Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
November 15, 2009

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Sometimes, when I’m reading from the Bible, a particular line will just jump out at me. A line will strike me as somehow really important, even though it may not be at all clear why it seems so important and I may have no idea what it means. I’m very grateful when it happens because the experience is usually telling me that that’s the verse I need to preach on. Or I guess I should say that I’m sometimes grateful when it happens. Sometimes I’m not at all grateful because sometimes a line jumps out at me and says “I’m what you need to preach on” that I desperately don’t want to preach on.

That’s what happened to me this past week as I was working on today’s service. The line that jumped out at me was the one where Hannah says to the priest Eli “Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.” It’s an odd way to put it because Hannah is actually praying but isn’t actually speaking. Here’s the setting of that line: Hannah and her husband Elkinah have been unable to conceive children. Hannah has gone to her place of worship to pray that she might bear a child. What may not be obvious to us is that the way she was praying was unusual. She was mouthing her words but not uttering them. That wasn’t what the priest Eli expected to see when someone came to pray. So he jumped to the conclusion that Hannah must be drunk, and he told her to stop making a drunken spectacle of herself. That’s when she responds with that line that so strongly jumped out at me: “Do not regard your servant as a worthless woman, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.” She says she has been speaking, but what she’s doing is praying. And here’s what struck me: The assumption here is that in the world of faith prayer is considered a worthy, worthwhile, activity. It is seen as having value. And, frankly, the value of prayer is something I struggle with. So my reaction to Hannah’s statement to Eli led me to give the matter further consideration. Here’s what I’ve come up with. If you want a more eloquent and moving statement of what I’m about to say than I can give, go read the latest entry on Marci’s blog. I’ll get you the web site if you don’t have it. [seminaryexecutive.wordpress.com]

My head struggles with the notion of prayer. I find it very hard to believe that our prayer actually changes anything. Can we actually talk God into doing things God won’t do unless we ask? That just doesn’t make any sense to me. After all, we say that God already knows everything that’s going on in the world and in our lives. God knows what we need. God knows what’s right. Beyond that: Does it make any sense at all that God, the power behind the universe, Who is so far beyond me, Who is so immense as to be utterly beyond my comprehension, has any interest in listening to the likes of puny little me? My head says no. It just doesn’t make any sense. Intellectually speaking, prayer is a nonstarter. There’s no reason to do it. There’s a ton of reasons not to.

Yet the historian and the theologian in me notice something about prayer that seems to contradict all that talk of my head. Every spiritual tradition we know of makes prayer the central discipline of the spiritual life. Buddhist monks spend their entire lives in prayer. Judaism in rich in prayers—Sabbath prayers, Passover prayers, prayers of blessing for every event in human life. Muslims all over the world stop what they’re doing five times a day to spend a few moments in prayer. The saints of our own Christian tradition have always been men and women of prayer. Christian worship, which I lead here every week, is a time of prayer. The chief artifact of Christian spirituality is a prayer, the one we say Jesus taught us. And, of course, Jesus was a man of prayer. He prayed all the time. The Gospels speak again and again of him going to a place apart, usually up a mountain, to spend time in prayer. When he was in agony as the imminent end of his life approached, he prayed.

And here’s another thing: My head says no, don’t bother with prayer. Yet I do it. I don’t do it as much as a lot of people I know, but I do it. I do it here with you in worship, and I do it on my own, in private. And there’s something paradoxical about the times when I do it in private. My head says it doesn’t make a difference, but it is especially in times of distress, despair, and grief that I readily turn to prayer. My wife of thirty years dies of cancer, and I cry out “lift me up, Lord.” There’s a possible complication with my daughter’s pregnancy, and I cry out “protect her and her child, Lord.” My father becomes ill, and I pray for him even though I know he would never pray for himself. And my turning to prayer in those difficult times flies in the face of what my head tells me about prayer. If I listened to my head, I wouldn’t do it.

But I do it, so what’s going on here. I think that what’s going on here is that prayer is not primarily a head thing. It isn’t something we think our way to. It isn’t rational. It isn’t logical. It doesn’t make sense—to the head. But it makes wonderful sense—to the heart. The heart hears what the head has to say and replies: “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever! You don’t get it! I don’t respond to your logic.” Prayer, you see, doesn’t come from the head. It comes from the heart. The heart prays despite what the head says because the heart responds not to logic but to love. And the heart knows in its depths what the head can only think about. The heart connects in the depths of our being with the Spirit that dwells within us. Some even say that it is not we who pray, it is the Spirit in us Who prays through us or at least that moves us to pray.

I don’t know about you, but I pray most authentically in those times when the pain or the emotion is so strong that it pushes my head out of the way. Maybe that’s why so many varieties of prayer seem designed to do nothing so much as get the head out of the way. The most powerful prayer of all is silence, and silence isn’t really silence unless it is inner silence, unless the head will be quiet and let the spirit rise. Meditation and centering prayer are disciplines designed to quiet the mind, silence the head, so that we can just be with the Spirit within us and all around us. Some prayer is body prayer—walking the labyrinth, doing tai chi, doing yoga, and so on. The heart is part of the body. Focusing on the body is focusing on the heart that beats in the center of the body. Focusing on the body takes the focus off the head, off the thinking of the mind. Really meaningful prayer always takes the focus off the thinking of the mind.

So I say to my head: “Do not regard your servant as a worthless man, for I have been speaking out of my great anxiety and vexation all this time.” The heart knows what the head does not. It knows that prayer works. Not that it changes external things. Not that it changes God. It certainly doesn’t do that. The heart knows that prayer connects us with God. The heart knows that connection with God helps. The heart knows that connection with God in prayer changes us. It makes us strong. It gives us courage. It gives us peace. When we pray God pours the fruits of the Spirit into our spirit, and our lives are changed.

So let us pray. Let us pray without ceasing. Let us pray in good times and in bad times—especially in bad times. That’s what Hannah did. That’s what Jesus did. That’s what people of faith have done in all times and in all places. So let us trust our hearts. They will not lead us astray. They will do nothing less than connect us with God. Thanks be to God. Amen.