Sweet Hour of Prayer

Preached at Hanover Street Presbyterian Church

On June 26, 2005

By Pastor Thomas C. Davis

Texts:

Excerpts from Psalms 25, 62, and 130

Make me to know your ways, O Lord; teach me your paths.  Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long . . .For God alone my soul waits in silence; from him comes my salvation . . .I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning.

Luke 11: 1-4

He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples."  He said to them, When you pray, say:  'Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.  Give us each day our daily bread.  And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.  And do not bring us to the time of trial.

Sermon Text

This week we had a good discussion in the Hanover email group about the importance of experience in religious life.  For a church to grow, wrote one of our members, "it has to become a living experience . . .The members have to live their faith, demonstrate their faith, so that those who attend can see a reason for the existence of the congregation." 

He was talking, of course, about the crucial importance of practicing what we preach.  If what we do demonstrates the truthfulness of what we say, then newcomers will have a good experience among us, and they may respond to God's call by joining us in the ongoing ministry of Jesus. 

But spiritual seekers aren't just looking for a social-service club, which they could just as easily find outside a community of faith.  Spiritual seekers want above all to experience God, or perhaps they might say, to feel connected to all that is.  They want to be in touch with something or someone beyond their ordinary, everyday world, something or someone to give themselves to, to center themselves in.  Not all people have this spiritual yearning, of course, but those who do eventually come to realize that living a moral life doesn't quite scratch where they itch.  They want God, not piety.

The name for this yearning for a direct experience of God is "mysticism."  Mystics are people who aren't satisfied with believing what a religious community deems correct, nor with doing what a religious community deems right.  Mystics want more.  They want to know God, first hand.  Communities of faith that take this yearning for experience of God seriously, and respond to it in helpful ways--those are the ones that are growing. 

By in large Presbyterians have been suspicious of people's yearning for transcendental experience.  We have mistrusted religious feeling because it is much too subjective.  Our piety is based upon God's word, and we have tended to understand the content of that word in doctrines that can be expressed in nice, neat, logical syllogisms.  My, how we do love our systematic theology!  It's not surprising that newcomers to our Presbyterian culture often find us reserved, unemotional--"God's frozen chosen," as some have quipped.  The impression is well taken, for our Presbyterian culture flows from a theology that has pretty consistently suppressed the core energy of spiritual longing, the will to know God directly.

How do people come to know God?  Through right belief?  I have already said that that isn't enough.  Through right action?  No, that isn't enough either.  Over eons, the answer that so many religious traditions have offered is this:  Prayer is the way.  Prayer is humanity's way of making a transcendental connection. 

Hearing this answer, perhaps you feel short-changed.  "I've been praying all my life," you may say, "but my prayers have never helped me have an experience of God.  Oh, don't get me wrong.  I feel good when I pray.  And I trust that I've been heard.  And sometimes, I'm pretty certain that something that happened in my life later was God's answer to my prayer.  But, prayer has never given me a direct experience of God.  For me, prayer has always been a one-way communication.  God has never talked back to me.  In fact, I'd be scared if God did.  I mean, I'd wonder about my health, you know.  Crazy people think God talks to them, right?  I'm quite content with not getting immediate feedback."

Lots of us wrestle thus with the idea of conversing with God.  Although deep down we want, as that tune from "Godspell" said, to "see God more clearly" we regularly pull back from too clear a connection.  After all, we don't want anybody to think we're nuts! 

But, perhaps you are coming to see that there is no way to satisfy a longing to know God directly without daring to walk the boundary between sanity and insanity.  Some of our heroes of faith must have seemed quite crazy before they were beatified.  The Bible tells us that Abraham heard God calling him to kill his son.  Some people would regard that auditory message as a sure sign of social psychopathology.  Ezekiel saw a wheel, way up in the middle of the air.  Hallucination, some will say.  Saul, later to become the Apostle Paul, was struck blind when he saw the light of Jesus on the road to Damascus.  Temporary blindness is listed in the diagnostic manual of mental disorders as a symptom of "Conversion Disorder."  Joan of Arc's voices?  -- indicators of schizophrenia, most likely.  In his journal the founder of the Quaker tradition, George Fox, mentions times of very low spirit, and times of almost ecstatic enthusiasm.  Might he have had bi-polar disorder? 

David Boder wrote an amusing little coffee table book in which he summarizes the content of literary classics through haiku, the Japanese poetic form of five, then seven, then five syllables.  He sums up William James' classic, "The Varieties of Religious Experience," this way:

Let's be pragmatic

Saints, monks, mystics--their faith works,

So what if they're nuts?

