Hilton Head Island, SC – April 16, 2023
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 11:20-26; Mark 14:32-42
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you will receive it, and you will.” – Mark 11:24 (RSV)
I want to begin this sermon with an explanation. The first thing I shall say is that anyone who has heard me preach for a dozen or more times probably has concluded I do not use the lectionary for the scripture passages I address in sermons. For those who don’t know, the lectionary is an ecclesiastical calendar that suggests certain biblical readings for every Sunday of the year. Many of you also may not know that every Sunday has a particular name or number, but it does.
I don’t follow the lectionary because I am not liturgical kind of preacher. Instead, I am what is called a topical preacher by other preachers, and not always in a kindly fashion. But, because I am a topical preacher, and usually have an ax of some sort to grind or at least to sharpen a bit, I first decide on a topic, and then find scripture readings which address that topic. Those who don’t approve of this brand of hermeneutics (which is a fancy word of Greek origin which means “preaching”) might say that I use biblical texts as pretexts for what I want to say. That could be true in some instances, but I wanted to begin by telling you something some of you have long ago deduced, and others may not have thought about until this moment.
I tell you this because when I went to look for scripture passages and other literary sources that refer to prayer, it became evident to me almost immediately that this is going to be a Mulligan Stew kind of sermon, because so many ancillary ideas flashed through my cranium. I will simply do my best to try to make sense out of all these factors. But --- to be forewarned is to be forearmed, as they say.
There are five basic elements to prayer. First is praise. We praise God for His never-ending love and care of us. We recognize that He alone is worthy of unending praise. If we fail to praise God, inevitably we demean ourselves.
Next comes thanksgiving. We thank God for all His blessings to us, for the bounty of the earth, how it provides for our needs. We thank God for one another, that we are not alone in the world, but that He has placed all of us in a community. We thank Him for our families and friends, for those who give warmth, meaning, and enjoyment to our lives. Most of all, we thank God for life itself, and for all the ways in which life showers us with blessings far beyond our deserving.
We also engage in confession when we pray. We are forced to admit that we do not always follow God’s laws, and we do things we know we shouldn’t do. They say that confession is good for the soul, but some souls are more aware of their wrongdoings than others, and confession is more of a challenge for some than others. But until we confess our sins, we cannot be entirely liberated from the knowledge of the burden by which they weigh us down.
The fourth element of prayer is intercession. By means of that type of prayer, we ask for God’s assistance for people we know or kinds of people we know about who need God’s power to overcome particular difficulties they face: illness, sorrow, pain, loss, grief. Because we have concerns for these people, we ask God to intercede on their behalf.
The final aspect of prayer is called petition. As we pray to God for others, we also ask His blessings to descend on us as well. We are especially prone to petition God for our own assistance when we are confronted by situations for which we can see no solution. We pray the hardest when we hurt the most.
Not every prayer always contains all five of those elements, but over time all elements should be included in whatever prayers anyone prays. Too often petitions and intercessions are the only parts of prayer.
God hears all our prayers, and He responds in a manner we may understand or possibly never understand. Sometimes God’s answer to our prayers is “No.” God is the only being in the universe who sees all and knows all, and whose wisdom is capable of sorting out all the vicissitudes of human existence. He knows our needs before we do and better than we do, and He provides the best means of meeting those needs. So we are urged to bring our concerns before the throne of grace, trusting that, as the anthem based on the 23rd Psalm proclaims, “My shepherd will supply my needs; Jehovah is His name.”
Clearly, Jesus was a man of prayer. All of the Gospels tell us that he frequently prayed, and that he sometimes went off by himself to pray for hours or even days. He also encouraged his disciples to pray. In Mark’s Gospel there is the story where Jesus saw a fig tree with no fruit on it, and he prayed to God to cause its death. Why he did that has caused much discussion among biblical commentators, but I won’t comment on it here. Mark says that the next day, when Jesus and the twelve passed the tree, they saw that it had withered away. Jesus said to them, “Have faith in God. Whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes…, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, it will be done for you” (Mark 11:22-24). The saying about the mountain is a poetic metaphor; Jesus surely did not mean for us to interpret it literally.
Later, in an episode where Jesus and the disciples were in the Garden of Gethsemane after the Last Supper, Jesus seems to have reversed his own advice to the twelve. Suspecting that at any moment he would be arrested by Roman soldiers, Mark says Jesus prayed as follows, “Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt” (14:37-8).
The title of this sermon may seem odd: Is Prayer Necessary? If we don’t pray to God, asking for certain things to happen, will they happen? Does God depend on us to pray the right kind of prayers for Him to do what we request Him to do?
Surely prayer is not a requirement to initiate divine action. It is debatable whether God does anything directly or if instead He uses other agents to accomplish His will. In any event, prayer probably is not a necessity as far as God is concerned, but it may be as far as we are concerned. People regularly pray for miracles to happen when nothing else appears to be achieving the desired result. Whether or not miracles occur likely does not necessitate prayer, but praying for miracles may ease the concern of those who pray for them.
