I’M PRAYING FOR YOU
Rev. Dr. Kathy Fuson Hurt
FBC, November 16, 2008
Scripture: Genesis 18:20-33
In the process of learning the history and traditions of our church here, I heard a story about some First Baptist members that sounds both a bit hard to imagine and so, so typical. The story claims that a couple from our congregation was on a backpacking trip in the mountains when they suddenly came upon a very hungry bear. They turned to run and the bear gave chase; being a large and well-motivated bear, the couple realized they were losing the race. Cornered by the bear at the edge of a cliff, the couple jumped down to a narrow ledge, only to have the ledge begin to crumble beneath their combined weight. Each of them grabbed hold of a bush growing from the side of the cliff—yet the roots of the bush slowly, slowly pulled loose. With a bear looming above them, and a thousand foot drop below, the pair realized they were in dire straits, and began to pray for help. “Um, God, um—well, we haven’t kept in touch with you much over the years, and we’re sorry about that. But you can see things are really, really bad now. So we’d appreciate it if you could do your miraculous thing here and save us.”
To the couple’s astonishment, their prayer immediately received an answer. A rich, resonant voice boomed out, “You must have faith, and let go.”
Let go? Really? The couple looked at the drop below them, at the bear still growling above them, at each other, and called, “Is there someone else we can talk to?”
Prayer is a tricky subject, especially in a church like ours where we find a diversity of belief about the nature of God and what sort of relationship, if any, we have with God. For many, prayer implies a subservient kind of stance towards the universe in which one is always bargaining or begging for something, or prayer conjures up images of magical occurrences. Or we hear perhaps the most common definition of prayer as talking to God, and if we do not think of God in personal terms, then praying as talking to God will make no sense to us.
For children, or for persons at the earlier levels of spiritual development, prayer may look like talking to God, or invoking magical occurrences, or begging for things. All those characterizations of prayer do have validity, but mostly when one is considering the prayers of children, or the prayers offered by a person in the primary stages of spiritual development. Think of talking to God and begging for things as a kind of kindergarten form of prayer.
But go past children and kindergarten, and prayer becomes difficult to define, like many elements of spiritual life. For instance, alongside all the characterizations of prayer as talking to God, there are as many, if not more, writings that depict prayer as a kind of waiting, without expectation, simply being still and quiet. One cannot really do a lot of talking to God or begging for things if one is being still, quiet, waiting.
And if prayer does sometimes involve talking to God, then it would seem, as in any relationship, that it must also include a fair amount of listening. Listening would go hand in hand with that still, quiet attitude of waiting—and the waiting is without expectation. If I ask your advice or your perspective or your help, I need to wait and see how you respond, and while I may be hopeful about your response, if I truly value your presence in my life, I will also try to listen for you without putting words in your mouth or anticipating what you will say.
Each Sunday during our time of joys and concerns, some of you include in your sharing a request for prayers, or even more specifically prayer for comfort, for healing, for guidance, for support. And it is here that we move into the most problematic aspect of prayer, when it heads beyond the individual into the realm of others’ lives. If I skip any notion of praying for another, and if I dodge the question of just exactly who I am praying to, or who or what the other party is in this prayer relationship, then I avoid the controversial aspects of prayer.
But prayer for others seems to be a key part of this whole prayer business, and it certainly happens in all kinds of churches each week during worship services. Television religious personalities are able to pull in significant sums of money by praying for other people. I suspect few of us can claim never to have been prayed for. Just to test that hypothesis, a show of hands please: how many of you have ever had someone say to you, “I’m praying for you?” I have been prayed for countless times by people both known to me and by people I have never met. Those prayers have been for my healing when I was ill, for my comforting when I was grieving, for my peace of mind when my mind was far from peaceful, for my safe travel and safe return from travel, for my guidance in making crucial decisions, for my good fortune when I took risks, for a change of fortune when those risks did not go well, and—perhaps most frequently—for the salvation of my soul whenever I was on a course that seemed destined to take me far from God, if not straight to hell. So I know very well what it means and how it feels to hear another say, “I’m praying for you.”
And I have to say that with rare exception, hearing another say, “I’m praying for you,” has not left me with a good feeling. No, quite the contrary: someone says to me, “I’m praying for you,” and I am likely to fee, instead of comforted, reassured, or cared about—which, I believe, is usually what the person saying those words intends—I feel trivialized, dismissed, misunderstood, even bullied. Though I am usually polite enough to thank the person for the offer of prayer, or at least to just smile in response, what I want to do—and a couple of times, actually did, though with poor results—is to decline the offer of prayer, to ask them just to leave God out of the matter or say that while prayer is nice, I would prefer some concrete help from them. Often what I most wanted to do, when a person promised to pray for me, was to respond by yelling at them to get lost.
Why the hostility to being prayed for? Why not just accept it for what it is, a kind of offer of help, and figure that I can use all the help I can get? While I have known a few individuals whose prayers for me I do accept gratefully, feeling the reassurance and comfort they intend with their offers, from most of the people who promise to pray for me I hear, in those words, an unwillingness to engage me, to hear me out, to offer real help. Instead, they glibly hand me off to God, preferring to let God deal with me so they will not have to get their hands dirty or spend precious time trying to listen and understand. Without knowing me in any depth, these pray-ers for me have already determined what I need and are going to ensure that I get it (whether I want it or not) by calling in the forces of the Almighty to whip me into shape.