By the lights of a culture that has lost all taste for transcendence, and all patience for waiting, the hunger for conversation with God will seem crazy indeed.  So, if you are a spiritual seeker, and you hunger for more than walking a pious path, if instead you hunger for conversation with God, then you must dare to pray and wait for an answer, and let those who would label you nuts think what they will. 

The psalms are the Bible's prayer book.  The psalms frequently mention waiting, waiting for God to teach one and enlighten one as one prays.  Says one of our prayer excerpts this morning:  "Lead me in your truth, and teach me, for you are the God of my salvation; for you I wait all day long."  Another says,  "I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope; my soul waits for the Lord more than those who watch for the morning, more than those who watch for the morning." 

When I was coming up, no one taught me that prayer was mostly waiting, instead of speaking.  When Jesus' disciples asked him to teach them how to pray, it's clear that they wanted to know what they should say.  He answered their need.  He taught them what they could say.  We know his response as "The Lord's Prayer."  But Jesus didn't mention that his own way of praying was mostly waiting.  Jesus spent the whole night in the Garden of Gethsemane praying, so says scripture.  Do you think he was speaking all that time?  I challenge you to keep talking in a steady stream for more than even one hour.  It's hard!  You wear out your brain!  Pretty soon you can't think of anything else to say, and you just shut down.  Now, if you've been taught that prayer is a message that you speak to God, then that's the end of your prayer.  But you're really only getting started, you see, because prayer is mostly waiting.  The psalmist says, "For you I wait all day long . . .For God alone my soul waits in silence."

If you were trying to have a conversation with a friend, and you didn't wait for even just a little while to let your friend get a word in edgewise, what kind of conversation would you have?  None at all!  And yet, though many of us think of prayer as communication with God, we behave as if we believe that it can only be a one-way communication:  We say what we have to say, and then finish with "amen."  Our prayer is over.  No wonder we've never experienced God's presence if we pray that way.  Prayer is not just speaking.  Prayer is mostly waiting. 

The Quakers taught me that.  I've sat in silence with them for an hour at a time, and my monkey brain, my sincere, pious monkey brain churned on and on, but finally, I couldn't think of anything more to say to God.  My monkey brain just wore out and shut down.  Then, every once in a while in the silence, something floated up like a leaf in a rain barrel, and it became clearer and clearer.  Behold, an opening!  God was speaking back.

Shortly we will sing, "sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer, that calls me from a world of care."  How quaint!  Who prays for an hour anymore?  I've been amused by the mention of "flash prayer" in a number of popular books about praying.  Flash prayers are the little thoughts we send flying to God in a brief moment, when we have a channel open.  Flash prayers are heard by God, say the books.  They may not be eloquent, but they are sincere, and they are heard by God.  Well, I won't dispute that, but what is God going to do about such prayers if we don't have a channel open to listen for God's response because we're back to business as usual, too busy multi-tasking?  Monkey brain is our standard operational mode these days.  We don't even recognize that something more than flash prayers might be required to establish a conversation!  Everything must be had in a hurry, or else it's not worth trying for.  "Sweet hour of prayer," sang our forebears, celebrating something real.  They experienced communion with God because they set aside enough time to have a conversation.  Flash prayers weren't enough for them, not because they weren't as efficient as we, but because they understood that prayer is mostly waiting, not speaking.

You'll say:  So what is to be done, preacher?  I don't have an hour each day for praying.  Why, you're lucky to get me in church for an hour a week!  People, I know all about that rat race.  I'm part of it.  I rarely make enough time for praying myself; and I'm not proud of that.  But, enough is enough.  It seems to me that some of us--those of us who aren't killing our pain by narcotics or booze or other addictions-- are experiencing the boundary of our tolerance for the monkey brain life. 

I listen to you, and I read between your lines.  I know that you do yearn to know God, especially in the midst of your hectic schedules.  So, what I'm about to say to you, I say with sympathy, and as a fellow, over-burdened rat in the race:  Let's try to slow down every so often.  If we can't take an hour, let's try taking a quarter hour.  The clock time isn't so important; how we live time is.  Let's try to take long enough in prayer to wear out our monkey brains and reach the time of fertile silence.  Speaking to God is good, but it's just a beginning.  Let's try to get past that beginning.  God is calling us:  "Take time to be holy.  Prayer is to change you, not me.  Take time to be holy."