July 24, 2011
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
One day when I was in Puerto Rico for the ABC Biennial, I joined our choir to visit the Arecibo Observatory. This was the setting for Jodie Foster’s 1997 science fiction movie, Contact. While this huge radar was impressive, I was still stirred by the images of Jodie Foster’s movie when she was able to contact extra-terrestrial intelligence appearing as her father who died when she was a little child. She was able to make contact and communicate with aliens of another world.
As human beings, we yearn for making contact with others. When a relationship is broken, we crave to restore connections and to make contact once again. In our Roman’s passage for today, Paul is speaking about the yearning of Creation for full restoration and redemption in the future in light of the suffering being endured in the present. In Romans 8:22, the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains waiting for adoption, redemption and hope. Because there’s a broken relationship that we have with God, we are yearning, craving, groaning for connecting and making contact with God so that our relationship can be restored. We want communion with God again and prayer is one way to contact God.
But Paul says that we do not know how to pray. The primary way that we know how to pray is the communication that we have through the Holy Spirit. Without the Holy Spirit, we are at a complete loss for how to communicate with God. Prayer with the help of the Holy Spirit is like the space capsule that Jodie Foster was in that propelled her to make contact with extra-terrestrial intelligence. In the Holy Spirit, God graciously gives us what we need to make contact with God. In turn, God makes contact with us in the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit opens up the lines of communication with God and prompts us in our prayer.
Don’t Know How to Pray
Yet, it’s rather amazing to hear from Paul say that “we don’t know how to pray.” Paul has been an authority on so many theological subjects. What should we do about eating food offered to idols? Paul tells them. How should we get along with one another in the church? Paul has a ready response in a couple of places.
But Paul says that we don’t know how to pray.
As a pastor, one of the services that I offer is to pray—pray for you when you are in the hospital, pray for those whom you are concerned about, pray over a meal that we are about to eat, pray for safe travel and protection when we are about to embark on a long journey. I’m asked to pray with the assumption that my prayers are more effective than yours. Knowing how to pray is the way that the Holy Spirit helps us to be in communion with God again.
We all seem to have a lot of questions about prayer, don’t we? How do you know that, when praying, you are not just talking to yourself? How can we be sure that prayer really works? Is it okay to pray to anything that’s on your mind or are there some things that you just should never talk with God about?
We don’t know how to pray. But we so desperately yearn and groan to be connected with God again.
Some of us have put God high on the throne and we wonder what ever can we say to God who is complete holiness and goodness when we are a bundle of sins, doubts, and mistakes. Would God almighty have time for my particular little needs that are on my wish list for God? Would my simple prayers match up to the flowery prayers I hear from others?
Sometimes when I ask for prayer requests, you would make petitions related to your friends and families and then apologize to me afterward thinking that you didn’t deserve the prayer or that you have a limited view about the power of prayer. We don’t know how to pray.
Does prayer really work? Every now and then I receive an email from someone who tells me about some scientific study at some university or hospital that shows beyond a doubt, that “prayer works.” Prayer lowers blood pressure, or prayer helps to cure people of various physical ailments. I find such claims to be interesting, but I also doubt that they really have much to do with truly Christian prayer. George Lai shared with the Senior Fellowship a couple of weeks ago that religious people live longer. But the Stanford study wasn’t so much on whether religious people who prayed a lot lived longer but that religious people tend to be prudent and more conscientious and therefore they lived longer.
We are modern people who greatly value “what works.” Do this; get that. A and B results in C. It’s only natural that we should turn prayer into another technique for getting whatever it is that we think we want and need. And if science (which we tend to value more that say scripture or church teaching) says that prayer “works,” then that’s just great.
But what if the best thing you can say about prayer in Jesus’ name is not simply that “it works,” but that it is the way we lay ourselves open to the presence of God, a way in which we think with God, in which we seek to attune our wants and needs with God? Prayer with the help of the Holy Spirit opens up the communication lines with God. God makes contact with us and we make contact with God.
What God Wants
As your pastor, I wish that every prayer I say, works. If this were the case, we would have people lining up to get into this sanctuary. We wouldn’t have to worry about attendance, budgets, sick and dying people, even angry church members. Wouldn’t that be grand!
