Teach Us To Pray

Pictures from 2nd and 3rd century catacombs of women leading prayer in worship. (above and below)

Eastern Orthodox icon detail of woman leading prayer in worship.

The familiar version of The Lord’s Prayer comes from the middle of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:9-13 KJV). We are less familiar with the version in Luke 11:2-4 where Jesus responded to his disciples’ request, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

While I am certainly not Jesus, many have recognized how important I believe prayer is for us as individual disciples of Jesus and for us together as a congregation. I have been asked in a variety of ways to teach how to pray. The prayer exercises I have planned for Lent are in response to those requests. I am making them available here for any who wish to use them.

Praying with Scripture

My simplest answer to the question, “How can I learn to pray?” is to pray with Scripture. When I was with Henri Nouwen at the Daybreak Community in Ontario nearly 23 years ago, he compared praying with Scripture to a cow chewing its cud, talking over a specific passage with God for a prolonged period to extract the maximum nutrition. I was interested to read in the January 21, 2015 issue of the Christian Century (p. 8), that the nuns of the Abby of St. Walberga in Colorado, who raise beef cattle, connect their cattle and their prayers. They say, “Praying with Scripture is like chewing your cud. All through the day we’re ruminating on it. We chew, chew, chew, swallow, regurgitate.”

I also like a different image from the 4^th century Desert Father Abba Poeman who said, “The nature of water is soft, that of stone is hard; but if a bottle is hung above the stone, allowing the water to fall drop by drop, it wears away the stone. So it is with the Word of God; it is sort and hour heart is hard, but those who open their hearts the Word of God often, open their hearts to the fear of God.” I like to think of this as God’s way of using Scripture to make my heart match the heart of Jesus.

If you want to learn to pray with Scripture, you must start by filling the reservoir of your heart with Scripture. It is not a matter of how much Scripture you can read through but how much of what you are reading gets into you. For over 30 years I have taken a week with just three passages (Hebrew Scripture, Epistle, Gospel from the Common Lectionary) and spend time with them every day. For about 45 years I have prayed through 5 Psalms a day, thus coming back to each of them once a month (the day’s date +30+30+30+30). At least once a week I devote substantial time to being silent in God’s presence with no agenda of my own. I just wait for the Holy Spirit to bring from the reservoir of Scripture in my heart an invitation to have a conversation with God.

The Lord’s Prayer

Jesus gave his disciples and us The Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13; Luke 11:2-4) as our basic starting point for learning to pray. I somehow doubt that he intended or expected it to be memorized and recited in private devotions and public worship (unless you consider his divine foreknowledge of what would happen centuries later was purposely included in what he was teaching his disciples at the time). Rather, he gave it as a model on which we could confidently build not just our individual prayers but our complete prayer lives. The Lord’s Prayer is remarkable for being amazingly simple, compact and comprehensive.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer considered The Lord’s Prayer to be the summation and climax of the Psalms. He explains this in The Cost of Discipleship, which is really a commentary on The Sermon on the Mount as instruction for practical spirituality and discipleship. In his less known little book, Psalms the Prayerbook of the Bible, Bonhoeffer suggests that as a boy growing up in a devout Jewish home, Jesus learned to pray from the Psalms, so that when he taught his disciples to pray he could condense the totality of the richness and depth of the prayers of God’s people through the generations into the exquisite nugget we know as The Lord’s Prayer.

If the Psalms are the reservoir from which The Lord’s Prayer is extracted, the prayers in the New Testament Epistles are their extension from the Hebrew community to the global community of the Church through the centuries. The Psalms express a profound longing for God. The prayers of the Epistles express an awesome awareness of God present and active among the people of the Church and the Church at work in an often hostile world.

Prayers from the Epistles

If you want to grow in your praying I recommend to you praying the prayers in the Epistles for this congregation. Perhaps take just one prayer a week. Read it slowly every day. Ask the Holy Spirit to enable you to pray in this same way for this congregation. I promise you far beyond your routine prayers asking for God’s blessing into spiritual territory that might even be a little scary.

·         Romans 1:8-10

·         1 Corinthians 1:4-9

·         Ephesians 1:15-23

·         Ephesians 3:14-21

·         Philippians 1:3-11

·         Colossians 1:3-14

·         1 Thessalonians 1:2-3

·         2 Thessalonians 1:11-12

These prayers confront us with what Annie Dillard asked in her 1982 book Teaching a Stone to Talk. “Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? … The sleeping God may wake someday and take offense, or the waking God may draw us out to where we can never return.”

Prayer as Vocation

Weavings, the magazine for spiritual formation from the Upper Room, tells how Glenn Hinson, Professor Emeritus of Spirituality and Church History, Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, Virginia, visited the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky with a group of seminarians. They heard a talk by Thomas Merton on contemplation. One student asked Merton, “What is a smart fellow like you doing in a place like this?” Hinson expected a stiff response from Merton. Instead Merton said, “I am here because I believe in prayer. That is my vocation.” However the student took Merton’s response, Hinson said that it had never before occurred to him to think of prayer as a vocation.

