One of the things that lightened up COVID was that people had too much time on their hands and they made memes to help us through. Not that I want to trigger you, but here are some of my favorites:
1. Because suddenly, there was no toilet paper.
2. We started working remotely with the best of intentions, but pretty soon.
3. And homeschooling was sometimes its own train wreck.
4. We learned some things had to be different. Here’s Ikea’s new furniture line.
5. So we started getting creative. One family looked at the floor plan of their house for weekend travel ideas.
6. All in all, we thought if we got caught up in the apocalypse, we would be ready for zombies in hard-core leather, and instead we had sweats and fuzzy slippers.
7. As we started finding our way through COVID, we had to learn new rules And new hygiene rules—the dog looks entirely too pleased with itself.
One of the biggest things we learned was how little control we had of some things, and how to focus on the things we could control. Turns out, praying was one of the things we could do—even if we couldn’t be with someone we loved, we could pray for them. Even though we couldn’t make something happen, we asked for guidance and inspiration for how to make things special. Those are ways of praying! In the post-pandemic world, these approaches to prayer are good, but we have the chance as individuals and as a church to go to the next level. Our passages for today talk about how to pray better and more powerfully.
First, Jesus teaches us to make the need of the person our focus. In our New Testament passage today, what is it that gets someone up in the middle of the night to go find some food? It’s the need of a friend. So if we are going to pray deeply for someone, we have to focus on their need. We can imagine with our heart’s eyes what the other person might need. I say, “with our heart’s eyes” because compassion may help us understand the person better. For example, when I’m praying for my children, I often recall what I remember about being their age, and what was important to me—what I was thinking about, and what was hard or painful.
Second, once we have the need in view, and we hold up that need for God to see, we can begin to imagine what God would want to do about that need. In A Slow and Certain Light, Elisabeth Elliot tells of two adventurers who stopped by to see her, all loaded with equipment for the rain forest east of the Andes. They sought no advice, just a few phrases to converse with the native peoples. She writes: “Sometimes we come to God as the two adventurers came to me—confident and, we think, well-informed and well-equipped. But has it occurred to us that with all our accumulation of stuff, something is missing?” She suggests that we often ask God for too little. “We know what we need—a yes or no answer, please, to a simple question. Or perhaps a road sign. Something quick and easy to point the way. What we really ought to have is the Guide himself. Maps, road signs, a few useful phrases are good things, but infinitely better is Someone who has been there before and knows the way.”[1] That’s what’s cool about God: God can reach into the person’s life we are praying for, can see and hear the true needs of their life and can guide us in how to pray. Since God loves the person we are praying for, and God wants what’s best for them, we can let God be the guide for this part of prayer.
Third, pray like you believe it’s already done. Television interviewer and journalist, Larry King, tells the story of three farmers who gathered daily in a field during a horrible drought. The men were down on their knees, looking upward, and praying the skies would open and pour forth much-needed rain. Unfortunately, the heavens were silent, and the petitioners became discouraged, but they continued to meet every morning to lift up their request to God. One morning, an uninvited stranger approached and asked the men what they were doing. They responded, “We’re praying for rain.” The newcomer looked at each of them and shook his head, “No, I don’t think so.” The first farmer said, “Of course we’re praying. We are down on our knees pleading for rain. Look around; see the drought. We haven’t had rain in more than a year!” The outsider continued to nod his head and advised them their efforts would never work. The second farmer jumped in and said, “We need the rain; we aren’t asking only for ourselves, but for our families and livestock.” The man listened, nodded, and said he still wasn’t impressed. “You’re wasting your time,” he said. The third farmer couldn’t take any more, and in anger he replied, “Okay, what would you do if you were in our shoes?” The visitor asked, “You really want to know?” The three landowners answered, “We really want to know! The future of our farmlands is at stake.” The guest said simply, “I would have brought an umbrella!”[2]
As a church fellowship, praying is something we could get more intentional about, and draw in the community more. I know many of us have strong prayer lives privately—after all, I look at the amazing decisions and movements of our fellowship, and there’s no doubt we are a praying bunch. But I wonder if part of what would help our fellowship to the next level would be getting a prayer team or prayer circle going. Maybe we would meet monthly, but in between time, we could share prayer concerns as they pop up. We could use our FaceBook page for prayer requests, develop our presence on NextDoor Squantum, and put a link so folks could ask for prayer on our website. One of the cool things about this fellowship, is that our Congregational Meetings have the flavor of a prayer meeting, as we mull over together how God might be leading us. In three weeks, February 26, we will have another one of those times when we put our heads together to imagine how God might be leading us in the coming year. Corporately, we follow the same guidance we have as individuals, to ask God to show us the needs that addressing, to ask God for guidance in how we should approach those needs, and to trust that we will have what we need when we need it.
Here we run into the part of the mystery of praying for others that may make many of us squirm a little. Oh we know that prayer is a good thing. We may even have a sense that through prayer, God can do things we can’t. But to believe that God could really truly heal someone of a disease, that God could shatter an addiction, that God could do what seems impossible…well… I heard about a church that had bought a new organ, and they invited a talented musician to play that organ during the dedication recital for that organ. The organist came and sat down at the organ to begin playing. And as soon as he touched one of the keys there was silence - nothing. A custodian there at the church knew what the problem was; the organ was not turned on. So a minister stood and called on a deacon to pray, and as the person prayed the custodian went to work and then jotted down a note and slipped it into the hands of the organist. The note simply read: “After the prayer, the power will be on.” In this story, we can ask ourselves who the real pray-er is. Is the real pray-er the minister who stops things and asks someone to pray? Is it the deacon who calls on God be at work? Is it the custodian, whose insight allows him to diagnose the problem and figure a way to fix it? Or is it the organist, who has to start playing when the deacon says, “Amen”? I wonder if they all have their part to play, just as we all do. And we are all learning about this praying thing, how to pray more deeply, with more compassion and more heart, more wisdom and insight, faith and trust. We can hear all those things as Jesus prays on the cross for all of us, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” As Jesus suffered for us, we should be encouraged to enter into the hurts and needs of others, and to give those hurts and needs a voice to the Father who will give us what we need: more of God in the world.
[1]Craig Brian Larson, Illustrations for Preaching & Teaching (Christianity Today, 1993), p. 106.
[2]Larry King, Powerful Prayers (Renaissance Books, 1998), p. 243.