Let Us Pray

Texts: Genesis 18:20-32; Colossians 2:6-19; Luke 11:1-13

We have some more very basic teaching today, as we continue to reflect on what it means to be a disciple or follower of Christ. We shouldn't be too surprised to find that one of the things it involves is prayer: one of the things we do as Christians is pray; we pray together in our services of worship, or in small groups, etc, and we pray by ourselves. But why do we do it? What is the point of praying – what does it achieve? Does it make any difference to the world or to ourselves?

All those are reasonable questions to ask, it seems to me, and many of us ask them from time to time. But there's a strange twist to this, because we tend to ask those questions of ourselves, individually. We don't ask other people for advice because we assume that other people don't experience the difficulties and doubts we have about our prayer life. As a priestly colleague of mine once put it at clergy school, there are two areas of life in which men suffered performance anxiety, and of the two prayer was the most troublesome for him!

So it may be reassuring for some of you this morning if I start off by saying that there have been occasions in my life when prayer has come easily and joyfully, and I have really felt that I was "getting somewhere" – but they have been more than off-set by long periods when I have wondered what on earth I'm doing, when I've been bored stiff, and when I have only been too pleased to be interrupted. I find regular prayer, sustained and sustaining prayer, real prayer, very difficult.

So over the years I have accumulated quite a few books on how to pray. Go into any Christian bookshop and you will find hundreds of them. There is a huge market for them, which, if nothing else, re-assures me that I am not the only one who finds prayer difficult sometimes. And, of course, the marvellous thing about reading books on prayer is that it takes the place of praying! If, like me, you're inclined to feel guilty if you haven't prayed for a while, reading a book on prayer seems to ease the guilt a little.

However, I have learned one or two things about prayer along the way – not from any of the books I have read, but from seeking the advice of people who pray regularly, and also from my own trials and errors. A spiritual director asked me once to recall one or two occasions on which I felt that I had been engaged in real prayer. Of course, once a lawyer, always a lawyer, so I asked him to define the term – what did he mean by real prayer? So he sent me away with some homework to do: he gave me a list of biblical passages to reflect on and to see if I could find any parallels with my own payer experience.

And one of those passages was the one we have as our first lesson this morning. When we read it or hear it, it doesn't sound like prayer – it sounds like a face-to-face encounter between Abraham and God, doesn't it? But hold on a minute – isn't that what prayer is? Isn't real prayer an encounter with God – a dialogue with God – a talking with God? So when we pray we need to be aware that we are in God's presence – face-to-face, as it were. That's a good starting point for real prayer. What else can this lesson teach us?

The second thing it can teach us is the subject matter of the prayer. What is Abraham praying to God about? Well, here's a bit of a shocker. Abraham is praying for his enemies. He is praying for the safety of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. He can't bear the thought that those whole towns are about to be wiped off the face of the earth, so he's interceding for them. He's pleading for them. He cares passionately about them. So here's a second learning point about real prayer: real prayer occurs when we are passionately involved in it.

It's easy to pick up a Prayer Cycle, turn to the right day of the month, and say a formal prayer for the people of Madagascar, or wherever; and there's nothing wrong with that as a regular prayer practice, I hasten to add. But my own experience is that I feel most connected to God in prayer when I am passionately concerned about a matter on which I am praying.

And that ties in with the third point. This prayer of Abraham's today is pretty bold stuff, but far from being uniquely so. The Psalms are loaded with passionate prayers, as are the Books of the Prophets, where nothing is outside the realm of prayer. If the people praying are angry with God, they don't hold back; they tell him just how they feel. In other words, real prayer involves being real with God. Expressing our feelings to God, positive or negative.

So Abraham, the great man of faith, is also the great man of prayer. He knows how to be real with God – he knows how to be real in prayer. But there's one thing that is missing from this morning's lesson, and that's the outcome. Many of the popular books on prayer tell us to keep a prayer diary. We should note our requests and the date on which we make them, and then record the date on which they are 'answered'. These books are very strong on the concept of answered prayer, and often have a sort of trouble-shooting section where they grapple with 'unanswered' prayer.

Well, here's the thing. Abraham's prayer for Sodom and Gomorrah was not 'answered' – or, to be more accurate, it wasn't granted. Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed. A great man of faith prayed passionately for a very specific outcome, and the actual outcome was the complete opposite of what he wanted. What went wrong?

Perhaps we can find the answer to that question in our gospel reading this morning. Whatever else we can say about Abraham's prayer, it is intended to talk God out of his intended course of action. Abraham is trying to change God's mind. In other words, he is not asking that God's will be done, but that God's will be changed. That, it seems from the teaching Jesus gave to his disciples, is a no-no. What else can we learn from our gospel reading?

First of all, we should note that Jesus' own disciples feel something is missing from their own prayer practice. They have noticed that John the Baptist taught his disciples how to pray; so now they come to Jesus and ask him to teach them how to pray. And the first thing we should notice about his answer is that it starts with content, not technique. He doesn't say anything about posture, for example, or whether our eyes should be open or shut, or where we should pray, or how often and for how long. Jesus tells them and us what to pray, rather than how to pray. And to whom we should pray.

That last point may seem rather obvious, at least to those who didn't attend the Synod Eucharist in the Cathedral recently. Real prayer is addressed to God – not to the congregation; and therefore it starts reverently, in a way that is honouring to God. And it focuses on God's kingdom and God's will. We ask that his kingdom replace the chaos of the present world, that his will be done in the particular situation about which we are praying.

So here's another clue to real prayer. It involves discerning God's will in the particular circumstances of the here and now. Sometimes that will be clear to us, sometimes it won't be. What do we do when it isn't? Well, we pray; and here, I think, is a way of understanding these troublesome verses we have in our reading this morning. Verses 9 and 10 simply do not accord with our own experience of prayer if they mean that whatever we ask for will be granted. That was not Abraham's experience, and it has certainly not been mine.

But what if we are to understand the primary purpose of prayer as being to discern God's will? Then, perhaps, we're getting somewhere. Ask, seek, knock, and you will discover the will of God. Then you will know what to pray for – and what to do – in a particular situation. Maybe, too, that's why at the end of our passage this morning we are assured that what we will receive when we ask is the Holy Spirit.

So where are we so far? What is real prayer? Well, this is where I've got to, I think real prayer requires of me a conscious awareness that I am in the presence of God. I bring to that encounter something or someone about which or whom I have a passionate concern. I don't proceed to tell God what he should do about it; I ask God what his will is in this regard. Is there something required of me to facilitate God's will being done in this situation?

That's it, so far. It's not much for twenty years of trial and error. But it's probably more than I've got out of any book on prayer. Except, of course, the Bible.