The Reverend Dr. Lillian Daniel
July 17, 2011
First Congregational Church,
www.firstconge.org
630-469-3096
Scripture: Psalm 17:1-6 (translated)
1-2Listen while I build my case, God, the most honest prayer you’ll ever
hear.
Show the world I’m innocent— in
your heart you know I am.
3Go ahead, examine me from inside out, surprise me in the middle of the
night—
You’ll find I’m just what I say I
am. My words don’t run loose.
4-5I’m not trying to get my way in the world’s way.
I’m trying to get your way, your
Word’s way.
I’m staying on your trail; I’m
putting one foot in front of the other. I’m not giving up.
6-7I call to you, God, because I’m sure of an answer. So—answer! bend your ear! listen sharp!
Sermon:
A new seminary intern was offering
the pastoral prayers one Sunday and received a request to pray for a woman who
had a last name he found very difficult to pronounce. It was a name from a
country whose language most of us did not speak, Polish, and it sounded nothing
like it was spelled. But in the intimacy of congregational life, we had learned
how to pronounce it over the years.
So it was particularly painful to
listen to the young man as he prayed out loud and kept stumbling over the name
as he tried to get it right. He would make one attempt to say it, stop himself,
try to say it another time, then stop again, wincing, and then butcher the name
all over again. It was like it would never end.
Finally he let out an exasperated
sigh that the whole congregation was relieved to hear, since it meant he would
finally stop. Continuing with the prayer, he looked up to the heavens and said,
“Oh God, you know what the woman’s name is!”
It was an honest prayer. And the
honesty was not just in his frustrated comment, but in his sigh to the heavens
as well. He was being honest in his emotions in the middle of a prayer, and
trusting that God could take care of the details.
Sometimes we pray to God with so
much specificity, it sounds like we are lecturing a sloppy subordinate at work
about when and where to show up for the key event, complete with last names,
details about the hospital room number and the exact diagnosis. When what God
really desires is an honest emotion, straight from the heart.
I have a friend who wants to one
day have a cottage by a lake. When I suggested she pray for it, she recoiled.
“First I should pray for health,” she said. “And not just my own, but my
family’s.”
“Don’t forget world peace,” I
added. “And a cure for all diseases. Be sure to name them all, with their
appropriate Latin names, so God knows exactly what your instructions are,
because we wouldn’t want hang nails to be eliminated before cancer. But yes,
there’s a lot to cover before you can ask for a cottage.”
That kind of thinking, that
reluctance to ask God for what we really want, is arrogance posing as humility.
It seems humble to not ask God for our own desires, and to put other larger
matters first. But doing that seems to imply we have power in all this. As if
by asking God to cure diabetes before asking for a raise we might actually
affect God’s priorities.
Do we honestly think that if no
one asked for anything trivial, and everyone got focused on world peace, God
would finally see that we had reached some quota and say, “Right, now that four
billion and one people have asked for it, I will make it happen. But don’t
anybody ask for a cottage by the lake right now, or I’ll get distracted.”
Sorry, but I just don’t think our
prayer requests have that kind of power. So why pray then?
Prayer is about connecting with
God, about having a relationship with our divine creator. God desires that with
us, and because God loves us so much, God actually cares about our trivial
wants, our big dreams and our petty grievances. This is humbling news indeed.
We can come to God with anything, and God will work with it.
When I do have a selfish desire, prayer
inevitably helps, in that is exposes it. By praying for what I really want, I
am sometimes shamed into realizing I should not want that thing after all. When
you are actually praying something like, “Please don’t let him get that job
because if that pompous moron has any more success in life, it will drive me so
crazy with jealousy I won’t be able to sleep…” you can’t help but notice that this
is not the person you want to be.
When you just think these things,
your mind allows the toxicity to bubble along, unchecked, but when you lay a desire
like that out in front of God, it gets exposed. And once exposed in prayer, God
can work on it with you. And a prayer for another person’s downfall might be
transformed into a prayer that envy would lose its sin-soaked hold on your
heart. But you can’t get there without first passing go, without first asking
for a pony, a cottage, your friend’s job or even her husband. God wants to hear
our honest prayers.
Prayer is full of surprises for
me. When I begin, I think I am praying for one thing, but by the end of the
prayer, I have amazed myself at what I have come up with. I didn’t know I was
so worried about a family member, until their face dominates my mind during
prayer time and shuts out the very thing I thought I had wanted to pray for.
That prompts me to make a phone call after my “amen,” which in turn leads to
more adventures.
Sometimes, when I am praying for
something I know is foolish, I come to the realization that there is a deeper
need beneath it. Praying for an extravagant vacation to Hawaii might really be
a prayer to spend more time with family, to be somewhere where the computer and
the cell phone do not reign supreme. Before the “amen,” God has revealed all
kinds of ways I might connect more deeply with the people I love, and none of
them require an airline ticket. By the end, I may still want the vacation, but
in prayer, God has taken my desire and led me someplace new.
