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.

Hopers and Dreamers

Acts 2:1-21, 38-47

This week a line of kindergartners 68 children long snaked its way up the sidewalk and through our front doors, and down into the basement of this building.  I stood with the door open welcoming them, and they looked up at me with bright curious faces and said Hi!- nearly every single one.  They were here to visit their new school, being renovated across the street, and I was invited to join a small group of them for a tour.  I took my place at the end of the line, and looked ahead at a dozen bobbing dark heads as we crossed the street, a dozen tiny bodies in bright orange and dark navy t-shirts that read on a dozen small backs, “Ask me about my hopes and dreams.”

Our session dreamed some dreams last March. We sat in a room and laid out in front of us everything we could think of that was happening in the life of our congregation. We read and absorbed all the congregations’ shared observations. We had pages and pages of lists on sticky newsprint on the walls and the floor.  We held it all up before God and asked what was next.  We talked and prayed, and then we waited. And waited. And we left the retreat without answers, but a clear sense that we were to keep holding these things and keep waiting.

And I couldn’t help but think of that as I oohed and ahhed the new windows and sanded classroom floors along with my tour-mates, standing in a space of hopes and dreams, and thinking about how all that is happening around in the life of this congregation, including being there with these little ones, was opening up of hope and stepping towards realizing some dreams of our own. 

Hospitality. Jan and I sat on the basement floor eating bagged lunches with them that day and imagined a bit into the future.

What will happen to us in the Fall?  Who will we be then? Because we will be different than we are today.  To them we will be: the church across from my school!  (We are already, I was told by one of the little girls, “The church I went to once for a party.”) Will we be: the church where I wait for my dad to pick me up? The church where I go for help with math? The people that come and read to my class?

Who are we to the kids at St. Joe’s? The people who make space for my prayer? The people that listen to me? The people that share books with us, or helped us build our labyrinth where I go when I need to quiet my insides?

Who are we to our neighbors? The folks whose garden I water? The people who helped me with rent? The people who give lemonade and bathroom breaks to the playground building volunteers?

Who are we in the Church? The people who honor and value the gifts of all? The people who seek to follow Jesus alongside others? The people not afraid to risk, and gentle with each other in the bumpy places? The congregation that offers rest, and permission to stop, and a place to explore the gifts of peace and sabbath?  The people who are not afraid of differences and stand with others in honesty and love?

Pentecost is the beginning of the church, yes, but it really is the moment when the Spirit gets out ahead of the disciples, pulling them forward into the future that God desires for them, for the world.  When all the dreams of those who’d gone before and the lessons learned and the prayers prayed and the experiences experienced seem to be pointing to something that isn’t a conclusion or a summary or a regret or even a gratitude. 

It’s a calling.  It’s movement.  It’s motion. 

The Holy Spirit is out ahead of us, pulling us forward into the future that God desires for us. 

We once said of ourselves “God is doing something here that incorporates the past and leads us into the future.”  Pentecost invites us to that future, it compels us to have visions and dream dreams and in the process opens possibilities we never envisioned and dreams we didn’t even know to dream.

What is the Spirit doing ahead of us?  What is the Spirit doing ahead of you?  How are you being called forward into the newness breaking forth in the world? Which is to say, where are the surprising moments that make you feel like you are part of something bigger – even little moments, like walking unexpectedly one lunch time in a line of tiny hopers and dreamers toward their future, wondering how it will change the trajectory of our future?

You know it's the Spirit when you’re blown as if by wind from the places you’re hiding in safety into the place where you risk being known by others. 

You know God is going out in front of you and calling you forward when others are welcomed in whom you wouldn’t seek out.

It’s the Spirit when it’s messy and a little out of your control.

It’s the Spirit when you find yourself living into gifts and using language you didn’t know you had, or maybe that you that you’ve never been brave enough to test out. 

It’s the Spirit when it makes you want to love the world more, and helps you see Jesus there.

When it’s the hope and dreams that move front and center, instead of the fears and worries, that is the Spirit of God.

The disciples didn’t manufacture Pentecost. They didn’t produce it or strategically plan it.  They gathered together in prayer and waited for the power of the Spirit. And when it came it wasn’t what they expected. But they were ready nonetheless.

And the Spirit gave them the languages – all different – to speak the hope and love of God in many different ways to many different people, one message with many voices – Jesus, still meeting people exactly how they need to be met and telling them just what they need to hear to bring them to life. 

And then all together they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.

And Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. Living into this blessing that has grabbed hold of them and propelled them forward.

The author and artist Jan Richardson writes:

Here’s one thing


you must understand


about this blessing:


it is not


for you alone.

It is stubborn


about this;


do not even try


to lay hold of it


if you are by yourself,


thinking you can carry it


on your own.

To bear this blessing,


you must first take yourself


to a place where everyone


does not look like you


or think like you,


a place where they do not


believe precisely as you believe,


where their thoughts


and ideas and gestures


are not exact echoes


of your own.

Bring your sorrow.

Bring your grief.


Bring your fear.

Bring your weariness,


your pain,

your disgust at how broken


the world is, how fractured,


how fragmented


by its fighting, its wars,


its hungers,

its penchant for power,


its ceaseless repetition


of the history it refuses


to rise above.

I will not tell you


this blessing will fix all that.

But in the place


where you have gathered,


wait.


Watch.


Listen.


Lay aside your inability


to be surprised,


your resistance to what you


do not understand.

See then whether this blessing


turns to flame on your tongue,


sets you to speaking


what you cannot fathom

or opens your ear


to a language


beyond your imagining


that comes as a knowing


in your bones


a clarity


in your heart


that tells you

this is the reason


we were made,


for this ache


that finally opens us,

for this struggle, this grace


that scorches us


toward one another


and into


the blazing day.

We are a Pentecost people, and this blessing is not for us alone.  We are hopers and dreamers, pulled by scorching grace toward a world filled with people longing to be asked about their hopes and dreams.  We are watchers and listeners, noticers in waiting.  May we be ready for the Spirit to pull us into the future.

 Amen.