Ephesians 3: 14-21
Rev. Lisa Day
Swarthmore Presbyterian Church
July 26, 2009
You may have noticed our lectionary gospel reading this week sounds a lot like last week’s – last week we had Mark’s version of the miraculous feeding with a few loaves and fish, and this week, Bob read us John’s version – all four gospels contain this miracle. I thought perhaps summer was not the time for another rerun, so we will turn our attention this morning to the Ephesians passage. In Ephesians, we have just been given the privilege of eavesdropping on a prayer. So, it seems appropriate that this morning our sermon is going to be about prayer, and, more specifically, the prayers we pray for one another.
Usually you get something a little more open ended and narrative when I’m here in the pulpit, but today, we’re going to settle in for a good old fashioned three point sermon, classic Princeton for a change. Three main points – Point One, this is a hard sermon for this pastor to preach to Presbyterians (and their guests). Point Two: How do we go about this work of praying for one another? Point Three: Why do we?
Point One: This is a hard sermon for this pastor to preach to Presbyterians (and their guests). It is hard to preach on prayer because I do not have a great deal of theological certainty with which to answer the last question we will address – Why do we pray for one another? It is hard for Presbyterians because we have a robust view of the providence of God, the intervening grace of God, the all sustaining power of God. Human action, viewed with our reformed theological lenses, is always a response to God’s movement – not the prayer that will move God. Of course, we read our Bible, we understand our canon includes stories of Abraham bargaining with God and influencing God, we hear in our Psalm today that God’s ears seem specially tuned to the cries of the poor and oppressed. We know the Bible is full of prayer and it seems to be pretty important. But we wonder what it can mean we believe about God to pray. Doesn’t God already know? Is God really not going to cure a sick person, comfort a grieving one, bring peace among nations, because we forget or neglect to ask God to do so? And why pray for healing when some get well and some get worse and it doesn’t feel like prayer was the crucial variable?
And it is hard for this preacher because I come full of my failure to engage in the discipline of prayer in a disciplined way myself. I am expecting I will hear the cry, “Preacher, heed thyself!” I come in humility as a traveler on the road, not one who is expert or even well-practiced in disciplines of prayer, but one full of good intentions poorly reflected in actual practice. I come to sit at the feet of the prayer Olympians in our congregation and learn. And we all come to sit together, kneel together, stand with our hands raised together – to move nearer to the heart of God.
Point Two: How do we go about this work of praying for one another? This point is easy to preach, because you have taught me so much about prayer in our time together.
I have permission to share this example from one in our church who is rich and mighty in prayer. She is one of our own for whom even the modest stock purchase to support our mission trips is a big commitment, so she was very excited when this year we received prayer slips with the names of one of the youth or adults going on our three mission trips this summer. She was not content with one name, one trip, but asked for them all. Though she could not go herself, she was present in partnership. She told me how she prayed our Appalachia mission trippers through each day. When she was hungry and getting her breakfast or lunch or supper, she prayed for their meals. When she was on her way to bed, or unable to sleep well, she prayed for their sleep and rest. When her joints and muscles ached, she prayed for their bodies to be strong and safe. She even prayed for their showers as she took her own each day! John Weicher told me this might have been the best prayer of all. When we list our mission co-workers on the front page of our bulletin, her name could go there as her prayers have supported our ministries and missions and members and pastors all the years she has called this her church home.
For those of you listening in and worshiping after the deacons deliver your tape today – you have taught me so much when I thought I was coming to pray for you. More than one of you, as you have had to spend time in skilled nursing wings, or in hospital beds, has been given a difficult roommate. In a time when your own body is weak and suffering, your neighbor’s loud television or confused ramblings interrupt your own rest and peace. And yet, so often you have told me of your prayers for their comfort, their healing, for relief of their confusion and distress, for peace. You have prayed for patience in living alongside them and for gentleness for their care givers. You inspire me!
