Throughout this season
of Epiphany we have heard stories about how God’s love for the whole world is
being revealed. And in the healing of Simon Peter’s mother, we see the
transformation that happens when Jesus reaches out to her and lifts her up. In
his gospel, Mark jumps right into the teaching and healing work that Jesus does
in the world, real ministry to real, hurting people and communities.
But it’s what Jesus does
next that sets him apart from many of us, pastors and other religious leaders
included. In verse 35 Mark tells us, “In the morning, while
it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place and there
he prayed.”
Mark’s Gospel is quick-paced,
moving rapidly from event to event; yet, even he stops his narrative so that we
see Jesus leave his disciples and go to a deserted place and pray.
Maybe we shouldn’t be
surprised how hard it is for us to follow Jesus in prayer. Even his disciples
seem surprised to find him there, telling him when they find him, “"Everyone is
searching for you." (v. 37)
But even when we
accept that prayer is a worthwhile faith practice and a mark of discipleship, it
can be challenging to develop a regular practice of prayer.
One place to begin, of
course, is with table grace:
When I entered
seminary, someone shared a book titled One Hundred Graces that included prayers
from all different traditions. I brought a copy home so that we could choose
from the variety of prayers for our table grace; my own daughters quickly
memorized which pages had the shortest prayers and chose those.
It wasn’t quite the
faith formation practice I had imagined.
More recently, a local
pastor and friend shared a story about his daughter who responded to his
invitation to pray at the dinner table saying, “We don’t need to pray. There’s
no smoke on the food.” He asked her if she meant steam and she said yes, and
then he asked her why they prayed before they ate. She answered. “We pray for
our food. To wait for it not to be hot.”
Practicing prayer is
hard work.
Especially when we believe that God loves us
and knows our hearts’ desires and supplies sighs too deep for words, when we
are silenced by suffering, the reasons we pray are not obvious.
But Jesus’ own witness to us is that seeking God in prayer is
important.
In his Small Catechism, Martin Luther writes
about the Lord’s Prayer, teaching that God’s good and gracious will comes about
in our lives without our words, but we pray that it might come about in and
among us, and God delights in hearing us because we are God’s own children.
Earlier this week I was in conversation with
some folks and we were imagining the joy that God experiences as a parent when
two or three of God’s children are gathered together. Our
prayers bear witness to God’s promises to hear us and God’s desire to
be in relationship with us.
In Isaiah we heard:
29 [The Lord] gives power to
the faint, and strengthens the powerless. 30 …
those who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength, they shall mount up
with wings like eagles, they shall run and not be weary, they shall walk and
not faint. (Isa. 40:29-31)
John Wesley, who with his brother Charles
founded Methodism, reminds us that first we go and be with God and then we go and do God’s work in the world. He is quoted in Mark
Allen Powell’s book Loving Jesus, writing, “I
have so much to do that I must spend many hours in prayer before I am able to do it.”[i]
When
we encounter God in prayer, we are strengthened, we are revived and we are
renewed!
So why is it that these
things that draw us to pray —
knowing God and receiving
God’s love and mercy, and being strengthened to participate in God’s work in
the world —
are the very same things that keep us from praying?
Just as Jesus
encountered temptation in the wilderness, we are tempted and separated from God
by sin —turning in on ourselves and putting our own desires for esteem and
affection, security and control, before God’s desires for us. We doubt God’s
fidelity to God’s promises; we doubt our own value to God, and we fear what we
might hear if we quiet ourselves, sit in God’s presence and listen to God. We
are afraid of what God will ask us to do.
But,
“Have you not known? Have you not heard?”[ii]
Jesus shows that when we
follow him into stillness and prayer, we encounter “The Lord [who] is the
everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth.” (Isa. 40:28), and when we create
this holy space in our lives, we will hear God speak and see God act, according
to God’s promises.
Let us pray…
Holy God,
We give you thanks for
Your Son who witnesses to us that You hear our prayers.
Help us follow Jesus
into the silent presence of Your Spirit and open our hearts to hear you speak
into our lives.
Strengthen us and
renew us to follow your Son for the sake of the world.
Amen.
[i] Mark Allan Powell, Loving Jesus, p. 142
[ii] Isa. 40:28
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