Listen to the audio of today’s Reflection:
https://soundcloud.com/hapearce/reflection-for-january-13-2025-nbw
Friends –
I’m a fan of the Lutheran theologian Nadia Bolz-Weber, and this she just sent out a terrific short peace on prayer. So I pass it along for your reflection. Thanks to Nadia.
Henry
A Guest Reflection on Prayer
By Nadia Bolz-Weber
From her email service, The Corners
Luke 18:1-8
The Parable of the Persistent Widow
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. 2 He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. 3 And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
4 “For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”
6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8 I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
Once, my daughter Harper, who was four at the time, sat at the dinner table looking pensive until I finally asked what she was thinking about. She said “Mom, sometimes I forget about Kangaroos.” To which I replied, “Honey, we all do. It would be exhausting to continually remember about kangaroos.” I’m pretty sure that no one can think about kangaroos all the time.
And yet Jesus told his friends a parable about our need to pray always and not lose heart; about our need to pray without ceasing. Which sounds to me like one more unreasonable expectation that religion sets up for me totally fail at.
So it makes me wonder why Jesus would tell us a parable about our need to pray all the time if it clearly is not possible?
While it’s tempting to listen to prosperity gospel preachers who claim the story of the persistent widow is a self-help technique by which we can get all the cash and prizes we want out of God’s divine vending machine if we just kind of bug God to death through ceaseless prayer, when it comes down to it, we know better.
Then what exactly is the point of prayer? Is prayer a way to twist God’s arm to get what we want? Is it like God’s complaint box? Is it just totally passive?
And how do we keep in our peripheral vision the ways that our own rationalizations and wishful thinking can distort what we think God’s “answers” are to our prayers?
We might do well to ask what exactly, is an answered prayer? Do we think an answered prayer means getting what we ask for? Because it sure doesn’t feel like praying hard enough or righteously enough gets me what I want. We know better because even in the midst of prayer we have seen cancer be defeated and we have seen cancer win. Even in the midst of prayer we’ve seen the powerful exploit the weak and we’ve seen the weak rise up. Even in the midst of prayer we’ve seen teenagers who flourish and we’ve seen the sullen reality of addiction steal the joy of youth.
We in recovery are told that we should pray to align our will with God’s not God’s will with ours. So maybe prayer isn’t the way in which we manipulate God. Maybe prayer is simply the posture in which we finally become worn down by God’s persistence.
Maybe prayer is connecting ourselves to the persistent longing of God.
New Testament Scholar Fred Craddock describes this as us being hammered through long days and nights of prayer into a vessel that will be able to hold the answer when it comes.
In this world we live in – a world of Western individualism and alienation, I think prayer is radically about connection – but not just connection to God.
To pray for each other is to live not unaffected by what is happening in the blessed and broken and beautiful world in which God has placed us.
So throughout scripture when we are told to pray without ceasing, maybe rather than that being another thing for me to feel bad about not being able to do well, maybe the truth is that the only way to pray without ceasing is by having others pray for you, with you. Because let’s face it, who can pull off praying without ceasing alone? We all need to occasionally you know, sleep and eat and run to the grocery store. So to pray without ceasing is not an individual sport – if anything it’s a relay race. It’s what we do for each other, and it’s what we do for the world. When we pray we hold ourselves and our loved ones and the world up to God and then we pass it off for the next person to do the same.
So I started to think that maybe prayer is less how we get what we want and more how God gets what God wants.
Because as well-worn and understandable as the “thoughts and prayers” trope is, prayer is not what we do instead of taking action, prayer is an action we take so our egos can quiet down long enough to know what is ours to do.
For these silken threads of prayer which connect us to God and to one another and even to our enemies are how God is stitching our broken humanity back together. So people of God, pray without ceasing and do not lose heart. For God has some work that needs to get done.
Dear God, I ask that you enfold those affected by these fires in California with a peace that passes understanding. Send them signs of hope, however small. They’ve lost so much, Lord, keep them from also losing heart. And may the work ahead unite us in a time of division. We ask this and that for which there simply are no words, in your holy name. Amen.
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