A sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church
9th June 2024
Luke 11.2-4
In my sermon on prayer a couple of weeks ago,
I spoke about how we need to move away from the idea
of prayer as something which unlocks certain actions from God,
and how instead we need to see it
as an exercise in bringing our own lives
into alignment with the purposes of God’s will.
Well, I want to return to this topic of prayer today,
as I think there is much more still to be explored here. [1]
I guess my starting point for us today
is the question of what it is, that reduces you to prayer?
For most of us,
prayer is something that gets squeezed out of our lives.
Unless you’re very disciplined,
and have a regular practise of daily devotional Bible study and prayer,
or daily meditation,
it is all too easy for prayer to be something
that only ever happens when we are driven to it,
something that emerges in our lives
when we are in extremis, burned out, with very little else left
as a viable option except turning in desperation to prayer.
Sometimes it is the struggle against injustice
that drives us to prayer,
the experience of being done unto, done down, and done over.
And for all of our intellectualising about prayer
many people who pray, do so
not because they have come to rationally reasoned conclusions
about its efficacy,
but because they are simply desperate
in the face of powers that are threatening to overwhelm them,
and so they have nothing left but to turn to God in prayer.
And it is this sense of engaging through prayer
with powers that so often seem utterly beyond us,
that I want us to explore to day.
As a congregation, Bloomsbury has a long history of activism.
We go head-to-head with issues of injustice both locally and globally.
And I love this about us,
it is one of the things that makes us so compelling as a congregation.
Our spirituality is worked out
in acts of compassion and justice in the world.
But sometimes, no amount of action is going to shift the dial.
Some injustices are so deep seated, so deep rooted in the world,
that they are beyond any action we can take.
This doesn’t mean of course, that we don’t try.
But without prayer, our actions run the risk
of becoming merely good works
that justify our lack of deeper spiritual engagement.
The antidote to this of course is prayer.
At the conference I was speaking at a couple of weeks ago,
I was arguing that prayer does not have to involve
regular morning prayer
and it doesn’t have to involve
contemplative or sacramental actions.
In fact, there is no set form for prayer at all.
Because prayer is not fundamentally a religious practise for us to do,
rather it is our existential struggle
against those forces which seem to be beyond us,
it is the battle of our inner being
with the powers that would diminish us.
It's worth thinking for a moment
about the way in which prayer was characterised in the first century.
In the ancient world, God lived in Heaven,
up there somewhere above the clouds.
The Divine throne was surrounded by living creatures
and angels and other divine beings.
So when someone on earth prayed a prayer,
their prayers were gathered into heaven by the angelic beings
and laid before God’s throne.
It was a kind of heavenly mirror
of the way in which petitions from people
were brought before a human king.
And, like an earthly king, once God had heard the prayer
God’s answer would be relayed back out from the throne room
to the person who had made the petition.
And whilst we might want to reject the cosmology here,
(after all none of us really believes that God sits on a throne
somewhere up there above the clouds),
we shouldn’t lose the spiritual truth
that lies behind the contextualised image.
And the truth is this, that everything visible
has an invisible or heavenly dimension.
I spoke a little bit about this last week,
in my sermon on the environment.
Do you remember that I quoted my friend Noel Moules,
who has said that everything is sacred.
If it is true, and I think it is, that everything is sacred,
then there is a flow of spirituality between who we are,
and the world we inhabit,
and the world beyond us.
I think this is what Jesus is getting at in the Lord’s prayer,
when he instructs his disciples to pray that God’s will
be done on Earth, as it is in heaven.
The difficulty for us, with our scientific rational materialistic world view,
is that we don’t really believe
either that God is up there,
or that heaven exists as a real place just beyond our grasp.
From a materialistic perspective, the only stuff that exists
is that which we can perceive with our senses.
And in such a worldview praying gets reduced
to mere wishing, hoping, and dreaming.
