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.

It's ok to not be happy

Devotion for Being Apart -
June 17

We will share a devotion Sundays, Mondays, and Wednesdays through Fridays.
- Kara

I saw a fleeting headline today that Americans' happiness measure is the lowest it's been in over 50 years. I am not surprised. I feel it in myself. I had a burst of rally at the beginning of the pandemic - kicked it into productivity mode and met the challenge head on. Then it went on, and on, and on, and still there is no conceivable end in sight.

Then the collective trauma swept in from another angle, as our city cried out about the death of George Floyd, and the issues of systemic racism and police brutality that we've circled around for decades were thrown into the open and are now being talked about with more honesty and clarity possibly than ever before.  It's feeling like an open wound we're really eager (and perhaps a bit impatient) to heal.  But this too has gone on a long time, centuries, and the pain of it will continue, even as the healing happens. Healing is a painful and slow process, and this thing is deeper and more pervasive than we've often let ourselves acknowledge. There's going to need to to be prodding and poking, and exposing infection and cutting out death, and cleansing and tending to this, for a very long time. Truthfully, there is no end in sight.

And the future continues to be on hold.  Things continue to get canceled.  The economy continues to teeter.  Stability continues to feel like a shaky prospect.  And making even little plans is getting more complicated instead of less - because it feels like we're in it on our own to figure out how to navigate things without cohesive guidance or mutual agreement about what that should look like. And the virus rages on - it's not done, even though we are so done with it.

So unknown remains the biggest factor of life right now.  We just keep living, day after day, in the unknown.  With no end in sight.  Kind of hard to feel "happy."  Thank God for the moments we do, but much of the time we're too busy feeling all sorts of other muddled things.  And rightfully so.

It's ok to not be happy.
That's not a very modern American thing to say.  We think being happy is the highest goal in life. But it's not.
Other goals might be: to be real. To be connected. To be awake to this life. To share in it.  To contribute. To take it in with gratitude. To leave it having helped somewhat. To know God and each other and ourselves.  To uphold each other as human beings.

I feel generally kind of rotten. It feels important to say that.  There's no shame in being tired, worn out, discouraged, or depressed, depleted or weary or anxious. It's an anxious time. I am trying to recognize and have compassion for myself in the anxiety, (the "squeezing" - we said back in March that anxiety was a reasonable response. It still is.).
I'm reminding myself that I can trust that new life comes out of these times, and it's not because we put on a happy face and power through.

I am not pretending things are fine.  I am not throwing myself into the fray, ignoring my sadness or fatigue. And bonus: I am exposing the idol of happiness in my life. That allows me to refocus my aim on being present and true.

How are you today?  What are you feeling and needing today?  
I hate coming back to this again and again, but I think again my need is for mourning.  At least, it eases my tension and anxiety when I realize that's a need I can meet.  And I am meeting it anyway - whether it's by being short and irritable with my family and pretending it's their fault, or letting myself sit down and have a good cry.  I can choose how I want to meet the need to mourn.  And I can let others in my home meet the need for mourning too, without trying to make them be "happy," when happiness doesn't make a ton of sense right now.

One gift of trying hard to stay honest in this time and not hide it, is that we get to receive care.  I'm not super good at this - I would way rather give care than receive it. But to be human is to do both.  We are all ministers, after all, made in the image of the Divine Minister.  We are created to give and receive care with each other. I do believe that's the whole purpose of this life - we're here to care for one another and receive each other's care. It's how we experience what's real: that we belong to God and we belong to each other - with no end in sight.

Today my friend Lilly Lewin sent me a text:
"Sending you a bit of beauty in the midst of all the messiness of life!"
She attached this photo, and the following prayer and scripture.
It was just what my soul needed; she brought me back to my belonging to God and others by showing me care.
Perhaps it is what your soul needs today too?
(It's ok if it's not.  If it's not - what does your soul need today? How can you be honest with yourself about that need, and maybe even share that need with another?)



