A Reflection for the Seventh Sunday of Easter

“Prayer”, Kathleen Norris writes, “is being ourselves before God.”

Having invested much of her time in working, studying and praying in a Benedictine Monastery she has come to know the Benedictine Motto, 

“Ora et labora, pray and work, and how the monastic life aims to join the two. This perspective liberates prayer from God-talk; a well-tended garden, a well-made cabinet, a well-swept floor, can be a prayer.”

“The liturgy of the Word is prayer. You pray the Scriptures in worship with, and for, the people assembled, and the words go out to them, touching them in ways only God can imagine. The words are all that matter, and you send them out as prayer, hoping to become invisible behind them.”

Prayer is embracing the pursuit of what Gregory of Nyssa, a 4th century Bishop (who made significant contributions to the creation of the Nicene Creed) saw as “our lifelong task to find out what part of the divine image God has chosen to reveal in us... [to know] what our primary faults and temptations are, as well as our gifts-not that we might better ‘know ourselves,’ or in modern parlance, ‘feel good about ourselves,’ but in order that we might become instruments of divine grace for other people, and eventually return to God.”

The question people often ask is, “Does God Answer Prayer?”

Some people ask this question less diplomatically: What good is prayer?

What does prayer do? One thing I’ve found helpful to consider is what prayer is not: It’s not the coin you put in the celestial gumball machine that gives you a return on your investment in kind. Prayer is neither payment in advance for services rendered nor is it divine bribery. God will not say: OK, already— 

25 “Our Father’s” is enough! You get the vintage muscle car!

Yet Jesus does use the image of a harried judge entreated by a widow about her cause so long and earnestly that he gives in for fear she might become more tempestuous. If even the hard-hearted judge caves in to just demands, won’t God be even more likely to attend to ours? This sounds good in a parable. Still, most of us can remember having prayed hard for things that didn’t seem to ever quite come through.

The 6th-century mystic John Climacus was no stranger to this problem. “When requests are made to God and are not immediately answered, the reason may be one of the following: either that the petition is premature, or because it has been made unworthily . . . or because, if granted, it would lead to conceit, or because negligence and carelessness would result.”

Bede the Venerable, 7th-century Doctor of the Church, agrees at least that timing is a factor: “It also sometimes happens that we seek things entirely related to salvation with our eager petitions and devoted actions, yet . . . the result of our petition is postponed to some future time.” He notes that we’ve all been praying “Thy kingdom come” for quite a while, yet no one has yet to have the kingdom delivered at the end of the prayer. It will come “at the proper time,” he concludes.

In the 12th-century the Cistercian abbot Bernard of Clairvaux probably offered the most popular answer: “[God] will give either what we ask, or what he knows to be more profitable to us.” This echoes the prayer of Jesus in the garden: “If it be your will, let this cup pass; still, not my will, but yours be done.”

I’ve been praying for 35 years for a reconciling of hearts between two people I love very much. One of them died two years ago without the healing ever taking place. Yet I haven’t stopped praying for their reconciliation. Because I believe they both need it, now more than ever. I leave it to God to work out the details.

Then there is this… a story Kathleen Norris shared in remembering an old friend;

“There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below zero, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive!” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that happened was a couple of old Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp…”

Thoughts on Prayer – Adapted from the writing of Kathleen Norris

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MAY GOD BLESS US TO GROW AND THRIVE – IN 2025!

May God Bless you and yours as we journey together through this Beautiful Easter Season…

As we see, appreciate and embrace the Great Gift of God with us

May God’s Spirit empower us to

“expect great things from God and to attempt great things for God”… and

May God Continue to Bless Union Church!

-Pastor Mark