In our collective efforts to demystify the world,
we have quite rightly dispensed with a superstitious approach to prayer.
But the danger however is that we end up dispensing with prayer altogether.
Shedding ourselves of pre scientific beliefs
should not rob us of the deeper spirituality
that these ancient stories convey.
If we reduce prayer to self-hypnosis, self-examination, or self-centering,
we rob it of its ability to transform the world.
We need, I honestly think, a renewal of our spirituality.
And I think the sense of ourselves as inherently spiritual,
along with the sacredness of all things,
is a profoundly helpful place to start.
After all, every single part of us, every molecule, every atom,
has, over the preceding millennia, been part
of streams, rivers, mountains, gases, and indeed stars.
We are so deeply connected to the created order,
that our spirituality surely must arise
from that deep connectivity.
So every time we turn our attention to the world beyond ourselves,
every time we look outward rather than inward,
we participate in a world in which the selfishness of humanity is undone,
and in which the values of God’s kingdom are made that bit more real.
Every week here at Bloomsbury,
we end the service with our prayers of intercession.
We articulate the needs of the world before God,
collectively asking that God will hear and heed our desire
that the world be different.
When we pray our prayers of intercession,
we are engaging in an act of spiritual defiance.
You see, the world knows how these things go,
the world knows that people suffer and die,
that wars are fought, and that the climate crisis is inevitable.
And yet when we articulate together before God
our hope that the world can be different,
we create a world that can be different.
This is what is called the politics of hope,
and it is the outcome of intercessory prayer.
It is the collective spiritual act
of envisaging an alternative future,
and then acting as if that future is now irresistible,
thus helping to create the reality for which we have been praying.
The key thing here, is that the future is not closed.
The outcome is not certain.
And a world in which a different outcome has been prayed for,
is a world in which a different outcome might actually happen.
I worked with someone a few years ago,
who had a sign on his notice board.
It said, “If you think you’re too small to make a difference,
you’ve never been in bed with a mosquito”.
Sometimes, the prayers of the faithful few
can make all the difference in the world.
This isn’t simply suggesting that our prayers to God bounce back on us,
for us to become the solution to our prayers.
Although I’m sure that this is often what happens.
Rather, I think that our prayers offered in hope
for a different future to that which seems inevitable,
actually change the world
and change what is possible in the world.
New futures are born in our prayers.
When we pray, we open up space in ourselves,
in our lives, and in our communities,
within which God is invited to act.
As we pray, we become partners with God.
We are not manipulating God into action,
and neither are we asking God to compromise human freedom or free will.
Rather, through the very essence of our being,
our free will is turned outward to the needs of others,
and becomes the path down which God’s grace can walk into our world.
Walter Wink captures something of this urgency in prayer.
He says that, “prayer is rattling God’s cage and waking God up
and setting God free
and giving this famished God water
and this starved God food
and cutting the ropes off God’s hands
and the manacles off God’s feet
and washing the caked sweat from God’s eyes
and then watching God swell with life and vitality and energy
and following God wherever God goes.”
Which brings us, I think to the question of unanswered prayer.
I don’t know what you’ve been told over the years
about the problem of our prayers seeming to fall on deaf ears.
Maybe you have been told that you lacked faith,
or were too sinful, or were asking for the wrong thing,
or maybe you have been told
that God sometimes simply just says no
because God knows better than we do.
Well, all of these things may occasionally be true.
Sometimes we do lack faith, sometimes we are sinful,
sometimes we pray for ridiculous things,
and sometimes we ask for things
that are entirely beyond God’s good intent for humans.
But these things are not directly related to prayer.
Jesus says that prayers only need faith the size of a grain of mustard,
or in other words, we only need any faith at all.
Our faith may be misguided,
it may be full of doubt and holes,
it may come from a place of sin,
it may be utterly self deceived.
But if we have any faith at all, then that is enough for us to pray.
I remember in my first church we had a child in the church
who developed a cancerous tumour.
