The Power of Prayer?

            When Irene and I were first married, we decided to pray for three items each night until those prayers were answered. We prayed that an older man who had left the church would return. We prayed that a distant relative who lost his faith would rediscover Jesus. We prayed for peace in the Middle East.

            We prayed in this manner, every night, for over twenty years. We did it earnestly and hopefully. In the end, though, the elder gentleman died without returning to church. The distant relative hasn’t changed his mind. And if you’ve been following the news about the Middle East this week, you will know that there is no peace in Israel or Gaza, Iraq or Syria, Afghanistan or Pakistan. Our prayers came up short.

            Still, many Christians insist that prayer has power. They talk as if prayer has the power to heal people, the power to convert people, the power to find you a husband or new job. For example, popular blogger Lorna Byrne wrote, just last week, "Prayer is such a powerful force. We underestimate it so much. Prayer can move mountains if we only would let it. If only you would realize just how powerful prayer can be, you would never feel hopeless." Unfortunately, the only mountains that I've noticed that have ever moved left landslides, death, and pain in their wake--all too commonly in places like The Philippines, where I used to live. 

            The power of prayer is also an Internet meme. A picture of a medical staff praying together showed up on my Facebook page this week, along with the words, "Type, 'Amen' if you believe in the power of prayer." More than 3,000,000 people "liked" this page, and hundreds of thousands had typed "Amen," as instructed. The picture showed medical staff praying together, intending, I think, to subtly undermine our perception of the power of medical science to heal. Or maybe it's suggesting that if even medical people feel the need to pray, so should you!

            Personally, I don’t think that the notion that prayer has power is actually scriptural. In the Bible, only God has power. Of course, in some stories, God responds to the prayers of the oppressed and acts. But sometimes not. Sometimes God extends the life of ill people, sometimes not. The thing is, in the Bible it is God who decides, and prayer is, of itself, powerless to make God act one way or another. Prayer isn’t a magical wand that can be used to manipulate God.

            And God is not a divine magician in the sky responsible for all the good or the bad that happens to people. In fact, humans are mostly responsible for their own problems—especially big ones, like climate change, war, or racism.

            Moreover—a little known fact—in the Bible, most prayers have nothing to do with asking for stuff. In the Psalms, for example—150 public and private prayers—the majority are prayers of lament—that is, these Psalms are public or private mourning before the face of God about how everything is going wrong. They may also ask for God’s embrace and comfort or aid along the way. But judging from Old Testament Israel’s history, they rarely got it as the nation stumbled from military sack to exile, to fumbling restart, to being conquered not once but two or three times again—all before Jesus’ birth.

            Still, the popularity of the idea that prayer has power—although it isn’t emphasized in the Bible—that idea has been around for as long as priests sacrificed children in order to ensure the growth of crops. And in recent times, the idea that prayer has power has received new life. In the late nineteenth century, the American Philosopher William James said that good religion should have cash value, that is, it should be good for something. James argued that there was no sense in believing if it didn’t get you valuable stuff. He said good religion is like a hallway that gets us to where we want to go.

            And so the idea developed, especially over the past 100 years, that religion is a pragmatic means to an end. Churches are thought of as smorgasbords meant to fill us with good things. For example, religion is how you get your morals—the morals you need to succeed. Religion is how you get healing. Religion is how you turn out good kids. It is a means to an end—an end that usually involves our happiness, our wealth, our health, or maybe even some good for the people I love—like aunt Minnie, who needs a kidney stone removed. The bottom line here, however, is that the notion that prayer has power is part of a bigger movement in North American religion—a movement that experiences religion as a pragmatic means to an end.

            But the truth about both religion and prayer is a lot more complex. For starters, even in the Bible, religion that is true always involves the wants and needs of our neighbours before our own, with an emphasis on mercy, piety, and justice for others rather than religion’s cash value for us. And prayer? Well, it is never portrayed in the Bible as something that protects Christians from the common lot they share with all other humans. In spite of all their prayers, Christians are not richer, do not live longer, and do not have healthier extended families or even fewer divorces than non-Christians.

