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May 28, 2006
Text: Romans 8:26-28
Sermon by Rev.
Wayne Irwin
“Prayer is the most powerful thing!”
That’s what he said. Jim
Meyer. In Caledonia.
On Wednesday.
“Prayer is the most
powerful thing. It worked here.
I asked my God, or
Creator, or Maker to give me wisdom. And here I am.”
And Jim Meyer. one of the
residents of Caledonia, whose house is among those closest to
the disputed area, picked up a lilac branch, caught the eye of
Michael Laughing, one of the native mainstay persons at the
barricade, accepted his offered handshake, and together they
walked down the road.
“Prayer is the most
powerful thing. It worked here.” Prayer.
We are beginning our
annual Week of Guided Prayer here in Centenary.
Our retreat in the midst
of ordinary life.
And not just a week of
prayer.
But a week of “guided
prayer.”
So what do we mean by
prayer?
Apart from “guided”
prayer. What do we mean by prayer?
There are probably as many
definitions of prayer as there are people who use the word.
And there are as many
vehicles which draw us to prayer, which draw us to connect
with the presence of the Holy: vehicles such as worship, the
reading or hearing of scripture, the experience of nature, the
experience of music, of art, of silence, of solitude, of
relationships, even the experience of work, and the awakening
caused by crises, and also the joy of celebrations.
All of these, and a
thousand others are vehicles of prayer. All of these connect
us are able to re-connect us with the Holy.
So prayer, clearly, can be
defined as whatever it is that connects us with the Holy.
And that presents a pretty
broad spectrum.
But there are specific
forms of prayer with which we traditionally engage within the
church: elements of prayer . . . such as praise, such as
confession and thanksgiving, such as petition, supplication,
(prayer for ourselves), and intercession, (prayer for others).
But, in fact, everything
we do together as a community of faith can be a form of
prayer.
Even the flea market.
Even the cleaning out of
the storage room.
Together.
It can be an act of
prayer.
Because prayer is actually
dependent only on our intention. If we are being open to the
presence of the Risen Christ, if we are attending to the Love
in our midst, if we are attuning our heart with the heart of
Divine Love, God’s Love, unconditional, accepting, forgiving,
compassionate Love, in whatever we are doing, then what we are
doing . . . is praying.
But prayer is more than
any form.
It is more than any
particular activity. And it is much more than a moment on our
knees at bedtime.
Ron DelBene, the American
spiritual director who has been teaching on prayer for nearly
forty years describes prayer as being simply this:
“attentiveness to God’s presence.”
He puts it this way in his
video series: “Praying in the Midst of Life”
"Many of us believe it is up to us to pray in a
way that reaches God. I believe we are in the presence of God
at all times, and prayer is being attentive to that presence."
We are like fish in the
ocean. We swim in a sea of interchanging energy, which, like
for fish, is not visible. And we take it for granted
because of our familiarity with it.
Saint Catherine of Siena,
(14th century Italian) is remembered for saying:
“The soul is in God and God in the
soul, just as the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish.”
Saint Augustine . . . (4th
century – African) is remembered for saying:
“We live and move and have our being . . . in
God.”
So, our prayer can be
understood as the awareness of living in . . . and living out
of the presence of God.
Living in and out of the
presence of our Eternal Lover . . . Whether we can see our
Lover or not, whether we acknowledge our Lover or not.
God is forever blessing
our lives. And prayer is our intentional opening of ourselves
to that blessing.
So what do we do when we
intentionally pray?
We intentionally attend,
first of all, to our conceptualization as to who God is.
Notice that Jim Meyer, in
Caledonia, referred to God as “my God, Creator or Maker,” –
unsophisticated – simple – but making no difference.
We name God with whatever
name we know. And when we do we bring to mind in that moment
our understanding of God's attitude toward us – an
understanding that is enhanced by the degree to which we know
and understand the story of Jesus – who incarnates an attitude
of compassionate, forgiving, accepting love, without
condition.