She was going into hospital for treatment,
which thankfully was ultimately successful.
But we didn’t know that that would be the outcome.
One service we had a time of open prayer,
and one of my colleagues raised his voice
and just shouted at God,
that this was utterly unacceptable
for a child to be facing such an illness.
It was one of the most powerful prayers I have ever heard,
and it wasn’t actually asking God to do anything.
It was simply holding God to account
for the terrible thing that was happening in the world.
And sometimes that is all we can do in prayer.
In our anger and frustration, in our hurt and our pain,
we hold before God the needs of our world.
And not necessarily in direct expectation that God will sort or solve.
There are institutions, and structures, and systems that dominate our world,
and affect our lives, and ruin our health and our planet.
And our task in prayer
is to continue kicking the darkness until it bleeds daylight,
as Bruce Cockburn so memorably put it. [2]
Sometimes there is no quick fix, no ready solution.
As Martin Luther King said, the arc of the moral universe is long,
but it bends towards justice.
Human freedom thwarts the coming of God’s kingdom at every turn.
Every act of evil, every selfish desire, every thoughtless moment,
all these create the powers of sin and death in our world.
But prayer reverses this process.
As we align ourselves with the values of God’s kingdom,
as we pray for justice and liberation, for forgiveness and love,
we create a world in which God’s ability to intervene
in the affairs of humans is increased rather than decreased.
Our calling is to live in the place of tension,
where our hope in God’s ability to act
is matched by our realism in recognising the capacity
of human activity to restrict God’s action.
The powers of evil in our world continue to thwart God.
We live in a world of death camps, invasions, and drone warfare,
of nuclear bombs, cancer, and starvation.
And yet despite all of these, in fact to spite all of these,
we are called to nonetheless be people of hope, people of prayer.
We cannot stop praying for what is right
just because our prayers are seemingly unanswered.
Our prayers are heard the very first day we pray,
and we keep praying because even one more day
is too long to wait for justice.
As we pray, and particularly as we pray collectively,
we create the alternative human community,
where the values of the kingdom of Heaven
are made real in our midst.
When people pray, they withdraw their consent to the powers of darkness,
and whenever sufficient numbers of people withdraw their consent,
the powers that dominate the world inevitably fall.
To quote Walter Wink again,
he says that, “recognition of the role of the powers in blocking prayer
can revolutionise the way we pray…
We will recognise that God, too, is hemmed in
by forces that cannot simply be overruled.
We will know that God will prevail,
but not necessarily in a way that is comprehensible
except through the cross.”
It is this insight from the crucifixion of Jesus,
that I think opens prayer to another level.
When Jesus wanted to do battle
with the principalities and powers of evil in the world,
he did so not by taking a sword and defeating them.
That would have been playing them at their own game,
and would ultimately have failed.
Rather Jesus took into himself all of the suffering
that the powers cause in the world.
In his death, is every victim’s death.
And it is only through the defeat of the cross,
that ultimate victory over the powers of sin and death is secured.
It is only when God enters into the depths of human suffering,
that the path to new life is opened.
So when we pray, as we must, as we do, and as we will,
we pray for the spirituality of our families, our communities,
our corporations and businesses, and our nations.
These systems can be corrupted,
but they can also be redeemed.
And this is surely something to pray about
as we approach an election!
Just as we are deeply connected with one another,
and with nature, and with the planet;
so also are we deeply interconnected.
Prayer, offered in and through Jesus Christ,
informed by the cross,
and infused with the hope of the resurrection,
is the best path to hope that we have,
it is the gift of God,
and we lose it at our peril.
So friends, let us pray.
In Jesus’ name. Amen.
[1] This sermon draws on Walter Wink, ‘The Powers that Be’, chapter 10 ‘Prayer and the Powers’.
[2] https://youtu.be/NKjgJ3oLJqE?si=wIN7Xk_1yHg1mKls
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