Prayer is not primarily a way of getting what we want out of God but primarily a means of God getting what God wants out of us! I think of all those people who have told me, as a pastor, how they repeatedly went to God seeking deliverance from some problem, seeking to get something in their life fixed only to be told by God, in effect, “No.”
Jesus sure got “No” for an answer when he prayed in Gethsemane.
When we pray, we are essentially bringing some person and their needs before God, placing that person in perspective, laying that person alongside God and then being open to the presence of God, in the way that we are to attune our wants and needs with God’s.
As parents who have sent or still sending their children off to college or if you are a college student right now, we know that parents are going through terrible worries about what mischief or troubles their children might be getting into that they know nothing about. We would earnestly pray to God to change our young people’s behavior and to protect them from any risk of danger.
But eventually when we pray, we stop seeing our children in college as some rebellious, difficult young adults, but rather as vulnerable, sometimes confused, and scared little children. That’s the way God sees them. Pretty soon, we begin to see our young people more as a gift than a problem. With time, our college students or young adults change for the better, perhaps because we began to look upon them with God’s eyes.
Sometimes we bring someone we love to God in prayer simply because we’re at the end of our rope and there’s nothing else we can do. Perhaps you are that mother or that father who is so worry about your wayward son or daughter. Then, after much prayer, you say, “It was just like God said to me, “I’m eternal. I’ve got lots of time to love your son or daughter. It ain’t over until I say it’s over. This too shall pass.” Your immediate crisis is placed, in prayer, in a more eternal context and you are given a longer view.
But whether or not prayer works, helps changes things or doesn’t, I find it helpful to remind myself that the primary purpose of prayer is simply to be with God, to reestablish that connection and communication with God. In prayer with the help of the Holy Spirit, we make contact with God in a focused, direct, and intense way.
Remember that the last thing that is prayed by any Christian at the end of any truly Christian prayer of intercession is the prayer that Jesus in Gethsemane said as he faced the cross, “not my will, but thy will be done.”
Nothing Separates
By now, you know that one of my favorite Bible passages is Romans 8 when we read this at funerals and at times of trouble waters. When troubled waters are upon us, the bridge that helps us to get over this time is Christ who intercedes for us. Christ Jesus who died for us and raised by God will never allow hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword to separate the love of Christ from us. None of these awful things will break the relationship that God wants with us because of Christ Jesus.
Paul says that we don’t know how to pray. But Jesus is the chief, model pray-er. Paul tells the Romans and to us that Jesus sits at the right hand of God, interceding for us. This means that we never pray by ourselves. Jesus prays for us and with us, prompting us through his Holy Spirit telling us, teaching us how to pray as we ought.
As long as you and I are breathing and living on this terrestrial ball, we’ll have challenges and problems that will hurt us and devastate us. As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.” What an awful thought!
But in the end, “neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
When you share your prayer concerns with your church family and me, we can let go of the outcomes that we desire. We lift them up to God in prayer and that is sufficient. We can see whoever is in need of a miracle to be in the presence of God. Our prayer will be sufficient and God will be with the person and with us. We are able to pray this way for a simple reason: Christian prayer assumes the miraculous, that God speaks, listens, and responds through human beings. But also God works in ways that are beyond our human powers through the power of the Holy Spirit who moves among us all the time. Christian prayer assumes that God is not bound by space, outer space, extra-terrestrial intelligence or time today, yesterday or tomorrow.
Thanks be to God that we don’t have to try to desperately pray to communicate with God on our own. God loves us never to leave us “on our own.” The Holy Spirit helps us to speak and to listen to the God who so desperately wants to speak to us. We ought to pray.
Let us pray right now.
Lord Jesus, help us to approach you as we ought. Help us, in prayer, to speak to you, but even more help us, in prayer, to listen to you. Give us an open, teachable spirit in our prayers. Give us the courage to hear whatever you have to say to us and, in hearing your will, help us to act upon your will for our lives. Keep reaching out to us, Lord Jesus; keep revealing yourself to us, we pray. Amen.