Today's Sermon - Intimacy of Prayer - 9/22/19

This morning's sermon is not one of my best, in my opinion.  It is a strange combination of trying to use the Old and New Testament writings to create what I had in my head a month ago, which just wouldn't come out this week.  But, here it is nonetheless.  Blessings to you all!

Intimacy of Prayer

(based on Jeremiah 8:18-9:1, 1 Timothy 2:1-7)

Last week we spent some time on Lament and what a lament is.  In our Old Testament reading this week Jeremiah continues lamenting his purpose in life as a prophet to the Lord.  “My joy is gone”, he says.  What’s kind of funny about this statement is that Jeremiah has never struck me as someone exhibiting the slightest amount of joyfulness.  In any case, whatever joy he had has flown away and it has been replaced by grief.

More lamenting, “The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”   Regardless of how dire Jeremiah sounds, we might want to take a note from his comments here.  We often want quick turnarounds, in a season.  But Jeremiah told the people of Israel that they would have to wait on the Lord’s time.  If you recall, they needed to wait for more than 70 years for a turnaround to even begin to happen.

Jeremiah’s grief is to be pondered.  He not only grieves, he yearns to grieve even more.  Jeremiah wants to weep.  “Oh, that my head were a spring of water, my eyes a fountain of tears.”  Again, Jeremiah’s words are strange.  Who wants more sorrow?  And yet, it is only in prayer that we can be that honest and intimate with God.  In praying and opening to God, we’d be more in sync with God if we were to fully comprehend the sorrow God feels over the people of the world.  Robert Pierce, founder of World Vision, once said, “Let my heart be broken by the things that break God’s heart.”

This concern and lamenting for the people we know and love, like Jeremiah did for the people of Israel, like Robert Pierce did when he founded World Vision, for the situations we hear about around the world can lead to real and intimate prayer time with God.

According to the Internet, as of July 2019 the population of the world stood at more than 7.7 Billion people.  That's a lot of people.  I don’t think most of us can even imagine that many people, but that's our world today.  People who live in tiny villages in the jungles of the Amazon to bustling cities that barely have a green tree growing in the concrete jungle of their metroplexes.  And yet, according to God's own Word, all – each and every one of them – were created in God’s image and are precious in God’s sight.  And Timothy urges us to pray for them all.  But how do we pray for 7.7 billion people?  Timothy especially calls on us to pray for those in leadership positions.  All those 7.7 billion people are under the authority of their governments; kings, queens, prime ministers, presidents, dictators, tribal leaders, courts, republics, democracies, militants, empires, and regimes.  Timothy urges us to pray for all of them. 

Afterall, God thinks global thoughts.  God thinks about everyone, because God created all of them and loves all of them.  It is only right for us, then, to pray for them, as well as praying for ourselves.  But in my prayer time with God, I don’t think it’s possible for me to pray for 7.7 billion people without being overly simplistic and not terribly genuine.  Sort of like saying, “Dear Lord, right now I pray for Aunt Betty and her health issues, for Mike and his problems at work, for Esther and her upcoming surgery, for my neighbors who just learned that their son has cancer, for John and the death of his wife, and everyone else.”  That last tag line just seems ingenuine.

So, I think I prefer a modern writing and translation of scripture by the late Eugene Peterson called, The Message.  He translates verse 1 this way: "The first thing I want you to do is pray.  Pray every way you know how, for everyone you know".  It’s a little bit different than praying for everyone, because that’s just impossible to pray for 7.7 billion people. 

However, in writing to Timothy, Paul affirms the importance of prayer and the need for prayer on behalf of all people.  We need to pray for all the people we know, but in so doing we pray for the world, because we are connected with one another and you know people I don’t know and I know people you don’t know.  We are then, each of us, praying for a larger and larger circle of friends and family and others.  It is through that intimacy and our united prayers that we can touch all the corners of the world with prayer.

Our prayers cannot be just for the people we know and love, however.  Most of us are good about praying for people we love, people we know, people with whom we work.  But our prayers must go beyond our comfort zone to include others, too.  It’s in the intimate inclusion of those who are different from us, who think differently than we do and who might not be our friends or loved ones that we are deeply moved and changed.

Alan Paton, in his novel, Cry, the Beloved Country, describes the pain and inner turmoil of a black priest named Kumalo. Kumalo's son, who has moved away to Johannesburg, is convicted of murdering a white man, who happens to be the son of Kumalo's neighbor.  The last scene of the book describes Kumalo during the early morning hours on the day that his son is to be executed.  He has taken some tea and maize cakes and has climbed to the top of a familiar mountain where he spends those restless moments in prayer.  As the dawn approaches he prays with even greater fervor, not for the release of his son, but for his forgiveness.  And then in that poignant moment, he prays for others, the family of the slain white man, the judge who has pronounced the verdict, the people of Johannesburg, some who had led his son to ruin, and others who have befriended and helped Kumalo in his search for his son.  It is a soul-searching, gut-wrenching prayer.  It is an inclusive prayer.  Inclusive prayers are not always easy, but they are what God desires.

It is through prayer that we are changed.  That’s the intimacy of it.  It is in being in a relationship with someone else that we are changed.  It is in being in relationship with God, that we are changed by God to be more than we ever thought we could be.  It is in being in relationship with others, that we are changed by them to become better people.  That’s the intimacy of relationships.   And we cannot be in an intimate relationship with another person if we have sinned against them and not asked for forgiveness.  We cannot be in relationship with another and continue to sin against them.  Our sins against one another pull us in the wrong direction.  They lead us away from God; they erect a barrier that divides us from God.  And yet God desires that we be brought or brought back into the fellowship of the kingdom of God.  God desires that those who stand on the outside be brought to the inside.

Mother Teresa said, “I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that He will guide me to do whatever I’m supposed to do, what I can do.  I used to pray for answers, but now I’m praying for strength.  I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things.”

My God lead you to a time of lamenting over the situations in your life, the people you love, those around you, and the stories you hear in the news around the world.  But then let the Lord guide you in that intimate time together not just to lament and grieve, but into strength, joy, and action to change the world around you and in so doing we can change the whole world.