Prayers of the Righteous

Psalm 124; James 5:13-20

September 30, 2012

The author of the book of James makes it sound so simple. Suffering? Pray. Sick? Pray. Broken by your own sinfulness? Pray. Yard need some water? Pray.

Got questions – deep, abiding questions – about what prayer is, what it means, what it does? Well, the author of James doesn’t really go there. I’m tempted to answer for him with the simple instruction, pray.

If that answer, given without cynicism, works for you that’s great. Pray. Like Nike used to tell us: just do it! But that just doesn’t get it for me, and, I suspect, some of you want more than that as well.

When a loved one is seriously ill and the prayers of the faithful do not bring healing, then what? When the waters rise and, contrary to the witness of Psalm 124, the flood does sweep away people you know and love, what then of your prayers concerning the weather?

Or, more likely most of the time for most of us, when the ordinary, everyday vicissitudes of life roll over you like a rising, inevitable, irresistible tide, then what?

I was thinking about this last week in the context of our community life. Last Monday we posted our newly created Christian education position with great hopes and expectations of a more vibrant congregational life being born in our midst. A lot of prayers have been part of creating that job, and we continue to pray for the person that God will eventually call into the role.

Tuesday at the National Capital Presbytery meeting, we sang together from a sampler of the soon-to-be-published brand new Presbyterian hymnal. We sang with more great hopes and expectations of more vibrant worship lives across our broad church. Again, a lot of prayers went into creating the songs and the collection of songs that will be part of the prayer lives of millions of Presbyterians in the years to come.

We celebrated Sean and Christina’s marriage in worship yesterday and with it the promises of young lives setting out toward, one hopes, decades of adventure. We surrounded them with our prayers yesterday, and hold them in the light as their married life begins.

Today we celebrate and give thanks for the decades of faithful service that Evelyn Woodson – and her entire family – have given to this church, and bless her as she sets out toward the next adventure of her rich, long life. We lift Evelyn and her family in the light of our prayers this morning.

Next week we’ll celebrate World Communion Sunday, and be reminded in that service that we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses. We’ll also reunite in worship for one Sunday with the Church of the Covenant, a congregation that we gave birth to a half century ago. Talk about an opportunity for not only the Great Prayer of Thanksgiving, but for lots of prayers of thanksgiving.

The week after that, we’ll baptize another baby, and surround Nora and Jim and Sarah in our prayers.

What does all of that, and so much more the runs along similar everyday lines mean? After all, all of these grand adventures will end someday. That should not come as any great surprise. Someday, in God’s time, this congregation will almost certainly come to an end – churches do that. Someday we’ll replace these now old blue hymnals just as, a generation ago, they replaced the old red ones. Someday the one that comes next will be replaced. Someday, whoever we hire to be our first CE director will move on to something else, and, someday, that person, like each and every one of us, will die. After all is said and done, the demographic fact of the matter remains: the ratio of the birth rate to the death rate remains a constant: one to one.

All of this – jobs, churches, books, lives – all this shall one day pass away.

The question is not and never can be “will we die?” Rather, the question before us is always, “how shall we live?”

The suggestion from James is simply this: live prayerfully.

What does it mean to live prayerfully? First, it means to be awake. Don’t sleepwalk through your life, anesthetized to life’s rich unfolding. Be mindful.

Second, be awake also to the reality of that which is larger than yourself. Be awake to the presence of God, and, make sure it’s not a false god to whom you are awake. Oh, to be sure, there are dozens of false gods in our lives competing for our attention, or, sometimes, trying simply to lull us into mindlessness. Gods of mass consumption, massive power, mass distraction come to us in all sorts of beautiful and enticing packages, but when we bow before them we do so mindlessly and, therefore, not prayerfully nor even capable of prayer.

Authentic prayerful living is always mindful, awake, aware of the deepest parts of our own lives; aware of, connecting to, and mindful of the lives of others around us – all others; and aware of and mindful of the reality of God.

I believe that the text is saying to us pray that you might live. Not pray in order that you and your loved ones won’t die, or won’t face struggles, or won’t encounter deep brokenness, but rather, pray that you might live fully and completely into all of what life holds for you even life’s ending. Live prayerfully, then, that you might live at all.

Indeed, if we pray listening for God more than talking at God we might come to discover that some of the things we fear, and thus pray to avoid or to get through, are not as filled with fear as we imagined.

The apostle Paul invited his readers, famously, to “pray without ceasing.” What might that look like in practice? Let me slow down here on just that phrase: in practice.

For that is the key, ultimately, to living mindfully day by day throughout the days of our lives.

The way we live day to day is shaped and formed by practices. We shape our lives by how we spend our time, and if we spend some of it shaping our days with habits and rhythms that we know will open us to that which is holy, bit by bit, day by day, we reshape our whole lives. Such practices, as Bryan McClaren – and many others – insist, “transform us,” in McClaren’s words, “rewiring our brains, restoring our inner ecology, renovating our inner architecture, expanding our capacities.”

The author of James is inviting us into just such practice. He invites us to “take actions within our power that help us become capable of things currently beyond our power.”

The spirituality of prayer is, first and foremost – and, perhaps, last and always – simply about transforming ourselves and, thus, transforming the world around us. So, for example, if you find it difficult to be grateful when you are worn out, practice gratitude every day when you are fresh and energetic, and it will, in time, become the primary way you react to the world even when you are tired.

If you find it hard to be patient when you’re stressed, practice patience every day when you’re not under stress. In time, you will find, and be possessed by, wells of patience you did not know you possessed.

What does it mean to practice gratitude or patience? To a great degree it simply means being mindful and aware. Remembering, for example, to give thanks for all that you’ve been given, including the air you just inhaled: a gift from the Creator of the universe. Remembering, for example, to listen to the whole of the dream that your child is sharing before responding, or to the whole story your lover is telling of her afternoon before you respond, listening, that is to say, not in order to prepare a response but, simply, to understand.

There is way more that could be said about all of this, for there are so many more virtues we can practice. But for now, let’s end with this thought: the prayers of the righteous begin in listening for the prayers of God. The beginning of prayerful living comes when we start to listen, mindfully, step by step, breath by breath, through all the days of our lives for the prayers that come from the heart of the author of those days.

When we can begin – and it is never too late – when we can begin to live that way then we can find God, feel God’s presence, follow God’s calling to us, and rest in God’s love for us at every moment along our life’s journey whether we are bringing a baby to be baptized, preparing to move to another state, beginning a marriage, or walking life’s final steps. God loves you this moment, this day, and will for all days. The prayer of God is that each of us knows that simple truth. Amen.