Readings:
Sermon:
If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it. (John 14:14)
I wonder if this is your experience - if and when you pray for something does it happen for you? If not, why do you bother praying?
Clergy are often asked by others whether if they prayed for something they would receive it, or when they have prayed for something and feel they didn’t receive it - could we explain why. Intercession, asking God for things in prayer, is a deeply serious issue for people and often a make-or-break issue in their pursuance of faith. Yet there is something deeply intuitive, deeply ingrained in us about asking God for things in prayer, whether or not we actually believe in God. People who have no allegiance to any faith community will whisper a prayer as their team steps onto the pitch or as their loved one is wheeled into surgery.
I think there is something deeply rooted in the human psyche that almost compels us to reach out and ask God for the things we need, even if we are not sure of the spiritual or psychological dynamics that surround such activity.
But what about a more overtly Christian theology of prayer – what do we think we are up to when we intercede either on our own or corporately in worship. What value do we give to our intercessions at the Eucharist? Most weeks, in most churches across the diocese we will pray for peace in the world, for an end to conflict, for an eradication of world poverty and various other worthy causes, and with good reason, but do we do so with any real expectation that any of these things might actually happen? Do we genuinely expect to wake up tomorrow morning to hear that the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East have been peacefully resolved? And if we’ve don’t have any real expectation that any of this is going to happen, why do we bother praying? Do we believe that Jesus was lying when he said:
If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
We also have to contend with questions such as these:
- If God is supposed to know what we need before we ask for it (as scripture tells us), why do we need to ask for it? or indeed
- Given that we often attribute the characteristics of all-powerful and all-knowing to God, can we realistically hope to change God’s mind?
To understand how intercession works I would suggest that we need to differentiate between our wishes and our hopes. We wish for all sorts of things and for many people their wishes can be somewhat outlandish. Wishing, to use the word in its technical sense, is all about meeting our appetites – we might wish for a snazzier car, a bigger house, for a win on the lottery, whatever… Our wishes are never terrible rational and seldom related to reality. And it that that differentiates ‘wishes’ from ‘hopes’ – wishes tend to be unrealistic and unrelated to reality, whereas hopes are grounded in the ‘just possible’ – we hope for things because we have witnessed something that gives us the hope that what we hope for might just come true. When we intercede for our wishes, we indulge in a self-centered fantasy; when we intercede for our hopes then something much more powerful begins to take place.
When we bring our hopes before God in prayer, we reclaim for ourselves our relationship with our world, our neighbours and ourselves that we see modeled in the ministry of Jesus. Our ‘hopeful’ intercessions enable us to engage with the reality of the world as it is and our position in it as the people of God. As we intercede, say for the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, we move from the wish-fulfillment of wanting the war to end magically and for everyone to live happily ever after, to a realisation that this issue burdens us, and that in some very small way we are caught up in it, even if that is only in our emotional response to the News on television. What hope offers us is the realisation that we are not impotent in this situation– that we can impact in various ways (some greater than others) what is going on. We could for example support one of the Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) offering aid to the people of that country; we could offer support to the families forced to flee those countries for fear of death; we could write to our MP urging a change of tactics in our engagement with these wars. There are all sorts of things that we can do, and what we do will be determined by our particular take on the issue – the important bit is the realisation that we as the people of God in this place and at this time are caught up in this in one way or another and that it requires a response from us.
Intercession then is never a handing over of a problem to God alone, but rather a handing over of the problem to God along with our willingness to act as part of the solution. This then is where prayer becomes scary, and we are well advised to beware of what we pray for!
So, intercessory prayer gives us a heightened awareness of our roles and responsibilities in the world …and it becomes a skilled part of our religious practice, an area of great power and many dangers, an area of great blessing and potential challenge, but all rooted in the knowledge that we can, if we wish, act selflessly on behalf of others and their wellbeing.
Jesus says:
If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it…
This is the great hope of the Gospel – this is why we can return with confidence again and again to prayer for the church and the world. Jesus does not offer us magical release from our responsibilities, indeed quite to opposite the more we pray the more we come to realise our responsibilities within the reality of our relationship, our society and our world. He doesn’t offer us instant gratification, but rather the deeper assurance best articulated by Mother Julian of Norwich that , ‘All shall be well and all shall be well and all shall be very well’
If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.
Jesus offers us the assurance that not only will those people and thing for which we pray be transformed, but that we too shall be transformed by our intercession for them.
Questions:
- Who or what do you pray for?
- What do you hope or expect will happen when you pray?
- Do you think you can change God’s mind?