Vocation is not what someone does to earn a living. Vocation is not someone’s career. Vocation is someone’s calling. The root word is the same as “vocal.” Vocation is to be about what you have been called for. As Christians, of course, we recognize God’s calling, but I believe everyone has a calling, even if they don’t follow it. Vocation for Christians is not about their jobs or their careers, though they may often mesh together. Christian vocation is not about those who are called to careers in ministries such as pastors, chaplains, missionaries, professors. Christian vocation is about God’s call to every Christian to live out the life of Jesus wherever they are and whatever they are doing.

We easily make the mistake of thinking that people with a prayer vocation are somehow giants who live in a rarified spiritual atmosphere. However, the great spiritual classics make clear what is taught in Scripture and lived by Jesus, that the vocation of prayer is lived out in the ordinary rhythms of life. Thomas ‘a Kempis’ The Practice of the Presence of God shows us the spiritual power he knew in the kitchen. Jean-Pierre de Caussade’s The Sacrament of the Present Moment shows us how to recognize God when we focus on what is now.

A Lenten Prayer Journey

I have come to deeply appreciate worship on Ash Wednesday with its emphasis on our spiritual frailty and mortality that sharpens the wonder of the resurrection. That evening we will begin our Lenten Wednesday evenings with an experience of the prayer of examen as we receive the ancient sign of imposed ashes. On the subsequent Wednesday evenings after enjoying your wonderful tradition of “Stone Soup Suppers,” I will guide you through a different prayer experience each week.

·         Ash Wednesday: Prayer of Examen

·         Lent 2: Praying the Four Points of the Compass

·         Lent 3: Praying with the Church through the Centuries

·         Lent 4: Praying for Healing and Wholeness

·         Lent 5: Praying Without Words

·         Lent 6: Praying with Scripture

Ash Wednesday: Prayer of Examen

Read Psalm 139:1-6, 23-24

Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home – Richard Foster

Precious Savior, why do I fear your scrutiny? Yours is an examen of love. Still, I am afraid … afraid of what may surface. Even so, I invite you to search me to the depths. So that I may know may myself – and you – in fuller measure. Amen.

             

Spiritual Exercises – Ignatius of Loyola

Pray silently to receive the grace for three things:

              First, that I may feel an interior knowledge of my sins and also an abhorrence of them.

              Second, that I may perceive the disorder in my actions, in order to detest them, amend myself, and put myself in order.

              Third, that I may have a knowledge of the world, in order to detest it and rid myself of all that is worldly and vain.

Imagine Christ our Lord suspended on the cross before you and converse with him. How is it that he, although he is the Creator, has come to make himself a human being? How is it that he has passed from eternal life to death here in time, and to die in this way for my sins?

Reflect on yourself and ask: What have I done for Christ? What am I doing for Christ? What ought I do for Christ?

Lent 2: Praying the Four Points of the Compass

Read Daniel 6:3-10

You may modify my pattern to match your experiences and relationships.

I start facing EAST, toward the rising sun. I pray the Lord’s Prayer and take one step forward. I thank God for a new day, review what I know is coming, ask for God’s guidance and release the day to Him. I pray for people I know who are east of me. Our son Jon and his family. My two of my nieces and their families. The folk I served at Central Christian Church, this congregation and in New Jersey. I pray for the people in government in Washington, for Europe, Africa and the Middle East.

Then I step back to the center, turn SOUTH and pray the Prayer of St. Francis. After stepping forward I pray for people I know south of me. The church I served in Duncanville. Southwest Good Samaritan Ministries. The people I got to know in Haiti and Honduras and our son Jon and his family know in Guatemala. News events taking place in Latin America.

I step back to the center, turn WEST and pray the L’Arche Prayer. I take a step west and pray for people I know west of me. My nephew serving with the Navy in Guam. The church I served in Odessa. Those I grew up with in California, friends in Colorado. I pray about people and events in Asia, including Afghanistan and Pakistan, Thailand and Burma. As I was giving thanks for the people in China who cared for our granddaughter Elizabeth for the first 15 months of her life and her biological parents.

Then I step back to the center, turn NORTH and pray the invocation and memorial prayers I typically use in the funeral liturgy. Those north of me whom I pray for include Candy’s Dad, our son David and his family, our niece and her family, the people of the churches we served in Illinois and Wisconsin, the people at the Daybreak community where we lived in Ontario.

After stepping back to the center, I face east again and reflect on having traced a cross with my steps, then I lift my hands and sing a hymn of praise to Christ.

Lent 3: Praying with the Church through the Centuries

The Great Thanksgiving from the classic liturgy of the Church offers wonderful guidance for group prayer that can be used individually as well.