One of my favorite places of prayer is the Benedictine Abbey at St. John’s University in rural Collegeville, Minnesota. You drive and drive through fields of soy beans and suddenly you see the college, marked by an architecturally stunning building that looks like a set piece from a futuristic science fiction movie, a massive structure of poured grey concrete that demands attention from the heavens, completed in 1960 and designed by the Hungarian architect and former member of the Bauhaus, Marcel Breuer. Inside, the concrete swoops and allows light in through modern stained glass at odd angles, and the monks’ seats in the choir are all geometric little seats that separate one worshiper from another as if in astronauts seats, each of us the pilot on our own little prayer adventure. During the regular times of prayer throughout the day, the monks are joined by the rest of us, students, artists in residence, a world famous potter, and writers like me who come for workshops on the craft of spiritual writing, all in the setting where Kathleen Norris produced her beautiful book, Dakota: a Spiritual Geography, exploring her Presbyterian roots in South Dakota, in conversation with artsy Benedictine monks in Minnesota.
Benedictine monks have a simple rule which states: “Let the
brothers serve one another,” written at a time when sisters might not have been
on the radar screen. But at St. John’s they are known for their ecumenical
vision to have artistic and literary conversations across the barriers that
divide the church. They are currently producing an illuminated Bible, each page
hand painted in colors and in gold leaf, a project from medieval times but one
that will be admired by Methodists and Muslims as it goes on its rock star
illuminated Bible international tour. No wonder so many people find it easy to
pray in a place where the soil seems to be soaked in the art of the creator,
and brings out the creativity of those who happen upon it in the fields, just a
few miles away from the Cracker Barrels, the Menards, the Aldis, the TGI
Fridays, the McDonalds and the ubiquitous Taco Bells. Just off the highway and through
the cornfields lies a landscape of prayer.
But having said that it is easy to pray there, it is not
always. Leaving a session with the other writer’s, I was inattentive to their
small talk, eager to walk out at exactly 11:45 a.m. to make the noon time
worship a ten minute walk away. It would be of five short services each day
where scripture is read, songs are sung that I don’t know the tune of, and we
sit in our own little cubbies and soak in a tradition that is not any one
tribe’s to own, but I had yet to make one that week, and now it was Wednesday.
I had things and people to pray for, a ticket to punch.
But on the way there, I was joined by two other writers, and
the walk slowed to a snail’s pace and the conversation intensified, and by the
time we entered, the monks and the lay people in the choir loft were well
underway. We slipped in the back, behind the organ, into three little seats
with their individual bookshelves, one book for each service and for each
person. The monks wore black shirts, the students wore sweatshirts, and the
latecomers stumbled in wearing the garment of shame, unaware of where we were
in the service, straining to look over the monk’s shoulder to see if he was on
page 82 or 92. OK, now I knew I had the right page, but I still wasn’t saying
the right words of the right psalm, and he was sitting down just as I was
sitting up. Oh no, I was in the evening prayer book, and this was mid-day. Back
to page 82 or was it 92. By the time I finally got my book open to the right
page, the final song was sung and the monks processed out first, all leaving
through a tiny door at the back on the abbey church, into the monastery, off
limits to the rest of us, who watched them, the majority of the small
congregation, leave, and all the rest of us in our sweatshirts and clothes of
many bright colors were left looking garish and mismatched after the sea of men
in black had pulled back as if in a wave, leaving the rest of us like little mismatched sea shells on the sand.
“That’s it?” I said. “We missed it. I had no idea it would
be over so soon.”
“Don’t blink or you’ll miss it,” said the Presbyterian I was
sitting next to, as we extracted ourselves from our little monk pods. And the
part of me that thinks that prayer is all up to me, that thinks that everything
depends upon what I do and say, that part of me thought, “What a waste of
time.”
But then I considered the monks, who worshiped here in the same
way not once a day but five times. Did they ever get bored, distracted and
wonder if what they were doing made a difference? A friend had told me a story
about a Minneapolis college professor who had brought his undergraduates out to
the Abbey to meet the monks. He had prepared them to meet a group of men who
had chosen a life entirely apart, to be respectful of their different choices,
of their meditative way of life. But when they finally sat down with the young
novice in training, just a year or two older than the college kids, his entire
goal seemed to be to convince them the monks were no different at all. “We do
all the things you guys do,” he exclaimed animatedly. “We watch American Idol,
we play video games! It’s great here!”
The professor was disappointed. He had wanted his students
to see a life apart, something exotic, but instead they just got to see life:
Video games, black robes, American Idol, prayer five times a day, fraternity
mixers, a trip to an abbey, a shared prayer service on a hot summer day. We’re
all just people, trying to get it right before God.
My thoughts went back to the seminarian who had botched the
woman’s name and mangled it so horribly her relatives had cringed, but I doubt
that God cringed when he finally said, “Oh God, you know what the woman’s name
is.”
And I thought “Oh God, you know what time worship was
supposed to start today.” Yes, I had missed most of the prayer service but I
had not wasted my time. Any more than the monks who were there had wasted
theirs. In prayer we have to lean into one another, into the generations that
have gone before. Today and tomorrow the monks will pray in Collegeville and
you and I will pray here, and together we will pray each other into an honest
prayer that depends less on us than it does on God.
Oh, God, you know, you already know it all. Amen.