“No,
I don’t have a prayer, really.” Those were the words of a friend of mine - we’ll
call him Terry - in a conversation we had the other day. He told me he didn’t have a prayer. He’d just been interviewed for a job, and I’d
asked him what he thought his chances were.
He’d started out with high hopes, but he didn’t think the interview had
gone all that well (not that he minded too much, from what he said, he’d also
found he didn’t want that job quite as much as he’d thought he did).
But
it’s an odd phrase, I think, especially in this rather secular world, to say
you don’t have a prayer. As a Christian, I’d want to reply that we always do have
a prayer. But as today’s Gospel reading reminds us, we have to do it right if
we want our prayers to be heard. We have to know ourselves, and we have to know
what we’re praying for, and why. And we have to honest and sincere when we do
it.
The
story Jesus told concerned two people who went up to the temple to pray, and
the prayer of one of them was heard by God, the prayer of the other was not. I
think the people listening to this story would have been pretty sure straight
away whose prayer would be heard, and their assessment would have been wrong.
The Pharisee went into the temple full of confidence and knowing all was well
between him and God. If that’s not the sort of guy whose prayer is heard then
something must be going very wrong. The other man was a tax collector, a
betrayer of his people and his faith, a man in league with the pagan Romans, a
collaborator and probably a swindler and a cheat to boot. He probably entered
the temple half expecting to be thrown out at any moment. But in fact the one of those two whose prayer
was heard by God was the one who probably didn’t really think he had a prayer. But in reality it was the other guy who
didn’t have a prayer, for I don’t think the Pharisee was even talking to God at
all.
Imagine
him, standing there to declaim his prayers in a confident and loud voice. And
picture the tax-collector, mumbling prayers in a way that you probably couldn’t
tell what he was saying even if you were right next to him. And anyway, he wasn’t standing like the
Pharisee, but flat on his face not daring even to look upwards. But here’s the thing: the tax-collector was
praying, while the Pharisee was just showing off. The tax-collector was talking to God, even
though perhaps he didn’t think he had much of a chance of being heard; the
Pharisee, super-sure of his own goodness, was really talking to anyone within
earshot, to anyone he could show off to.
The
famous preacher and Biblical teacher Charles Spurgeon was once listening to
young ministers in training, as they practised their preaching skills. He watched one young man ascending the steps
to the pulpit full of confidence, almost showing off, and looking very certain
of himself. Sadly his performance as a
preacher didn’t match his show; he made
a mess of his address, had nothing really to say, and at the end of it he
descended the steps full of shame and dejection. Charles Spurgeon took him to one side and
said, “Young man, if you had ascended those steps the way you came down them,
you might have descended them the way you went up!”
In
other words, we should always avoid boastful show. For it isn’t how good we are that matters
ever, all that matters is how good God is.
And this is the great theme of the story Jesus told: what we offer God
in humility, what we offer knowing we’re not worthy, not sufficient, not
spiritually healthy and wealthy, well, it may not even seem worth offering, we
may not think we have a prayer - but what we offer God will transform, to make
it more than we could ever have been, ever have achieved on our own. When we’re tempted in our prayer and our
worship into too confident a show of what we have and who we are, then we tread
on very dangerous ground. I have lost count of the times in my life when pride
has come before a fall.
But
even when our pride brings us down, we still have a prayer. Over the years I’ve
been greatly drawn to the gentle and persuasive writings of Mother Julian of
Norwich. Mother Julian was a medieval
mystic, an anchoress or female hermit living and ministering from the church of
St Julian’s, in Norwich, from which she took her name - her real name is
unknown. I think her writings speak just
as profoundly in this modern world as they did to the people of her day; and I
think I’m right in saying that her work has never been out of print since its
first publication. She had a deep and
wonderful awareness of the all-availing love of God, coupled with just as deep
an awareness of her own frailty and sin. The visions that informed her writing
occurred during a period of her life that involved both severe physical illness
and alongside that a profound sense of her own spiritual unworthiness.
