“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and
the door will be opened for you.
--Matthew 7:7 NRSV
I am in
the business of prayer. In every setting where others know I am a minister, I
am asked to pray. I lead corporate prayer in worship. I pray with people whom I
meet with and visit. I offer up prayers for others throughout my day. One might
think I know more about prayer than I do, since I’m doing it all the time. Yet,
when it comes to praying, I feel like a tightrope walker without a net. I know
so little of how it works, if it works, when it works and why it doesn’t work
or at least seems not to work. So much about it is a mystery to me.
As with
a lot of language about God, it is easier for me to say what I believe it is
not than it is for me to say what I believe prayer actually is or does. For
example, I do not believe prayer is a mechanical transaction where we say the
magic words and then what we pray for happens. Prayer is not a purchase via
Amazon Prime where the 1-click-purchase button makes a product in a vast
warehouse begin its journey to my door step within two days and my credit card
is automatically charged. Jeff Bezos may control much of our economy, but he
hasn’t figured out how to make prayers act like monthly refills of laundry
detergent.
I also
don’t believe that prayer is only a process of changing the one who prays,
although I know plenty who do. No doubt, praying does change the one who prays.
It can operate much in the same way as meditation bringing centering,
mindfulness and inner peace. The act of praying brings intention to changing
one’s own behavior for the better, such as achieving more patience, less
anxiety and more awareness of others. In some ways, measuring a change in one’s
self is the easiest way to discern that prayer works. I don’t believe, however,
that prayer is simply a closed circuit within a person. If prayer affects
nothing outside of oneself, it seems like something else is going on, however
good it may be.
I don’t
believe God is like a genie who exists to grant our wishes. I suppose God could
have a purpose for us finding a parking spot close to a store or an interest in
us making it through an intersection before a light changes, but in general, I
would assume God has bigger concerns elsewhere in the universe. And no, as much
as Patrick Mahomes’ passing ability seems like a supernatural occurrence every
time he connects with Hill or Kelce, I don’t think God is going to fix it so
the Chiefs automatically win a second Super Bowl.
I don’t
believe God controls everything making prayer unnecessary. I do believe that
God is always at work in our world, in ways we often fail to recognize, but
there’s a whole lot of awful stuff happening in this world that I don’t want to
lay at God’s feet. If God causes pandemics, school shootings and cancer diagnoses
and God could have prevented them but just willy-nilly chose not to do so, then
God is amoral if not immoral and therefore unworthy of love and worship. God
may allow awful things to happen, but my faith in God being first and foremost
a loving God prevents me from believing God allows terrible things to occur
without some other worse thing making the terrible things we see a necessity.
Call it free will or what you like, but I am still placing my bets that God
allows the chaos still present in this world to exist because of a higher
purpose unknown to us.
It's
this last point, which involves some pretty deep stuff, such as the nature of
who God is and questions of why God allows undeserved suffering, that hits at
the heart of the question of whether or not prayer works. In my experience, one
never arrives at truly satisfactory answers to these questions but at best one
can only find answers one can live with. When one has discarded all the bad
solutions for the question of why God seems to act sometimes and not others,
the few solutions left are enough to get by on or they are not. Most days the
answers I’ve come up with are enough for me, but truth be told some days are so
bad these answers are not enough. I’m always mistrustful of people who think
they have such deep mysteries, like the ones surrounding prayer, figured out.
A big
reason I believe prayer does work is because I accept that there are more
variables in the mix than just my prayers and God. There is a whole planet of
people acting with free will, making good and bad choices, and the consequences
of those choices may linger for generations to come. Also, we exist in a present
moment affected by the choices of people who lived generations, if not
centuries and millennia, before we even drew our first breaths. If human free
will is real, then God has to work within and without a whole lot more human
actions than just my single prayer.
I just
read an essay on prayer that addresses this point by the excellent scholar ofthe Old Testament/Hebrew Bible Terrence Fretheim, who died last year. Fretheim
notes occasions in scripture where human prayers seem to change God’s mind—a startling
thought, if such human language can apply to the creator of the universe. He
also offers a great example of how our prayers are one part of a massive matrix
of human activity:
An analogy
may be suggested: human sinfulness has occasioned numerous instances of the
misuse of the environment. Some of that misuse (e.g., pesticides) has caused
cancer in human beings and devastated animal populations. Human beings may be
forgiven by God for their sin, but the effects of their sinfulness will
continue to wreak havoc beyond the act of forgiveness. We confess that in
response to prayer God is at work in these effects, struggling to bring about
positive results in and through human (and other) agents. It is not a question
as to whether God wills good in the situation. The issue is God’s relational
commitments that may entail self-limiting ways of responding to evil and its
effects in the world. Anti-God
factors may be powerfully present and shape the future in negative ways, even
for God.
I have many Christian
friends for whom talk of God’s “self-limiting ways” amounts to blasphemy. They
would argue that since God is omnipotent, God Can do anything at any time. I
wouldn’t disagree with that point in theory, but I would assert, along with
Fretheim, that God has for whatever reason given human beings freedom and
freedom is often misused. God works in response to our less than good choices
and actions at a level of complexity that boggles the mind considering all the
choices and actions of all the people who live now and have ever lived before.
If anything, the idea of
God working in response to and in the midst of the multitude of human actions
and choices means that your and my prayers matter greatly. The more we connect
with God, align ourselves with God’s purposes and make space for God to work
through us and our prayers the less resistance there is to God’s ongoing works
of love and goodness. We can never know for sure or by how much, but our
prayers for ourselves, for others and for our world may be just the wiggle room
God needs to work in a given situation or life. I have often heard the metaphor
of a small crack of light shining into a dark room enabling a person to see as
a description of God’s love and light shining into a painful situation. Our
prayers may just be the small crack for God’s light to shine through.
Grace and Peace,
Chase
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