Prayer Is... Personal

Check out the video version of this sermon by clicking here!

Hello and welcome back to another week here on Making Waves! I’m so glad that you are joining us here to further our walk with God and journey closer towards a better understanding of our faith.

I want to start out this sermon by asking the question: how did you learn to pray?

Did you learn to pray? If so, who was it that taught you? Did you perhaps learn it from Mom and Dad? Maybe from Vacation Bible School or Sunday School? Maybe you didn’t learn it until wayyyy later in life? Maybe you’re still learning?

I think, regardless of when, where, or how we learned to pray, we can all agree that prayer is something incredible and bizarre. It’s a miraculous mystery that many interpret differently. What even is prayer? What happens when we pray?

If you’ve ever prayed around me, then odds are you’ve noticed that I’m not very traditional in my action of prayer. More often than not, unless I’m trying to be extra respectful and adjust to others, then I will pray with my eyes open and my face pointed to the sky. This was something that I learned at a very young age because until the age of 8 or 9 years old, I was terrified of the dark. I’m still not totally comfortable with the unknown that the dark brings, but I’ve grown out of it a bit. But, when I was a child, I wanted to pray, but the thought of closing my eyes and allowing the dark to surround me was enough incentive to never pray again, thank you.

That was the case, until I noticed something one day whenever I had my eyes open during prayer. I wasn’t the only one with my eyes open. I can recall sitting down with one of my Sunday School teachers and explaining my predicament and confessing how I didn’t think I could pray, even though I wanted to. That was when she told me that she thought there was more than one way to pray.

Since that day, I’ve been on a journey in prayer. In the Bible, we are told to pray without ceasing. Now, I refuse to believe that the apostles of Jesus’ time went around with their eyes closed without ceasing, so maybe there is more to prayer than folded hands and closed eyes. But before we can talk about means of prayer, we have to talk about what prayer even is… what does it mean? What are we doing when we pray?

As always, I believe it’s best to turn to our one true example when we ask questions such as this, so let’s turn to the Word and dive into what Jesus says about prayer. We’ll be reading from the NRSV translation and the scripture will be written below, feel free to follow along in your personal Bible or translation, if you’d like. I’m sure this will sound familiar.

“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.” 2 He said to them, “When you pray, say:

Father, hallowed be your name.
   Your kingdom come.
3     Give us each day our daily bread.
4     And forgive us our sins,
       for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
   And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

- Luke 11:1-4 (NRSV)

Will you pray with me? Dear Heavenly Father, I ask that the words of my mouth and the meditations of our virtual hearts here together be acceptable in Your omnipresence, God. For you are our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.

In the movie Bruce Almighty, there is this hilarious scene where we see comedian Jim Carrey after the worst day of his life. After having a horrible morning stuck in traffic, he arrives to his job as a field reporter for a news crew. He stays confident because he knows that this is the day he should be getting a promotion to anchor. Instead, while filming a silly newscast that he hates, he finds out live on the air that - not only did he not get anchor - but the position went to his rival Evan. He has a breakdown on camera and loses his job. Then, as he is packing up his desk (needless to say, he was fired after his outburst) he comes outside to find a homeless man being picked on by some thugs. He calls out to help the man, so the gang throws their attention on Carrey and beat him silly. Carrey wakes up to his broken and vandalized vehicle and drives home to his long-term girlfriend, who he yells at and she leaves him to give him some space. From morning to night, he has quite literally lost everything that he had when he woke up. He has nearly lost his marbles. So, he goes on a drive and notices a bracelet that his girlfriend gave him earlier in the film: a prayer bracelet. He grabs the bracelet and then the begins to pray, and then the movie really gets interesting. I won’t spoil anymore of the movie for you, but if you haven’t watched it, you really should. It’s a wonderful story.

What I’m getting at here is that, in the movie, Jim Carrey’s character has no real ties to Christianity or God. There is no mention or focus in his life on his faith. But when he is totally broken down, he finds that when all other hope is gone, he turns towards prayer.

Sociologists - those who study society and people - notice a trend in humanity. Regardless of where people are or their former knowledge of a higher power, humans have some kind of natural sense ingrained within us of God. We will naturally turn towards some kind of higher entity - something bigger and stronger than us - when faced with hard situations or blessed by something incredible.

This natural response within us provokes another kind of response - prayer. We have a natural sense of God and then we create within ourselves a reaction to God through communication, which we call prayer.

So, through sociology we can assume that prayer is a natural reaction to our own sense of God that we have within ourselves. When we ask, “What is prayer?,” we can know that prayer is how we as humans communicate with our sense of God. After we answer that question, we ask the more specific question of, “What is prayer… to a Christian?” In order to answer that question, we have to take a look at what happens during prayer.

In the scripture that we read just a moment ago, we see this moment where the disciples are so curious about Jesus’ connection with God that they ask him to teach them how to pray. I imagine the disciples are like me and are thinking of the Americanized one-stop-shop of a prayer to fix all things. Kind of like the duct-tape of prayers.

Jesus responds in the usual Jesus-type way, a means which leads to surprise. The disciples were likely expecting Jesus to lead with some reverent form of God, calling Him some great name: Yahweh, Elohim, or something of the equivalent. Instead, Jesus starts off this prayer with the most casual of all names: Father. Abba.

One of my friends back in my youth days took this idea of casual prayer and ran with it. She would start off each prayer with, “Dear Daddy God…” She found that it helped cement the idea of God being her paternal role model. She would never call her human father “Father,” so it didn’t mean as much to her to call God “Father.” So, in calling him Daddy, it helped to make that connection stronger.

This is the first and, arguably, most important factor of prayer: prayer is the connection between Father and child (i.e. YOU!)

What comes next in the prayer that Jesus teaches us? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not all about our own personal wants. In fact, it’s not about wants at all. Jesus teaches us to pray for our “daily bread,” which refers back to the manna in the days of the great Exodus. It talks about giving us what we need, but it doesn’t stop there. We express our desire to use those needs to forgive those who have hurt us, and hope that God will forgive us that same way.

So, in this prayer, after we establish a connection between Father God and us, His children, we then go on to establish a connection between us, the children, and everyone else, the world around us. Once again, our second-most important factor in prayer is the connection with the child and the world. When we pray, that is what is happening, we are talking and forming a connection with God that, ideally, strengthens and benefits our connection with the rest of the world.

Okay.

So now we know what prayer is, and we know how we as Christians treat prayer. We might not have it totally figured out, but that’s what sermon series are for, right? (:

There’s another important factor that comes out of this discover, however. We know that prayer is our connection of God, but it’s hard to talk to someone that you can’t hear or see tangibly, right?

This is a seminarian topic of our own personal imago dei. What is the image of God that we picture in our prayer and our view of God? For my friend from home, she imagined God as the image of her daddy, the loving and gentle father figure. For some, God might be the firm, but loving image of God. Strong and dependable. For one of my mentors, she imagined that when she prayed, she was resting in the immense hands of a gigantic God who formed the universe in the palms of His hands.

Does it matter whether or not you pray with your hands folded? Or whether your eyes are closed or open? I’d say those things are unimportant, or at the very least tertiary to our task of first coming to view an image of God. The first and most important part of God is to determine who God is to you and establish that connection with Him and the world.

I encourage you to think on that for the next week until we meet again to continue our conversation on prayer. Who is God to you?