Prayerful Communication

1Kings 3: 5-12
Matthew 13: 31-33, 44-52

Many of us pray for what we feel we are missing in our lives. We pray for good health, lots of wealth and good fortune, and we pray quickly for others to receive what they need as well. Sometimes our prayers stem from our neediness or our greediness, and other times they well up from deep inside of us like wordless groans full of pain and anguish and despair. There are no words really, at times like this, there is just those feelings that so overwhelm us that our thoughts swirl with no sense and our voice is lost.

In those times, I believe, is when the Holy Spirit takes over our prayers. God doesn’t need perfect word choices or good English to understand what we desire most in our hearts. God doesn’t even need words to know what we want to pray for, what we desperately wish we could voice, but sometimes find ourselves without proper articulation.

What God does need is for us to keep the ways of communication open between us and Jesus. The best way to do that is through prayer. We need to speak to God and God wants to speak to us. It’s weird if you think about it, that God wants to speak to any of us. What is so interesting about you or me when compared to all that God knows, has done, and seen? It is very hard to imagine that anything we could say would be scintillating to God. It is also hard to imagine that God doesn’t already know exactly what we need or want and how we are going to phrase our request, so what’s the point in praying if God already knows?

This kind of reasoning is the rationale behind why some of us do not pray very often. When we do take the time to squeak out a prayer it is short, to the point, and it becomes the very thing we fear it is – boring to us and boring to God. God doesn’t want Reader’s Digest prayers from us. Of course God knows what we need and want, the reason for prayer is so much bigger than requests or asking for favors. Prayer opens up our lives.

This is what Solomon teaches us in the 1Kings passage we read today. Although God had created Solomon and was a blessed man, he still managed to surprise God when he asked not for money or power, but instead he asked for divine wisdom to rule God’s people. God not only heard and answered Solomon’s prayerful request, God also gave Solomon the things he did not ask for because that is what happens when we start to pray and communicate more with God. We find blessings begin to surround us everywhere we go because our spiritual eyes are opened.

Prayer creates a mystery, a living link between God and the person praying. They are linked by the Holy Spirit and Jesus Christ. Just as the Spirit offers up wordless groans when we have lost the words we need in the depths of our emotions, Jesus offers up those perfect words and a pure heart so that when God hears the prayer through Jesus, we are not left as audacious sinners begging for crumbs from the master’s table, we are elevated up into the realms of heaven and are able to stand with our head high. The prayers we pray in Jesus’ name become a conversation with God instead of a servant begging its master for favors.

Do you see the distinction? This is what Jesus did for us. This is the reason we come to worship and why we pray. How could we not pray after such a gift has bestowed upon us? We are able to have a conversation with God. God listens to us, God hears us and God responds to us. It’s glorious!  We matter to God. If you do not matter to any other person in this world, you matter to God. You have worth and value in God’s eyes. That is worth praying just to say thank you.

There are many kinds of prayers. I love the Psalms because they are basically prayers that were sung by various people. Many of them were attributed to David, Solomon’s father. You’ll find as you read the Psalms that each one offers up things to God that many of us have forgotten how to offer to anyone, let alone to God. There is vulnerability, anger, despair, happiness and frustration in many of these Psalms. The people who wrote them weren’t afraid to give God all of their ugly feelings; they never curbed their tongue so as not to yell at God when they were angry with what God had done to them. But they also gave to God the flip side; they shared their joy and happiness with God.

It’s sad that often we forget to pray when we are happy. When we are content and moving along well in life, God seems to take a step down the ladder of importance. However, the moment we are in trouble, our thoughts find God like a beacon. Perhaps that is the human condition, to be concerned with God and the afterlife when we face our own mortality and frailty, when we face how helpless we really are in the world. When we are happy we feel in control of our surroundings and if we are in control then we do not need any help from God.

The point of prayer is not just about getting help. As I said, prayer opens up the mystery of the divine into our very ordinary and un-divine lives. When we pray in Jesus’ name, many of us do it out of habit perhaps not even knowing why anyone does it to begin with. We pray in Jesus’ name because there is power in that name. If we prayed in our own name, it would be just us against all the world’s ills. But we pray in Jesus’ name because Jesus is God made flesh, Jesus is the divine entering into the ordinary and making it extraordinary. We pray to remember that it is by God’s grace that we have anything at all. We pray because it pleases God and it pleases our own soul.

Prayer is communication with God. Therefore prayer is the meeting of the divine soul with the human soul. It’s a brief moment where we are no longer stuck here in the muck and mire of sinfulness, but we get to experience the beauty of salvation because we are with God. And when you look at prayer like that, the more often we pray the better chance we have of staying away from those things that tempt us. Instead, we could say with confidence that sin has died inside of us and that the Spirit is strong within us.

