. The assignments were, so far as we could tell, arbitrary. I drew a nursing home. Another classmate drew the county jail, and a good friend of mine was assigned to one of the many hospitals in Richmond, Virginia.

On his first day, on his very first visit, my friend walked into the room of a man who had been in a motorcycle accident. He almost died, and was unconscious for several days. He woke to find that in order to save his life, the surgeons had amputated his right leg.

My friend walks into the room. "Hello, I’m Steve. I’m your chaplain."

"Thank God you’re here," the man replies. "Come and pray with me. I want you to pray that God will make my leg grow back."

My friend did indeed pray with the man. What he said I’ll never know. I’m not sure he knows. I know he did not ask God to make the man’s leg grow back, but I also know that the man reported that he was greatly helped by the prayer they shared.

What exactly is prayer? What good does it do? Why pray in the first place? It takes a lifetime – more than a lifetime – to explore these questions. This morning we can only make a start. With the hope that you will forgive an old-fashioned outline, let us take each question in turn.

First, what is prayer?

Professor Martha Moore-Keish, who teaches theology at Columbia Theological Seminary (and, as most of you know, learned to say her prayers surrounded by the saints of this congregation) provides the best answer to this question that I have yet to encounter.

Prayer, says Martha, is participation in the life of the Triune God. God is the source of prayer, the object or goal of prayer, and at the same time our companion in prayer. We pray to God, in God, with and through God -- to the Father, in the Spirit, with and through the Son.

Think about that for a moment. Prayer is participation in God.

We’re used to thinking of prayer as something we do to persuade or cajole or even to manipulate God. "God, give me a pony. . . God, find me a better job . . . God, grow me a new leg."

But suppose we’ve got it wrong. Suppose prayer doesn’t begin with God working for us. Suppose, before it is anything else, prayer is God working in us. Suppose it’s God’s invitation to us to enter into the mystery of the One God who is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

In what has become a classic illustration of this idea, C S. Lewis, writing in Mere Christianity, describes how God draws us into God’s "three-personal" life:

An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get in touch with God. But if a Christian, he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so-to-speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God – that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying – the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on – the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed toward that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary Christian is saying his prayers.

This a scriptural picture. The Apostle Paul says writes to the Romans:

We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the . . . Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God (Rom. 8:26, 27).

"God," says Prof. Moore-Keish, "is source, goal, and companion in prayer, the Holy Trinity that envelops us as we pray, drawing ourselves (if we open ourselves to it) into ever deeper communion with God. True prayer is thus participation in God."

Second, what good does prayer do?

This, of course, is a typically American way of speaking. We tend to think in utilitarian terms. We think of prayer as a tool, rather than as a gift. Therefore we want to know what prayer can achieve. Preachers of the "prosperity gospel" are quick to tell us that God is anxious to bless us with fast cars, big houses, and hefty incomes if only we would have more faith and give more money to their ministries.

But if prayer is participation in God, then it is not the means to some additional good, but rather a good in itself. Not the means but the end. In prayer we adore God’s name, we seek God’s will, we beg for God’s mercy, and we marvel at God’s love. We are, in the words of the old hymn, "Lost in wonder, love, and praise."

It’s true, we do offer prayers of intercession for others and petition for ourselves. Jesus did the same. Sometime God answers quickly, sometimes slowly (or at least it seems so to us), and sometimes in ways we don’t expect.

When I was a teenager, I used to ask to borrow the family car on Saturday nights. (Back then people my age went on something called "a date." It involved going to the girl’s house, sitting in the living room with the girl’s father for a period of approximately 1,000 years, and then taking her to a movie. An odd ritual, I admit, but that’s what we used to do back in the 20^th century).

When I asked to borrow the car the answer was usually "Yes." Sometimes it was "No." That wasn’t the answer I was looking for, but it was an answer.

Sometimes God says Yes, and sometimes No. Sometimes God answers our prayers with silence – the silence of one who sits beside us in the dark and walks with us along a road the end of which we cannot see. Because it begins with God, prayer itself is a kind of answer.

In today’s Epistle reading James urges those who are sick to "call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord."

"The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up," writes James. I am not about to argue with James. And yet there have been times when God has not provided the miracle I have prayed for.

In last week’s Christian Century, Dayna Olson-Gray wrote about the baby she will soon bear and then bury. His name is Ethan. Twenty weeks into the pregnancy Dayna and her husband Eric learned that when Ethan is born, he will live only a few moments. His birth defect is so profound that there is no medical possibility of life outside Dayna’s womb. Dayna has seen the ultrasounds. She knows that Ethan will die. She writes,

I have not been praying for the miracle of [Ethan’s] healing, but I have been taking great comfort in the miracle that is already assured – the miracle that Ethan’s life will not end with his death, but will be joined to the eternal life of the God who made him and gave him to us.

. . . .there is something about his life – the life that God put in him – that is not ephemeral and fragile like his body. In this way, Ethan is no different from any of us. Our bodies are frail and fallible too, and they will all die sooner or later, but we have the promise of resurrection into a life that is not constrained by our frailty and that comes from the One who breathed life into all creation.

When Dayna prays, she does not ask for a miracle. Rather she prays by, with, to, and in the Triune God. James is right. "The prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise them up."

Why pray?

Because prayer is God’s gift to us. Because prayer is God’s invitation to join in the mystery of God’s three-personal life. Because when we pray, the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.

Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire,
Unuttered or expressed;
The motion of a hidden fire
That trembles in the breast.

Prayer is the burden of a sigh,
The falling of a tear,
The upward glancing of an eye,
When none but God is near.

Prayer is the Christian’s vital breath,
The Christian’s native air,
Our watchword at the gates of death;
We enter heaven with prayer.

O Thou, by whom we come to God,
The Life, the Truth, the Way;
The path of prayer Thyself hast trod:
Lord teach us how to pray.

                                                                                        -- James Montgomery (altered)