Is God My On-Call Personal Interventionist or Calling us to Creativity?

10 Pentecost, Cp12, July 28, 2013  

Gen. 18:20-33     Ps.85:7-13  

Col. 2:6-15   Luke 11:1-13 

Lectionary Link

   What is prayer?  If we look to the catechism in the Book of Common Prayer we find this answer:  Prayer is responding to God, with or without words.  That is a rather embracing notion of prayer.  We probably are more used to compartmentalized and occasion specific prayers, like table grace or the corporate prayers of the church when we gather to offer the Holy Eucharist or one of the other prayer offices.  Perhaps, you have your own style and practice of private prayer in the morning or in the evening.  Maybe you practice centering prayers, or meditation or contemplation as a way of remembering the fullness of God everywhere.  In centering prayer we can practice a command of God, written by the psalmist:  :Be still and know that I am God.”  In a busy life, it is sometime a necessity to take time to be still

  Today, we have some lessons from Holy Scripture on prayer.  We read that even after the great man of faith Abraham bargained with God, he still could not change the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.  Apparently, Abraham did not get his prayer answered and his prayer ended up in talking himself into accepting what actually was going to happen.

  In a Gospel tradition, the disciples of Jesus asked Jesus to teach them to pray.  And in the example of prayer that Jesus gave to his disciple and in his ironic explanations, one can sense the motive that his disciples had for learning to pray and we are given some insights that are attributed to Jesus about prayer.

  I suspect that the motive of the disciple for wanting to know how to pray was this:  They wanted to have influence with God.  They wanted God to be their own on-call personal interventionist for their needs.  I think that one of the reasons people quit church and quit praying is that they find out rather quickly that God is not an “on-call interventionist” stepping in to fulfill what I need and on my time schedule.

  God, I want bread and how come it seems that I am getting  a rock?  God, I want fish and how come it seems as though I am getting a snake?  God, I want an egg and how come it seems that I am getting a scorpion?

  We are or can be so ego-centric as to think that the universe should follow our own schedule so that when we are confronted with a delay in our needs gratification, we can bemoan the inconvenience of our actual circumstances not to give us what we need and when we need it.  And we can protest, “but God, I only want regular things…food, clothing, shelter, good health, safety for myself and my family and friends.  And what’s wrong with wanting those sorts of things?”  Could it be that in this prayer dilemma, Jesus is also giving us the invitation to the kind of abstract thinking needed for invention and creativity?  Necessity is the mother of invention?  Stone, instead of bread?  Perhaps I am to earn my bread by being a geologist?  My fish by being an herpetologist?  My egg by being an arachnologist? 
Sickness?  Maybe God is teaching us something about health and how to be with the suffering?  And how to be really appreciative and thankful when we do have health.  Perhaps poverty, lack of church participation is the challenge for us to learn how to be relevant to the lives of people in a different way?

    In our age of skepticism, some people might question the value and the purpose of prayer.  Why should we pray?  I mean if you can’t see God’s immediate intervention why should we pray?

  I believe that the ironic response of Jesus indicates that Jesus wanted his disciples to be attuned to the spiritual flow of life itself, rather than just see God as an omni-present Santa Claus dropping gifts to us whenever we ask.  Jesus was trying to teach his disciples that his Father was a giver of good gifts and maybe his disciples’ definition of “good gifts” was much too narrow.

  During the development of modern psychology, psycho-therapy was sometimes referred to as the “talking cure.”  What if we could understand prayer as the “talking cure” that we can have in our relationship with God?    How can we come to health through persistent “talking with God?”  How can prayer become our talking cure?

  I think that it is important for each person in life to find his or her voice.  Each person needs to practice the words that each one has and be able to use them to tie together their inner lives with the events in their outer lives.  Part of finding our voice has to do with finding a way to name and categorize all of what we experience.  Part of maturity involves an honest assessment of what is actually happening in our lives.  An egg is desired, but a scorpion appears.  A fish is desired, but we seem to get a snake.  We want bread, but apparently we receive a rock.  In finding our prayer voice we learn to find a way to deal with delayed gratification and one of the results is to receive an increased appreciation for even the things that we desire even the basic things of life, the fish, eggs and bread.   When we find our voice, our prayer voice, our talking cure with God, our life experience becomes more expansive.  We begin to deal with a larger spectrum of human experience and so we become better able to deal with more diverse circumstances and we become more useful to the people who need us and depend upon us.

  A wise parent does not just yield to a child in a temper tantrum who is demanding immediate needs gratification.  Why?  Because a parent wants to teach the child many other ways of responding and acting to an apparent situation of need.  Always giving in and being an interventionist at the whim of a child is not wise parenting.

  So we have  prayer as a practice to find our talking cure with God.  And if we are persistent with this talking cure, if we can find our prayer voice, we will find that God’s Spirit has been given to us and that we are in a wonderful flow.  Then from our relationship with God, we can find ways to integrate the human experience that comes our way.

  Learning to pray is not treating God as our own personal interventionist; it is more about getting in tune with God’s Spirit so that we can know how God is already intervening in and through us.

  Perhaps you have heard it said that “Prayer changes things.”  I don’t think that is true.  What is true is that things can become seen differently as we are changed by prayer and as we understand that we are in the flow with God’s Spirit.

  The words of Jesus encourage us to find our “talking cure” with God today.  Prayer is a way to find our voice; if you need to keep a journal of your prayer talk with God, do it.  Work to bring to language everything in your inside world in interaction with your outside world as a way of finding your voice.  If you find your prayer voice, then you will also have words of wisdom to share with the people who need you to find your prayer voice.

  May God help us to practice the “talking cure” of prayer today, and may we find our voice, a voice that is able to integrate our inner worlds with the events that are occurring in our outer worlds.  As we read the circumstances as the "response"  to our prayers, let us also be willing to let need and necessity be for us the inspiration for invention and creativity today.  Amen.