Sermons

“A Praying Church”

Habakkuk 2:1-3; Micah 6:6-8; Romans 12:9-15 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – January 12, 2020

Worship/Life Series #3

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might remember you are present in all our shared words, sighs, tears, and laughter.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

So this is the third week of our Worship/Life series, and as I’m an honest Midwesterner, incapable of artifice, I’m just going to straight up remind you what we’re trying to do with this.  As a congregation, we are 18 months into what we have projected as a three-year season of cultivating vitality and growth in ministry and membership.  This commitment is partially about shoring up our finances and our people power to a level of sustainability beyond mere scraping by.  But it’s also about growing in faithfulness and fruitfulness, ensuring that our ministries are rooted in God’s vision for our future and “Christ’s clear call to work and worth” as one of our beloved hymns describes it.

Over the past few months, we have observed some signs of lagging enthusiasm for this commitment to vitality, not least in our worship attendance numbers.  Thus it is that, as we begin this new year, we are spending some time reminding ourselves of the vision set forth a year and a half ago and talking about why and how your presence and participation in Sunday morning worship are such a fundamental part of this effort.  Two weeks ago, I started us off by locating our situation in the wider context of the 2020 Vision set forth by former General Minister & President Dick Hamm and reflecting that the Christmas lessons of the Incarnation show us why it matters that each and every particular one of you is here each week.  Last week, Tesa helped us understand the centrality of worship to these efforts, because worship is where we gather to remember that Christ is the root and reason and goal of everything we do as church.  If we do not continually submit ourselves to being formed and re-formed by Christ through worshiping together, the rest of our activities as a community will fail to add up to church.

We heard the verses from Micah 6 today that form the primary scriptural basis for the Disciples’ 2020 Vision.  Dick Hamm called us to become “a faithful, growing church that demonstrates true community, deep Christian spirituality, and a passion for justice.”  You can hear how that is an echo of “do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God,” right?  Our current focus on worship as vital to our becoming a faithful, growing church connects with both “true community” – that is, loving kindness – and “deep Christian spirituality” or walking humbly with God.

Today we will begin getting into the nitty gritty.  Over the next three weeks, we will be exploring the three main components of our worship service – prayer, preaching & communion, with the goals of helping us understand the importance of each one better and learning how to engage with them more effectively.  The hope is that being better equipped to fully participate in worship will help you be more motivated to get yourself here as often as possible.  It makes a difference if you show up or not.  It is my prayer that you experience that difference in your own life, rather than just politely trying to believe me when I say it’s true.

So, prayer.  Perhaps we should begin by identifying what we’re talking about.  How many instances of prayer are there in our worship service?  We could make an argument that every part of the service is a form of prayer, but for our purposes today, it will be more helpful to use a stricter definition.  I invite you to pull out your bulletin and take a look at the order of worship.  There are three instances of prayer that are fairly brief and ritualized.  Can you guess what they are?  The first one is the Passing of the Peace of Christ.  When I say “The peace of Christ be with you” it is a prayer for the healing and reconciliation of your soul.  When you say “And also with you,” you are praying that same prayer for me.  When we then repeat it to one another individually, we are spreading that prayer of holy intention over the whole congregation like a knife smearing honey on toast.  What could it mean to carry out this opening ritual with a clear consciousness that it is an act of prayer?

The other two short, ritual prayers in our service are the one Tesa & I pray before we preach, which I will talk more about next week, and the benediction, which is often a prayerful recap of the sermon and our hopes that it will impact our lives in the coming week.

Beyond these three short, ritual prayers, there are two other categories of prayer I want to address today.  There are five prayers throughout our service that involve one person sharing words on behalf of all of us.  Can you identify all five?  The first, of course, is the Opening Prayer, given by the Elder who is serving as the Worship Leader that day.  The second is the prayer that we do in call-and-response style at the end of the Children’s Moment.  The third is the Pastoral Prayer.  The fourth is the Prayer of Dedication of the offering, and the fifth is the Prayer for the Bread and the Cup, which concludes with a unison speaking of the Lord’s Prayer.  It is a sign of the strength of our belief in the priesthood of all believers that only one or two of these prayers are given by the pastor.

The fact that three of these five prayers are regularly given by someone other than me means that prayer is the component of worship that offers me the most insight into your experience of worship, namely, what it’s like to sit in this room and listen to someone else talk.  That may sound funny or you may not be convinced that I’ve gained any insight into listening at all; we must remember that I’ve been a solo pastor my entire career, since I was 26, so 92% of my worship experience as an adult has been hearing myself talk.  But I promise I’ve been thinking about this pretty hard for a few weeks now, and I think I’ve figured some things out.

Before we get into the technicalities and theology of listening skills though, let’s name the other major portion of our worship service that involves prayer, namely, the Prayers of the People, or as we often still refer to it, the sharing of joys and concerns.  This is probably the part of our service that I get the most feedback about, sometimes even more than my sermons.  It is the most unpredictable, the least controlled, and the most likely to cause various ones of you to have strong opinions.  It is the time when the full diversity of this congregation gets all stirred up together, occasionally causing sharp edges or rough surfaces to rub up against each other.  It is when souls are bared and the difficult cry for help is finally voiced.  All of which, I might argue, makes these moments some of the most precious in the whole service.  I have heard your struggle and your many perspectives.  I know this is hard.  So I hope you will listen carefully, as we dive deeper into how to engage in prayer together in worship.