And so, in prayer, we also
are choosing, then, to essentially enter into an intimacy with
this Divine Mystery – an intimacy of private conversation,
moving towards a deeper awareness and a more mindful
consciousness of the presence and guidance, and even
indwelling of God – a surrender to the Universe that
ultimately opens up our whole being to what God would do
within us, with us, for us . . . and through us.
And there is nothing more
fulfilling in life than the sense that we are engaged in the
ministry of God to this world.
And it seems that ordinary
folk are the best suited for this ministry.
Ushi Entenmann, writing in
the latest issue of Ode magazine, observes, for
example, that over the past couple of decades ordinary
civilians have shown themselves to be just as effective in
stopping violence and conflict as diplomats and national
leaders.
Doctors and priests and
sports stars, business people, artists and aid workers are now
the ones who are often bringing the clashing groups together
around the negotiating table -- not the politicians.
United Nations
Secretary-General Kofi Annan has
recognized this global network of new peace-makers as an
important complement to the reach of governments. And although
the headlines that focus on the flames make us think that
violence is on the increase, the opposite is actually the
case.
While journalists wrote
about tragic battle zones like Bosnia, and Somalia and Rwanda,
more wars ended in the 1990's than began.
And since 1990, the number
of armed conflicts in the world has fallen by more than 46% –
this according to The 2005 Human
Security Report.
Between 1988 and 2001 the
number of genocides and assassinations fell by 80 %. And wars
are claiming fewer victims. In 1982, 250,000 died in war. In
2002, 60,000. The trend is visible. Our world is growing
increasingly peaceful.
So ‘Imagine’ – what
Martine sang – John Lennon’s lyrics – the peace is possible.
Henner and Barbara
Papendieck – two ordinary people – a sociologist and an
economist – undertook to do something about the war raging on
in Mali, in Africa, between the Tuareg people and the Songhai
people.
The international
community knew virtually nothing about it – because the press,
as usual, was focused on the situations affecting North
American and European interests.
Henner and Barbara
Papendieck felt called, themselves, to do something. And they
did. They went to Mali in 1994, in the midst of the war,
carrying with them 18 million Euros entrusted to them by a
German aid organization and a credit institution.
They organized a peace
conference, brought combatants together, founded an advisory
board of village elders including influential men from every
ethnic group.
And they did this on their
own. They were not missionaries for any group.
“The young men,” they
said, “had grown up with war. They knew only one way to solve
conflict – with violence. They were not invited to the
peace conference.
The old men – the elders –
could remember a time when things were different. They were
the ones invited. So we told them we had money, they said, and
that we would spend it wherever there was peace.
And it was their job, the
elders’ job, to find where the peace was so we could begin.”
And today, eleven years
later, with a total of 55 million euros, about 80 million
Canadian dollars, they have created 25 schools, 45 city halls,
7 health clinics, 2 banks, and they have dug 13 deep wells and
put in place 330 motorized water pumps, each pump capable of
turning 75 acres of desert into fertile land able to feed 700
people.
The reward of ten years of
negotiations by two ordinary persons responding to the calling
within them, responding to their awareness of God’s guidance
for them, for the spending of the resources of their lives, in
concert with the relationships of their lives.
And it is something that
is possible for every one of us. Each one of us is able to
make a difference in concert with our own resources and
relationships..
To do something towards
the well-being of the world. And there is no telling how big a
deal that can be, if we are faithful to our calling.
And there is nothing in
life more fulfilling.
But, it involves prayer.
It involves becoming utterly vulnerable to God, becoming
utterly trusting of God, becoming utterly tuned in to doing
blessing, wherever we are, as simple as caring for an employee
or doing something special for a neighbour..
So, prayer, in a phrase,
can be defined as “surrender to Love.”
All of this, of course,
stirs questions.
Sometimes intellectual
questions. Sometimes practical ones. For example, there are
those among us who may ask: “Does God really hear us when we
pray?”
And within our Centenary
faith community we can talk about these things. Because it is
in our gathering here that we refuel for the tasks out there.
And in here, we
acknowledge that we believe that God always hears our prayer,
whether it be shouted, or whispered, whether it be groaned, or
whether it be silently breathed.
