Late last Sunday afternoon, as bright autumn sunlight slanted through the trees and poured into my kitchen, I found the following email in my in-box. The subject line read “St Peter’s Prayer List Request.” The person had filled out the on-line prayer request form on our website, churchsp.org.
“I have asked God to forgive for everything, and right now I feel like God hates me and I cannot sleep at night and am stressed and worried all day long. I have no peace, and I do not even know what to ask you to pray for, but I ask you to pray for me. I feel like I am under attack day and night. I need wisdom and peace. I cannot endure much more.”
Ben and I tried to trace the email back to the sender, because I really wanted to talk to Shaun, but we weren’t able to find a way back to Shaun, or to contact him.
We did all we could do, which was to add Shaun to our prayer list, and I’ve been praying for him—and now that Shaun is on our prayer list, we will all be praying for him.
Shaun’s request captures one of the great truths that we find in our scripture readings today about prayer.
To pray is to be in relationship.
When we pray to God, whether our prayer is one of silent listening, or of gratitude, or a prayer of desperation, or a prayer of guilt, or a cry of anger toward God, we are claiming our relationship with God.
Our relationships with God are shaped by our relationships to one another. And our relationships with one another are shaped by our relationship to God. When we pray to God for someone else, we enter into a relationship with that person.
James says that if any among us are sick, we should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over us.
A stumbling block that we trip over in this society that values self-sufficiency and individualism, is to go it alone—maybe we lay awake at night praying for ourselves over some awful problem, and then the next day, when someone asks us how we are, we say “Oh, I’m fine,” not wanting to burden the other person with our problems.
Shaun stumbled on a deep truth when he, in an act of desperation, filled out the prayer request form. He finds that his solitary prayer to God is incomplete somehow. And so Shaun has cried out to a Christian community for help.
“Call for the elders of the church (and that’s each and every one of us) and have them pray over you.”
That’s what we’re doing each Sunday when we pray for Shaun and for every person on our prayer list. We’re laying our hands of prayer and healing on each and every one of them, and praying for them in Jesus’ name.
And this prayer of faith will save the sick—and this saving may not be a literal physical saving, but saving in the sense that we are changed and can embrace life more fully because of our prayers.
Rachel Naomi Remen is a doctor who has faced many of her own life threatening illnesses, and these illnesses have shaped her ministry as a physician. In her book, Kitchen Table Wisdom, one of my favorite books, Rachel describes lying on an operating table, waiting for anesthesia.
One of her surgeons takes her hand and asks her if she will join with him and his operating team in a prayer. Rachel is startled by this request, but she agrees.
So the team gathers around the operating table, and after a moment of silence, the doctor quietly prays this prayer.
“May we be helped to do here whatever is most right.”
James also says about prayer that we are to confess our sins to one another and to pray for one another, so that we may be healed. In his letter in the latest Virginia Episcopalian, Bishop Shannon talks about passing the peace during our worship each week, which is actually a form of prayer.
Bishop Shannon quotes Desmond Tutu, who says that passing the peace is one of the holiest moments in our liturgy. This is when we honor the very presence of Christ in another person. Tutu says that rather than shaking hands with one another, “we should be bowing to one another, even genuflecting,…because our Lord Jesus Christ is truly present to us in a fellow believer.” When we pass the peace, we are claiming a three way relationship with another person—acknowledging the presence of God with us and in each of us, and God brings the powerful dimensions of forgiveness, healing and compassion into our relationships with one another.
Jesus himself tells us to pray for our enemies, to honor the presence of God in that person, because when we pray for an enemy, we enter into a relationship with that person, and ultimately, we find that the enemy we’ve been praying for turns out to be another hurting, vulnerable person worthy of our compassion and love. Prayer helps us to see our enemies in the light of God’s love, rather than through the haze of our own hate.
In the gospel today, Jesus talks bluntly to his disciples and provides dire warnings about stumbling blocks cause us to trip and that inevitably also will provide opportunities for other Christians to stumble. In order to make sure that the disciples understand the importance of ridding themselves of these stumbling blocks, Jesus tells them “that if your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off…if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off….if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out…”
I have trouble imagining living fully without my hand, or my foot or my eye. We all have things in our lives that we believe we cannot live without.
These the very things that I can’t live without may be stumbling blocks in my relationship with God, and in my relationships with other people. These very things that I think I cannot live without may also be the stumbling blocks that keep me from praying.
Rachel tells the story of Frank, a middle aged internist, who had a stumbling block in his life. He had been trained only to give, and never to receive, because to receive in a helping profession is unprofessional. To receive is a sign of weakness—and not being able to receive was Frank’s stumbling block.
Frank was burned out, and was thinking of finding a different profession that would bring him more satisfaction. But before he made the switch, he decided to try to claim what was truly satisfying in his current work.
One of Frank’s patients was Mrs. Gonzales, a woman in her eighties in the final stages of breast cancer. She came each week and Frank would listen to her, adjust her pain medication, and treat any other complaints she had as well as he could.
He did those same things at this particular appointment, but on this particular day, he paused to reflect on his time with Mrs. Gonzales and to listen to what his intuition had to say about her.
Frank found himself thinking that the most helpful thing he could do now for Mrs. Gonzales would be to pray for her, and Frank was not a praying man. He broke into a sweat, but could not find a reason not to pray for her, and so with great trepidation, he turned to this elderly grandmotherly patient and said,
“Mrs. Gonzales, perhaps it might be good if we prayed together.”
And Mrs. Gonzales looked at him and began to cry. So Frank just took her hand and waited, and then she said,
“That would be very wonderful, Doctor.” She told him that she was Catholic, and she asked him if they could kneel down. Frank was on unfamiliar ground, but he had gone this far, so he agreed.
“And so, in his white coat, he helped her to kneel down and he knelt down in the tiny examining room. She began to pray, first in Spanish and then in English. Frank had not prayed in many years, but a calm settled over him and his memory, awakened by the sound of her voice, gave him back a prayer from his childhood. When she had finished, he said his prayer aloud. Then there was a long comfortable silence.”
Then very gently, the old woman reached across and touched his cheek. First in Spanish and then in English she asked God to bless him and strengthen him in doing his important work.
He says he can still feel the touch of her hand even now. He remembers it when things get tough, and it helps him.” With his stumbling block of never being able to receive gone, Frank often prays with his patients now, both for them and for himself.
To pray is to be in relationship with God. When we pray, God’s grace allows us to embrace the miraculous lives that each one of us has been given, to embrace one another, to love one another, to heal one another, to be salt for one another, and to be at peace with one another,
and as we pray to God for one another, we enter together into the immense beauty and peace and hospitality of the kingdom of God right here and right now, here in this place.
Amen.