The guiding principle of what I am going to offer you today, as a path to deeper engagement with prayer in worship, is that the portions of our service that are dedicated to prayer offer us our purest opportunities to commune with God, as creatures created in God’s image.  There are two aspects of this truth.  The first is both practical, and surprisingly, a little trinitarian.  I want to suggest that there is a spectrum upon which we find our brains and hearts when participating in prayer together.  This spectrum extends from the Word end – what we could call the Jesus end, since he was the Word made flesh – to the “sigh too deep for words” end, which Paul might have us call the Holy Spirit end.  When someone else is praying aloud, one option is to listen very closely to all the words they are saying, to take in their meaning as they come, and by receiving them, amplify them in your own mind and heart.  This is the Word/Jesus end of the spectrum.  Another option is to focus on the overall purpose of the prayer, whether it’s preparing us to worship, or blessing our gifts, or deepening our appreciation of the Lord’s Supper, and to let our hearts, rather than our minds, lead us in wordless meditation on that, as the leader says the word that clarify the intention.  This is the Sighs/Holy Spirit end of the spectrum.  A place in between the two ends of this spectrum of participation might be to listen to the words, but give yourself permission to be struck by a word or phrase as it comes and linger there awhile, contemplating the gifts God is offering you through those particular words, while the rest of the prayer washes over you.  This can be an especially good place to land if we allow the Holy Spirit to be present with us when a word or phrase someone else offers in prayer bumps into our judgments or prejudices, to help us bear fruit in prayer, in spite of ourselves.

You will notice that all of these options require intention and effort.  There is no place on this spectrum for replacing prayer with your post-worship shopping list or playing on your phone.  Listening is one of the primary skills necessary for shared worship.  We probably don’t say that often enough.  If we were to make a list of the things required for a strong relationship, we would definitely include listening to one another.  If we are to be a true community living out deep Christian spirituality, we have to be willing to invest the effort and time to listen to one another and God.  So how do we do that?

This brings us to the other aspect of prayer connecting to our nature as creatures created in the image of God.  There are two skills we must develop to effectively engage in prayer together.  One is empathy, and the other is creativity.  Empathy is at the core of the compassion we know in Christ.  It is at the heart of the Word taking on flesh and living among us, experiencing the ecstasy and agony of mortal life.  Empathy is what Paul is talking about when he tells us that, as the body of Christ, we rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.  Empathy is an absolutely imperative ingredient for building true community.  We are to care for one another as we would care for ourselves.  Our triumphs and sorrows are shared because we empathize with one another.

Now, this may sound like kindergarten Sunday school stuff, but a closer look would show otherwise.  Observers of our modern life have begun warning that we are suffering from a “empathy gap,” that is, we are in danger of losing our capacity to care about others, especially if those others are seen as different than ourselves.  This is one of the warning signs of a society on the verge of collapse.  When we gather for worship and engage in prayer together, the empathy we experience in those moments is not just a way of connecting us more closely to God and one another, but also a way for us to practice the skills that hold the world together.  Our world needs us to be praying and praying well.  So again, how do we do this?

To be created in the image of God means that compassion is at our core.  But it also means that we are creatures, created in the image of a creating God.  Creativity is also at our core.  And creativity is the often unmentioned skill that makes empathy possible.  Now what I’m about to describe, for those of you taking notes, falls somewhere in the middle of that Word/Sighs spectrum of participation in prayer that I described a minute ago.  When you are listening to someone offer a prayer on our behalf, let yourself ponder the words they choose with an open, wondering mind.  Why might they have chosen those words, rather than the ones you might have said?  How does their life speak that moment in worship differently than yours?  How can you build an imaginative bridge from your experience to theirs, to enrich your understanding of what is happening in worship or even your understanding of God?

This creativity/empathy connection becomes even more important when we’re sharing the joys and concerns during the Prayers of the People.  I know that many of you feel that some folks abuse the moment and indulge in the sound of their own voices far too long during this portion of worship.  And for those of you prone to going on and on, let me offer this reminder:  you are talking to God more than you’re talking to any of the rest of us, and God already knows the details, so you don’t need to list them all.  If I need to catch up with you later, I can!

But we must also realize that giving people the space and time to voice their sorrows is an essential part of the blessing worship offers those who need it.  So for those of you who struggle to stay prayerful and not judgy, let me offer this practice.  Use those moments, when someone is sharing the joys or sorrows of their life, in the time before I summarize and invite you to respond with our ritual words of petition, to practice your creative empathy skills.

Try to imagine what it would be like to experience the situation being described.  What would your first reaction be?  What would your second and third reactions be?  Who could you call on for help?  When have you or someone you love experienced something similar, and what was needed in that moment?  If you want to get even more abstract, consider some other things.  What song comes to your heart in response to this concern?  If the problem were a color, what color would it be?  Is there a smell associated with this issue?  How does it make you want to move your body?

If these questions don’t keep you occupied, make up your own.  If you find yourself blocked and unable to explore any of that, try moving to the far Holy Spirit end of the spectrum and just focusing on sighs too deep for words in those moments, trusting that God will honor your good intentions by filling in the rest.

To build true community with deep Christian spirituality, we need to learn to listen with our whole souls.  We need to learn to engage in prayer as beings formed in the image of a compassionate, creative God.  Whether we do it with words or with sighs or all the thoughts and wishes and hopes found in the middle of that spectrum, God will honor our intentions.  We will begin to experience what it is to be met by God in prayer, to have prayers answered, to have prayers shifted, to have our hearts changed and strengthened and connected.  May it be so.  Alleluia and Amen.