O Holy Spirit, give me stillness of soul in you.
Calm the turmoil within, with the gentleness of your peace.
Quiet the anxiety within, with a deep trust in you.
Heal the wounds of sin within, with the joy of your forgiveness.
Strengthen the faith within, with the awareness of your presence.
Confirm the hope within, with the knowledge of your strength.
Give fullness to the love within, with an outpouring of your love.
O Holy Spirit, be to me a source of light, strength and courage
so that I may hear your call ever more clearly
and follow you more generously.

- William Browning, CP, "An Anxious Person's Prayer"

Come to me all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls."

- Matthew 11:28-29

---

CONNECTING RITUAL:

Perhaps tonight before 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:

God, another day is ended, another day begins.
Still me in your rest.
Quiet me in your strength.
Sustain me through the unknown.
May I surrender now to sleep,
entrusting myself to you,
just as I am.

When I awaken to a new day,
give me courage to feel what I am feeling,
to be right where I am.
Give me opportunities to care for others,
chances to receive care from others,
and grace to care for myself.

Thank you for this day that is ending,
for the healing happening,
and the hope taking root,
for the disorientation of the unknown,
that drives me to seek you,
and for the ways our shared pain
connects us more deeply
to you and each other.

Thank you for your presence with me
still
always,
right now, and
in the day I will wake up to tomorrow,

Your love holds me,

and holds this world,

with no end in sight.
Amen.

In our humanness, Hope.

ADVENT 1 (Grace Embodied, Part 1)

Genesis 1:26-2:9, 2:15-25, (and some of Genesis 3)

There are things we can’t control.  Like this crappy weather.  Or the calendar.  We are carried along on the current of life and here we are, once again bumping up against the time of year most fraught with expectations, and staring down the last page of 2018 with all the millions of things that get jammed into December.

It’s Advent.  Advent is the beginning of the church year, and the church version of the countdown to Christmas.  As the world around us comes to the end of a year, we have come to the beginning.  We’re returning to the silence, the darkness over the face of the deep before the Creator says “Let there be Light” and life begins.

  

Every year the Church cycles through this pattern of seasons of worship that help us understand our story inside God’s story. In Advent we use the color deep blue to signify the darkest night just before the dawn starts breaking in, and we see it as a time of hushed waiting, of longing for God inside the promise of Christmas, that God is with us.  

Come, Lord Jesus.

This first week of Advent the theme is Hope.  Hope is anticipation. Hope trusts that it will be so: the promise will be fulfilled. All wrongs will be made right. There is something beyond us that is pulling us forward into a new thing, and it cannot be stopped. This is the message of hope.

Before God spoke life into being, there was nothingness, and the Spirit hovered over the waters of the deep. And there was hope.

Because first there was God. God is a relationship of giving and receiving, one in three persons in freedom bound to each other in generosity and self-emptying love.

And because our scriptures hold two different stories of the beginning, we know some very important things about God. The first is that God is a speaking God. God speaks from nothing and something comes to be. God declares and it is so. And then God calls it good.  

This is a God who brings forth life with a word. Then God rests.

Just before God rests, God makes human beings, male and female in God’s image, and God tells them to take care of the world, and brings them into relationship and rest with God. Connected uniquely to God in all creation, they are invited into dialogue with God, drawn into a conversation already taking place within the Trinity.  That’s the first Creation story.  From nothingness to being, from speaking, creation, culminating in human relationship with the God who speaks, creates and rests.

The second story of the beginning is a love story, intimate and risky.  In it God is vulnerable, by choice.  Humans don’t come last in this story, they come before everything else, held in God’s hands and breathed into life by God’s own breath.  Made from the dust of the earth, Adamah, is this creature of the earth, Adam.  When the earth creature, the Adam awakens, all that is true is what is true – being completely known and loved by God, the source of being, the source of all life. Fully known. Fully loved. Fully in dialogue with God, connected and whole, Created and cared for. This is reality and it has never yet been otherwise.

And this creature gets to witness and share in God’s act of creation. God opens the process to this special creature, inviting the human creature also to speak, to name the other creatures.  And whatever the earth creature calls them, that is what they are. 

We’ve been talking this year about grace and the first grace the human ever knows is to be embodied. It is our creatureliness itself. It is that we need God, we are made by and cared for by God.  We are not God, we are not God’s equal, we are not angels or transcendent beings. We are, literally, earth creatures. Creatures connected to, from and returning to, the earth, living inside bodies that are trapped inside the confines of time and space.

