Never Give Up Praying

"Never Give Up Praying"
1 Thessalonians 5:15-24

When I was in seminary, there was a little room just off the sanctuary.  It was the room that was used the least of all the rooms on campus.  It was the room for private prayer.  It was just a little bare room with a chair, maybe two, and a small altar.  The door was always open.

I confess, of the three years I was on that seminary campus, I never went in that room.  Never used it.  Nor did I use other places of prayer, or opportunities for prayer.  When I prayed, I did like all of my seminary peers:  I opened a Book Of Common Worship, and read one out of there.  It was the only kind of praying I had modeled for me.  I did as I saw.

Like most Christians, I knew prayer was important.  I just didn't know what it was or how to do it.  I got a book about prayer now and then.  Mostly because I felt a nagging guilt that I should know how to pray.  I was like most of us in the way we approach a task:  I was convinced that if I learned the technique of praying, I would be able to pray.  It was just a matter of learning the technique, as if I were simply learning how to play the guitar.  But just because I have learned the technique of playing the guitar doesn't necessarily mean I understand music.  Or appreciate it.  That comes from a deeper quest, and I had not even begun to embark on that quest in respect to prayer.  That would come later, by crisis.

The crisis was my first church out of seminary.  I entered seminary clutching my Bible and ready to serve Christ.  I left seminary clutching my theology books and not exactly knowing who Jesus was.  I was at a church, unbeknownst to me, that was a tyrannosaurus that had a hunger for pastoral meat.  Several pastors in a row, who had served that church before me, had been chewed up and spit out.  The average stay of a pastor at that church, over it's 100 year history was 2 and a half years.  I was next.  I thought I was ready.  I was a fool.  I thought I had the truth.  I didn't know squat.  I thought I was strong.  I have never whined and whimpered more in my life.

I remember one Sunday.  I got up early, as has become my habit, and went next door to the church.  I practiced preaching my sermon to an empty sanctuary.  Suddenly I stopped in the middle of my rehearsing.  A pit opened up in my stomach.  I started breathing heavy.  I left the sanctuary and walked around the block.  Several times.  I was making myself sick.  It wasn't just because I was nervous about preaching.  It was because I was nervous about what I was preaching.  It was just a bunch of words.  Moralistic clap-trap about "we gotta be nice to each other."

Part of this was Floyd Hogg's fault.  Floyd was an 84 year old man in the congregation.  He was my first spiritual mentor.  But he had no idea that's what he was doing for me.  He taught Adult Sunday School.  He had for years.

When he started each class with prayer, or when he would help me lead worship and he would pray, or when I would go over to his house to play Chinese Checkers and drink root beer floats and he would pray at the end of my visit, I knew I had gotten way off track.  There was something about him that was so powerful in a quiet sort of way.  I knew I wanted what he had.  There's a verse in the book of Ecclesiastes that describes Floyd:  "The quiet words of the wise are more effective than the ranting of a king of fools" (Ecclesiastes 9:17).  That was Floyd.  Quiet wisdom and strength.  That flowed out of a relationship of prayer.

It wasn't soon after my anxiety attack about my preaching and pastoring that Floyd died.  While I was on study leave he had gotten sick and went into the hospital.  By the time I got back he was nearly gone.  His was one of the hardest funerals I've ever done.

After he died I got deeply depressed.  I felt like I was washing out of the ministry.  Floyd had modeled something for me that was deeply engaging, but I still didn't understand.  The life of prayer.  I wanted that with all my strength, but had no idea what direction to take, or how to take care of my nagging restlessness and depression.  All I knew was I had nothing to preach.

The more theological books I read the more confused I got.  The more people I talked to, most of whom were supposed to be the most looked-up-to pastors in the Presbytery, the more I realized their lives were just as empty as mine.  They had just learned how to pretend and become accomplished Sunday morning actors.  I was determined not to become one of them.  But how?

Answers did not come quickly, but they did come steadily.  The first thing that God did was open up a move for me to California.  I became an Associate Pastor in Saratoga, a suburb of San Jose.  I was in charge of the Christian Education programs, getting a new Christian Education wing built, Deacons ministries, and all youth activities.  Only rarely did I preach, which was OK by me.  If I never preached again, it wouldn't have bothered me.  Because, by then, preaching terrified me.

I thank God as I look back over those years.  I know God wasn't giving up on me, though I was ready to give up.  God put me in each place to help turn my head.  Turn my head toward prayer.  Turn my head in God's direction.  Sounds weird coming from a minister, doesn't it.  You have no idea how many ministers out there don't pray, don't know what prayer is.

At Saratoga, the people of the church in the programs and areas of ministry I was responsible for, were deeply spiritual people.  People who knew about prayer.  People who actually prayed.  Through knowing Floyd, and then those others in Saratoga, I learned my first lessons about prayer.  That probably sounds weird, too--that a minister learned about prayer from his parishioners.  If you don't know what it is, find people who do and who model the life of prayer.  I didn't know how to do that for myself, so God did it for me.  God intentionally forced me into places where there were people who could help me become a person of prayer.