In first Thessalonians (5:17), Paul advises us to “pray constantly,” or, as it says in the King James Version, “Pray without ceasing.” In the 1980s and 90s, I used to go on retreat to Mepkin Abbey near Charleston three times a year. I admire the monks there for many things, but especially because they have seven occasions for worship every day. More than anyone else I know, they “pray without ceasing.” However, again that can’t be taken literally, because if they prayed constantly, they couldn’t do anything else. “Never give up praying” is what Paul may have intended to say. In Romans, Paul wrote that God’s Spirit “helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (8:26). In other words, God answers our prayers even if we don’t know what to pray for or how to formulate a particular prayer request.
Sometimes in their prayers the clergy say things that are directed more toward the listeners than toward God. According to the Gospel of John, Jesus himself did that at the Last Supper, in what had been called the Great High Priestly Prayer. Speaking to God, Jesus said, “I have manifested thy name to the men thou gavest me out of the world; thine they were, and thou gavest them to me, and they have kept thy word. Now they know that everything that thou hast given me is from thee; for I have given them the words which thou gavest me, and they have received them and know in truth that I came from thee” (17:6-8). Those particular words seem more directed toward the ears of the disciples than to God’s ears, if God actually has ears, which somehow seem unlikely to me in a literal sense.
It is often claimed that there are no atheists in the foxholes. In times of major danger, some people who have never once prayed anything may hammer loudly on the gates of heaven with eager entreaties that they be spared. Hamlet said to Ophelia, “Nymph, in thine orisons be all my sins remembered,” but he didn’t pray for forgiveness for himself. In secret Hamlet listened as his uncle, who poisoned his father, the king, asked God’s forgiveness for his evil deed. At the end of his long plea, the now falsely-crowned new king mutters, “My words fly up, my thoughts remain below; words without thoughts never to heaven go.” We may delude ourselves when we pray, asking God for things we know He cannot give us.
People pray for outcomes for which prayers should never be offered. Teenagers pray that someone they are drawn to will be drawn to them. God doesn’t play Cupid for anyone. People pray for good weather when big events in their lives occur. God never changes the weather to suit people. People pray that “their team” might be victorious. That is ridiculous. They pray for new cars or bigger homes or more children or no children. Those too are highly dubious petitions. We should never pray for divine assistance in matters that don’t matter, or at least don’t matter much.
Sometimes it may be more effective to ask God for strength and endurance to withstand physical or spiritual challenges than it is to ask God to eliminate the challenges. On the bulletin cover is a quotation from Phillips Brooks, the famous nineteenth-century Boston preacher. “Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger people. Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks.” Richard Cecil, an eighteenth-century evangelical Englishman, said, “God’s way of answering the Christian’s prayer for more patience, experience, hope, and love often is to put him into the furnace of affliction.” Sometimes, instead of getting us out of trouble by prayer, God may put us into trouble.
On the other hand, Tennyson wrote, “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.” While no doubt that is true, there are many people who would not recognize the work of God in their lives if they tripped over it. To some people, prayer comes very naturally, and to others, even to people of deep faith, it seldom occurs to them to pray. Last Sunday Lois and I saw a friend we met in a church in which I was the interim pastor more than twenty years ago. That lady prays without ceasing for everything and everybody. Her piety is as deep as the ocean and as wide as the sky. Would that everyone was like that, but it is not so, nor shall it ever be. Some people need to be prayed for, because they will never pray for themselves. For them, prayer is the last thing on their minds.
If you are not a practiced pray-er, don’t beat yourself up over it. Nonetheless, prayer may become more necessary for you than for others, because prayer does draw everyone closer to God who regularly prays to God. If you don’t pray very often, starting to do so will certainly strengthen your connection and commitment to God.
Furthermore, when many people pray for God’s intercession over particular issues, it can have a positive effect. Through the years I have called on many people in hospitals who told me they knew that many people were praying for them, and that helped them to get well sooner and to heal quicker.
Our hymnal is The Pilgrim Hymnal, a hymnal of the former Congregational Christian Church, most of whose congregations are now part of the United Church of Christ. At home I have a copy of it, and four other hymnals of the Presbyterian Church (USA), plus the Scottish Psalter and Church Hymnary of the Church of Scotland. Every one of those hymnals contains What a friend we have in Jesus. The older I have gotten, and therefore the more crotchety theologically, I sing our last hymn with less enthusiasm every time I sing it.
Nevertheless, in preparation for this sermon, I looked up the background of this hymn in The Gospel in Hymns by Albert Edward Bailey. I have owned that volume since I was in seminary. Mr. Bailey was an educator who took a particular interest in musicology and hymnody. Here is his honest assessment about the text of What a friend we have in Jesus. “It is not good poetry. The rhymes are monotonous: ‘bear, prayer, bear, prayer; anywhere, prayer, share, prayer; care, prayer, prayer, there.’ It is what might be called doggerel…. Our criticism is made harmless by the tremendous service it has rendered. An unlettered person can understand it; the humblest saint can take its admonitions to heart, practice prayer, find his load more bearable and his spiritual life deepened.”
Everything Bailey said, including the last two sentences, I agree with, even when my crotchets are working overtime. Therefore, let us sing with gusto, if possibly less than overwhelming theological affirmation, the best-known hymn to Mainline Protestants on the subject of prayer on both sides of the Atlantic, and the only hymn which seemed appropriate for ending this service, What a friend we have in Jesus.