            So, E. Griffith Jones, a contemporary of William James, once wrote, Christians should only pray "for the power to overcome the world in a spirit that is courageous as well as meek, militant against all forms of evil while profoundly thankful for what seems good in life."

The truth, of course, is that the Bible never promises us that our journey through this life is going to be a trouble free smorgasbord. Actually, the Bible speaks the opposite; of hurting people stumbling under the weight of a sin‑broken, groaning world. Jesus actually warned us that there would be persecutions and crosses to bear—and many Christians through the ages, and now Christians in places like Saudi Arabia, Iran, India, and Pakistan--many Christians know what he was talking about. Choosing, when the chips are down and we’re at the end of our rope—choosing for the other—for people we love, for neighbours, for principles of justice, for people on the margins—this is what the Christian life is about, even when such choices are costly, and even when such choices don’t have much cash value for us personally.

So what do we make of the Bible, when it says things like, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” On one level this does sound like if we pray for it, we’ll get it. It is dangerous, however, to take such texts too literally—especially when, in all of human experience, the literal sense of the text obviously isn’t true. Perhaps, in the context of Jesus’ whole life, what he means is that when we ask, what is given is divine guidance in scripture. When we search, what we will find—if not a personal experience of God—is the difficult path that Jesus walked and described in Sermon on the Mount—a sermon most Christians have no problem not taking literally! And if we knock, the door that is opened is the door to our own hearts, so that the Word lodged there will inspire us to compassionately enter into the suffering of others with enough mindfulness and energy so that we actually carry some of their pain and suffering away on our own shoulders. 

Søren Kierkegaard said, "prayer does not change God, but changes him who prays." That makes prayer a risky proposition, of course. Will you dare? 

What Does It Take to Write a Sermon?

     What does it take to write a sermon? Well, many books have been written on that topic, and all I have to offer here are a few suggestions. They’re borne in experience, have been tested by my homiletics students—and sometimes rejected. I admit that they’re a bit crotchety at points—I’ve been a preacher who has spent years sitting in the pew, and have heard far too many sermons that were clunkers not to be a bit crotchety, I guess. But take these suggestions for what they’re worth to you.

·       Preach good news. So much preaching is so full of the law, of the “do’s and don’ts” of the Pauline Epistles, of warnings against sin, of doctrines that confuse (“leave difficult things for books,” said Augustine), of platitudes, of distinctives that pit us against other Christians, and so on. The gospel is good news. It is joy. It is what parched lips long for. Offer living water, not dishwater; offer a light that shows the way to safe harbor; not a spotlight for keeping the crime rate low.

·       No recipe turns out great sermons unless one of the ingredients is a mysterious, creative, imaginative moment that contains the sermon’s nugget. Such moments are half gift from God, half talent, and half stubborn persistence. I had an old teacher (Marrion Snapper) who told me “the imagination is the door by which the Spirit enters our hearts.” If you read the Psalms or Jesus’ parables or the Song of Songs, you will understand.

·       Beauty is redemptive. The universe has an aesthetic dimension. It strikes me that one of the divine uses of beauty is its ability to turn us from the things that weigh us down to the heavens—or the poetry or temples—that declare the glory of God. Whether it is a song sung with holy passion, or a painting that sheds new light on something we would otherwise not have seen, or a sermon that seizes the heart as well as the brain—beauty has the power to turn us towards the divine. Cultivate beauty, especially in sermons.

·       Don’t mistake the sermon for advice (such as you’re reading here!). This is the pragmatic turn in preaching, absolutely at home with this age’s concern for self-help, easy maps to success, and ten bulleted points but no narrative. Preaching is about the story mostly, and only rarely, advice. The theological synonym for advice is “repent,” and its genre is prophecy. Real prophets are extremely reluctant.

·       On a more mundane level, write a manuscript. If you don’t, you’ll soon be preaching the same three sermons (or paragraphs or themes within a sermon), over and over. Manuscripts also force you to plainly state the tough issues (or beautiful truths) in a text that you might otherwise gloss over by speaking of them off the top of your head.

