Sermon for Sunday,  February 5, 2006

WHY DOESN’T GOD ANSWER MY PRAYERS?

5^th in a series on Questions from the Street

by

Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz

 Scripture:  Matthew 6:5-13

⁵ "And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. ⁶ But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you. ⁷ "When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. ⁸ Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. 

⁹ "Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. ¹⁰ Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. ¹¹ Give us this day our daily bread. ¹² And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. ¹³ And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one

I looked at two books the past week that tell some important stories about prayer. One is the story that New York resident Trisha Meili tells about her life threatening ordeal when she was attacked in 1989 one evening while jogging in Central Park. She was sexually assaulted and brutally beaten and left for dead. When she was discovered several hours later she had lost most of her blood and her family was told that she probably would not survive this awful trauma.

She did survive and became known in the media as the Central Park jogger. Her story is an inspiring example of resilience and courage and determination—and prayer. While she describes herself as someone who is not religious by the traditional meaning of that word, she tells of the hundreds of letters and notes she received from people who were praying for her recovery and says that she knows those prayers were part of her healing.

And she tells of one of her doctors, the eye surgeon who accomplished the almost impossible task of replacing her eye that had been torn from the socket in the beating. She met with him a year or so after the surgery and here is what he said: “I am sure that prayer has something to do with this. I am someone who believes in prayer. It helps you when you are a doctor and you don’t think you are able to do something because you are just as fallible as everybody else, when you don’t think you can reach a certain level that has to be reached.” (P 83 in I Am The Central Park Jogger)

The other reference I looked at is a new book by University of Colorado professor Patricia Raybon who tells about her own journey of faith and prayer. Her book, I Told The Mountain To Move, is a story of her growth in prayer as she dealt with her husband’s life threatening illness and ten hour brain surgery and then the challenge of her daughter becoming a Muslim. She tells about how while her husband was in surgery the stranger sitting with her in the surgery waiting room was trying to strike up a conversation. Raybon says that she found herself not wanting to talk to anyone because she was so concerned about the danger her husband was in, but she found herself moved when the woman next to her in the waiting room shared that she was waiting while her young adult son was having surgery because he had tried to kill himself by swallowing Drano. Patricia Raybon led the woman to a corner of the waiting room, took her hands and said a prayer for her and her son.

Almost everyone says that they pray—even people who say they are not sure that there is a God say that they pray. And almost all of us say that we want to grow in our practice of prayer and our understanding of prayer. And most of us have questions about prayer.

What is prayer for? Is it a way of telling our wish list to a cosmic Santa Claus? Is it a way of persuading God to come around to seeing things the ways we see them? Is it manipulating God? When people take slips of paper to Jerusalem to the Western Wall to place in the cracks and crevices there, is that a way of getting even closer to God and seeing that God automatically grants whatever we ask?

Most of us have questions, and most of us have prayed prayers that did not get the sort of answers we prayed for. And we are in good company. Even St. Paul had that experience. Paul tells us in his second letter to the congregation in Corinth that he has some sort of illness or problem or disability. He calls it his thorn in the flesh, something from Satan he says to keep him from being too elated. He prayed three times for God to take this problem away and his prayer did not remove this problem but what he learned or heard from God was, “My grace is sufficient for you and my power is made perfect in weakness.” Even Paul, the leader of the early Christian movement did not get everything he prayed for.

Prayer is not a way to tell God how to run the world. Prayer does not mean, if we trust in God and follow God’s ways, that life will go just the way we think it should and all our wishes will come true.

If that is the case, why do we pray?  Someone said, we pray not so much to inform God as to inform ourselves. We pray so that we can strengthen our relationship with God. And while some of our prayer time is talking to God as a good friend who wants to know what is on our heart, more of our prayer time may become a matter of listening to God, reading a passage of scripture and then being quiet and letting God speak to us while we focus on that verse.

If our prayer time is successful, we will become different persons. We will be better aligned with God and formed by God into more of the likeness of Christ. We will be altered. I was reading something about a church altar recently and the writer accidentally misspelled the word for this centerpiece of our worship; they called it an “alter”. It is a fortuitous error. In Israel the altar was the place where people brought their offerings to God—their sacrificial gifts. This beautiful piece of wood is to be that—an altar, a holy place for us to bring our offerings—not to bring our “collection”. The gifts that we bring here represent our lives and ourselves just as the offerings our Hebrew mothers and fathers brought. We do not bring just a “collection” of dollars; we are offering our lives again for God to utilize this week so this is an altar for our offerings.

It is also a table where we come to be fed and to commune with God; we Methodists call it an altar table. But the misspeller was right—it is also a place for us to come to be altered—to be transformed and changed and formed more into little Christs. And that is what our prayer time should always do for us—change us. Prayer not only changes things; prayer changes people and people go on to change things.

How shall we pray? The book of Psalms in your Bible is the first and one of the best answers to that. We began worship with a Psalm—Psalm 27—which is a statement of praise. Sometimes we begin worship with Psalm 51: Have mercy on me O God, and wash me thoroughly from my wrongdoing. I encourage you to use the Psalms with all of their variety of feelings and expression of doubt and loneliness and faith and trust—use those as a vital part of our prayer life. Begin this morning during communion.

Then-Jesus gives us a model prayer that we just heard being read. It has become so familiar to us that we just let it roll off our tongue without realizing what it means. It is a dangerous, subversive prayer just like the teacher who gave it to us. We cannot pray this prayer without being altered, without being changed.

This model prayer begins by focusing on God and not on our desires. May your kingdom come and your will be done—THROUGH ME! You and I are offering our lives for God to utilize for God to bring about God’s kingdom of justice and peace and compassion. We are signing on to that revolution when we recite that prayer!

 And after we do that, then we pray for ourselves—not as individuals but always as a community: give US our bread each day. Then Jesus has the gall to tie the forgiveness and mercy and new beginnings we ask for to our willingness to give that grace and forgiveness to other people. One goes with the other.

This is a life changing prayer and I use it regularly and a little fearfully in my own devotional life. There are other model prayers in your study guide today and if you want others we can provide them as well.

What do we get when we pray? We will not get everything we ask for but we will always get one thing: we will get time with God; we will strengthen our relationship with God. When we pray, we will get God with us. 

Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy knows that. He and his family are still reeling from the death of his 18-year-old son by suicide a month ago. Here is what he says about the past few weeks after he spoke graciously at his son’s funeral. He said, “One can never be prepared for that. The biggest thing for me is that I realized that God was going to uphold us. We are not promised in this world that everything will go the way we think it should.”

God is going to uphold us. God is going to uphold you. That is the reliable answer to your prayer. That is the faith, the confidence, and the transformation that comes from taking time with God in prayer. Amen.

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