A Sermon for Sunday, May 12, 2024. Emory Presbyterian Church.
There once was a man who skipped worship at his family’s Presbyterian church every Sunday during hunting season, as it had been his ritual for 15 years. On this particular Sunday, as the man rounded the corner on a perilous twist in the trail, he collided with a bear. The impact sent him tumbling down the mountainside. During the fall, the hunting equipment went one way, and he went the other, twisting his ankle in the process.
Unable to move quickly as the bear charged toward him from the top of the mountainside, the man prayed: “Oh, Lord, I’m so sorry for skipping worship every Sunday to come out here and hunt. I swear I will be a faithful churchgoer if you could do something about this bear. I’ll be eternally grateful to you Lord if you just make him a Christian” That very instant, the bear skidded to a halt, rose up on his knees, clasped its large paws together and began to pray aloud: “Dear God, thank you for this food I am about to receive!”
With prayer, you never know what you’re going to get and most likely, it won’t be exactly what you desire. But then, again, prayer is not about saying the perfect words to God or wish fulfillment or expecting that our requests will be honored based on the amount of one’s faith and a long list of good deeds. In her bestselling book on prayer, author Anne Lamott says that prayer is about being real and honest in our relationship with God: [1]
Prayer, in some unique way, means we believe we’re invited into a relationship with someone who hears us when we speak. …Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy—all at the same time. It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves or when we are just sick and tired of being physically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toward something. … Prayer is taking a chance that against all odds and past history, we are loved and chosen, and do not have to get it together before we show up. … God can handle honesty, and prayer begins an honest conversation. My belief is that when you’re telling the truth, you’re close to God. … Prayer is our sometimes real selves trying to communicate with the Real, with Truth, with the light. It is us reaching out to be heard, hoping to be found by a light and warmth in the world, instead of darkness and cold.
Jesus is communicating with the “Real, with Truth, with the light” when he gives the longest prayer in the gospels as part of his farewell discourse—his last meal and conversations with the disciples. Jesus’ words in John 17 express a concern for his friends and their call to do God’s kingdom building in the world. Jesus asks for God to remain present in the lives of the disciples and to give them guidance and courage as they go out to share God’s love and invite others to be a part of the unifying body of Christ.
In the prayer, Jesus emphasizes how the disciples are set apart in a world that was created for goodness by God but has been corrupted by human sin or evil. The disciples are sanctified, consecrated, or anointed in the truth of God’s love and sent into a world that is in desperate need of that good news. Carmelo Álvarez, a professor at The Christian Theological Seminary in Indianapolis, Indiana, observes:[2]
Believing and witnessing in the world means that the church as a community of faith should live in a creative tension “in the world and not of the world.” A prayerful community takes seriously its intercessory role, in solidarity with the victims of injustice and marginalization, while denouncing the root causes of these unjust structures and broken relationships through its active witness in the lives of people and in the world.
Another theologian writes that Jesus’ prayer “includes a vision of ‘the world’ (kosmos) that is both tough-minded and tender, both realistic and hopeful.” They write further:[3]
The presence of danger and evil — we might think today of sexual assault, racism, or the ravages of war — are all too real, and the world’s brokenness extends into every nook and cranny, including our own hearts and minds. And yet this broken world is the world God loves. God sees through and beyond the world’s distortions to the wholeness and beauty underneath it, the original dignity and goodness we imply whenever we say something is “broken.” And God seeks to restore that original beauty, and so sends Jesus “into the kosmos, for the love of the kosmos” — and likewise, Jesus sends us.
Jesus’ prayer is powerful in that it communicates how much Jesus loves his friends and how much God cares for all of humanity and creation. Despite the evil and brokenness, God doesn’t abandon God’s people. Instead, God calls specific human beings to help do the hard work of healing and restoration. Like the African proverb that the late congressman and civil rights activist, John Lewis, was fond of saying: “When you pray, move your feet.” Sometimes praying is all we can do when tragedy and immense suffering occur. Most of the time, though, we can put our prayer into action, simply because God requires it to be done in the name of love and grace. An article on what members of the Presbyterian Church (USA) believe about prayer explains that:[4]
Prayer aligns us with God. Prayer is good for us. And prayer aligns us with those whom God loves. This leads us to praying for others, from personal needs of family and friends to the biggest issues that face our entire world. Sometimes praying is all we can do. And knowing that others are praying for you can be very meaningful. …
Prayer builds solidarity with those who are suffering. Prayer is a way of practicing empathy. When children (or adults) hear the church praying for people who are poor, they learn that this is something that matters to Christians. Prayer also provides an initial way to respond in faith, and thus becomes the first step toward action.
This is especially important when hearing about something distant or overwhelming that you really can’t do anything about, at least not immediately. While “first responders” are responding to a tsunami on the other side of the world, our “first response” is to offer our pain to God; then God may begin to illuminate what we can do to help. It keeps us from getting stuck.
Knowing that others are praying for us is meaningful, touching and soul stirring—even more so when we pause to consider and recognize that God in Christ prays constantly for each of us, no exceptions. Jesus’ prayer is just as much for his followers today as it was for the disciples in ancient Jerusalem, and it is proof of God’s unconditional love for humanity. God loves us so much that God entrusts us with carrying out God’s mission in the world. God doesn’t call animals or angels or beings from another universe to do the work of ministry. God calls us, with all of our quirks and flaws, to be God’s ambassadors and messengers of a love that unites people and creates beloved community. God calls you. God calls me. God calls all of us, regardless of what we’ve done or not done, and we can receive that call with the assurance that God will protect us in our endeavors and pick us up when we fall and when we fail. Jesus prayed:
“All mine are yours, and yours are mine; and I have been glorified in them. And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. … I speak these things in the world so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.
Keep and cherish those words in your hearts. Remember that God is always with you, even when you’ve hit rock bottom and lost hope in this weary world and time and remember that the God is always leading us to newness, wholeness, and joyfulness.
In response to Christ’s prayer for us, let us pray to God (for prayer is an intimate conversation with the divine), using the words of the Christian author, Sarah Bessey:
God of our honest prayers and more honest silences, open our eyes to see and our ears to hear and our hearts to understand how you are already here with us. Mother God, gather us as a hen gathers her chicks and let us catch our breath for one hot second and remember how you hold the whole world in your kind, capable, wise hands, including us. … Give us opportunities to practice mercy and courage…Call us to humility, confession, and repentance even when pride feels more comfortable and superior. Teach us how to rest, how to abide and how to light candles and be satisfied. …Teach us to pray, God, as you have always welcomed us to pray: fully human, fully yours, fully held and fully loved.
We will tell you the truth of our lives and of this world. And we will listen to the truth you speak back to us. The truth of our belovedness, of your justice, of your faithfulness, of love. And say let it be so, let it be in me.
Amen.
[1] Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, Anne Lamott, Riverhead Books, 2012
[2] Bartlett, David L.; Taylor, Barbara Brown. Feasting on the Word: Year B, Volume 2: Lent through Eastertide (Feasting on the Word: Year B volume) (p. 1290). Presbyterian Publishing Corporation.
[3] https://www.saltproject.org/progressive-christian-blog/2020/5/17/ascension-salts-lectionary-commentary-for-ascension-sunday
[4] https://www.presbyterianmission.org/story/presbyterians-believe-thoughts-prayers/
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