Matthew 6:5-13
Seventeenth Sunday after Pentecost
Prayer. It's often described as the
gateway to the Christian life. It's essential for a vital faith. And, still, so
many of us struggle with the nature of prayer, how to pray, when to pray, where
to pray. We question its effectiveness. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus
provided wise counsel: go to your room, shut the door, and pray in secret.
There’s a place for praying with others,
of course. There’s a rich liturgical
tradition of public prayer within Judaism.
Traditionally, Jews prayed three times a day, morning, late afternoon,
and early evening. Jesus is not
rejecting public prayer; he’s condemning those who seek attention by their
manner of praying, using empty phrases, words that are hollow and do not come from
the heart. He judges those who like to
use lots of words, who try to impress others with their piety or poetry or
erudition. They are the hypocrites, who
say one thing but do another. They’re
actors. They want to be viewed as holy
or good or pious or righteous. They pray to convince others, even God, that
they are holy or good or pious or righteous. We need to be on guard for false
piety in ourselves—others often see it before we do, children and teenagers
always see right through the act, and God certainly sees us for who we are.
“When you are praying,” Jesus said, “do
not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be
heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what
you need before you ask him” (Mt. 6:7).
Why is Jesus picking on the Gentiles or pagans? Because they liked to use a lot of words to
bribe their gods—a little verbal bribery.
Pagan prayers were loaded up with all kinds of names with the hope hitting
the right one, getting the right god’s attention to fulfil their wishes.
So Jesus sends us to our rooms. “Shut the door and pray
to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward
you in secret (Mt. 6:6). Why does Jesus
say this to us?
Maybe because, first, we need to
remember the real audience for prayer. When we are in that private place we remember
the true object of prayer, that our focus is on God—and God alone. This means
we must work to remove all that distracts us.
Go to your room and shut the door.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), the French mathematician, writer, Catholic
theologian, said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from [our] inability to sit
quietly in a room alone.”[1]
Go to your room. Go to your prayer closet. Create one. Find
one. I know people who have actual prayer closets or rooms set aside in their
homes reserved for prayer. Jesus spent a lot of time in the crowds, hanging out
with all kinds of people, people who made considerable demands on his
soul. But he also spent a lot of time
alone, apart, away from the demands of the crowds, away from his disciples,
sometimes for days and weeks at a time. In
John’s Gospel we read that after feeding the five thousand, the crowd wanted to
“use” him for their own ends. John says
that, “Jesus, knowing that they intended to come and make him king by force,
withdrew again to a mountain by himself” (Jn. 6:15). Jesus needed to be alone
with God.
My friend Tom Long (Tom was my preaching
professor at seminary) summarized Jesus’ words in Matthew this way: “When
you pray, go into the deepest part of the loneliest place you know, hide behind
the tallest tree where not even the birds and squirrels can see you. Then, in that secluded and unseen place, you
will know that all true prayer—whether it occurs in the quietness of your
bedtime, in the middle of rush-hour traffic, or in unison in a vast
congregation—is spoken only to the secret depths of God.”[2]
I suspect there’s another reason why
we’ve been sent to our rooms. While the object or direction or focus of prayer
might be God, to be in the presence of God, there is always a subjective dimension to prayer, which
cannot be ignored but often is. Søren
Kierkegaard (1813-1855) reminds us that “Prayer does not change God, it changes
the one who prays.”[3] You see, there is always a personal,
subjective, even psychological dimension to prayer. To be in a room alone with
God means that we are also alone with ourselves, and for many this is tough. The
French philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil (1909-1943) said, “To wish
to escape from solitude is cowardice.”[4] Harsh, perhaps, but true.
With no one to distract us, with no
one to impress we are left to ourselves, confronted by ourselves, and we are
now free(r) to be ourselves. If we can
approach God without trying to be holy or righteous or perfect, just
authentically being who we are, saying what’s on our hearts, voicing our loves
and our doubts and fears, this is truly liberating. We are then free to pray
from an even deeper, more secret room that we carry around within us wherever
we go: the secret room of the heart, the heart of hearts. When we withdraw for a season to that inner
room and pray from there, then the Father who sees in secret will reward you in
secret, will reward you there, in that secret place.
