The Eighth Sunday after Trinity

25th July 2010: Sung Eucharist 9.00 AM

Preacher: The Revd John Chynchen, Cathedral Chaplain

Readings: Genesis 18. 20 – 32; Colossians 2. 6 – 15; Luke 11. 1 – 13

Prayers of intercession can seem very easy to some people – for others they are the most difficult form of prayer; for many it’s the only thing they understand by the word prayer – praying for someone, asking for something – and when the words run out they say “I don’t know what to pray for” – and so sometimes they stop praying.

Asking prayers, petitionary prayer have a strong Biblical basis – the Lord’s Prayer that was part of our gospel reading this morning consists of nothing else. It is the great Christian prayer but, in a more enlightened world, it could serve as an all encompassing prayer for the whole of humankind. Any Jew or Muslim can recite it, and I have said it together with Hindus and Buddhists, for it is a basic prayer for the human condition that concentrates on the important things between cradle and grave. It marks out the ground on which we would hope others would join us with shared convictions — always supposing that we have previously introduced this prayer into our own lives...always supposing that we find in this prayer the convictions by which we can live and die.

There are numerous other examples throughout scripture of prayers of petition, many that have dramatic outcomes – people being cured, the sun moving backwards, armies being destroyed.

How we approach intercessory prayer will depend a great deal on what kind of picture we have of God and the limitations he may or may not have set upon himself in the way that he has created us and the world. In many towns and villages along the Yangtze River in China, no doubt many people have been praying (not necessarily always to the Christian God) that the Three Gorges Dam in Hubei province is fit for purpose and is preventing the endemic flooding of the lower Yangtze, an annual disaster during the mid-summer monsoon since time immemorial, and the fact that it is holding up so far will be seen as an answer to prayer. But what kind of a God is it that would stop the flood waters on this occasion but do nothing but do nothing about the flood waters that killed thousands in the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in spite of fervent praying? Certainly not a god one could worship.

Intercessory prayer is not straightforward and makes us ask lots of questions about the kind of God we proclaim a belief in. I hope that the way I see things will become a little clearer in the next few minutes...hopefully, in your own time, you might like to reflect upon these questions for yourselves. It’s possible to object to intercession by saying something like “If God is all-wise he knows what is best. I wouldn’t like him to give what was second-best – if he knows what’s best, I’ll leave it to him to give as he sees best.”

At first sight that argument seems entirely reasonable – but what it loses sight of is the possibility that prayer may open up the channel through which it is morally possible for God to work – that is, the way the world is, the way God has made it means he doesn’t act like a tyrant within it. He doesn’t force things upon us. We have a co-operative role to play within it – and intercessory prayer is a part of that.

Petition and intercession have nothing to do with changing God’s purposes, rather they are the way those purposes are released. God has entrusted an enormous amount of responsibility to us human beings – and it’s not therefore unreasonable that he should have entrusted things to us in the realm of petition and prayer. It’s true that God knows our needs before we ask him, but the nature of the loving co-operation into which we’re called means that petition is an important part of the relationship.

Intercessions aren’t a kind of Aladdin’s lamp – but part of the way that our wills are brought into conformity with God’s – and sometimes God’s will isn’t ours. It is perplexing, to say the least, to be asked by a child who keeps praying for her critically ill grandpa why he isn’t getting better. There are many times I feel, as I hold people and events before God in prayer, that silence is all I have to offer – and sometimes the silence is too much to bear – but I do believe that that’s part of the struggle that we’re called to enter into if we dare to pray seriously.

It’s at that moment that we perhaps understand more that silence is an important part of petition and intercession and thus listening becomes important too. In some ways listening needs to come first, after all any form of praying is first and foremost a work of the Holy Spirit within us – it isn’t something else we do in an already overactive world – rather prayer is the work of the Holy Spirit within us as we’re called to dispose ourselves so that that prayer can happen – so listening and stillness are the starters.

Prayer is never just a matter of words. Its roots are in the desires of the heart; words may help us in developing and expressing our inmost desires, but the words are a help to us and probably not to God.

Prayer always requires an involvement of heart, mind and will – and when that is present in relationship with God there will be prayer.

Words are of course necessary in our corporate public worship – although we could make more use of silence as well – but in our private praying we do well to remind ourselves that it is the heart, the desire of the heart that is the essence of intercession and not the words we use.

We read in Hebrews ch7 verse 25 that Jesus Christ ‘always lives to make intercession’ for us. Commenting on this verse, Archbishop Michael Ramsey said that the basic meaning of intercession isn’t pleading with God, but standing in God’s presence on behalf of another – an intercessor is a kind of go-between. That’s a very helpful image. Interceding isn’t bargaining with God, it’s not pulling the arm of a one-armed bandit or fruit machine until we get three cherries and, hey presto, our prayers are answered – as intercessors we’re standing in the presence of God on behalf of another and simply being there. And in a way this brings me back to listening and stillness that I mentioned earlier. Simply to hold another in silence before God may be the deepest form of intercessory prayer that we can offer – and not something we run away from because we can’t find the right words.

Thirty years ago my ordaining Bishop, John Austin Baker, wrote an excellent book, The Foolishness of God. In it he writes, “When we pray for others we shall see that by far the most important requirement is inner calmness and tranquility. We are not engaged in creating or producing anything, but in becoming aware of what is already the fact, namely that God is immediately and intimately present both to ourselves and to the one for whom we are praying. Our task is to hold the awareness in the still centre of our being, to unite our love for them with God’s love, in the quiet but total confidence that he will use our love to help bring about the good in them which we both desire.”

I think that describes most succinctly the vocation of intercessory prayer.

We should continue to hold our petitions before God in our hearts – confident that nothing defeats love, and that through that love all for whom we pray and each one of us are being brought into the fullness of life with the one and only living God, who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.