July 29, 2012
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
The middle of our country is experiencing a great drought that is leading some forecasters to predict higher food prices, higher gasoline prices, and severe drought conditions like the days of the Dust Bowl. What’s happening reminds me of a story.
There’s a story of a farmer named Manuel who from his house on the top of the hill, he could see a field of ripening corn and bean flowers that promise a good harvest. The one thing the land needed was rain. All morning Manuel had been examining the sky, “The water will come.” During dinner the rain started to fall. Great clouds came from the northeast. Manuel thought, “These aren’t just drops of water falling from the sky.” Then all of a sudden, a strong wind started to blow and giant hailstones began to fall. For an hour hail fell on the house and garden. The countryside was white, as though covered with salt. The beans were left without a single leaf. The corn was destroyed. Manuel’s heart dropped. “A swarm of locusts would have left more than this. We won’t have any corn or beans. All our work is lost. Our only hope is God.”
The next morning, Manuel wrote a letter; “God, if you do not help me, my family will go hungry. Because of the hail you sent, I need one thousand dollars to replant and live until the next harvest.” He wrote “God” on the envelope and put it in the mailbox.
Later that day, the mailman picked up the letter addressed to God. At first he laughed, but then he thought: “I wish I had the faith of the man who wrote this letter. To believe what he believes. To write a letter to God.” So as to not disillusion Manuel, the mailman decided to answer the letter, but when he opened it (Isn’t this illegal?), he discovered that responding would take more than goodwill, ink, and paper.
He couldn’t raise the thousand dollars Manuel had requested, but he gave more than half. He put the money in an envelope and addressed it to Manuel. He enclosed the letter with only a one-word signature—“God.” When he delivered the letter the mailman smiled like someone who has done a good deed. He watched as Manuel opened the letter. Manuel didn’t show the slightest surprise upon seeing the money, but he became angry as he counted it. The next day the mailman opened another letter from Manuel (Again, illegal.) and read: “God, I only got $600 of the money you sent. Please send the rest of it again, but don’t send it through the post office, because the mailman is a thief!”
The story makes us smile. Sending a letter to God sounds silly. Believing that God will send a thousand dollars seems sillier. Every once in a while we meet someone like Manuel whose simple prayers seem naive.
Maybe it’s harder for educated, sophisticated people living in the Bay Area to pray. Or maybe we are praying for the wrong things.
Paul’s Prayer
Our lesson is a prayer from Paul. In the previous verses, we hear that Paul was reminding the Ephesians to not lose heart over the sufferings that he is experiencing as the result of them. Paul is in prison and probably in the constraints of shackles.
Paul writes, “I bend my knees before God.” Good Jews prayed standing with hands and palms up. They only kneeled in emergencies. We can see that Paul was suffering for the glory of the Ephesians knowing Christ.
Paul has suffered five public whippings and three beatings. He has been stoned once, shipwrecked three times, and imprisoned more often than he can remember. Now he’s on death row. He knows he will be executed soon. The only light in the room is from a small square window above his head. Paul sets the parchment on the floor in the middle of the light and writes a letter to his friends.
If I were writing this letter, it would begin, “Dear First Chinese Baptist Church, get me out of here. I didn’t do anything. Get Paul Fong or Beverly Chan, one of you must know somebody to get me out of here!”
Listen to what Paul writes to the church from prison: “When I think of everything that is going on I get down on my knees before God, and I beg God to give you, out of God’s glorious abundance, the power to live by the Spirit. God, grant that Christ might be in your hearts. May you have the strength to grasp the width and length and height and the depth of the love of Christ that surpasses our understanding. Let God’s fullness fill you.”
While waiting for the warden to call his number, Paul prays that the people in his church will have the same sense of God’s presence that he feels. Paul’s life is coming to a violent end, but it doesn’t diminish his sense of God’s grace. Paul is saying that all the criticism against him and the beatings and arrests don’t really matter. What matters is the Spirit he feels enlivening his body when he speaks of Jesus. In the presence of Christ, Paul has no doubt about God’s love.
Our Prayers
Paul has gone through hell on earth, but what he feels more than anything else is God with him. He prays that his friends will know God’s presence too.
We don’t really pray for what Paul prays for. We pray that what we want to happen will happen. We pray that greedy people who get in our way will get what’s coming to them. We pray that the driver who cut us off on the highway will be stopped by the CHP up ahead.
At church meetings that mean too little, we pray that we don’t become frustrated. At church meetings where you’re certain that you’re the voice of Jesus and everyone else is deaf, we pray that people will be smart enough to agree with us.
We pray that our lives won’t be so hard. We pray when we try new things and they don’t work. We pray when we can’t seem to find happiness through the right job, the right car, the right reading book, the right kids, and maybe the right spouse, admitting that nothing seems to be going right for us. Like Manuel after the storm, we could use some cash in an unmarked envelope.
There’s a story about a journalist assigned to the Jerusalem bureau of his newspaper. He gets an apartment overlooking the Wailing Wall. After several weeks he realized that whenever he looks at the wall he sees the same old Jewish man praying vigorously. The journalist wonders whether there’s a story here. He goes down to the wall, introduces himself and says: “You come every day to the wall. What are you praying for?”
