The great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman has a wonderful book about the Psalms – the ancient songs of faith collected in the Old Testament book called the Book of Psalms or the Psalter. Brueggeman argues that you can break out the Psalms into three different types, or tones, or perspectives. First, there are the psalms of orientation, which express a sense of order and confidence: The world makes sense, I’m God’s favorite, things are great. Here’s an example from Psalm 16: “O God, you are my portion and my cup; it is you who uphold my lot. My boundaries enclose a pleasant land; indeed, I have a goodly heritage… I have set you always before me; because you are at my right hand I shall not fall.”
But life isn’t always like that, right? Which brings us to the psalms of disorientation – when the psalmist discovers that even with God at your right hand, you can still fall. Things are terrible; where are you, God? What gives? These psalms include lament, reproach, cries for help and anger at enemies. There are many such psalms; the most famous is probably Psalm 22, used in Holy Week. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me, and are so far from my cry and from the words of my distress? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer; by night as well, but I find no rest. Yet you are the Holy One, enthroned upon the praises of Israel… Be not far from me, for trouble is near, and there is none to help.”
Among the psalms of disorientation are some known as the imprecatory psalms, which call down God’s wrath upon the poet’s enemies. Psalm 109 is a good example of the genre –
“Let their days be few, and let others take their office. Let their children be fatherless, and their wives become widows. Let their children be waifs and beggars; let them be driven from the ruins of their homes. Let the creditor seize everything they have; let strangers plunder their gains…” … There’s a lot more.
And then… there are psalms of reorientation, that describe life and faith after the crisis. God saved me; I’m sadder and wiser now; but I also know that I can trust in God at a deeper level. The chunk of Psalm 40 that we read today is a great example:
I waited patiently for you, O God; you stooped to me and heard my cry. You lifted me out of the desolate pit, out of the mire and clay; you made my footing sure. Happy are they who trust in you! (Psalm 40)
Brueggeman maps out all this to help us pray the Psalms – because our lives tend to have moments when we’re deep in the pit, and moments when we look back at hard times from a place of renewal and gratitude.
The church has a special relationship with the Psalms. It’s the only book of the Bible that’s fully included in the Book of Common Prayer. It’s the only book of the Bible that we read from at every service of public and private worship. Our liturgical tradition invites us not just to read (mark, learn, and inwardly digest) the Psalms but to pray them.
And: I struggle with that sometimes! Often my mood doesn’t match the mood of the psalm appointed for the day. And there are specific psalms where I struggle to connect with the text prayerfully. But the Psalms teach us something really important about the breadth of what prayer is and can be. About the scope of thoughts and feelings we can bring to God in prayer.
I want to talk about prayer, today.
I realize that I need to offer 100 words here on what prayer is, although that could be its own sermon. In general, prayer is any way of talking to God, or of listening for God. Prayer could be reading out loud from a book, alone or with others. Prayer could be talking or singing or journaling or knitting or painting.
Prayer could be hiking or walking the dog or washing dishes or going to a protest. It’s not that everything is prayer. It’s more than anything can be prayer, if you do it with your heart and mind pointed towards God, open to the holy. Let me know if you want to borrow a book on prayer, or if we should gather to talk about ways to pray, sometime.
Last week we had our first-ever Stump the Pastor session after church, and a couple of people asked really important questions about prayer. I do not want those askers to feel singled out; these were both questions I’ve heard from others too, recently. And I do believe what our high school teachers told us: if you’re wondering about it, others are too. These were good, timely, important questions, and I’m taking another run at them today.
First: What does it mean to pray for a political leader whom you believe to be causing profound harm? …
Let’s start with what we’re doing when we pray for somebody – for anybody. Is praying for someone an expression of approval? I thought about my personal prayer list, in the Notes app on my phone. Some things on that list are situations I’m asking God to sustain, to keep the way they are. For my parents’ continued good health. For the continued flourishing of our youth program. For my college kid to have interesting classes again this term.
But many things on my list are situations where I’m praying for change. For somebody to find a new, less toxic job. For somebody’s cancer treatment to be effective. For somebody to be able to move through grief. For a broken relationship to move towards resolution – one way or another. For someone’s heart to be profoundly changed, so that they stop causing harm.
When I pray about something or someone, there are all kinds of things I might be asking or hoping for. I definitely don’t only pray for things and people I think are hunky-dory; far from it.
Lots of our prayers are for change, of one kind or another. “Let their days be few, and let others take their office,” from Psalm 109, is a prayer. So is “Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore,” my favorite line from a hymn we’re singing today – a prayer for change in me, in us.