·       Writing a manuscript in not nearly enough. Editing is indispensable. Editing is the work of getting sloppy sermons into shape: making sure you’ve made your points to your satisfaction, finding the right turn of phrase, building fences between you and needless repetition or poorly thought out tangents, and giving yourself a script for practicing delivery or memorizing. I spend as much time editing as writing. It is also the only way I can build literary repetition, assonance, rhyme, and most especially, greater simplicity and economy into my sermon text. If you think you can do without a manuscript, listen to some politician or public official speak unscripted on the radio. It is usually very painful and not something I would volunteer to do from the pulpit.

·       What you do with the manuscript on Sunday is up to you. You can memorize your sermon. You can put it on note cards. You can take the manuscript in some form or other to the pulpit with you. On the pulpit, you can add or subtract—so long as you are aware of the temptation to add and subtract for lesser reasons. Beware, however—no pulpit strategy is so prone to failure as improvisation.

·       Don’t be too earnest. Yes, what you say seems important. But no one likes a nag. So relax. Spend more time on illustration, on humor, on retelling the story, and on reprising the good news. Spend less time trying to get it all in, or speaking as if this is their last, best chance to get it right. This is just one of up to 2500 or more times your parishioners might be in church to hear a sermon.

·       Be brief. Some people may be used to long sermons, but so what? A few stellar preachers may even have built a career out of hour-long sermons. And a few self-selected all-pro pew sitters may love long sermons. But are these the people you really need to reach? No. The youth, those who have not made up their minds, those who are visiting a church for the one time in their life and have learned to listen in front of a TV . . . I’m telling you, this country is ripe for preachers who can do good news in 20 minutes (1600 words) or less. Of course, that also means more editing.

·       Find ways to cultivate your imagination. Take a few small risks. Try an object lesson for a sermon. Write it as a children’s story. Copy the style/rhyme/brevity of a children’s story. Do it as a one-woman play. Poke fun at yourself. Project some art on the overhead and make it the outline for your sermon. Use a text other than scripture. The possibilities are endless even if the good news is one key thing.

·       Use self-disclosure. Build a relationship with your congregation that is rooted in the real you. Be honest and direct. I’m not talking about being a tattler or being self-absorbed or going on and on about the minutiae of your life or family. But strategic use of self-disclosure makes you, and therefore what you say, more real and believable.

·       Don’t spend too much time trying to say too much that’s too hard to understand. Simplicity isn’t just a lifestyle choice. It works with sermons too. But simplicity is very hard to achieve. Jesus did it well, Paul not nearly as well. However, in our media-saturated, non-linear, secondary-oral culture, people can’t follow complex or dense arguments nearly as well as they used to. They also don’t have the mental theological infrastructure to help them file what they hear. So simplicity is the tried and true way forward.

·       By all means, when some time has passed, pick up an old sermon and redo it for the second time the way it should have been done the first time.

·       Find a friend, usually a fellow pastor, who will ruthlessly dissect your sermons (with a little love left over). And then do the same for him or her. If you really do this, you will learn a lot. I met my first sermon critic each month over lunch. He taught me, for example, that preaching isn't nagging--much to the relief of my first congregation.

·       Accept failure with a smile. Learn from it. But don’t get too upset about it. No runner wins every race, though a real runner will enjoy every one.

     So what do you think? What would you add to this list? Or subtract? Or, if you listen to sermons, which piece of advice would you underline or add? Click the "comments" link below and add your two cents' worth.

Self-Help Faith

In one of my favorite Jay Leno Jaywalking sketches he asks random people if they can recite one of the Ten Commandments. A particularly popular answer seems to be, "God helps those who help themselves." In fact, according to pollster George Barna, 75% of Amercans (Canadians seem graciously exempted) believe the Bible teaches something like this.

Of course, that's nonsense. The Bible teaches that God helps those who can't help themselves. This is called "grace," and it is the scandal of Christianity. "God helps those who help themselves," on the other hand, is actually a bit of Greek self-help advice popularized by that agnostic saint, Benjamin Franklin.

Ironically, majoring in good advice about all sorts of problems and challenges on the path to success seems to be one of the most popular goals of Evangelicalism of late.

