Sermon from August 27, 2006
I suppose my first lessons in prayer came at bedtime when I was a boy. Invariably, my mother prayed with me. I am deeply grateful. Invariably, we made up the prayers out of our own heads and hearts. No prayer book lay on the nightstand. No psalm from the Bible to read or say or sing. The years that lay ahead would teach me that not everyone did it that way.

Catholics used written prayers. Did anything more need to be said? No doubt, Episcopalians and Lutherans used them too, but no one seemed to pay much attention to them in the Bible Belt of the Old South. Of anyone who did use written prayers it was said that their practice signified the presence of a dead religion. That conviction alone was enough to consign written prayers in any form to the trashcan.

There was a positive side to this disdain. Prayers, since they were not written, came from the heart. They needed to be spontaneous, Spirit-filled, and original to be the real thing, and the less ornate the better. A surprising number of people adhered to this idea in theory and practice, often with lovely results.

Given this background, conscious and unconscious, I was scarecely prepared for reality. It was something of a puzzle, as my adolescence gave way to young manhood, to kneel to pray in great anticipation, only to discover that I had nothing much to say to God, much less something spontaneous, Spirit-filled, and original. It wasn't always so, but it was disturbingly often.

Then came my seminary classmate, Ray Feeck, with whom I painted school buildings one summer. I discovered one day, as we stood side by side on second floor window jacks, that he was an Episcopalian. I had never since the day of my birth knowingly spoken to an Episcopalian, and I certainly didn't expect to find one at Dallas Theological Seminary.

Even more perplexing, he was a Reformed Episcopalian, a hitherto unknown (to me) species in the Protestant bestiary. The coup de grace was his claim that the President of Moody Bible Institute at the time was a Reformed Episopalian. Very unsettling!

Seven years later, on my way to Baltimore to do a wedding ceremony I took my family out of the way to find Ray in Haverford, PA, and asked him for a Reformed Episcopal The Book of Common Prayer. That began a quarter-century reeducation into the power of written prayers.

What finally unmade the assumptions of my childhood on this matter was praying with fellow Christians week in and week out in non-liturgical congregations where I have served throughout my ministry. They prayed the way I had learned to pray. And as I listened to people whom I loved pray, I began to recognize patterns.

The people who prayed most faithfully and most fervently were predictable in what they prayed. Familiar phrases recurred, punctuating the prayers we offered in our prayer meetings for specific people or circumstances. I did not and do not find fault with that. I did not and would not try to change that.

But the cat was out of the Baptist bag. If people by nature expressed their aspirations to God in repeatable phrases and even whole clauses, might there not be expressions of spiritual aspiration from the past that we would do well to use and learn from? My increasing experience with The Book of Common Prayer, other written prayers, and with the prayers of the Bible answered with a resounding yes. A new set of assumptions about prayer began to emerge.

From written prayers of the past we could learn from our betters in spiritual life. Furthermore, this continuity with previous generations could prevent a kind of spiritual amnesia that causes us to think that we have to learn everything on our own.

This sermon comes out of that long personal metamorphosis. My aim is to offer some ideas of how God's people at BVBC might use written prayers to deepen their personal and communal relationship with God.

Scriptural Antecedents
The Psalms of our Bible figure large in what follows, because the Psalms have figured large in the spiritual experience of Israel and the Church. For example, I have been present on many a Sunday night or Wednesday night, when people in the congregation I served stood spontaneously to read or quote favorite texts from the Bible. I don't know how many of those I participated in before it began to dawn on me that people were not reading or quoting from Romans or John or Hebrews. They were reading from the Psalms; or as my pastor memorably put it: they were reading from the sweet singer of Israel.

Well, it turns out that this habit of using the Psalms can be discerned in the communal worship of the early Church. As a good example, turn with me to Acts 4:23-26. Verse 23 gives us the immediate context. On their release (from prison), Peter and John went back to their own people and reported all that the chief priests and elders had said to them.

Now, what they had said to them, according to verse 18 was that they had commanded them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus. Verses 24ff. tell us how the Church responded to this threat.

When they heard this, they raised their voices together in prayer to God. "Sovereign Lord," they said, "you made the heaven and the earth and the sea, and everything in them, which sounds like a paraphrase of Psalm 24:1. Now, verses 25-26: You spoke by the Holy Spirit through the mouth of your servant, our father David:

'Why do the nations rage
     and the people plot in vain?
The kings of the earth take their stand
     and the rulers gather together against the Lord
     and against his Anointed One.'"

Mind you, this is the entire congregation that prayed, and the exact words of Psalm 2 were on their collective lips. The entire prayer continues through verse 30, and then you don't want to miss verse 31, After they prayed, the place where they were meeting was shaken. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God bodly. Using written prayers did not at all hinder the work of the Holy Spirit in their life together. As then, so now. Let's take a look at three written prayers.

Three Written Prayers
These are three prayers out of thousands of written prayers in the Bible and in the devotional books of the Church. I have chosen them, because they have a living place in my heart; I can talk about them with feeling. All three are in our 31-Day Prayer Guide.