Sursum Corda

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Lift up your hearts.

We lift them to the Lord.

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God.

It is right to give our thanks and praise.

We lift our hearts up to you and give thanks to you our Lord and our God. To give you praise is always and everywhere right and a good and joyful thing, Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.

Thanksgiving

You are invited to speak aloud your thanksgivings in a word or two, and all will respond:

Lord, we give you thanks …

Sanctus

Therefore we praise you, joining our voices with Angels and Archangels and with all the company of heaven, who forever sing to the glory of your Name.

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord, God of power and might, heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosanna in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.

Confession

Oh holy God you see us as we are, and know our inmost thoughts. We confess that we are unworthy of your gracious care. We forget that all life comes from you and that to you all life returns. We have not always sought or done your will.

We have not lived as your grateful children, nor loved as Christ loved us. Apart from you, we are nothing. Only your grace can sustain us.

Lord, in your mercy, forgive us, heal us and make us whole. Set us free from our sin, and restore to us the joy of your salvation, now and forever, through Jesus Christ our Lord. 

Amen.

Assurance of Pardon

Hear the good news! Who is in a position to condemn? Only Christ, and Christ died for us, Christ rose for us, Christ reigns in power for us, Christ prays for us. Anyone who is in Christ is a new creation. The old life has gone; a new life has begun. Know that in Christ you are forgiven and be at peace.

Memorial Acclamation

Great is the mystery of faith.

Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.

Intercessions

You are invited to speak aloud your requests in a few words, ending with:

For this we pray to the Lord:

and all will respond:

Lord, hear our prayer.

Let us pray for our world:

Let us pray for our nation:

Let us pray for our community:

Let us pray for Christ’s Church:

Let us pray for our congregation:

Let us pray for our families and friends:

Let us pray for ourselves:

Collect

Almighty God, whose beloved Son willingly endured the agony and shame of the cross for our redemption: Give us courage to take up our cross and follow him; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever.

Amen.

Lent 4: Praying for Healing and Wholeness

Read James 5:13-20.

Verbal, face to face, personal confession is not the exclusive domain of Roman Catholic priests and parishioners. Protestant tradition emphasizes the great Reformation principle of the Priesthood of All Believers. Thus, any Christian can legitimately hear the confession of any sister or brother in Christ. I would suggest that this is beneficial when guilt or shame over some sin or failing just doesn’t seem to go away. Then you may choose someone who spiritual maturity you trust to hear your confession. They can then respond, “In Christ you are forgiven, be at peace.” And if someone wants you to hear their confession, you can do them a powerful spiritual service by speaking aloud that same Assurance of Pardon.

Take a few moments for silent confession after which read aloud the Assurance of Pardon, “In Christ you are forgiven, be at peace.”

If you want a prayer of laying on of hands by the Elders and anointing as described in James, please see your pastor or one of your Elders.

Lent 5: Praying Without Words

Have you ever felt prayer surging up from deep inside that you just can’t seem to get into words? These two Scriptures give us some encouragement and guidance.

Read Romans 8:26-27 and Psalm 31:5.

Sit silently with eyes closed for a few moments thinking about these Scriptures. As something comes into your mind that is a peace or gift or presence from the Holy Spirit, turn your hands with palms up as a sign of receiving it. As something crosses your mind that you wish to release to God, turn your hands with palms down or out as a sign of letting it go to God.

After a few moments read Romans 8:26-27 and Psalm 31:5 aloud.

Lent 6: Praying with Scripture

Read John 12:20-33.

Follow this Short Guide to Lectio Divina From Discover Your Spiritual Type: A Guide to Individual and Congregational Growth by Corinne Ware, © 1995 The Alban Institute, Inc.

Lectio (Read): Read the passage carefully, getting the sequence and detail without thinking too much about the meaning. Imagine the time of day, season of the year, smells of the land, sounds of the countryside, the human touches – all the elements that would make this scene real to you. Transport yourself into the setting using your imagination.

Meditatio (Meditate): Read the scripture again. Why is there a record of this particular event or saying? What is the significance of this passage in the larger scheme of things? What does this piece mean? How does that affect an understanding of God? Of conduct? Do you see yourself in any of the characters in the passage?

Oratio (Pray): Allow your feelings to surface as you read the passage again. Do you feel happy, sad, angry or guilty? Silently or verbally talk this through with God; tell God what you feel about what you have read. Comment in you prayer on anything in the passage to which you respond.

Contemplatio (Contemplate): Sit quietly, breathe deeply and regularly, and let your mind go blank. As you quiet your inner self, simply listen in your heart. If you receive some impression or thought, quietly notice it; then focus your attention on remaining open. If you have no thoughts or impressions, return your mind to the scripture passage. After a while, open your eyes, rested and refreshed, expressing gratitude for your experience.