We are embodied, and we meet God’s grace from within these earthly bodies.

Let us consider for a moment our bodies -  our persistently beating hearts and insatiably curious and malleable minds, our limbs that work in coordination with each other most of the time, and our senses designed to help us most fully experience and interact this world from within this body we are given, with all its limits and all its possibilities – that we could mix and heat things from the earth and create and taste such things as curry and caramel and coffee! That we could run races! And build airplanes! And teach other humans how to walk and talk! Our bodies are astounding and marvelous.  They are also limited. 

We are made of the stuff of dust, the stuff of stars, yes, but the stuff of dust too.  We stink.  And we get sick. And we get tired. And have allergies, and parts of our bodies that don’t work like they should.  And we get old.  And we start out super weak and dependent – we are really only mostly able-bodied for a very short time of our time here on earth, actually, always coming into and out of different abilities.  We are not invincible, and not unlimited; each of us comes with an expiration date. 

Human beings are finite, dependent creatures. 

And this is grace.  

We need God.  

And so God ministers to us. God provides for us. God loves and cares for us, and we are designed to receive that. To be loved. To trust our maker.  To know our place alongside other earth creatures. To care for the other creatures upon it that we are so bound to on this earth we can’t escape. To live on it, and in it, and from inside our own creatureliness, to  speak and listen to God.

But we can’t do this alone. We are not alone, solo, individual creatures.  For just a short time God tried this out, and it didn’t work.  To be made in the image of a relational God, whose love Father, Son and Spirit spilled out into creation to be shared and spread, the human needs also to be in relationship, we need also to belong to other than just ourselves, and even other than just God.  The conversation requires discussion partners.

So God makes the first earth creature sleep, and takes from it bodily tissue with which to fashion a corresponding partner – a helper, which is the same Hebrew word used for God as our Helper, a rescuer.  And when this earth creature awakens and sees one like itself but different, it is rescued from what it was to now be what it is meant to be.  Once there is female, now there is for the first time male, once there is an other, a you, there is now also a self, a me, and now the image of God can be reflected in a relationship of dialogue, a vulnerability of knowing and being known, a mutual conversation, a community. 

Now there is belonging. Belonging to God is complete even as we belong to each other. Belonging to each other is part of our belonging to God. And they walked in the cool of the garden and conversed with God, and it was good.  And this too is grace.

  

But to be so creaturely! How risky and weak it feels!  How strong and safe it must feel to be God! Not to be bound by the constraints of time and space, or life and death, or bodies and needs! To know all; to be invulnerable!  

So they eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the one boundary God set up and said, Do not do this, is the thing they do.  And when they cross this boundary their eyes are opened, and they see they are naked and are ashamed.  Their vulnerability becomes a deficit, a danger; their nakedness transparency. Self-protection, competition and blame roar up within them and between them, and they hide from God.

We earth creatures try to be more than we are, to transcend our limits. 

We now know what is happening at every moment in virtually every corner of the earth.  

We extend our reach to digitally become enemies with those we don’t know and friends with those we’ve never met. 

We keep the lights on and the screens lit to work around the clock, always available and always responsive. 

We eat everything we feel like, and drink till we stop feeling. 

We hold in front of ourselves false images of fake bodies and then contort ourselves around diets and drugs and gurus and equipment to become something we are not. 

We ignore our responsibility for the earth, and its creatures, pursuing our own invincibility instead. We resent and punish others human beings for their weakness or need.  

We, in so very many ways, suppress our creatureliness, ignore our vulnerability, disregard our interdependence, and deny our need for a minister, (that is, for others to care for us).  And so we become disconnected. We disintegrate.  We lose our very selves, our primary identity and belonging, and we hide.   We hide from ourselves, from others, and most futilely, from God.

This conversation God has begun, this dialogue, this relationship, means God, in freedom, has chosen to be bound to this creature, has chosen to love, and therefore also to have the possibility of being rejected.  To give this creature a Yes means it might also say No.  To give it capacity to speak means it might also be silent. Or use words to hurt. To love this creature means God might also be scorned by it. 

