A Winter Walk --A Very Simple Prayer 2-5-12

The Reading: Philippians 1: 3-8

Every time you cross my mind, I break out in exclamations of thanks to God. Each exclamation is a trigger to prayer. I find myself praying for you with a glad heart. I am so pleased that you have continued on in this with us, believing and proclaiming God's Message, from the day you heard it right up to the present. There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears.
It's not at all fanciful for me to think this way about you. My prayers and hopes have deep roots in reality. You have, after all, stuck with me all the way from the time I was thrown in jail, put on trial, and came out of it in one piece. All along you have experienced with me the most generous help from God. [God] knows how much I love and miss you these days. Sometimes I think I feel as strongly about you as Christ does!

The Gospel Matthew 6: 5-15

"And when you come before God, don't turn that into a theatrical production either. All these people making a regular show out of their prayers, hoping for stardom! Do you think God sits in a box seat?
"Here's what I want you to do: Find a quiet, secluded place so you won't be tempted to role-play before God. Just be there as simply and honestly as you can manage. The focus will shift from you to God, and you will begin to sense [divine] grace.
"The world is full of so-called prayer warriors who are prayer-ignorant. They're full of formulas and programs and advice, peddling techniques for getting what you want from God. Don't fall for that nonsense. This is your Creator you are dealing with, and God knows better than you what you need. With a God like this loving you, you can pray very simply. Like this:
Our Creator in heaven, reveal who you are. Set the world right;
Do what's best— as above, so below. Keep us alive with three
square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others.
Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil. You're in charge!
You can do anything you want! You're ablaze in beauty!
Yes. Yes. Yes.
"In prayer there is a connection between what God does and what you do. You can't get forgiveness from God, for instance, without also forgiving others. If you refuse to do your part, you cut yourself off from God's part.
~~~~~
A Winter Walk-A Very Simple Prayer 2-5-12


When we first moved into our house, there was a rather large bush in the center of our yard. I took one look at it and knew there was a tree waiting to be born. Over the two-plus years we have lived there I have kept at it and now we have a quite attractive tree in the center of our yard. It occurred to me one morning this week, when I was out in the front yard with the dogs and the sun was rising, that God must see a lot of bushes when looking at us—knowing that we are really trees waiting to be uncovered. For me, the sunrise is always a symbol of God’s faithfulness so as I stood in the yard for a few minutes waiting for the dogs to do, well, what dogs do in the morning, looking at the bush-now-tree in my yard, I couldn’t help but reflect on the absolute faithfulness of God as the master pruner and creator of trees-from-bushes. It’s like Paul says, “There has never been the slightest doubt in my mind that the God who started this great work in you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish on the very day Christ Jesus appears.”
Now we know that the early Christians, including Paul, expected Jesus to return in their own life-time. We’re not sure how that misunderstanding came about, and it doesn’t really matter; because it makes the scripture as alive for us today as it was for the early Christians. According to Paul, if you will allow me to continue my pruning metaphor, there has never been any doubt that the God who started pruning you would keep at it and bring it to a flourishing finish in the shape of a wonderful, beautiful tree. What does all of this pruning have to do with prayer—for me, God works with me, prunes me, if you will, most when I am alone in prayer. My heart is most open, and my ears most attuned to God when I find the time that God expects, really demands of me, to spend alone in the presence of my Creator. Jesus, while on earth, did a lot of praying—always alone, many times in the desert, or garden, where He sought special alone-time with God. Strangely, there are not a lot of His teachings recorded about prayer, but the one that is, is enough for us. And so as we continue our Spiritual Walk, we turn to Jesus to hear what He has to say about prayer:
“When you come before God, do it simply. God does not think more of you if you make your prayers into a theatrical production.” This should be great consolation to all of you who tell me that you don’t know how to pray. There is no “how to” and the great pray-ers of the world are not heard any more than you in your talking to God. In fact, Jesus tells us to get away from other people to pray so that we are not tempted to pray in a manner that is insincere, more for the benefit of the listeners than for true communication with God. When we are alone, quietly praying to God, Jesus promises us that our focus will shift from us to God, and we will begin to sense divine grace. I want to challenge all of you to find just such a time to be alone with God, to allow God’s divinely graceful pruning shears to prune away some of what is holding you back in your spiritual walk. For you cannot do it for yourself. We spoke of that last week. It is God who perfects us and continually renews and revives us. Just a quick gardening question: Why do we prune trees or plants? That’s right so they will grow. When they are weighted down with branches they don’t need, with branches that suck the nutrition out of the tree, they cannot grow. Take off those useless branches and they will flourish and reach into the sky.
Sometimes the Bible records the words of Jesus in such a way as to make us think Jesus is walking on the earth today. This is one of those times: Jesus says, the world is full of people who call themselves, ‘prayer warriors’ but they do not engage in this simple kind of prayer Jesus calls us to. Some of you may have run into some of them along the way. Jesus says they have ‘formulas and programs and advice’ which somehow are supposed to get you what you want from God. “Don’t fall for that nonsense” says Jesus. Because God created you, God already knows what you need and because God loves you, you can pray a very simple prayer. I hope you will allow me to give you my translation of Jesus’ prayer:
God, who created the world and all that is in it,
Allow me to know your presence in nature and
in my sister and fellow travelers on this earth.
Make the world into what you intended it to be.
Keep the earth on which we live in tune with heavenly beauty and
peace.
Bless us with just enough to eat.
Forgive us in the same manner we forgive others.
Keep the forces of evil out of our lives.
I worship you in your glory and honor you in all I do.
You are God, now and forever. Amen.
It’s a very simple prayer. However you pray it, it pretty much covers it all. What is Jesus saying to us when we pray like this? “God, who created the world and all that is in it”—we come into God’s presence and first acknowledge that we know this to be the God who created all that we have and all that we are. We sometimes falter here, especially those of us who are made just a little different from what some of the world wants us to be. But this is what we say when we say, “Our Creator”—God created us, all of us, with our talents, with our shortcomings which teach us to trust, with our passions and our needs. God did this and so we pray, “Allow me to know Your presence in nature and in my sister and fellow travelers on this earth”. This is a powerful line in the prayer—if we truly know God’s presence in nature, we will treat this earth and work to get others to treat this earth far differently than most of us do. We will use whatever influence we have to encourage the responsible uses of resources. We will save some for our children and grandchildren and great, great, great grandchildren. And when we recognize our creator in each and everyone we meet along the way, we will treat those in our presence with just a little more honor and respect, for when we greet each other, we are greeting the presence of God in each other. I have great respect for nuns and monks of both the East and West who bow to each other every time they meet or pass each other in the hall. They are bowing to the presence of God in fellow monks and sister nuns. What a beautiful sign of respect for each other and for God.
“Make the world what you intended it to be.” You’ve got to know that what we’ve done with the world and the world’s resources brings great pain to God’s heart. What would happen if the major corporations thought about the pain they are bringing to God the next time they had a decision to make? It’s a sobering thought.
“Keep the world in which we live in tune with heavenly beauty and peace.” With one line of a prayer, all the men and women in the world, all of them—no matter what country, could return to their homes and gardens and children and jobs. “Bless us with just enough to eat”. It doesn’t take much information to know that if we all changed the way we eat, there would be plenty of food to go around. Perhaps, if all of us pray this prayer enough, we will live long enough to see all the children of the world full and not hungry. We can pray, folks, we can pray!
“Keep the forces of evil out of our lives.” As we grow spiritually, there will be those who try to limit our growth, who tell us that God is not present in our lives. And so we pray for protection and the courage to trust God through it all.
“I worship you in your glory and honor you in all I do.” What if we made this the focus of our lives—worshiping God in all we say and do—what if that was our first thought in the morning and our last thought at night--:Great God, Creator and Sustainer of us all”—I worship you in all that I do today, tomorrow, and into eternity. “You are God, now and forever.” A very simple prayer for very simple folk. As we pray and sing this prayer today, may it reach as high as the heavens and as deep as our hearts. Amen and amen.