I took a risk with those people.  I shared my pain and my sense of failure.  My pastoral self-esteem was at the bottom.  Instead of being judgmental or shocked, they prayed with me.  They guided me.  They gently asked me hard questions, and then entered my struggle to find answers to those questions.  Struggled before God in prayer in communion with me.  It was a tremendous time of healing and energizing for me.

At the same time, I picked up a book.  I was trying to find my way as a young Pastor.  Discover what it meant to be a Pastor.  What was my role?  What was my work?  The book I bought was titled, Five Smooth Stones For Pastoral Work, by Eugene Peterson (who did The Message Bible).  Peterson used the image of the five smooth stones David took out of the brook with which he killed Goliath, for the work of the ministry.

One of the longer chapters was about prayer.  One of the main roles of the pastor, Peterson described, is to spend a good amount of time in prayer.  If we are going to talk about God to our congregations, we better know God.  The only way to do that is by prayer.  We better be in prayer.

Peterson captured my attention, as I was growing in awareness about the life of prayer.  I read every one of his books.  I wrote him.  He was, at that time, a Presbyterian Pastor in Maryland.  I asked him if I could come back to stay with him for a week of my study leave to just talk with him.  He reluctantly agreed.  It was probably one of the best weeks of study leave I have ever spent.

Again, one of the points I'm trying to make about prayer for you was brought home to me:  If you don't know how to pray, get yourself together with someone who does.  Let them lead you.  Listen and pay attention.  My empty restlessness and sense of spiritual failure was slowly being transformed into a life made full and with peace through prayer.  Prayer that was modeled for me by people who were willing to be spiritual guides for me and lead me in God's direction.

Eugene Peterson gave me some basic, foundational, and important direction.  I want to share just a couple of those learnings.  They had to do with my expectations about prayer that were all wrong.

The first was that I thought I could learn prayer relatively quickly.  In most things I have been a quick learner.  I thought prayer would be the same.  What I found out was that prayer takes a lifetime.  It takes a lifetime because prayer is not a technique, it is a relationship.  When you learn to pray, you are not learning a technique, as if that's all prayer is.  You are learning how to be in relationship with the Most High God.  Developing that relationship will take you your whole lives.

I have a book, the title of which is The Little Notebook: The Journal of a Contemporary Woman's Encounters with Jesus.  It's an unusual book.  The author, Nicole Gausseron, records her daily conversations with Jesus.  Not just prayers that she prays.  Conversations.  Here's one of those:

The garden is full of sunlight, silence too.  The children will be arriving in a few minutes.
--Lord, are you here?
--Yes.
--It seems to me that it's been a few days since we've been together.  I feel a little dull in your presence.
--Nicole, I'd like to ask you something.  Would you like to give me a present?
--Yes.
--Take time for me.  Now and then you take time to call somebody, to listen to the voice of a friend.  Give me a call now and then.
--You want us to become gradually more intimate with each other?
--Yes.

How many of you have friends?  How did they get to be your friends?  Simply by saying, "You are my friend?"  No.  It took work and energy and time and effort.  You start by taking small steps in getting to know each other, and then you gradually risk more.  Your friendship deepens.  Gradually you become personally and intimately involved in their lives, and they in yours.  It is no different with God.  If we say we are God's friend, but we do nothing to encourage that friendship in prayer, we are living a lie, and our lives become spiritual frauds, just as I felt mine had become.

There was a time when philosophers were trying to prove that God existed.  One of the philosophers of that time, Blaise Pascal, in his proof, said he believed God existed because, "There is a God-shaped hollow in each in each of us that nothing else can fill."  I believe that's true.  Do you feel it?  Do you sense that deep hollow?  But most importantly, do you realize it can only be filled by a relationship with God?  I think we all feel it.  I think we all know where it is.  I think we also try and fill it with a bunch of other stuff that doesn't ever fit.  Only through a prayerful, ongoing, life-time relationship with God will that void be filled.

Your relationship with God is the easiest one to neglect.  It is the easiest relationship to let go by the wayside.  But it is the most important relationship you have.  When that God-shaped hollow goes unfilled, you will feel deeply hollow and unfulfilled.  You will know that something is missing in your life.  Something deep.  You will become restless.  You may even become depressed.  Realize what that restlessness and that emptiness is signaling for you.  It is beckoning you to a life of prayerful relationship with God.

In that way, prayer is not effortless or spontaneous.  Prayer is hard work, just like any important relationship is hard work.  Those were some of the other lessons I learned from Eugene Peterson.  Words don't come easily.  They are at times hard to find.  That's one of the reasons we have the Bible, and books like the Psalms, to give us the words, to prime the pump of our lips, so that conversation can start to flow.

Prayer is not just talking.  It is also learning how to listen.  God does talk back.  Believe me, God does know how to talk.  It becomes the pray-ers task to learn how to listen to God's voice.  How to pick out the divine Voice and distinguish it from all the other voices.  How to converse with God.

It's easy to give up.  Hearing God's Voice, and becoming conversational with God takes time.  It's easy to become frustrated, and by neglect, or time, or whatever, leave God totally alone.  And then the hollow starts aching again.  Don't give up praying.