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"Pray"

Rev. Matthew Miller

FROM THE LETTERS 1 Timothy 2:1-7 click here to watch the  Sermon – "Pray"
FROM THE LETTERS 1 Timothy 2:1-7 click here to watch the Sermon – "Pray"

I was ten-years-old when I landed my first professional theater job. Earlier that same year I’d made my stage debut as Winthrop Paroo in a community theater production of the Meredith Wilson classic, The Music Man. That was all it took to get me hooked. Summer rolled around and one morning my mom showed me an audition notice in the paper. The professional Equity dinner theater in town was casting local children for its upcoming production of The Sound of Music. It was a cattle call. All the kids who were out of school showed up with their parents- including my mom who must have taken to the day off of work so I could go. The theater sat 400 and there were so many kids and parents that they had to bring us in in two groups. Now, my mom had said when she showed me the ad, “you probably won’t get cast, but it will be good experience for you to audition.” However improbable, I did get cast as Kurt, the youngest son of Baron Von Trapp. I spent the next nineteen weeks singing “Do Re Mi” eight times a week.  

One of the hazards of having started my life in musical theater is that certain songs have become my reflexive point of reference. If someone starts a sentence, “So…” I’ve been known to chime in with, “a needle pulling thread. Fa, a note to follow So.” And so on. 

And when it comes to starting things I invariably default to, “Let’s start at the very beginning/ a very good place to start.” 

Our reading comes from one of the letters Paul sent to his protégé, Timothy, to instruct him on his role as a leader in the church. “First of all,” he writes, starting at the very beginning. Only this isn’t a list of directives that Paul is sending along. There are no more bullet points. No second, third or fourth direction to give. By beginning with the words, “first of all,” Paul means to say something like, “above all,’ or ‘before anything else.’  The one thing, the most important thing that Paul wants Timothy and anyone else reading this letter to know, the most important thing that we have to do as people of faith is this: pray. Ask God, talk to God, thank God, praise God, cry out to God-anything and everything that is on our hearts. This is the single most vital practice to living not only as a follower of Christ, but as a community of followers in something we call church. Before we are anything else, says Paul, as those called and claimed in the waters of our baptism by Jesus Christ, we are a people who pray. We ask God for what we need. We check in with God throughout the course of our day. We lift up the needs and hurts of others, interceding with God on their behalf. We give thanks with every breath that fills our lungs for the simple yet irreplaceable gift of our lives. When it comes to being a person of faith, first of all, above all, before anything else- pray. It is the essential tenet of our faith. 

But wait a minute. Don’t Muslims pray? Five times a day, I mean it’s a thing for them, one of their five pillars. And Jews certainly pray. Where do you think the prayer Jesus taught comes from? It’s basically a Jewish prayer. Hindus pray, Sikhs pray. Buddhists pray- although some prefer to call it meditation. It the first and most important thing for us to do as Christians is to pray, how does that make us any different than any other religiously, or even spiritually minded person? Still, Paul sounds pretty insistent. He names multiple forms of prayer to make the point. Maybe what makes Christian prayers distinctive is their subject. I can’t speak for the prayer practices of other faiths, by Paul’s instruction is to make these prayers, these supplications, intercessions and thanksgiving prayers for everyone. Like much of the world we find ourselves in, prayer is often and primarily practiced as an individual pursuit that folks mostly engage in for their own benefit. From the mundane to the profound, I suspect that the great majority of prayers are about the person who offers it up. Dear God, help me find a parking space or pass this test, don’t let me get caught, forgive me for what I’ve done.  

I think about the sequence in the movie Bruce Almighty. Jim Cared plays a TV reporter who is chronically unhappy with his life, the assignments he’s given, the opportunities that pass him by, even a dog who won’t be housetrained. He blames God. Who wouldn’t? In a cinematic twist of fate, God offers Bruce the job for awhile to see if he can do better. He plays around with his newfound power, but starts to notice a growing cacophony of voices in his head that he just can’t shake. They’re prayers. But there are just so many of them. So, he tries to organize them. He tries filing cabinets, post it notes, until he comes upon the perfect solution- email. Instead of Yahoo, his mail provide is Yahweh. Suddenly, he’s got prayers. And a lot of them. So, he starts working through them, typing so fast that his fingers become a blur. He stops to take a break, thinking he’s made a dent, when another couple million show up in his Inbox. So, he just selects them al and answers with a simply, “yes, to all.” Chaos ensues. There is such an unprecedented number of lottery winners that each one only receives $17. The local hockey team wins the Stanley Cup- in the middle of the season. Praying for what we want, what’s good for us, what we think will make us happy- these aren’t the kind of prayers that Paul has in mind as the thing we should be about before anything else. The clue should be that little word- everyone. And then, just in case we’re not clear, he gets specific suggesting prayers for “kings and all who are in high positions.” 

