“Pray without Ceasing”

(Psalm 19 and I Thessalonians 5:12-24)

          With our service on Ash Wednesday of this past week, we began the season of Lent, which is traditionally associated with various disciplines, among them the discipline of prayer.

          In nearly every conversation I’ve ever had with church folk about prayer, a number of questions have generally popped up.  For instance: how often do we pray, when and where do we pray, how formal or intentional do we need to be, to be praying?  Many of us have admitted to finding prayer pretty challenging at times.  Nearly all of us find it difficult to pray as consistently as we’d like to. 

It interests me that a little three-word verse gets cited over and over again in these discussions - this admonition we just heard in the middle of our text from I Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing.”  What exactly does that mean?  Presumably it can’t mean we should quit our jobs and neglect our friends and families and never run another errand all our live-long days, in order to pray.  But if it doesn’t mean that, what does it mean?  And what ‘counts’ as prayer, anyway?  If I were to live a life of prayer without ceasing, what would that look like?

          Since the Psalms are the prayer book of the Bible, I thought it might be interesting to bring the Psalms into conversation with the apostle Paul’s teaching on this topic.  In particular, I wondered whether the psalmists could model for us what it might look like to “pray without ceasing.”

          The prayers of the psalms are, first of all, very concrete, with much of their imagery borrowed directly from the natural world. Psalm 148 has fire and hail, snow and frost, creeping things and flying birds singing their praises to God. Psalm 23 describes the author’s relationship with God as that of a sheep with a shepherd – familiar sights of green pastures and cool streams becoming metaphors for trust and comfort in the presence of God.  And in this morning’s reading from Psalm 19, we see the sun rising and setting, circuiting the earth, and the heavens—the very stars in the sky—telling the glory of God.

As Eugene Peterson puts it, “prayer [in the Psalms] begins not with what we don’t see, but with what we do see.” Now this is excellent news, as far as I’m concerned, because I find it difficult to pray in big, broad strokes; I need something specific to focus on. When we open the book of Psalms we find “we are not launched into the life of prayer by making ourselves more heavenly, but by immersing ourselves in the earthy: not by formulating abstractions such as goodness… or beauty… but by attending to trees and tree toads, mountains and mosquitoes.” 

Like me, you may share this element of the psalmists’ experience – I expect the beauty, the wonder, the strangeness of creation has inspired many a prayer in this group.  But even if you’re not the outdoorsy type, the same principle applies.  Begin not with what you don’t see, but with what you do see.  It could be a tree or a sunset that draws you into conversation with God.  It could be music, candlelight, or words on a page.  It could be a person.  “Praying in general is tough,” someone once told me.  “But praying for a friend – now that I can handle!”

          The psalmists seem to pray, too, in every imaginable situation. How many of us have in mind a setting in which we know we could pray, if we could just get there. . . and yet we never seem to get there?  Instead of quiet solitude, we find ourselves surrounded by people and noise.  Instead of inner peace, we find stress taking its toll on body, mind, and spirit.  How many times have I told myself: someday I’ll pray far more consistently. . . when I graduate… or at least when finals are over…when the kids are a little older…when things settle down at work…So, what, then - until I can make my prayer time look a certain way, in the perfect setting, it’s not worth trying?  Again, to quote Peterson: “We all suppose that we could pray, or pray better, if we were in the right place.  We put off praying until we are where we think we should be, or want to be.  We let our fantasies or circumstances distract us from attending to the word of God that is aimed right where we are, and invites our answers from that spot.” If the people of Israel could offer prayers while hiding out from their enemies, while tending their flocks, during their captivity in Babylon, presumably I can manage to check in with God occasionally in the course of a typical workday. Surely this is part of what the Thessalonians verse is about too.  To pray without ceasing, we can’t possibly wait around till the time, the space, the circumstances magically fall into place.

And what sort of prayers would they be, anyway, if we had to step outside of our lives in order to pray them?  Impressively spiritual prayers? About terribly lofty things?  Free from the irritating interruptions of real life?  But prayer in the Psalms, at least, always seems to involve concrete, fleshy, down-to-earth stuff. Real life situations.  Abstract words are rare in the psalms. “The nouns are specific; the verbs are direct.  Everything is personal.” There’s a pesky little heresy that unfortunately persists in the church – that sense that anything of the flesh is bad, and only pure spirit is good.  But we are flesh and blood creatures, put on this earth by a God who took on flesh as well, and there’s really no sense trying to be more spiritual than God.  So to pray without ceasing cannot possibly mean to step outside ourselves.  It must somehow mean to pray as ourselves, wherever we are, finding ways to talk with God in the midst of everyday circumstances. The Psalms clearly demonstrate that “the regular place of prayer is ordinary life.”

