How to Pray in a Pandemic

Devotion for Being Apart -
July 26

This summer, I will share new devotions from time to time,
and invite you to browse through devotions that have been posted on this blog.

Illustration of the prayers, done today during worship by Susan Hensel

Romans 8:26-28

Likewise the 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. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.

We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.

Amusement parks have reopened in Japan, and along with them, some new rules.  (I mentioned this in my devotion on 7-17).  This rule for roller coasters is posted where you can see as you are boarding. “Please scream inside your heart.”  I first discovered it when someone shared in a tweet that said, “After six months, 2020 finally has its motto.”

Paul says that in our weakness, when we don’t know how to pray, the Spirit intercedes for us with groans too deep for words. In other words, when we are screaming inside our heart, we have a translator.
Maybe we’ve thought this verse means that when we’re praying and we aren’t using the right words, the Holy Spirit tells God what we really mean.  But (according to scholar James Dunn, the syntax tells us) it actually means, when we don’t even know what it is that we want, let alone how to ask for it, the Spirit groans with us and for us with a meaning known to God. When are trapped in confusion, and can’t even identify what to ask for.  When we have no idea what would help and we are just screaming inside our hearts, the Spirit intercedes, turning our silent screams into prayers for exactly what God knows we need.

This is such good news to me.
It’s hard to pray right now.
I don’t know what to pray for these days.
We like to tell God specifically what we want God to do for us.  Usually when we pray, we give God a little direction.  This isn’t bad; it’s just kind of cute.  When my daughter was three years old, she would stand on a stool next to the counter, watching me intently.  Pointing her little finger, she’d give me detailed, step by step instructions for how to make her toast.  As she told me how to do it, she’d also patiently remind me how she’d prefer it to turn out (lightly toasted, lots of butter, all the way to the edge).

We pray like this, as though God is a mom who ‘needs’ us to give her step-by-step instructions for how to do her job, and maybe has also forgotten our preferences and could use some helpful reminding of how we’d like it all to turn out.
We tell God things like, “please guide the surgeon’s hands”, “help her feel better”, “end the violence.” And we pray for God to do the things God already does, and be the things God already is. “God, bring your peace and comfort” “God, be with us here.”
This is all just fine. There’s nothing wrong with praying this way. (The Spirit translates these prayers too!) But sometimes, often, we ask way too small.  We pray in a “help us get through this” kind of way, when what God may want to do is more of a “use this to completely transform everything” kind of thing.

The bottom line is, prayer is something we’ve made overly complicated, and God hears us however we ask and whatever we say.  But what I absolutely love about this text is that Paul is telling us we don’t have to know what to ask for, and it’s ok if we can’t really find the words to say anything. We don’t even have to know what we really want from God. We just have to scream inside our hearts. And with sighs too deep for words—at a frequency maybe our ears can’t even hear—the Holy Spirit turns our silent screaming into prayer that God, who searches our hearts and knows the mind of the Spirit, hears and responds to.

I could stop there, and it would be enough for today. But it just keeps getting better.

We come next to a verse that has been widely misunderstood and misused.  “All things work together for good for those who love God.”  In utter contrast to the verses we just read, this feels so much like a shoulder-patting dismissal of deep suffering.  It sounds like a trite answer to hush the the deep groaning and sighing that we have just been told the Spirit takes up on our behalf.

And it feels exclusionary, like it’s saying, Hey – if you’re someone who loves God, and is lucky enough to be called according to God’s purposes, God will make sure everything that happens to you turns out good, so cheer up! 

But apparently our own human nervousness crept into the translations. (As the work of biblical scholars, especially Haley Goranson Jacobs and Brian Walsh, explains,) the original Greek actually says something like, “God works in all things for the good, together with those who love God.”

 First of all, it tells us God is actively working in all things.  Things themselves don’t work together for good - It’s not advocating an “everything will work out” approach to life.  There is a distinct actor here, and it’s God. In every situation, every moment, every conflict and especially in suffering, God works persistently and unrelentingly toward healing and wholeness and connection.

And second of all, our part, then, is not to just cross our fingers, paste on our smiles and and pat each other’s shoulders saying, One day this will feel better; God will make a bad thing turn out good, you’ll see.
Our place is to join God where God is working, to work together with God for the good, because “with those who love God, God works in all things for the good.”

This points back to what we were just talking about. When we are screaming inside our hearts at our own pain and the terrible suffering and injustice in the world, we are working together with God.  Miraslov Volf says, “we are being God-lovers, inspired by the Spirit to groan in such a way that God the heart-searcher knows what is going on. We are caught up in the love of God for the world, and it’s a painful love, because the world is in a mess.”
God will work for the good. And we will join in at the very place of the pain because that is where God’s Spirit is working.

Not only is suffering not worth comparing with the glory that is to come, like we heard last week, but suffering is something through which God is bringing new life. The cross reveals to us that in Christ God comes specifically intosuffering.  If you want to know where to find God, it’s in suffering.  Not just to share suffering, but to work in it and through it to bring new life.  God brings life out of death. That’s what God does. So we go to the death and we wail there at the agony of it, with insistent, expectant waiting for God’s new life to appear.

And we’re told that when we do, the Spirit—the same Spirit who hovers over the water at creation, whose breath becomes life in human lungs, who guides the people of God across the red sea and through the wilderness as a mighty pillar of fire at night and cloud by day, to the promised land, that same Spirit—is in us, groaning deeper than any of our words, for the salvation of the world, for an end to suffering, for the hope and promise of God to be fulfilled in our midst.  Our crying out in places of suffering joins in God’s work of redemption.

So here is what we will do: We will scream inside our hearts about the deep, pervasive cancer of racism that has been eating out the heart of this country since its inception, and we’ll work together with God to join the redemption God is bringing.

And we will scream inside our hearts about this sneaky disease that has shut down the world, and taken away from us the very things that help us stay human.  We’ll lament the absence of touching and spontaneous fun.  We’ll grieve the vacuum of human energy of gathered crowds, and the closeness of intimate conversations in restaurants, the joy of shared music and shared lockers, and the feel of hand holding and handshakes, not to mention the loss of each other’s faces, now modulated to each other by screens and blocked from one another by masks, paradoxically for each other.
And all the other places of despair within us, and conflict between us, that rise in us like a silent scream, the pain we have no words for, we will turn toward those places of suffering instead of fleeing them.  Addiction, illness, broken ties and broken futures, we will cry out about them.  And we wont worry about trying to tell God what we think God should do to solve the world’s problems, or even our own.  Because our solutions will undoubtedly be too small and short-sighted anyway.  We’d suggest repair and renovation to a God who specializes in resurrecting the dead.

So we’ll let that pressure go—to solve it all for God, or to be strong prayer warriors, or to even the pressure to have words.  We’ll go into our weakness, where we have no idea how to pray, and we’ll just bravely wait there, with our screams and groans, sharing the heart of God and letting the Spirit translate it all into prayers for God bring new life into our death. And we will trust, that in everything, God works together with us for an outcome shaped not by our limited imaginations, but by God’s limitless love.

Amen.


CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before we go to bed, whatever time that is in each of our homes, we can pray in this way, and so join our souls with each other and the people of the whole earth:

Let's try praying with fewer words. Instead of telling God what we want God to do, let's just lift up the things we are carrying by saying only the single word or phrase that expresses the need (a person's name, a situation). Pause... Then move to the next word or phrase.

God,
...
Amen.