Two things about that. First: we live in a democratic republic, so kings and other forms of autocrats aren’t really our jam. Second: because we might not fully relate to the absolute authority of someone like a king, we don’t fully grasp how odd this would have sounded to Timothy and the people in his community. The only “king” in their world would have been the Emperor of Rome. Depending on who filled that role, this would be a person who at the least claimed divinity for himself. In Rome you didn’t pray for the emperor, you prayed to him. At worst this could be someone who could, and very often did, make life a living hell for Christians. The kings and the people in high positions were the ones most likely to seek the destruction of the church and the people in it. 

The very first thing you do, says Paul, before you do anything else- you pray for those people. That’s what make it a Christian prayer. Anyone, and seemingly everyone, can pray for themselves. It happens all the time. As the old saying goes, there are no atheists in foxholes. God, if you’ll get me out of this alive, I’ll devote my life to you. It has to be one of the most common spiritual bargains for self-preservation every made. But the supplications, intercessions and thanksgiving that we’re called to offer up, the prayers that make and shape us as followers of Jesus Christ, aren’t the ones that we say for ourselves-they’re the ones that we say for the people we likely wouldn’t pray for otherwise. 

There is this misconception that we can follow Jesus and pretty much live our lives however we want, that it doesn’t really make all that much difference what else we do- how we make or spend our money. But I am here to tell you that that simply is not true. And above everything else, the difference it makes isn’t in who we vote for, or who we love, or where we stand on this or that issue. Above all the difference it make is in who we pray for. We pray for everyone. Period. No exceptions. We pray for their benefit. We pray for their good. We don’t necessarily have to pray for the success of their endeavors if what they’re doing is harmful, or destructive. But we do give thanks and ask God’s blessing on them. If, as Jesus suggests, God send the rain on the just and the unjust alike, who are we to withhold our prayers from someone who needs them. Who are we to decide who does or does not need, or worse who does or does not deserve our prayers. You don’t have to agree with someone to pray for them. In fact, that may be the very reason you need to pray for them.  

Paul makes it clear that we do not do this because it’s a nice thing to do. We do it because there is one mediator, Jesus Christ, who exchanged his life for the life of the world in order to set things right for everyone, everywhere. God didn’t pick and choose when sending Jesus to us. God replied to all and said, “yes.” God said yes, not to the individual desires of our hearts- a parking place, the lottery, an upgrade to first class, a Super Bowl trophy. God said yes to the deep hunger of the human heart to put right all the fear and enmity that have come between us.  

First of all, before anything else, that is the truth that informs everything else that we do. So we pray for the people we may not like every bit as much as we do for the people we do like. Our family lived in Denver when the shooting took place at Columbine High School there. It really took a toll on the community. In a gesture of healing, a local church planted 15 linden trees in memory of those who died on that day- 13 for the victims of that violence, plus 2 for the boys who carried it out before they shot each other. It wasn’t without controversy. Some of the parents who children had been killed walked into the prayer garden where they were planted and cut them down. Praying for everyone isn’t always easy. It certainly isn’t popular. But it is what we have to do before anything else- before all the moralizing and posturing and taking sides in endless and pointless culture wars. It’s what we have to do is we want to follow Jesus. Because that is what he did.  And what those parent, in their grief and their pain, what they didn’t know, what they didn’t realize, is that the only way to heal from that kind of pain, the only way to make any of that terrible, terrible wrong anywhere close to right is to pray for the ones who did it- to pray for their parents and their grandparents, to pray for the ones who loved them. Because when we pray for everyone, especially when we pray for the ones wo don’t want to pray for- for the ones who disagree and annoy us, for the ones who take too much and give too little, for the ones who would silence, or hurt, or destroy us if they could- when we pray like that it may not change them- but it will almost certainly change us. 

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