We believe that God knows
the yearnings of our heart, of everyone’s heart, as well as
knowing the thoughts or any of the words that are chosen to
attempt to give expression to our sighs.
That’s what the Apostle
Paul is speaking of when he writes that we don’t know how to
pray. He is saying that we don’t need to know, that the Spirit
of God within us knows, and actually does our praying for us .
. . as he puts it: “with sighs too deep for words.”
Why do we believe this?
Because we understand God to be ever-present with us, to be
present in every cell of our being, and to thus know us
through and through, better than we know ourselves.
Hence God knows any need
of ours in a very immediate way, whether it be expressed or
left unexpressed.
And God knows what we also
need in order to accomplish what God would have us do. Why
else do we experience the coincidences that amaze us.
We have a chef, for
example, volunteering in our tea room here. His name is
Raymond. A pastry specialist. He and his partner would like to
open a bake shop here. All we would need, he said, is
something like a pizza oven. That very week, Bruce gets a call
from the Staircase Theatre, which has closed.
Says the proprietor, “We
have some equipment here. Could you use it. You can have it
for the taking. Two commercial refrigerators . . . and a pizza
oven!”
All of which raises the
question then: If God knows our need . . . Even before we ask
. . . then why do we ever need to pray?
Of course, it is partly
because prayer is so much more than asking.
And because we actually
have an instinctive longing to pray.
A built-in desiring. We
are wired for prayer. We are designed for readily reaching
toward the One who is the Source of all that is, for whom
nothing is impossible, and who is already known to us
somewhere deep within our soul.
So, whether we be
religious or not, whether we be Christian or not, if we do not
pray, somehow, if we do not connect with the Holy somehow,
sooner or later we feel starved, and aware that we are aching
spiritually, and maybe even physically, for an experience of
coming into awareness of our relationship with God, of that
relationship in which we already exist.
William Wordsworth, 18th
/ 19th century English in his Ode
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections
of Early Childhood penned these
related words: "Our birth is but a
sleep and a forgetting . . . not in entire forgetfulness, and
not in utter nakedness, but trailing clouds of glory do
we come from God, who is our home: Heaven lies about
us in our infancy!"
Arguing that it is our
life in this dimension with all its tribulation that causes
our childhood certainty to become clouded. We become forgetful
of the Divine.
And yet there remains
within us the spiritual instinct that is able to lead us to
remembering that it is from God we come . . . and to God we
return . . . and that meanwhile God is with us all the while.
We are not alone.
So the words of prayer
simply prepare us. They prepare our minds and thus enable us
to open ourselves to what God is waiting and desiring to give.
To what God is poised to give. For the sake of God’s agenda
for this world. For the sake of what God wants.
That’s why in our prayer
time, we don’t presume to ask for what we want. We have
our ‘druthers, but they are so often selfish. We ask for what
God wants. Because nothing can ever be better than what God
wants.
And we in this faith
community believe that we can indeed knock on the door of
heaven, with our prayer, as we are invited to do, and that
when do, the door is opened by the Christ, as it were,
standing before us holding the door – holding it open -- the
door to God’s storeroom of blessings.. And one thing more.
It has been said that
prayer changes things.
And it does. But what it
mostly changes in the person doing the praying.
“Someone had to take
charge,” said Jim Meyer, in Caledonia. “It was a feeling I
can’t explain. Something felt different.” That’s how it is
reported that he described it.
He had asked the Divine
Mystery for wisdom, and had acted on what he felt moved to do.
There is nothing more courageous than that. It was his task
for that day . . . for the world.
And many of you, I know,
understand.
We begin our Week of
Guided Prayer today. Those of us who are retreatants spend the
week in listening, and together with our prayer companion,
discerning the assurance and leading of the presence of God.
Knowing that when our
prayers are in accord with the high and loving purposes of
God, miraculous things can and do, and will . . . come to be.
We can see it happening
here . . . All around us.
As to what all of that
will be in our personal lives, in the life of our faith
community – that’s the exciting part.
And the mysterious part.
We wait in anticipation of
blessing. |