Regarding praying for our political leaders, in particular… The Church of England, our mother church, was started BY a king, and founded as a national church. It’s not surprising that our way of faith developed with a strong bent towards praying for political and civic leaders. God save the king! The Episcopal church inherited some of that ethos, though we’re not a national church.
Praying for leaders is Biblical, too. The Old Testament has a strong sense of leaders’ responsibility for the wellbeing and righteousness of the people. 1 Timothy calls Christians to “pray for kings and all in high positions, “that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life” – a prayer for boring, stable, non-hostile governance.
I found a website from the Church in Wales listing all the prayers they needed to update recently from Queen to King: “We beseech thee to hear us, O Lord God; and that it may please thee to keep and strengthen thy servant Charles our King that he may serve thee in righteousness and holiness of life…”
“We pray thee to guide and direct all who govern the nations of the world, especially our Sovereign Lord, King Charles…, that we and all [people] may be justly and quietly governed.”
“Almighty God, the fountain of all goodness, we humbly beseech thee to bless our Sovereign Lord, King Charles, and all who are set in authority under him, that they may order all things in wisdom, righteousness and peace, to the honour of thy holy Name and the good of thy Church and people.” These are prayers for the King; but they’re prayers for the King to be righteous, holy, wise, and just. And to do his job well.
There are similar prayers in our Book of Common Prayer – like, “We pray for all who govern and hold authority in the nations of the world; That there may be justice and peace on the earth.”
In the Prayers of the People that we use right now, there aren’t spaces for specific names, but there have been times when our liturgy has had us praying for a Democratic president and a Republican governor, or vice versa, by name, in the same breath.
Maybe our Prayers of the People needs a few more words, to remind our praying selves that when we pray for our leaders, our prayer is “that thy people may be justly and quietly governed.”
It’s OK if there are people you just can’t bring yourself pray for. Truly. You can leave it to others. And – but – repentance and transformation are at the heart of the Gospel. It is the responsibility of the Church as a whole to pray faithfully for all people to turn from evil, and towards good; from cruelty, towards mercy; from greed and hunger for power, towards justice and righteousness. As a church, we will keep praying for our leaders – the ones we like and trust, and the ones we hate and fear.
God save the king.
The second good question from last Sunday was something like this: Isn’t prayer kind of passive, in the face of everything coming at us and our communities? …
The question evokes leaders who, in the face of preventable tragedies and atrocities, offer “thoughts and prayers” for those affected. Prayer should never be an excuse for inaction about something on which you have the power to take action.
Fury at those leaders who offer “thoughts and prayers” when they could offer real change is absolutely justified. I’m willing to call that blasphemy – a sin against the Holy Spirit.
So, yes, there are people who use prayer as cover for pious passivity. But I’m not going to let those jerks ruin prayer for us.
Prayer can also look passive in the face of the immoral use of violence. If people of faith praying at a vigil or protest are ignored, or mocked, or tear gassed, or arrested, that’s not the fault of the clergy or the moral order and convictions they represent. It’s the fault of the culture and movement and institutions that have decided that they just don’t care.
It is true, and can be frustrating, that historic Christianity (as opposed to white supremacist Christianity) has a difficult relationship with the use of violence. I took a whole class in seminary on Christian pacifism and just war theory. These are both huge bodies of writing and thought and policy and action. And a lot of it is an argument among Christians: between the pacifist position, that a follower of Jesus should never intentionally cause harm, and the “just war” position, that it’s incumbent upon Christians to be willing to use force in defense of the vulnerable. The course barely scratched the surface of these big issues, but I carried away a sense that pacifism is a fiercer and bolder position than I’d thought. Pacifism underlies the tools for nonviolent protest and organizing for change that have been so influential over the past century.
Nonviolence is far from passive, and we don’t have to look back at Gandhi or King to see that in action. I watched a video this week from the Minneapolis suburb of Lyn Lake. Picture a cool little downtown corner, older buildings updated with current businesses, traffic flowing by; could be someplace in Madison. An SUV pulls up onto the curb in front of the corner building, under a neon pizza sign; several ICE agents get out. As the video begins, you can see maybe five or six people on the street.
But within seconds, there are ten, then fifteen, then more, gathering around the agents, blocking the doors into nearby businesses, holding up cell phones to record, blowing whistles, chanting. Cars stop and honk their horns. People come out of the woodwork, rushing towards the scene – just ordinary people, who were just going about their days thirty seconds earlier.
By the end of the video, there are fifty-plus people on the scene. It takes exactly one minute for that loud, obnoxious, angry, nonviolent crowd to convince the ICE agents to get back in the car and drive away – tossing a can of tear gas as a parting gift.