If the folks of Sodom and Gomorrah were as depraved as the story makes it sound, they likely would have been similarly hostile to the intervention that Abraham made for them with God. While not characterized as prayer, Abraham was, in today’s scripture reading, having a pretty lively conversation with God that involved both asking for something as well as waiting and listening to see how God might respond. Though Abraham’s motivation may well have been mostly personal—his nephew Lot lived in Sodom—he engaged in this bargaining with God, this intercessory prayer, on behalf of the entire population. And amazingly, Abraham succeeds in his intention: he reminds God that God will certainly care enough about the Divine Image to want to continue being seen as just and merciful, and destroying entire cities would thus be counterproductive. Though Almighty God is the powerful one here, capable of wiping out cities in one blow, the real power seems to lie with Abraham as he skillfully maneuvers through this prayerful encounter until he achieves his desired result. And though the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah come out ahead as a result of Abraham’s intervention, they do ultimately get destroyed for failing to show evidence of even the requisite handful of decent people. What is most important then, in this story, is not the cities up for destruction, or the God who is willing to change course, but the single human being, Abraham, who is mostly depicted as someone who simply says yes to whatever God asks, meekly acquiescing to outrageous demands, here is anything but meek and subservient. A different Abraham shows up here, one who is himself changed by this experience of talking with God.
“I’m praying for you”: those words are more than just the title of this sermon, more than just a description of a common and sometimes unpleasant encounter many of us experience with some frequency. For the fact is, I pray for you, the members and friends of this church.
Now I hasten to add, as I see some of you already looking squeamish, that in acknowledging that I pray for you, I am in no way saying that I talk to God about any of you, that I beg for things to come your way, that I am invoking magical interventions in your lives (though perhaps you might wish I would do just that). I do not pray for you in any of those somewhat limited versions of prayer.
What I do, rather, in praying for you, is best described by a Quaker definition of prayer for others: to pray for someone, according to this definition, is to “hold [them] in the Light.” The person’s name or face is called up, visualized, and simply held as a focus of attention, in a prayerful attitude of waiting, listening, watching, acknowledging our connection with each other and with all of life, the entire interconnected web of existence. In this kind of prayer for another, nothing is asked for or expected, no change in the person is intended. Instead, the person being prayed for is simply cherished as she is, for who he is, just as they are.
To which those who prefer the version of prayer that makes things happen, that brings results like unexpected healing or amazing good fortune or saved souls, might wonder: what’s the point? If praying for another is merely holding them in the Light without pressing for some sort of change, why bother? Abraham bargained with God, but Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed in the end, so what, if anything, did he accomplish?
And my answer—an answer that continually surprises me—is this: such prayer does result in change, remarkable change; the surprise is that the change resulting from such prayer comes in me, the one doing the praying for someone else.
When I pray for any of you, when I try to hold you in the Light, I discover, again and again, that my understanding of you, my feelings about you, my sense of our relationship, changes. What happens, when I pray for you, is that the typical challenges you present to me, the frustrations you may provoke in me, all shift, diminish in intensity and significance, often disappear. I no longer care much, if at all, about how stubborn I think you are, or how you refuse to do what I want you to do, or the ways you resist the changes I believe you need to make. All those ego-driven concerns of mine go away when I hold you in the Light, replaced by a fresh appreciation for your presence in my life, the unique and wonderful way you have of being in the world, the gift your life brings. Held in the Light as I pray for you, I remember that you and I are both part of the interconnected web, both God’s children, both persons of inherent worth and dignity, carrying the divine seed in the center of our souls. And when that prayer is finished, you may be no richer, no healthier, no closer to being saved, no more cooperative and compliant than before—but I am certainly different, different in a way that can only enhance our relationship. As the quote at the beginning of the order of service notes, “Prayer does not change things. Prayer changes people, and people change things” (Lon Ray Call). I start out praying for you to change you, and discover that in praying for you, I change myself.
Now I am aware from conversations I’ve had with many of you that the notion of a personalistic God with whom one can interact or have a relationship with, is not something that makes sense to you, in which case prayer may seem like an activity that would not be meaningful for you. Another definition of prayer, this time from poet W. H. Auden, unlocks this issue for me: Auden said “to pray is to pay attention to something or someone other than oneself.” Whatever is compelling enough to draw my attention away from the endlessly mesmerizing parade of my own thoughts, feelings, impulses, desires, fears—whatever can thwart our natural tendency to self-absorption can draw us into prayer, can be who or what we pray to. Abraham had usually been presented as an aging man preoccupied with his lack of a son to carry on his legacy. But in the story recounted in today’s reading, he is no longer struggling with God to produce that promised son, but actually is completely engaged on behalf of people who are likely unknown to him. If prayer is understood to mean attending to, listening to, watching, waiting, lifting one’s awareness beyond the self to the larger life of which all of us are a part, appreciating how very dependent we are on one another, how very dependent they are on us, then virtually any activity can become a form of prayer—not just talking to God, or sitting on a hard church pew facing forward on Sunday mornings, or asking for things.
At many points in scripture we are urged to “watch and pray,” to “pray without ceasing.” If we can begin to image prayer as all sorts of diverse activities, then we can begin to live out that prayerful advice. May we not fail in praying for one another—and thereby discover ourselves prayed for, changed, made whole.