          The Celtic tradition of prayer in many ways resembles the prayers of the psalms, for “like the ancient Hebrews, the Celts were earthy people who led simple lives.  Believing God was involved in all the ordinary events of their lives, they prayed constantly, asking God to bless whatever they were doing.” “They had no hesitation in asking God to bless them with successful crops, good food and drink, safe homes and warm fires.”  All this sounds nice enough in a sort of old-fashioned, romantic way, but what about those of us who are 21^st century city dwellers, with nary a sheep nor a cow in sight?  Think about what it would look like to pray through the course of our typical day. While brushing our teeth.  While sitting in traffic.  While drinking that first cup of coffee at our desks in the morning and scrolling through our email inbox, or glancing over our schedule of appointments.  The point of the Celtic and Hebrew prayer traditions is not that shepherds and farmers are inherently closer to God.  The point is that “their prayer . . . grew out of life itself with all its relentless demands.  They had found that the pattern of daily living could become the most natural way to God.” They believed firmly that “God comes to us where we are.”  Prayer helps us notice “God in our midst,” allows “the awareness of [God’s] constant presence [to be] mediated through [our] daily work, and not destroyed by it.”

            If we take their advice, it naturally follows that we’ll be praying quite a lot. For each time of day has its own challenges, each time of day presents its own opportunities for blessing. Think about it: What does your typical morning routine look like?  What are you up to around noontime?  How about between the fateful hours of 3 and 8 pm, those of you who have young children at home?  And what do you find yourself thinking and feeling as you prepare for bed, especially if you’ve just turned off the evening news?  Whether or not you formalize your own prayers at those moments, the psalms remind us that God is with us in every one of them.

          I have sometimes borrowed these words that a former colleague would use to begin our prayer time together in worship: “Remembering that we are always in God’s presence, let us pray.”  In other words, God’s always there, always tuned in.  We don’t say “let us pray,” to get God’s attention, but to focus our own.  Or think of it the way a church  member once put it to me: “Maybe God is smarter than we are.  Maybe God doesn’t wait for me to wake up in the morning and pray, before getting to work on a to-do list for the day.”

          So from the psalms we learn to pray concretely, to pray as the down-to-earth, flesh and blood individuals we are, to pray in real life situations, and to remember that God is always with us, whether or not we’re tuned in at a given moment. Since all this sounds more freeing than demanding, why do so many of us continue to find our prayer lives difficult to maintain?

One of the most common stumbling blocks to consistent prayer is thinking we have to do it right.  And “right,” of course, means different things to different people.  20 minutes of silent prayer early every morning, for instance.  Or remembering to pray for everyone on our prayer list right before bed each night.  There are people who seem to have mastered each of these disciplines with great consistency; there are also many for whom one or both of these particular ideals has set them up for failure.  A few good days, followed by weeks of guilt. 

For my own part, all my years in the Episcopal Church notwithstanding, there are apparently enough generations of Baptist blood in these veins that I’ve always felt I was cheating if I prayed prayers that were written down by other people.  That heartfelt prayers had to be made up in my own words right on the spot.  It’s taken me years to recognize that I often focus far better in prayer if someone else’s words are there for me to use, as an anchor, as a tool, than if I have to craft them myself.  Why? I don’t know – perhaps because I spend so much of my life working with words, selecting them, editing them.  But I find it hard to come up with the words I want, and to actually pray them, simultaneously.  I know people who are blessed with that gift – they seem always to know exactly what to say in the moment, so that when I hear them pray, I find my heart chiming in “Yes, God, what she said!  What he said!”

          Do you ever feel that way?  “God, what he said. . . what she said.” The refrain we offer up during the prayers of the people is actually a similar idea, isn’t it?  When we respond to someone else’s prayer with the words, “Lord, hear our prayer,” it’s really an awful lot like saying: “what that person just said, God? Me too!” If you find it helpful to be able to chime in with someone else’s words when you pray, you may find the prayers of the psalms a good resource for you, or prayers in some of Paul’s letters in the New Testament, or one of the many books of prayers Laura Wideburg has gathered for us in the library here.  As C.S. Lewis once remarked about prayer words, “it does not matter very much who first put them together. [Even] if they are someone else’s, we shall continually pour into them our own meaning.”

          Of course others of you may have exactly the opposite reaction to printed prayers.  You may find that they don’t allow you to be who you are before God.  That you require the freedom to phrase things in your own way for a prayer to be genuine.  Or perhaps you require music in order to pray.  Or silence.  My point is simply this – do what works for you!  All of the above – silence, imagination, prayer books, biblical prayers, praise songs, contemplative music—can be tools to help us to pray.  Pray in a way that allows you to focus your thoughts, your heart in conversation with God.  Don’t be fooled for years, as I was, into thinking one or the other is the only pure form of prayer. God hears us, however we pray.

As we begin our Lenten journey, let’s encourage one another to ‘try on’ prayer both here in the psalms, and in its many other forms.  Starting with what we do see—the world around us, real people, real situations—as we look for reminders of God’s constant presence.

And let’s not forget to hear the promise, the comfort, in those words we’ve so often heard as command.  We’re invited to “pray without ceasing” only because there isn’t a single moment, day or night, when God’s not standing there with us, ready to receive our prayers.  Amen.