Others have shared how you use external cues as your call to prayer. When the Swarthmore goose starts her obnoxious honking to summon the volunteer fire fighters, prayers rise up for those fire fighters, for those they will help, and then those prayers circle out to include those who have lost their homes to war or other disasters, for those in peril, for women not safe in their homes because of domestic violence. You pass a hospital, and soon you are praying for the sick, for the dying, for doctors and other health care workers, and your prayers widen asking that all will have quality health care in America, and across the world. You are checking in on Facebook – and you pray for your Friends, and then pray for the friendless, the lonely, those isolated by mental and physical illness, those with no access to life saving technology, let alone recreational.
Then, there is the privilege of being prayed for –up close, personal and out loud. The great power of this text this morning is that it is a warm and wonderful prayer – and it is prayed in a way that God surely heard it, but so did those for whom it was prayed. I know from my own experience as one who prays, and as one prayed for, that there is something amazing about hearing yourself prayed for – folks have shared what that experience has meant on a Sunday morning to hear themselves lifted up in prayer, by name and out loud.
And we can’t do this wrong! I had a professor in seminary who had a practice of giving an A on the first day of class. He said that if we got all that performance anxiety out of the way, we would know we were A students and he would know he had a class full of A students, and we could proceed with our excellent work. It is the same way for us when we pray. There is no doing it wrong. As Paul says in Romans 8, “[T]he Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” Whatever we say, it gets translated for us by God’s own Spirit into just the right thing – into that deepest place near to the heart of God, incorporated into that stream of prayer that Jesus is already praying there at the right hand of God.
Point 3 – Why do we pray for one another?
I still have the questions I came with, about why prayer doesn’t always bring healing, but what it does always do is place those who are suffering in God’s hands and in my heart. Or rather, it reminds them and me that they have been cradled there all along.
Prayer builds community. As you and I pray for one another, and as we are bold to share those prayers with one another, our life in this community is built up. As we pray for Presbyterians around the nation and the globe, our interconnection as Christians is built up. As we pray for all the people of the world, our place together as God’s beloved children is built up. As we pray for the world, we are rooted together in the creation we share and of which we are a part.
Prayer builds community, but it also opens our eyes to the solid foundation that underlies the community, to the good soil in which it is rooted. As the author of Ephesians says, to be rooted and grounded in love. Prayer builds community and prayer reveals foundations. We draw near to God’s heart when we pray.
But there is, I think, at least one more reason to pray –it is one of the prayers’ we heard prayed in our passage today -- that Christ may dwell in our hearts. I think we pray to make him some room there in our hearts. If your heart is like mine, it can become a place cramped and crowded with anxiety, with bitterness, with fear – not really a very welcoming place for Christ to dwell. Instead, prayer helps our hearts to become a place of song. Prayer opens up our hearts, helps them to beat in concert with the very heart of God.
Many a day I have sat by a bedside, or on a living room couch, or on a garden bench, or with my telephone receiver pressed to my ear, and we have joined hands when we could, and I have poured out words. Sometimes they feel like they have come straight from God’s breath to my mouth, sometimes they come all broken and messy from the stories that were shared before them, sometimes they feel a little trite or simple, or lacking in the richness of power and varied vocabulary one might attribute to a disciple of the God of Heaven and Earth. But words come, prayers spoken aloud with two hearts joined. When we open our eyes, they are often filled with tears. We have not moved, but we have been moved. God has been invoked and God’s attention has come to us and our hearts are warmed and expanded. There is more room there – more love and care and hope, less fear and loneliness, more comfort, joy and peace. We have been near to the heart of God, and so our hearts have been made a little more roomy for the “breadth and length and height and depth” that is the love of Jesus Christ, the power of the Spirit and the fullness of God.
Let us pray!
God, strengthen us by your Spirit—not with a brute strength but a glorious inner strength—that Christ will live in us as we open the door and invite him in. And I ask you, that with our feet planted firmly on love, we'll be able to take in with all followers of Jesus the extravagant dimensions of Christ's love. Reach out and experience the breadth! Test its length! Plumb the depths! Rise to the heights! Live full lives, full in the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:16-18 (The Message paraphrase) Amen.