Prayer Day
Delegate Edwin Exiomo of the Philippines prays during a a day set aside for prayer at the 2019 United Methodist General Conference in St. Louis. (Photo by Mike DuBose, UMNS.)
Sunday, July 28, 2019, Luke 11: 1-13
"So I say to you, ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” – Luke 11: 9-11*
I find prayer to be hard work. I have students and friends of the more evangelistic church who are always talking about how the Lord answers their prayers. I grew up in East Texas where they sang about “having a little talk with Jesus to make it right.” But I find prayer a mystery. Indeed, the Almighty seems a bit timid around me. I wonder if I am like the fellow who didn’t believe that God answered prayers and found himself lost in the wilderness of Alaska. He finally showed up at home again and was asked, “Well, did you pray for deliverance and found that it worked?” “Oh, I prayed but nothing happened.” “Then how did you survive?” “These native folks came by in a canoe and brought me home.” How many times have we been delivered and called it luck? I do find that more coincidences seem to happen when I pray than when I don’t!
The farm crisis of the 1980s hit the Iowa farmer hard. The district I served in southern Iowa was marred with despair as neighbor after neighbor lost the family farm. They called it “going under.”
On one occasion, a Saturday morning, I joined with farmers to place more than one hundred white crosses on the courthouse lawn, each representing a farm that had “gone under.” Later in a church nearby, Bishop Wayne Clymer joined with us to offer prayers. The local bank had closed a few weeks before school was to start, and assets were temporarily frozen. The Bishop had given me a large check from the United Methodist Committee on Relief to cover back-to-school costs for the children. I told him those proud Mount Ayr Scottish laity would not take charity, even from their bishop. He said, “Well then, ask each church to take an offering and put our check into the pot with the rest. Call it “neighbor helping neighbor.” That worked. Later the Neighbor Helping Neighbor Fund that we created that day raised thousands of dollars across Iowa to help rural people. That was, for me, the kind of praying that works.
Paul Tillich once said if you pray, you should also work for its coming. I think that prayer opens up a space in which God can act. I served on the Iowa Cabinet with Bishop Rueben Job. He will always be remembered as a man of deep conviction and prayer. He also was a person of action. Once when I told him that persons on our district without health insurance were using the local veterinarian for help, he said, “Let’s get a community worker into that district who can work with a team of nurses.” I said we have tried but the denominational office moves too slow—it will take months. “No,” said the bishop, “I will make the appointment and we will ask them to confirm it.” He did. The denominational office was not happy, but you didn’t argue with that bishop. He had the reputation of being a spiritual man, but as one Iowa farmer put it, “That bishop is tough as pig iron.” We in the church miss him so. The person he appointed as a Church and Community worker, the Rev. Kathleen Clark, was later put in charge of the United Methodist Church and Community Workers Program and worked there for fifteen years.
All of this is to say that prayer ought not to be separated from action. It is a bit like Santiago the fisherman in Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, who finally hooked a great fish that could feed his family if only it didn’t escape. As he hung on to the fishline with bloodied hands, he shouted “Hail Mary” to the Almighty.
Rabbi Abraham Heschel reminds us that prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action. He speaks of prayer as like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness. It is in the light that we who grope, stumble, and climb discover where we stand, what surrounds us, and the course we should choose. In its radiance we behold the worth of our efforts, the range of our hope, and the meaning of our deeds.*
Prayer is more than a way out if things don’t go well, or a celebration if they do. For me it is vital like the air we breathe. As Heschel put it, “Prayer may not save us, but it makes us worth saving!”
Dear God, we do not know how to pray as we ought. Save us from the distractions of this world, enable us to center our lives in your purposes, give us in these days a new hope for the future, and the energy to work for its coming. We pray in the name of Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen
*For those using the text on prayer, here are two resources:
Abraham Joshua Heschel, I Asked for Wonder, edited by Samuel H. Dresner, p.20ff.
Thomas Merton, Contemplative Prayer, Image Books.
The Rev. Bill Cotton is a retired clergy member of the Iowa Annual Conference. Along with colleagues and friends, he produces a weekly e-newsletter, "MEMO for Those Who Preach." Subscribe here.