Taking Your Prayer Pulse

October 4, 2020 The Rev. Mark Pendleton Christ Church, Exeter Taking your Prayer Pulse What a week! Again! First and foremost, let us truly offer prayers for the President of the United States who is in the hospital with the Covid-19 virus. So, let us pray: O Lord our Governor, whose glory is in all the world: We commend this nation to your merciful care, that we may dwell in your peace. Grant to the President wisdom and strength to know and do your will. O God of all comfort, our only help in time of need, we ask you to visit and relive your servant Donald. Give him patience and in your good time restore him to health. For his wife Melania and the many other officials in our nation's capital, may their sickness be turned into health. Guide our nation into the way of peace, healing and justice; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen. I hope that we can rescue the oft-mentioned "thoughts and prayers" phrase from being so broad that we can offer our prayers with generous hearts - especially in these polarized times. No one who claims to follow Jesus wishes anyone harm without harming themselves in ways they may never see. Prayer is what I wanted to focus on this morning. One way to gauge or measure our inner spiritual life is to consider the kind of prayers are we praying. What thoughts or feelings rise to the surface when you wake up to a new day and before you close our eyes as night falls? Before you say or claim that you're not much of a pray-er, let's take a wide view of what we're referring to. I believe we all pray, silently or with words, even if we describe the practice as thinking, wishing or simply being still and quiet and aware of the world around us and the feelings that well up within us. For those of you using the Book of Common Prayer at home, and remember we are literally giving them away at the door of the church offices, in the Catechism near the back on page 856 you can read this: Prayer is responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with or without words. And there are different kinds of prayer, among them praise, thanksgiving, penitence, intercession and petition. We all pray. What can we learn - how might we take our spiritual pulses - by the kinds of prayers we offer? The collect of the day sets up the ground rules. Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we to pray, and to give more than we either desire or deserve. Let's pause there. What the collect means to me is that we have a God who is waiting, longing, to hear what is on our hearts, what rattles around in our minds. I come across people all the time who work harder than they need to to convince themselves out of praying for something that is weighing them down. "It's so small" they say, or "I return to the same thing again and again." Let God decide and sort through what is what. A sentence from a colleague's sermon over the summer has stayed with me these months. He said: God does not so much answer our prayers as much as God listens to them. It fits well with the collect. For me this makes all the difference, because if we expect God to only answer our prayers, what happens when the answers are not what we asked? Let me allow you all to eavesdrop on a conversation someone might call prayer: "God. Jesus. Holy Spirit. All of you. Things have been tough recently. Life events are feeling a bit Biblical right now. I've been super anxious, fearful, and bit self-absorbed and cut off from others. Feeling a bit lonely and cut off. With all that is going on sometimes my blood boils and I get really angry and want to throw my remote at the T.V. By the way, Jesus, I'd wouldn't mind a side offline conversation about that whole 'love your enemy' sermon you preached. Having trouble with that one. Anyway, I continue... I hope that you might fill my spiritual tank with some love, and joy and forgiveness, because I'm running a bit empty. And if I didn't say it before, Thank you. Isn't that what the German medieval mystic Meister Eckhart say: 'If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough. 'Thank you for life and love and family and friends and dogs and cats and everything else St. Francis sang about. For this beautiful world I feel we're don't caring for the way we should. Thank you for fall in New England and the gaudy display of colors that remind us that death and falling gives way to new life and rising. Give me hope. Amen." God hears and God wants to give us more than we can desire. Yet don't mistake the God of the Universe with a poor version of Santa at Christmas we wrote to as children. What God wants to give us is something we could never walk into a store and buy. That something will never rust, fade, or be lost or taken from us. I have a kind of revolving topic kind of prayer rotation. Near the top always: I pray that I stop worrying about things that I cannot control. I pray to stay in the present moment more - not looking too far back and not rush ahead. Another top prayer: I try to take Jesus at his word the many times he would say: do not be afraid. When I think about the many people who I used to see in our pews each Sunday and get the chance to shake their hands and simply check in, I pray that I won't worry too much about when and whether they will return when Covid passes. As gratified that I am for so many of you faithfully joining us online for this new way of worshiping, I have also heard from some in our parish community that "Zoom just doesn't do it for me." "I just can't make the move from sitting in church to watching church on a screen." Many families with school age children who are doing school remotely just need a break from the screen on the weekend." To all those comments I respond: "I totally understand." Another prayer: Is this good enough? We live in a culture that values and rewards excellence. Those who often rise to the top in their fields are disciplined and unrelenting in their desire to be the very best. But living faithfully is not like about striving only for excellence. It is more about, I believe, learning more though loss than profit, risk than gain, and being vulnerable and open than being strong and without shame or soul. And it's always better keep the conversation between God and you so that the lines of communication are open. Pray now rather than later. Corrie Ten Boom, who was an amazing person who hid Jewish families in her home in Holland during World War II and was later imprisoned in a concentration camp, put it this way: "Is prayer your steering wheel or your spare tire?" Take your spiritual pulse. Examine the prayers you are praying. God longs to hear them. 2