Psalm 5:1-3
Prayer is this great mystery to many people. It's a great mystery, because God is surrounded by mystery. We don't know how to approach God, because we don't know what God is all about. If we don't know what God is all about, then certainly prayer has got to be an enigma.
In the cartoon, "The Family Circus," the older brother is holding a flattened football. "I need a new football," he said. "But I don't know if I should send up a prayer, write a letter to Santa Claus, or call Grandma."
It is difficult to talk with someone whom you're not sure what they're about. People do all kinds of things to make God more approachable. In one of her newest books--a book about prayer titled, Help, Thanks, Wow, one of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, wrote, "My friend Robyn calls God 'the Grandmothers"...I called God Phil for a long time, after a bracelet maker promised to engrave 'Phil 4:4-7' on my bracelet, Philippians 4:4-7 being my favorite passage of Scripture, but he got only as far a 'Phil' before having to dismantle his booth. Phil is a great name for God" (page 2).
The author, Clarence Day, wrote in his book, Life With Father, "Father expected a good deal of God. He didn't actually accuse God of inefficiency, but when he prayed his tone was lucid and angry, like that of a dissatisfied guest in a carelessly managed hotel."
Even though people aren't sure about the One they are addressing in prayer, or understand what prayer is, it doesn't keep people from praying. A recent Gallup survey found 90 percent of Americans pray. 75 percent of those pray every day. A majority say that they pray more than they did just a few years ago.
It seems that a high majority of people know that in order to develop a relationship with God, we need to pray. We cannot develop our relationship with God any other way, better.
And here comes my bold claim: In order to pray, to understand prayer best, to develop our relationship with God through prayer, we need the Psalms. If we wish to develop a life of faith, to mature in our humanity, and glorify God, we will need to pray. And we won't know how to pray without the Psalms. We cannot bypass the Psalms.
In order to learn to pray, we need a prayer master. The Psalms are just such a prayer master. We must be an apprentice to the prayer master of the Psalms. Eugene Peterson wrote, in his book, Answering God: "If we are willfully ignorant of the Psalms, we are not thereby excluded from praying, but we will have to hack our way through formidable country by trial and error and with inferior tools." (page 4)
One of the reasons we need the Psalms to teach us about prayer is because most of the time our prayers are full of ego where we try to get ourselves some credit with God.
Like the hunter, who was out hunting bears. As he stalked through the forest looking for bears, he started climbing a steep hill. As he was pulling himself up over the last outcropping of rocks a huge bear stood up in front of him, nose to nose.
The bear roared fiercely. The man was so scared, he screamed and lost his balance rolling down the hill with the bear close after him. When he finally stopped tumbling, he had a broken leg. Escape was impossible. So the man, who had never been particularly religious, prayed, "Dear God, if you will make this bear a Christian I will be happy with whatever you want me to do for the rest of my life."
The bear was just a couple of feet away from the man. But suddenly it stopped in it's tracks, looked up to heaven, fell to its knees and prayed, "Lord, bless this food of which I am about to partake. Amen."
Prayer becomes, all too quickly, a bargaining process, where we quickly try to get God in our debt. Prayer doesn't work that way, neither does God.
The last thing we seem to want to do is be "honest-to-God". We can't even be honest with ourselves, let alone God. The Psalm masters show us the way of this honesty before God. God catches us in sin, finds us in despair, invades us by grace.
This ego, this ego-defensiveness, this wheeling and dealing with God must be wrestled to obedience, and brought face-to-face with the God who reveals himself to us. In order to do this hard work through prayer, we need a master who has done this work before us. That master is the Psalms.
Another vital thing we learn from the Psalms is not only how to express ourselves in prayer, but more importantly, we learn how to answer God. The Psalms show us how to answer. That's the first lesson of the Psalms: God speaks to us first, and prayer is basically our response.
The Psalms are poetry and the Psalms are prayer. Poetry is not decorative speech. It is language used with personal intensity. Poetry isn't cosmetic language--it's intestinal. It's from the gut. It's earthy and basic.
Thus, when we use the Psalms for prayer we won't be looking for ideas about God. Instead, what the Psalms teach us is that prayer is the experience of being human before God. We will be exposed. But then we will be transformed. That is not easy.
Our answering prayers to God are not always positive. There is anger, there is skepticism, there is even cursing and fist shaking. But the Psalms are honest feeling, honest response to our God who first reveals himself to us and speaks to us.
Our habits tend toward talking about God, not to God. We love discussing God. But the Psalms resist that kind of discussion. The Psalms aren't to be learned and discussed. They are primarily to be prayed and to teach us about prayer.
The poetry part of the Psalms demand that we deal with our actual humanity. The prayer part of the Psalms requires that we deal with God. This dual work of the Psalms is for the sole purpose of the total renovation of our lives.
It is vitally important to understand the two sides of the coin in praying the Psalms: our humanity and God. If we try one without the other in prayer, we will get lost and no transformation will happen.
For example, if we come to the Psalms for prayer, thinking the Psalms are just a way to develop our inner life, we've come to the wrong place. Kahil Gibran would be a better bet for that. The Psalms are not interested in human potential. They are passionate about God: a God who is obedience-shaping, will-transforming, sin-revoking, and praise-releasing.
Or, if the Psalms were just about God, they would be nothing more than a religious bull session. The Psalms would become a bunch of theological pontificating with no human angst and passion to connect with the theology.
The Psalms, in leading us into praying, bring the human condition into the presence of God.
Now here's the thing. In praying the Psalms, we don't first learn how to do it, like taking a class. We simply do it. In the doing we find out what we are doing. In the constant doing we deepen and mature in our praying, in our humanity, and in our relationship with God.
Prayer is a human being conversing with a holy and great God--which is a mystery. The Psalms help us cross the gulf of that mystery. And the only way we can do that is by doing it.
So, that's what we're going to do for a few minutes. Pray the Psalms.
Psalm 13
Psalm 51
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