            You will see what I mean, I think, if you visit the Christian section of your local bookstore. A lot of it looks like the self-help section of the bookstore, baptized. If you go, you may find books like, Every Day a Friday: How to Be Happier 7 Days a Week, by Joel Osteen: or God Wants You to Be Rich—The Christian Guide to Financial Freedom & Unlimited Health (12 Steps to Bring More Money Into Your Life While Still Serving the Lord), by Alex Landon; or perenial favorite, Nine Promises of a Promise Keeper, which explains how to be a real Christian man. Then there is The Dieter's Prayer Book: Spiritual Power and Daily Encouragement by Helen Kopp, for those of us who need a bit of spiritual rigor to loose some pounds; and my favorite--if a bit outdated example--Robert Schuller's The Be Happy Attitudes, which he is probably rereading himself now that he’s gone bankrupt and lost his Chrystal Cathedral.

            Do you get the picture from this tiny but typical sampling? Judging by such titles, evangelicals seem more concerned with what to do and how to do it to succeed than in what has been done--what we call the gospel.

The truth is, Christianity, and the Evangelical branch in particular, is in danger of trading the good news for a kind of works-righteous bondage to good advice. These books remind me of the kind of sermon that turns every Old Testament hero into an object lesson for how to live the Christian life--rather than a lesson in how God accomplishes his will no matter how crooked his humans on the ground are. This self-help spirituality, rooted in American pragmatism and a kind of "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" faith focuses on numbered lists of "to do's," on strategies, steps, bulleted principles, and programs. It cares more for how to get things done than on what has been done for us; focuses more on success than on sacrifice; more on the cash value of religion than on humble service that asks for nothing but opportunity to love God and neighbor.

In the end it is a matter of balance. The good news of the gospel is that Jesus died and rose for sinners. That’s all of us. The practical result of his sacrificial love should probably be that I try to pick up my own cross and follow him. I don’t doubt that along the way some of us might find worldly success carrying our crosses. But what Jesus really wants us to discover is the sort of divine gratitude that inspires us spend our lives loving God and neighbor.

Power of Prayer?

Power of Prayer?

This past week President Obama said that American policy for peace in the Middle East has always required Israel to accept her pre-1967 borders. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu frostily rejected that position. But the exchange got me to thinking about prayer. You see, for as long as I can remember, my wife Irene and I have been praying--earnestly--for peace in the Middle East. We've been doing so, now, for over thirty years. If prayer's success is to be measured by getting the answers we want, our prayers have not been very successful.

On the other hand, some Christians are pretty sure God answers their prayers with exactly what they want. So, for example, Alan Wolfe humorously describes a women’s prayer meeting at a New York church. These women pray using Robert’s Rules of Order. They start the meeting by making sure that old business has been covered. They do this by going through the previous week’s prayer requests and checking off the prayers have been answered. Then the women move to new business. Here they share current prayer requests, adding them to their open checklist of as yet unanswered prayers. Wolfe notes that these new requests mostly involve healing for family and friends, personal finances, and real estate--personal health and wealth matters. Their prayer is a sort of churchly business technique. Given their presumed pipeline, I wish they would pray for peace in Palestine too.

The notion that prayer has power, however, is not, actually, deeply Biblical. God has power, and humans can certainly speak to God, through prayer. And he listens. But the idea that prayer itself has power--especially if prayer is done "correctly," that is, with enough faith, or enough people, or unceasingly, or with the correct blending of voice and actions as in "concerts" of prayer, is a peculiarly North American--and ultimately secular--idea. It comes from the notion that religion is a pragmatic means to an end. The idea was popularized by American philosopher William James, who spoke of religion having "cash value," and of it being like a hallway that gets us to where we want to go.

The truth, however, is much more complex. Prayer does not protect Christians from the common lot they share with all other humans. Christians are not richer, do not live longer, and do not have healthier extended families than non-Christians because of prayer. So, E. Griffith Jones, a contemporary of James, once wrote, Christians can pray "for the power to overcome the world in a spirit that is courageous as well as meek, militant against all forms of evil while profoundly thankful for what seems good in life." Or, as one of my favorite church confessions, the Heidelberg Catechism says, we pray mostly because it is the most important part of the thankfulness we can offer God for the opportunity to love both him and neighbor.

Originally published by Northumberland Today at www.northumberlandtoday.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=3142259