But
one of the wonderful things she says is that she realised how God loved her at
the point of her own sinfulness (and even at the times when she was openly
rejecting him) - he loved her just as much, just as deeply and fully, in those
bad times as he would love her in heaven.
Even at the times when she herself chose to be lost and perhaps also
chose to be unlovely, she was never lost to God, never unloved by her Lord.
And
that’s true for all of us, and that’s why the prayer of the penitent and
suddenly so self-aware tax-collector was heard that day in the temple. That’s true for me. I haven’t got a prayer; or frankly I shouldn’t have, not the way I
see it. What right have I to expect that
God should want to hear anything I say, what right have I to insist he should grant
anything I might ask? Haven’t I rejected
him, again and again, by the selfish choices I’ve made, by the hurtful things
I’ve said and thought, by the unthoughtful and uncaring things I’ve done or the
good and kind things I’ve left undone? I
needn’t expect him to like me, and perhaps he doesn’t, or at least I suppose he
doesn’t like the ways in which I hurt him.
But he does love me, and so he does hear me, he does listen to me.
I
used to hate it when children came up to me at the end of school assembly or at
our messy church or family service, to ask me questions about God. Because they would always ask really hard
things, like ‘If God made everything, who made God?’ But the other week a young child asked the
minister at a service I was attending, ‘What do you think God looks like?’ and
that was I think a bit easier to answer.
As Christians we can say that God is like Jesus. In Jesus we see the what complete and divine
love looks like when expressed in human terms, when lived in a human life: for Jesus is the one called Emmanuel,
God-is-with-us. So this is what God’s
like: he is like the man who, as the
nails were hammered through his wrists to secure him to the cross on which he
would die, still said, still prayed, ‘Father, forgive them for they don’t know
what they are doing.’
God
loves me now as much as he will ever love me.
That’s the insight Mother Julian had;
and it’s true for you as it is for me, and it’s true for all those
people out there who aren’t thinking of church, or God, or sin, or
righteousness today. God doesn’t only
love nice and safe and good people - in fact sometimes we must be harder to
love than the prodigal sons of this world, because they might wake up to just
who they are and what they’ve done, whereas we might fool ourselves that we’re
good enough as we are. For here’s the thing about that story Jesus told: God
loved the Pharisee in the temple that day just as much as he loved the
tax-collector; indeed, if either one of
those two men was breaking the heart of God it would have been the Pharisee,
because that shell of supreme and yet unfounded self-confidence with which he
surrounded himself was fatally separating him from the love God so much wanted
him to know and to share. Fatally
separating him from the love of God - the way to life is open to us, but we’re
made worthy of it not by our own goodness and piety and regular attendance at
divine worship, but only by God’s love, by grace, by Jesus. It’s true what they
say: blessed are those who know their need of God.
I
don’t have a prayer; that’s as true for
me as it was for my friend Terry. But
that’s sort of the point; as a
Christian, I have to wake up to the fact that it’s not about me, it’s about
what God can do for me, and to me, and through me, if I let him - with what I
can offer him, not from strength and certainty and success, but from weakness
and failure. I don’t have a prayer,
except that God gives me a prayer to say out of weakness and brokenness; not from any place of security or
achievement, but when I know I need his healing grace; not from some high place where I can be seen
and admired and respected, but at the foot of the cross where the reality of me
is exposed, and I can’t still be the fake me I’d like the world to see and
applaud.
We
need always and constantly in our prayers and our meditation, in our planning
and our preparation, to come to the cross. We need to come to the place where our
Lord bears the pains and the penalty that should have been mine but have become
his, that should have been yours but have become his. In the end I have a
prayer not because I believe in God but because, amazingly and against all the
odds, he believes in me; and in you; and in those who don’t yet know him, but who
might come to know him if we tell them about the prayers he hears, this prayer
of ours he has heard: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
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