If part of you is wondering, well, what if ICE was there to arrest somebody dangerous, one of those worst of the worst we hear about? … Well: the day before, that pizza shop hosted a fundraiser for local nonprofits helping those affected by the ICE presence in the Twin Cities, and raised $83,000. The co-owner of the shop told a reporter, “We probably put a target on ourselves… by helping people.”
Were any of those people praying? I don’t know. Probably. I would be. I will be. Praying for the dangerous moment to pass, unfulfilled. Praying for everybody to come out of this okay. Praying for clarity about what’s mine to do, and courage to do it.
Nonviolence can be fierce; nonviolence can be effective. And nonviolence can be dangerous.
Some of you may have seen a clip that’s been circulating of Rob Hirschfeld, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of New Hampshire, speaking at a vigil the night after the murder of Renee Good. Bishop Rob spoke about Jon Daniels, a seminarian from New Hampshire who became a martyr of the Civil Rights movement. Then he said, “I have asked [my] clergy to get their affairs in order, to make sure they have their wills written. Because now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”
When I heard that, I thought, “Yeah, he has a point. We should find a lawyer and make sure we’re up to date.” The reason I can – sort of, kind of – take Bishop Rob’s advice in stride is that I pray.
What does prayer do? Does prayer act in, or on, the world? Does prayer move anything outside of me? I find it untenable to think of God like a slot machine: if you put in enough prayer-coins, you increase your odds of getting the outcome you want. Many of us also know well that praying really really hard for something doesn’t make it so. There’s no qualitative or quantitative degree of prayer that gets you what you want. Does our prayer change something in God, or in the world? I don’t know. I’m not prepared to say no, but those answers lie in the terrain of mystery.
But I do know two things. I know that prayer changes something inside of me. It helps me pay attention. It helps me be available to opportunities to say and do what needs saying and doing. It helps me be more grounded, more clear, more brave – which is not to say that I’m notably grounded, clear, or brave; just more so than I am when I’m not praying regularly.
Prayer does things inside of me. And prayer, when it’s shared, does things between and among people.
On Tuesday evening, with some of you, I tuned in for the Zoom vigil held by the Episcopal Church’s Public Policy & Witness staff and the Episcopal diocese of Minnesota. It was “webinar”-style, where you can only see the leaders, not everybody else on the Zoom, and the “chat” function, the place over on the side where people can comment and share, was turned off as we began.
It started out as a pretty ordinary Compline service, and I admit, I was thinking: is this it? We do this several times a week here. Then they got to the prayers, and they had some special prayers read in various languages, for people at risk of deportation, for people living in fear, and so on… those were good; I saved some of them. But still, it felt a little flat. I wasn’t feeling like I was part of something. I was just sitting at the desk in my college kid’s bedroom, staring at a screen, alone.
And then they opened the chat for our prayer requests. And there was a wash, a waterfall, a fire hose of prayer. In Zoom meetings, once that chat column fills up with comments, you have to scroll down to see more. I scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, and scrolled, and still there was a little red box that told me, “99+ more comments below.” I didn’t read every word but I wanted to read enough to be in prayer with thousands of other Episcopalians across the country and the world – praying for many, many things, but also praying, over and over again, for peace; for justice; for safety; for courage. For those in power to be just and merciful. For those vulnerable to be protected. For those standing by to be faithful, and brave, and ready. Someone wrote, For all of us trying to carry on with our lives despite our fear and griefs. Someone wrote, Forgive my weariness and fear. Someone wrote, Show us how to be.
I read, and scrolled, and scrolled, and wept, because I wasn’t alone in front of a screen anymore. I was part of a great fellowship of prayer. I am part of a great fellowship of prayer.
So are you. So are you.
A lot of us have friends, family, connections in the Twin Cities; what’s happening there feels close and urgent and weighty. But I know, too, that for many of you, there are struggles on the homefront that have you keeping the news at arms’ length. Somebody’s not well. Money is tight or a job is toxic. A relationship is failing, or loneliness or grief haunt your days.
I want you to feel prayer wash over you and your needs and struggles, too. I want you to feel grounded in practices of prayer that console and guide and encourage you.
Prayer is a frustratingly elusive topic. I can’t tell you, Just do this. Nonetheless: this is a time for us to lean into being a people of prayer. Among other things, I hasten to add! But prayer should be near the top of the list.
Episcopal priest and writer Jim Friedrich wrote recently, “Prayer is a refusal to consent to an unredeemed world, and for people of faith it is foundational for an ethical existence…. Prayer breaks the silence, awakens the passive, and cultivates action, both human and divine. So don’t despair, or give in, or give up. Look for the ones who are called into the righteous flow of prayer and action. And join them.”
Amen, amen.