Open yourself up to the mystery of your faith by praying to God in Jesus’ name. Every day, every moment that you can, open yourself to God’s love through Jesus Christ. The prayer does not even have to be in words that anyone else would understand because God understands even our wordless thoughts. Through prayer we become closer to God and God’s love begins to shine within us like a priceless diamond in the sun. Every single one of us needs the gift that Jesus gave by dying for our sins so that when we pray we may do so with confidence and clarity, knowing that God hears our words. Enjoy that gift, embrace it and use it often.

Amen.

A Different Kind of God

Zechariah  9: 9-12
Matthew 11: 16-19, 25-30           

In the scripture today, Jesus tells us that his yoke fits well when we put it on and what he means is that instead of filling up our lives being busy all the time and trying to create our self-worth from how many things we accomplish in a day and how many people are our friends and how many likes we get on Facebook – Jesus tells us that the yoke he will give to us is made specifically for us and it will bring MEANING to our lives instead of just busyness. Because that is what we all want. We want to mean something. We want to leave a mark on the world and know that when we’re long gone, those who loved us still remember us.

Jesus brings meaning and purpose to our lives. Rather than filling up on useless endeavors that mean nothing in the long run, we need to fill our lives with the words of Jesus Christ, fill our lives with the voice of the Holy Spirit, and we need to fill up on the love God the Father has for all of His children. This is where meaning and purpose truly exist for us.

Every time you choose to do something good for your community; every time you forgive someone for something they did to you; every time you show compassion while everyone else is showing anger – you proclaim your witness to the love of God born out through the birth and death of Jesus Christ and continued through the presence of the Holy Spirit. Your life and your decisions may very well be the only Gospel some people ever read.

Think about that for a moment. When you proclaim yourself a Christian, you label yourself and YOU decide what people will think about a Christian by the way you treat them and by what you say to them. There are so many people who have never or barely ever cracked open a bible. YOU are the only living witness to the love and forgiveness of Jesus Christ.

John, tried to show God to the people by being very ascetic and Jesus tried to show them God by being very friendly. Both were shot down by the people that thought they knew the Old Testament and knew God, but they were embraced by the people who didn’t know much about the OT, although they desperately wanted to know God. In today’s world, you can bet the same holds true.

We, in these churches like to think we know Jesus and know the ways of the Holy Spirit and that we know the love of God the Father. And we do to a certain extent just like the scribes and Pharisees did. However, you can bet that if Jesus came back today, that he would deliberately be the opposite of everything we’ve ever imagined him to be. Jesus was always breaking our preconceived ideas of what God is all about; as well as our ideas of what a Savior is supposed to be.

Back in the Pharisees time they were looking for a warrior on a horse that would lead a great army and cut down the Roman Empire. What do we expect Jesus to be now? The great humanitarian? Or is Jesus the emo kid with the black hair and spikes in his chin and piercings everywhere? Is Jesus the dirty, homeless man we passed by without a thought? Is Jesus the illegal immigrant just trying to save his family from a life as awful as the one he lived? Is Jesus the lesbian woman with cancer trying to get her lifelong partner death benefits when she dies? Is Jesus the black teenager trying to escape from the gangs he grew up in and was told he could never escape from by everyone in his life? Is Jesus the young woman dressed provocatively because she bases her self-worth on how many glances she receives because no one ever bothered to love the real person she is inside?

Jesus comes to us in many forms and in many ways. He rarely is what we expect him to be because we are limited by our own biases and preconceived ideas the way the Pharisees were when they encountered Jesus and John. Where are we blinded? It’s important for us to recognize our own failings and lack of imagination because it helps us grow into better people that accept the failings in others.

It’s easy to judge. We see in this passage that the scribes and Pharisees had judgment down to a T – and let’s be honest – so do we. However, we’re not called to be super critical and passive aggressive to our fellow human beings. We’re called to share the Gospel and that doesn’t always mean quoting scriptures at people. It’s about how you live your life. It’s about the words you choose to say that can wound or heal a person. It’s about taking a moment to help instead of hurt. It’s about offering real advice that is meant to help a person instead of using it as a way to put them down.

Every choice we make in both word and deed tells the world the kind of person we are and since we have proclaimed ourselves Christians – then we better recognize who Christ is so that we can follow his example. We cannot lie, hurt others, deliberately gossip, deliberately put them down, deliberately refuse to forgive mistakes, deliberately cause pain and think that non-Christians will want anything to do with Jesus Christ. They will run from God because we have shown them that God is a hypocrite that says “love and forgiveness and mercy” but then shows hatred, judgment, and pain when a person falls short of perfection.

Perhaps we need to take time to get to know Jesus all over again. Crack open that Bible and before you begin to read, ask God to show you where you have lacked imagination and forgiveness and acceptance. Ask God to show you more about who God is and what Jesus Christ is doing in this world today and then begin to read. Read with an open mind and heart. It’s what we need to do when we meet people as well. We need to listen with an open mind and heart. We need to find the beauty in each person because there is something beautiful and pure and good in everyone we encounter. They are God-made therefore they cannot help but have beauty inside of them.

When we start looking for the goodness in people, the flaws start to disappear. Stop criticizing and start loving – that is what Jesus calls us to do!

Amen.