Psalm 73:21-27
21-24 When I was beleaguered and bitter,
totally consumed by envy,
I was totally ignorant, a dumb ox
in your very presence.
I’m still in your presence,
but you’ve taken my hand.
You wisely and tenderly lead me,
and then you bless me.
25-28 You’re all I want in heaven!
You’re all I want on earth!
When my skin sags and my bones get brittle,
God is rock-firm and faithful.
Look! Those who left you are falling apart!
Deserters, they’ll never be heard from again.
But I’m in the very presence of God—
oh, how refreshing it is!
Matthew 18:19-20
When two of you get together on anything at all on earth and make a prayer of it, my Father in heaven goes into action. And when two or three of you are together because of me, you can be sure that I’ll be there.”
As you may know, I’ve been doing a sermon series on Rabbi Harold Kushner’s Who Needs God, a book that had been sitting on my bookshelf for roughly 30 years, and if there is a small silver lining to the Covid crisis for me, I finally found time to read it.
In his chapter entitled, “Can Modern People Pray?”, Rabbi Kushner tells an absurd but true story about a man who went to church and heard a sermon about how God rewards people for being charitable and generous. This man took the sermon to heart, and, in response, wrote a large check to his church. But the man had an ulterior motive--he wrote the check praying and expecting God to literally reward him with a windfall of cash for being so generous. When that didn’t happen, the man turned around and sued the minister, for making false promises. (The lawsuit was thrown out and the man was reprimanded by the judge for taking preaching too literally.)
Rabbi Kushner’s point in telling this story is that it illustrates how people often--consciously or unconsciously--think about prayer. We pray about something, we act in ways we think will please God, and then we expect God to give us exactly what we want--what we’ve asked for. Kind of like the way we thought about Santa Claus when we were kids. We’d write out the list of what we wanted, we’d mail it to Santa, we’d do our best to be good girls and boys, and then we’d expect Santa to give us exactly what was on our list. And we were sorely disappointed if the presents we requested were not under the tree on Christmas morning!
Which brings us to Kushner’s definition of prayer:
Prayer is not a matter of coming to God with our wish list and pleading with [God] to give us what we ask for. Prayer is first and foremost the experience of being in the presence of God. Whether or not we have our requests granted, whether or not we get anything to take home as a result of the encounter, we are changed by having come into the presence of God. A person who has spent an hour or two in the presence of God will be a different person for some time afterward. (p. 148)
“Prayer is first and foremost the experience of being in the presence of God”--and being changed by it.
Our first Scripture reading--Psalm 73--describes this experience. In contemporary language, the Psalmist describes himself as having been “beleaguered and bitter, totally consumed by envy,” an “ignorant dumb ox” until God took him by the hand, led him with wisdom and tenderness and blessed him.
We know from earlier in the Psalm that the reason the writer was bitter was that he saw things going on in the world that made his heart sick. He saw arrogant, rich people speaking and acting like bullies, threatening people with violence, and getting away with it. And getting richer in the process. While, at the same time, the psalmist himself did his best to be an upright, moral person, but was not rewarded for it. Instead, he struggled and suffered “a long run of bad luck.” (verse 14, the Message.)
But then, the Psalmist walked into the Temple, and his whole perspective changed, turned 180 degrees, so that by the end of the Psalm, he was able to claim in verse 25, “[O God,] YOU are all I want in heaven! You are all in want on earth!” The Psalm doesn’t tell us exactly what happened in the Temple to change his perspective from bitterness to joy--did he hear a sermon? A Scripture reading? A prayer? Did he have a mystical experience? We’re not sure, but somehow, he encountered the presence of God, and his entire outlook was changed by it.
Anne Lamott, in her book, Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers shares some examples of what it is like to pray, to experience the presence of God in unexpected ways, and be changed by it, to be moved from hopelessness to joy. She tells the story of trying to go for a walk with two of her best friends, Barbara and Suzie, whom she hadn’t seen for a while. Her friend Barbara had ALS (lou gherig’s disease), and Anne, the writer, was filled with what she described as “anxious sorrow” when she saw how much the disease had advanced: Barbara was now using a walker, feeding tubes, and a computerized speaking device called Kate that worked through her iPad.