My beloved creatures, where are you?  God asks, coming to the conversation and finding nothingness, as though they have uncreated themselves. Why are you hiding from me?

At first they don’t answer, they are hiding behind leaves from the Source of all life. 

Because now shame feels more powerful than trust, and weakness seems more dangerous than disconnection.  

So when God’s voice speaks to them they do not answer back.

But God’s love comes first and last and all throughout. No matter what and always they, and we, belong to God. So when God finds them, and they confess their nakedness, their shame, their weakness, God sees their agony and clothes them, not because they need clothes, but because they need a minister.  Human beings need a minister, even when we think we don’t – maybe especially then - and God will always minister to us. When we turn our backs on God, God will drape over us a warm, protective garment, and help us face our own humanity.

At the very most core of us we are from God, and for God, and the parts deep beneath our knowing know - body, heart, mind and soul - what it is to be known and loved by God.  

And at the core everything, before and after and apart from and throughout the cosmos, is this God who is love, who gives God’s very self for us. 

This is grace. God’s self-emptying, self-giving, ministering love that doesn’t need to, but does it all anyway. 

This relationship is not up for grabs.

But here’s how this works- we are creature, and God is creator. 

We are human and God is divine. 

We are dependent, and God is independent, but chooses out of love and grace to share God’s own self with the world.  God decides to get tangled up in this conversation with us from here on out. 

In fact, in a few weeks, we are going to celebrate that God forfeits independence and invincibility and becomes dependent too – taking on the earth creatureliness that we are bound in, and becoming bound to us and alive alongside us.  Christmas is God taking on the limits of a human body with an expiration date, to keep this conversation going.

My beloved ones, where are you? God asks, as we hide in shame and see our vulnerable,  

soft bodies and tender hearts and questioning minds as ugly, weak, shameful and in need of changing.

But Advent is about noticing and trusting and watching for God.  

So let's begin Advent in the grace of our own creatureliness. 

Let’s feel our moving bodies and our aching hearts and our messy thoughts and gross humanity. 

Let’s take in the smells around us, and wiggle our fingers and toes, and gaze on something or someone lovely and complex. 

Let’s listen to music and words, and feel how we need other people to know us and we need to know ourselves alongside them, and notice how if we’re honest we crave something a little bit more perfect than we ever actually experience. 

Let’s observe our limits, witness our new abilities and new disabilities - the ones we’ve made peace with and the ones we’re just uncovering.  

Let’s recognize our dependence on each other and God, and respond to our needs, like sleep when we are tired, food when are hungry, tears when we are sad, laughter when we’re happy, and connection for the continually reloading need for listening, speaking, touching. 

We are not God. We don’t have unlimited power. We can’t know the divine mystery, but neither can we screw up the divine plan. So this Advent, from our embodied place as creatures, let’s look to our Creator.  Let’s enter into the ongoing conversation with the limitless, transcendent God, who improbably answers our vulnerability and need by coming vulnerable and needy.

Let’s listen to the God who speaks, and see the world as God sees it – deeply interconnected, beautiful and complex, and call it good. 

Let’s see ourselves as God sees us – part of the glorious whole, each one gorgeous and intricate, each one not meant to be isolated and alone.  

No matter what we do or don't do, we can’t stop ourselves from dying. But neither can we stop love from redeeming the whole world. 

Inside our creatureliness, inside our inability to be more than we are, there is our grace. It is the place God speaks to us. It is where the conversation happens.  It’s where hope begins.

Amen.

On Prayer (and the two only ways to Not-Pray)

Psalm 130 & 131

This summer we are trying out different ways to pray.  But it occurs to me, that we might want to take a step back and ask, What is prayer?

Perhaps we think it is something only especially religious people can do – or at least, only especially religious people are good at. (Watch how many potlucks and picnics are put on hold until the pastor can get there to pray).  Most of us don’t want to do it in public, that’s for sure.  Maybe prayer is something we feel like we should do before we eat or go to bed, or we find ourselves doing it urgently when things go wrong, often feeling guilty that we don’t do it more when things are going right.