We must, therefore, not be afraid of
interiority. There’s a way to go to that interior place without being
narcissistic or selfish or egocentric. Honest prayer from the inner room is not
being narcissistic or egocentric. The narcissist
and the egocentric have considerable difficulty being alone, looking inward,
becoming self-conscious; they are often unable to confront and acknowledge the
hurting, broken, insecure parts of their souls. A good way to overcome
egocentricity is to pray secretly in our innermost room, and that means, as
much as we can, see ourselves before the light and presence of a loving,
compassionate God.[5]
Examining our needs, our fears, desires,
ambitions in the presence of God, we begin to name our innermost burdens and
hopes and confess them to God. When we are free to be authentically ourselves
in the presence of the one who looks upon us with compassion, we are gradually changed
over time, we become more
authentic—and we don’t have to worry about impressing anyone, including God.
The English word “prayer” comes from
the French, prier, meaning “to
ask.” Sadly, this is the extent of what
prayer means for many, asking and asking and asking God for a lot. This kind of
prayer turns God into a genie or magician tending to our every whim, want, and
wish. Yes, there’s a place for asking in prayer. But sometimes what we wish for is not exactly
what we need. And sometimes our
petitions are just giving God a lot of bad advice. I want a castle in the
highlands of Scotland—its doesn’t have to be a big one, mind you, I’ll be perfectly
happy with a simple tower with several turrets, it doesn’t even have to have a
moat. But this doesn’t mean that I’m going to get one. And while I would like a
castle (I really would), having a castle might not be a good thing for me. So, yes, there’s a place for asking, but
prayer is so much more than throwing up a long list of petitions. And, no, I’ve
never asked God for a castle.
I recently heard the story of a
minister who was on a spiritual retreat.
The participants met together for a time, they would talk, and then they would
go to their rooms and pray. Then they talked together again and then go to their rooms to pray. And in his room he was always
talking to God. And at one point, during
his long talks to God, he heard a voice say, “Shut up—and let me love you.”[6]
Sometimes, probably often, we just
need to be quiet. Sit in the presence of
God and listen and let God love you. Listen with your ears, but also listen
with your heart, listen with your body, listen with your gut, listen for what the
silence says. Be attentive. Pay
attention. Listening is a kind of
sacrament; we could say that listening is sacramental.[7] In listening we become attentive to the
impressions that touch us, the voice of God that echoes in the silence, the
rhythm and movement of the soul as it gradually comes alive in the warmth and
light of God’s presence. And sometimes in the quiet, when we are silence, we discover
what is being asked of us.
This week I discovered the writings
of the Irish poet and Roman Catholic theologian Pádraig Ó Tuama. He’s also the leader of the Corrymeela Community
in Northern Ireland. Corrymeela
was begun in 1965 by Ray Davey (1915-2012), a former chaplain in World War II, and a group
of students from Queens University in Belfast. During the war, Ray was captured
and incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp in Dresden and there bore witness to
the Allied bombing of that city, which was devastating. This experience
profoundly changed him. He returned to work as a chaplain in Belfast and became
concerned with the tensions brewing between people of different political,
religious and ideological differences in Northern Ireland. Corrymeela grew out
of this concern. It became a place of reconciliation and peace for Protestants
and Roman Catholics during “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Today, Corrymeela offers space for analysis
of the underlying dynamics of conflict, fracture, scapegoating and violence
that we see across so many spheres of our world today. It’s
a community that knows the importance of language, the essential value of
naming fears, naming hates, naming wrongs, naming prejudices, and staying in
community.