But Barbara was still up for a walk, despite the challenges of ALS, so they drove to a scenic site above San Franciso, planning to walk along a trail that was supposed to have a beautiful view of the Pacific Ocean. With her characteristic honesty and humor, Anne Lamott describes the disappointment of what happened next: when they got out of the car, it was cold and windy and foggy--so foggy, and they couldn’t see a thing. Feeling hopeless, Anne turned to prayer. Bluntly she said to God, “This is all a mess…I love these two women so much, and I had had such high hopes for connection and joy today: Help.” (Lamott, p. 55)
To make a long story short, they got back in the car and drove around for a while. And then Anne began to notice the presence of God in the midst of the disappointments and great sorrow she was feeling. The sun came out. And they got a perfect parking spot with a view where they could sit and talk. Anne writes:
We all got so happy. We talked about real things for an hour: life, death, families, feeding tubes, faith. I asked Barbara, who does not eat food anymore, “What are you most grateful for these days?” She typed on her iPad, and Kate’s mechanical voice spoke for her: “The beauty of nature, the birds and flowers, the beauty of friends.”
This is called radical gratitude in the face of whatever life throws at you.
I was so glad and so grateful to be there with them that day--euphoric. (p. Lamott, p. 56)
“Prayer is first and foremost the experience of being in the presence of God”--and being changed by it.
Yet prayer is also a discipline. It is a choice we make--to open ourselves up each day to what God wants us to hear and see and notice--to remind us of “what we have and what we might so easily take for granted and forget to be grateful for.” (Kushner, p. 154)
Yes, you may be thinking, but is that ALL that prayer is? An experience of God, a change in our perspective. What about asking God for specific things? Should we stop doing that?
No. The Scriptures direct us to bring our needs, our wants, our heart’s desires before the Lord--and to ask God to meet those needs. In fact, Lord’s Prayer is clear about this. Jesus instructs his followers to ask God for daily bread, for forgiveness, for freedom from temptation. For God’s will to be done.
And the good news is that God acts in response to our questions and requests. Our reading for today from the Gospel of Matthew, Verse 19 puts it this way: “When two of you get together on anything at all on earth and make a prayer of it, my Father in heaven goes into action.”
This doesn’t mean that God will be like Santa Claus, giving us exactly what we want. As we’ve all experienced, sometimes God doesn’t answer our prayer requests the way we want God to at all, even when we ask for things that are in line with the values of Love and Justice, Healing and Reconciliation that Jesus preached.
And we may wonder why this is. Rabbi Kushner implies that God doesn’t always answer our prayers the way we want God to--because there are some things God just can’t do. For example, God has set up the world to run a certain way, and even God cannot intervene to change the rules and laws of nature that God had previously set up. This is one possible explanation, and while I agree with what Rabbi Kushner says 95% of the time, this is one time I do not agree with him. I believe that God, being God, is not limited in any way, even by the laws of nature.
I believe that sometimes God says “no” in answer to our specific prayers--not because there are limits to God’s power or God’s role--but for reasons that are beyond our comprehension. I believe God can and does intervene in the world in response to our prayers, but when God intervenes, it is to enact God’s will, not ours. God sees the Big Picture--the ultimate Purpose for God’s entire creation, which is to increase Love and Compassion in the world. And for Love and Compassion to increase, sometimes what we get in response to our prayers is NOT the answer that we are looking for, not the immediate alleviation of suffering, but is rather the strength and resilience and the depth of connection with God and with one another that can only come through shared pain and sorrow.
The last verse of our scripture reading from Matthew reads, “ [Jesus says] when two or three of you are together because of me, you can be sure that I’ll be there.”
So prayer can begin by bringing our requests before God and asking for what we want. But it doesn’t end there. Paradoxically, we discover that what we want is only a step on the road to what we need more than anything else--God’s presence through thick and thin. It is this presence that we experience and celebrate when we come together to worship in Christ’s name. Let us relish that presence right now. Let us be refreshed by it, and let it change our disappointments, pain or bitterness into joy.
I invite you to pray with me:
Lord Jesus, you have promised to be with us when we gather together in your name, and we feel your presence here today. We thank you for the Scriptures, for your Word that teaches and challenges us to grow beyond where we are now. Lord, we lift up to you the pain and suffering we see in the world and in our own lives: from Covid and its effects, from isolation to economic downturn to racism and our struggle to even talk about racism in ways that value and respect all of your children.
Lord, go with us out into the world. Help us to courageously wade into the pain and struggle, despite the discomfort that it may cause us. Help us to find “refreshment” in your presence--and in the presence of our fellow seekers throughout the world.
In your name--and for the sake of your will--we pray. and act. Amen.
Rev. Dr. Marlayna Schmidt
Franklin Federated Church
Franklin, MA
July 26, 2020