But prayer is nothing more, and nothing less, than communication between God and us.  In that way it is both utterly simple and natural, and also pretty astonishing.  We were made to be connected to our Creator, each other, the world around us.  But that God wants to communicate with us? Wants to hear from us? Wants to tell us things? Amazing!

Prayer can happen anywhere, anytime. In the dead of night when fear grips you, flat on your back on the grass gazing up at a soft, sunset sky, naked in the shower when your mind is roaming, anxiously driving in a snowstorm, sitting in a heart-soaring concert.  Martin Luther famously prayed on the toilet.  Prayer is something we’re made for. 

And it’s not just talking to God with words. It is talking. It is also listening. It is receiving, and resting, and noticing and being quiet, and yelling and crying, laughing and singing, dancing, walking, and sitting very, very still. It’s thoughts in your head or words outloud, or a feeling in your gut, or a warmth in your chest. Think of all the ways a person can communicate without even using words!  Sighing, and body language, laughing, pointing, shaking in anger, weeping in joy. Prayer uses our senses, our bodies and minds and hearts.  It is the substance of our communication with God.

Anyone can pray. Everyone does pray - even if they don’t realize that’s what they’re doing. 

The point is – there is no wrong way to pray – it’s a relationship –hanging out with God in whatever way the two of you happen to be hanging out at the moment.

There are really only two ways to not-pray.

The first is to act like God isn’t here. 

And the second is not to show up yourself. 

If you acknowledge God is here, and if you show up too, you will be praying.

This may be harder than it sounds.  

We have all sorts of handy and habitual ways to ignore God, and all sorts of practiced and thoughtless ways to be less than fully present ourselves.  

In fact, much of what we might think of as prayer is actually Not-praying - it acts as though that God is an idea, concept, or belief, rather than an actual being who encounters us. Or else it's playing a role, going through motions, checking a box, rather than being fully and honestly present.

But in the two prayers we have before us today, we see a beautiful example of both recognizing that God is here, and showing up yourself.

David didn’t hide from God or sugarcoat things.   There is a particular kind of honesty, a kind of trust, to be able to say what you are really feeling and needing, without feeling the need to make the other person think the best of you, or protect their feelings.

David didn’t say, I’ve got this God. no worries. I’m on top of it.  I don’t mean to trouble you. He didn’t keep himself out of the relationship. Make himself seem ok, even when he wasn’t. He didn’t dismiss his discomfort or need; he let it all out.

Out of the depths I cry to you Lord!  Hear my voice! Listen to me! Please!

In both of these Psalms David starts by talking honestly to God, moves into to talking honestly to himself, and ends with talking to the community about God.

God hear me!

I wait for the Lord, my soul waits…

O Israel, hope in the Lord. For with him there is steadfast love...

And then,

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up too high….

But I have calmed and quieted my soul. Like a weaned child.

O Israel hope in the Lord form this time on forevermore!

Yesterday, inside a single day, I shared joy with someone I love who was excited. 

I was unable to take pain away from someone I love who was suffering.

I felt stuck in misunderstanding and sorrow with someone I love.

I felt ashamed and vulnerable about a weakness of mine on full display, and was embraced and unconditionally seen and loved in the midst of it by someone I love.

And I also caused pain and deeply hurt, to someone I love.  All different people.  In one day.  

Lord, if you marked our transgressions, who could stand? 

There is no way to do this perfectly, this living and loving and being in the world.  We will hurt others. We will be hurt. We will wander off, and come home, and do things we regret and do things we celebrate, and the whole big mess of it is something we can bring to God, plop down before him and say, From my depths I cry to you!

Our hope is not in our own ability to love well or live right, it is in God. God’s forgiveness, God’s steadfast love, God’s Spirit working in and through us.

God is here. And God expects us to show up too. 

We are here. And we expect God to show up too.

I wait for the Lord. More than those who watch for the morning.  

More than the father by the sick child’s bedside, counting down the hours. The worker on the night shift, the clock inching slowly by.  The sailor in the terrible storm, the traveler on a long flight, the child away from home overnight for the first time.