Ó Tuama remembers, “Once, I
was sitting with more zeal than sense in a church, praying with fervour for
something like holiness, or righteousness, or some other term I still don’t
understand. All of a sudden, the
question came: What do you actually want?” He was “shocked by its clarity. It was a blunt
question that demanded truthfulness, not devotion. I couldn’t answer it,” he said. “I got up, I walked out. The prayer came with me. I’m still answering
it.”[8]
In a beautiful short essay on
prayer, titled Oremus, Ó Tuama reminds
us that prayer is essentially giving voice to something; it entails the
liberation of our voice, to say what needs to be said, to say what we’ve been
reluctant to say, to say what our tongues have been fearful to name, but are
crying out to say, whether it’s praise and adoration or pain and anger and
disappointment. Oremus, Latin for
“Let us pray,” is both an invitation and an imperative. The Latin word oro, from which we get oremus,
is related to an old Sanskrit word for “mouth.”
Let us open our mouths.
What
do you actually want? Often it takes going to that secret
place to start listening for the answer to a question such as this. There are times in the life of faith when we
are summoned and told exactly what we need to do: go there, do this. But there
are also times when God intentionally steps back, and asks this question of us,
and then waits—waits for us to step in with an answer, away from distractions
and the influence of the crowd, to listen to the heart. This kind of prayer sends us deep, below the
surface of things and impressions. It requires silence and then out of the
silence we begin to speak, as we struggle with language, as we try to find
words to wrap around the heart. Answering this question requires focus,
attention, particularity, exactness. To answer this question requires language,
your words from your mouth, not the
words of your pastors, your parents, your spouse your church, the society that
surrounds you. Your language, your
words, which are always inadequate articulations. Always inadequate, but they are you
inadequate articulations. And, so, nevertheless we strive to name it all. God
wants us to say: what do you actually want?
What do you hope for? What is the deepest desire of your soul? Not
the surface stuff of our fearful egos, but soul stuff, core stuff, core
desires, what your soul really wants and needs. We can bring—we need to bring—all
of this into our prayer. We wrestle with
it all and with God. We bring every aspect our lives into the struggle. All the joys, all the fears, all the pains,
all the burdens, all the things that trip us up and hurt us, all the sorrow that
we carry. They’re all valuable. All of
it. Listen and name. And in the listening and naming and asking and
wrestling, do you know what happens? We discover who we are and then we find
ourselves stepping into our lives in
new ways. And in good time, we discover
that our desires have slowly become aligned with what God desires, for what our
souls truly desire is what God desires for us…Your kingdom come. Your will be done (Mt. 6:10). The more we listen
and name and listen and name, all within the presence of God, we are being formed
and reformed.
Pádraig Ó Tuama summons us to pray this way:
“So
let us pick up the stones over which we stumble, friends, and build
altars.
Let us listen to the sound of
breath in our bodies.
Let us listen to
the sounds of our own voices, of our own names, of our own fears.
Let us name the harsh light and soft darkness
that surround us.
Let’s claw ourselves
out from the graves we’ve dug, let’s lick the earth from our fingers.
Let us look up, and out, and around.
The world is big, and wide, and wild and
wonderful and wicked,
and our lives are murky, magnificent, malleable and full
of meaning.
Oremus.
Let us pray.”[9]
[1] Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Thoughts), paragraph 139. First
published in 1670.
[2] Thomas G. Long, Matthew
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 69.
[3] Søren
Kierkegaard, Self-Examination/ Judge for Yourself (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991). See also Perry D. LeFevre, The
Prayers of Kierkegaard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).
[4] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
(New York: Routledge Classics, 2002), 67
[5] Fritz Kunkel, Creation Continues:
A Psychological Interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew (New York: Paulist
Press, 1987), 88. See also Ann Ulanov and Barry Ulanov, Primary Speech: A Psychology of Prayer (Wesminster John Knox Press, 1982).
[6] Recounted by Marilyn Nelson in “Pádraig
Ó Tuama and Marilyn Nelson: Choosing Words
That Deepen the Argument of Being Alive.” The full interview may be found here: Onbeing.org.
[8] Ó Tuama, xx.
[9] Ó Tuama, xx.
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