Sunday, July 24 - Prayer

 This sermon was preached for Sunday, July 24, 2022 at St. Mark's Episcopal Church, East Longmeadow. The texts for this sermon were: Luke 11:1-13, Psalm 85, and Colossians 2:6-15.

Early on, my husband and I were advised by wiser and more experienced parents that the key to a successful bedtime is a predictable routine. So for months now, right around 7pm, we read my son a storybook, give him some warm milk, and then we pray. Every night we pray the Our Father and then sing a Jewish prayer in Hebrew, the Shema, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” Most nights, it’s like magic. No matter how hyped up he is before bed, by the time we finish the last sacred song, his eyes are closed, his head is nodding, and his little body is all curled up and ready for sleep.

Routine is key. The persistence of our prayers has made all the difference.

When I lived in Jordan, a Muslim-majority nation, the entire day was broken up by prayer. Five times a day, from sunup to sundown, the call to prayer would echo from minarets of the mosques all across the city. “God is great! God is great! Come to prayer, come to prayer!” Most everyday Muslims I knew didn’t actually pray five times a day, but the devout ones did. You’d see them on the sidewalks or in the back of their stores, bending and straightening, then bending down again, mouthing memorized prayers and scripture.

In Islam, the experience of prayer is a whole body experience, involving bowing and prostration. It’s visually striking and totally engaging to practice. The most intriguing part to me, when I learned to pray from my Muslim friends, was the preparation for prayer. The ritual cleansing, or ablution, is the thorough washing of your hands, your feet, your face, and neck - even your nostrils and ears. By the end, you feel clean, really clean. And you are ready to put your whole self into prayer.

When I teach prayer to children - and I think that’s one of the most important things we can do here for kids - I teach them to pay attention to their bodies first. Get your body ready for prayer! I don’t like telling people what to do with their bodies in worship, so I like to offer options. You can bow your head, you can close your eyes, you can breathe slowly and deeply, you can hold your hands together. Whatever tells your body that this moment, this thing we are doing, is different, sacred, set apart from normal speech and thought. It helps to do the same thing every time. It helps to say the same things every time. The words get inside you, in your heart. Our Father…

Teach us to pray, Lord, they asked him. And Jesus gave them the words that have echoed through generations, in many different languages, by so many different believers, the words we pray every time we gather. They begin “Father…” or in Matthew’s Gospel, “Our Father…” They begin by declaring our closeness to God. It’s like a close friend you can ask anything of, Jesus explains. It’s like a child to a parent.

I love that my son’s first experience of prayer is the experience of his own father’s deep and abiding love. Usually his little body is lifted up close on dad’s shoulder, his favorite place in the world, held and rocked gently. For him, prayer is the experience of feeling completely loved and totally safe. My dream is that when he prays the Lord’s Prayer the rest of his life, his body will remember that feeling. My prayer is that in that moment, in those words, he will know how loved he is, by his father, by his mother, and by God.

Prayers do not have to be calm. They do not even have to have words. They can be filled with rage or desperation or despair. But even in those moments, when our hearts and mouths are filled with venom, if we direct that towards God, who can take it, who can take all of it, we are still opening ourselves up to love.

To pray is to be open to love, to receive love, and to be shaped by it. Sometimes that doesn’t look like how we intend it to look. Sometimes that looks like coming to terms with what our life has become, finding acceptance and forgiveness. Sometimes prayer gives us the strength to get up and go do what needs to be done. Sometimes prayer gives us permission to lay it all down. In prayer, we align ourselves to love. Thy will be done.

I pray because I believe prayer can change the world in many mysterious ways. In a more tangible way, though, prayer, especially persistent prayer, changes us. It changes us in a way that empowers us to change the world, to be the love it needs.