Let's read through each prayer. Each will be on the screen. Here's the first one. Everlasting Father, whose will it is that we give thanks in all things, that we fear nothing but losing you, and that we cast all our cares upon you, because you care for us: preserve us from faithless fears and wordly anxieties. May no cloud of this mortal life hide from us the light of your immortal love, which you manifested in Jesus Christ, our Lord; who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, now and forever more. Amen.

"Give thanks in all things" comes straight from 1 Thessalonians 5:18. "Cast all our cares upon you" comes from 1 Peter 5:7. "Fear nothing but losing you" reminds me of Jesus' words in John 15:5: "I am the vine; you are the branches. If a man remains in me and I in him, he will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing."

The first request in the prayer asks God to "preserve us from faithless fears and worldly anxieties." "Faithless fears" brings to mind Jesus' words to His disciples after He had stilled the storm and calmed their fears: "Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?" "Worldly anxieties" takes us back to Jesus' words that interpret the meaning of seed that fell among thorns: "the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful."

This characterizes the great prayers of the Church. They are stained with Scripture. They turn Scripture into prayer and do it, if I may say so, economically. They don't waste words. They are short and weighty and full of spiritual energy.

A second prayer illustrates it again. Almighty God, you have taught us to obey all your commandments by loving you and our neighbor. Grant us the grace of your Holy Spirit, so that we may be devoted to you with all our hearts, and united with our neighbor in pure affection; through Jesus Christ, our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever more. Amen.

We all know that the First Great Commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. The Second Great Commandment is to love our neighbor as ourselves. I daresay that we hear those defining statements of what human life is for, and the first thing we think is: how do I do that?

Think for just a minute; have you ever prayed the Great Commandments? That's what this prayer is all about. Once again, it says so much in so few words. It summarizes the central teaching of Jesus and the apostles about the Great Commandments in that magnificent praise to God, "you have taught us to obey all your commandments by loving you and our neighbor."

"All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments," said Jesus in Matthew 22:40. "Love is the fulfillment of the law," said Paul in Romans 13:10. "The fruit of the Spirit is love," said Paul in Galatians 5:22. The prayer picks up that idea of seamless ease and asks God, "Grant us the grace of your Holy Spirit, so that we may be devoted to you with all our hearts, and united with our neighbor in pure affection; through Jesus Christ, our Lord."

The third prayer begins nearly every day of my life. Lord God, Almighty and Everlasting Father, you have brought us in safety to this new day. Thank you. Preserve us with your mighty power, that we may not fall into the power of sin, or be overwhelmed by adversity; and in all we do direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Does using it daily make it seem repetitious? It could, but it doesn't. Thomas Merton in his book on meditation taught me a better way by "repeating the words slowly, thoughtfully, prayerfully in the deepest centre of one's being, so that the (words) gradually come to be as intimate and personal as one's own ... feelings," (Spiritual Direction and Mediation and What is Comtemplation, 51).

For example, take the last request of the prayer: "in all we do direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose." "Direct us." How do I know that God is directing me? Is it possible that He directs me without my knowledge? Might it be years before I recognize how He directed me? Might there be things I'll never know?

When that sort of thing gets under your skin, you start looking for answers. You begin looking for tokens of God's presence in your life. Praying like that everyday, far from being repetitious, is to enter a living drama with the God whose purposes in this world cannot be thwarted.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
I'd like to offer two reflections on using written prayers in the unending process of our spiritual formation. The first reflection has to do with an assumption about life that we may have absorbed from our culture. The assumption asserts vigorously that feeling good validates experience.

Prayer offered day in and day out does not make it easier to pray tomorrow. Likely as not, we feel tomorrow just as much resistance to begin and just as much relief to be done. Coming to the discipline of prayer with this feel-good assumption may guarantee that we stop praying as surely as a badly out-of-shape schoolboy stops running halfw way around the track.

Even worse, this feel-good assumption may cause us to pray and all the while be looking for that sudden burst of sweet emotion that courses through our bodies, sends chills down our backs, and leaves an afterglow, which confirms that something spiritual happened, while we prayed.

I say this is worse, because the next time we pray, we will be expecting a repeat performance by our emotions. If it doesn't come, we may get discouraged or try to produce the emotions. It feels phony, and it seldom lasts.

In short, we have to give up false doctrine. It is not true that feeling good validates experience. Our feelings offer little help in measuring our spiritual maturity. The right way to pray is to seek God, irrespective of feelings.

My second reflection on using written prayers is that we need to have a plan for drawing daily on the Church's treasury of written prayers. Right here, our 31-Day Prayer Guide offers a helpful place to start. It's not a classic like The Book of Common Prayer, but it's useful and accessible.

Take advantage of Luther's Garland of Four Strands that we talked about two weeks ago. It offers a way to turn Scripture into prayer.

None of this means that we dispense with spontaneous prayer. The opposite has been true in my experience. The Psalms and other written prayers inside and outside the Bible have given my faltering tongue words to utter to Almighty God; and as that utterance unfolded, my heart was loosened as was my tongue. The ensuing words and feelings appropriate to the presence of God signaled the liberty of the Spirit.

You might even call them "spontaneous, Spirit-filled, and original," thus fulfilling the criteria of prayer with which my spiritual life and this sermon began, and with which, transformed and deepened by the grace of God, my life will end.