The old man replies: “In the morning I pray for world peace, then I pray for the brotherhood of man. I go home, have a glass of tea, and I come back to the wall to pray for the eradication of illness and disease from earth.”
The journalist is taken by the old man’s persistence. “How long have you been coming to the wall to pray for these things?”
The old man thinks for a minute: “Twenty, twenty-five years.”
The amazed journalist asks: “How does it feel to come and pray every day for over twenty years for these things?”
“It feels like I’m talking to a wall.”
Sometimes we stop praying entirely because it feels like we are talking to a wall. When someone we love gets sick and we pray fervently—it’s like talking to a wall. Some of the most prayed for people die too soon. Some of the people who wanted to check out long ago stay alive and keep suffering.
When we are about to face a big decision, we want to pray. But with some decisions like career choices, we try to pray hard but not too hard. If we pray too hard, we might end up with a job that doesn’t pay as much–like working at a church!
During times of national emergencies, we pray. We pray for peace in the middle of war, but it doesn’t feel like it’s doing much good. We pray for those who have lost and injured loved ones in Aurora, Colorado but we can’t erase their suffering.
What sends us to our knees to pray? The answer may be “not much.” Some of us haven’t been on our knees in a while, and a few of us are sure that if we did fall to our knees we’d have to pray to get back up. But perhaps there is something else for which we most need to pray.
We think we need to pray for more health, more wealth, an easier life than the one we have. But the truth is that we need to pray for a sense of God’s presence, to be filled with the love of Christ, to recognize that the Spirit is with us.
Christ Moving In
Paul describes the Christian life as praying without ceasing. Our formal prayers and silent prayers in worship are not all of our prayers. We pray in this place so that we will learn to pray everywhere. A definition of prayer is “lifting our hearts to God.” We should be constantly lifting our hearts to God. Prayer is recognizing the holiness that always surrounds us. Prayer is the odd silence you fall into when something beautiful or terrible is happening. Prayer is the pain we feel at another’s pain and the joy we feel at another’s joy. The Christian understanding is that every bit of our lives given to God is a prayer.
Paul prayed that, “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith (3:17). Having Christ dwell in our hearts is akin to having a new person move into your home. If he is just visiting, it’s all rather easy; you simply offer hospitality and try to practice good manners. But if someone moves in to stay, everything changes. At first you might try to hold on to your familiar patterns and routines, and the new member may work hard to accommodate you and stay out of the way. But eventually he makes his mark. Conversations change. Relationships realign. Household tasks increase and responsibilities shift. So it is when Christ moves in to the hearts of Christians. This isn’t merely tweaking old patterns; everything changes.
Prayer is opening our lives to God. When we ask for health and wealth we may be asking for too little. The audacity of prayer is certain to be answered by the God that surrounds us. Martin Luther said, “We pray for silver and God gives us gold.”
When we give ourselves to prayer, when we live with the understanding that God surrounds us, everything changes. We lose the delusion that we are the center of the universe. We see others differently.
We realize that the mailman is not a thief. The greedy person may have struggled through much of life and is still discovering that hoarding is not necessary. The church member you don’t agree with thinks she’s heard the voice of Jesus, too. Maybe you’re both right. The jerk who cut you off in traffic is a single mother who worked ten hours that day and is rushing home to cook dinner, do laundry, and spend a few precious moments with her children.
The pierced, tattooed disinterested young man who can’t make change correctly is a worried eighteen-year-old, who plans to go to college in the fall, but is still waiting for news about the financial aid he has to have. The scary looking homeless man, begging for money at the same stoplight every day, is a slave to addictions that we can’t imagine in our worst nightmares. When we recognize that God is with us, we see God is with everyone else, too.
If we give our lives in prayer, if we recognize that God surrounds us, we’ll see ourselves differently. When we’re weary from responsibilities with family, work, and church, the vision of God leads us back to life. When the hard realities break in, when we’re feeling broken, we pray knowing that God is waiting to put us back together.
If we believe God is with us, we are more likely to turn off the iPhone, tell a child a story, hold the one we love tight, share a slow dance, spend our money differently, spend our time differently, choose our friends differently, sing louder on Sunday morning, read the Bible every day, laugh with someone, ask “How are you?” and listen carefully for the reply.
If we see that God is with us we will tell the truth even when we know it’s going to make somebody angry. We will challenge the prejudices around us, and on occasion, do something that doesn’t add up because God wants us to.
When we pray, God gives us the courage to risk. We learn to trust not in ourselves, but in something far bigger than we are. We live with at times a muffled, but persistent sense of the holy.
Why do we pray? We pray for a bigger vision of God. Pray that you will see your life in the center of God’s goodness. Pray that Christ will dwell in your heart. Pray that God will overwhelm you with grace. Pray knowing that at the heart of every genuine prayer what we are praying for is God.
Let us pray.
We pray, dear God on our knees both physically and symbolically so that according to the riches of your glory, you may grant us strength in our lives through the power of the Holy Spirit. We pray that Christ Jesus may dwell in our hearts through faith. We pray to have the power to comprehend with all those who knew you before and know you now which is the love of Christ that surpasses all knowledge. Fill us with your fullness today. Amen.