I’ve watched for the morning.  When Owen was brand new, I had the midnight to 5 am shift.  And sometimes I was awake for the bulk of it, bouncing, feeding, burping, comforting. And Oh, did I watch for the first sign of the sun peeking over the horizon, the light in the room to begin to shift.  For the hope that would meet me like I was crawling onto shore, I made it, I made it through the night, and it was going to be ok.

To wait for the Lord more than that... With all fervent desperation and staunch commitment to see it through.  There is trust there.  That like the morning sunrise, God will come. God will answer me. I will hang on.

This is what prayer does: It waits for God.

Wait.  Don’t rush to the next distraction. Don’t cave to the easy solution. Wait for the Lord. Sit in the discomfort. Feel how frustrated you really are. Cry out from your depths.

God will show up.  Prayer trusts God to show up.

And then – the other side of it – show up yourself. 

A weaned child, David calls his soul. A weaned child is no longer nursing, completely dependent on mom.  A weaned child is one who crawled down off mom’s lap and walked off on their own, felt the world, been knocked about, done things they regret, learned things they love, and then, in his metaphor, comes back to climb into mom’s lap and rest in her arms, to find comfort and peace. My soul is like the weaned child that is with me. 

 My soul had been bruised and battered, has explored, and made mistakes, and learned some things, and tried out life, and I bring it back to myself and hold it close and calm it. Shh. It’s ok. You’re ok.

My friend Jamie taught me to put my hand on my cheek, and say, Oh honey.  It is a way of summoning my soul back to myself when I am upset or overwhelmed. I feel my eyes well up often when I do it. I feel the empathy of seeing my own soul with compassion, as God sees it, welcoming it back, battered and bruised, to the love and care that God is extending to me. I may have been hiding because I didn’t feel worthy, or fleeing because I thought I’d be found out in my shame, or too busy and distracted to pay any attention, or racing too fast to catch up.  This move, Oh honey, brings me back to myself. It brings me back to God.

Tend to your heart. Discover your need for forgiveness. Accept it with gratitude.  Lower your eyes, set down your ego, coax your wild and weary soul back into your own embrace. Let yourself feel your scattered pieces come together and hold them, right here before God. Right here, and nowhere else.

Here I am Lord.  All of me. Right here. Seeing myself clearly, reigned in and ready. Waiting for the source of hope to meet me.

Around here we call that space where we wait for God and where we tend our souls, “Sabbath,” and we keep saying, forgetting, and remembering this: When we stop, God will meet us.  When we stop, God will meet us.

After a time, waiting for God and tending your soul, it happens.  There is a kind of thing that gently overtakes you.  A wonder, or gratitude, or confidence, or peace: a recognition of transcendence – that the Holy, wholly other than you, is actually here, can be trusted, sees you and loves you. And perhaps the feeling bubbles up as it did for David, the urge to announce it, O Israel! Hope in the Lord!  God cares about us! God will not let us go! Steadfast love! The power to redeem! God can be trusted until the end of time!

So far this summer, we’ve recognized God and shown up ourselves - with journaling, with movement, and on Saturday with clay.

Sometimes our heads get in the way. We overthink things, we try to make everything into words, we analyze and justify, and find it hard to quiet our souls and wait before the Lord.  On Saturday a lump of clay helped us out with that.

We worked it with our hands and saw what happened. For some, an image came to mind and they tried to shape the clay that way, for others, the shape changed as they went and it was more about the process. The clay became things we wanted to tell God, or things God might be telling us, or just a chance to play together.

You each got some playdoh when you came in. For the next couple of minutes, I invite you to work with it.  Don’t worry about how it looks, about artistic skill or anything like that, and don’t worry about what anyone else is dong with theirs.

Maybe for you it’s just a quiet stress relief to squeeze it, a moment that helps your mind quiet and be still.  Whatever it is, for the next couple of minutes, we are going to hold the playdoh in our palm and hold our heart open to God, and see what happens.  God is here, and we will be here too.

Let us pray.

*          *          *          *          *

O Lord, our hearts are not lifted up, our eyes are not raised too high;
We do not occupy ourselves with things too great and too marvelous for us.
But we have calmed and quieted our souls, like weaned children with their mothers;
   our souls are like the weaned children that are with us. 

O children of God, hope in the Lord, from this time on and for evermore.