June 6, 2004
By Jack Price

My great grandfather used to say that, in business, if two partners agree on everything, one of them is not necessary.  The psalmist writes, “O God, our sovereign.”  God is our sovereign, our Lord.  We affirm the reality of that sovereignty in the words of Psalm 8, in our worship, and in the living of our lives. 

God is sovereign and humanity is the junior partner.  “You have made human beings a little lower than God, and … have given them dominion over the works of your hands”.  Wise leaders encourage their colleagues to speak freely and to exercise initiative.  Effective organizations are partnerships with team members being co-creators, expressing diverse opinions, and cooperating with the organization’s overall vision and purpose.

God has made the world a partnership.  We reflect that truth in our congregation.  Important decisions about mission, values, direction, and congregational life come from cooperative efforts among congregational members and in partnership with God, our sovereign. 

The apostle Paul wrote to a group of Christians in Rome, in advance of his own journey there.  Attempting to explain his own theological views, Paul told them about this idea of partnership with God.  (Romans 5:1-5).

Justification is a term that means to balance or to make things come out evenly.  In theology, it means salvation, to save people from our indebtedness to sin.  Justification is God’s gift.  The result of that gift is peace with God.  Notice that Paul never says “peace of mind” or “peaceful, easy feelings.”  He says peace with God -- a solid connection with the one who is sovereign.

Peace with God colors our whole attitude toward suffering – that we can actually find good from that suffering.  Remember, the followers of Jesus suffered greatly – especially Paul.  This suffering increased and was probably at its worst in the second and third centuries, before Christianity became the state religion of Rome under Constantine.

The good that comes from suffering is this:  it makes us stronger by building endurance.  It makes us better by building character.  By experiencing our improved endurance and character, we have hope that the present suffering will also make us stronger and better.  Finally, we become more faithful because of our experience. 

            Paul experienced a very special gift that seemed to come through the suffering and challenges he had known.  He discovered divine love in his life.  He uses a metaphor is illustrate:  “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.”  Love equals Holy Spirit.  Holy Spirit connects with our spirits to receive God’s love.

All creation is a blend of the material and the spiritual.  Individuals are spirit – have a spiritual dimension.  Systems and institutions of humanity are also a blend of material and spiritual.  They are spirit as well.  This is the original design by God.  Even when individuals get off-track in terms of values and mission, still God respects our free will.  When human institutions and systems get off-track in terms of values and mission, still God respects their free will. 

Here we stand, then – individuals and human systems created for partnership with God and primary actors in the ongoing work of creation.  Yet we have gotten off-track in our values and our mission.  This is clear and undeniable when we look at ourselves, look at the injustice and innocent suffering in our world, and see the divisions in our humanity.  This brings us to the matter of prayer. 

What is prayer?  It is our conference room.  Prayer is where God meets us.  Prayer is a spiritual discipline, the ongoing conversation through which we grow and maintain relationship with God.  Prayer is the discipline we practice to develop self-awareness and to discover the power of our partnership with God.

As with so many things, our ability to be successful in prayer has a lot to do with the assumptions we make and the questions we ask.  The context of prayer is how we understand the world God has made.  In the Bible, there is a clear worldview in which the material world has a spiritual counterpart.  Every person and institution has an angel.  Human conflicts are reflections of heavenly ones.  This is the biblical worldview. 

Some people view the world as only materialistic.  Others view the only reality as spirit.  The worldview that is emerging through science, the arts, and theology in our time, according to theologian Walter Wink, is an integrated worldview.  Every aspect of this material world has spirit at its core.  This emerging worldview gives shape to prayer.

            Prayer is where life is lived.  When we prayer for others, we are living the hope of the future.  We are actually placing ourselves in the present reign of God’s kingdom – heaven.

            Prayer changes things.  Prayer changes us.  It is our preparation for life and the primary battlefield on which our life’s struggles are fought, before we ever encounter them outside ourselves.  Prayer changes the world since we are part of that world.  Community prayer changes the corporate atmosphere of institutions, including churches. 

Prayer changes what is possible to God.  God’s abilities don’t change, but what is possible for God changes because of prayer.  God’s formatting of creation limits God’s freedom of action.  Human choices control our world.  The systemic dysfunction we call the powers of darkness result from human choices.  Our choices, those of all people throughout history, have resulted in the powers of darkness being in control of this world.

So, we return to the powerful theological understanding that we are partners with God.  Our mission, the vision for this partnership, is the redeeming of persons and the redeeming of the powers:  the systems, the institutions at whose heart lie spirit.  God does the redeeming.  We help through the imperatives of prayer.  Our passion is vital.  Walter Wink reminds us:

All of Jesus’ teachings on prayer feature imperatives – “ask, seek, knock.  In prayer we are ordering God to bring the kingdom near.  We have been commanded to command.  We are required by God to haggle with God for the sake of the sick, the obsessed, the weak.  This is a God who invents history in interaction with those “who hunger and thirst to see right prevail.”  We are engaged in an act of co-creation in which one little sector of the universe rises up and becomes translucent, incandescent, a vibratory center of power that radiates the power of the universe.

So, why is prayer effective, or not?  Let’s examine the top ten reasons prayers don’t work:

10.       We fail or God refuses.

  9.       Or not!

  8.       Our faith is too weak

  7.       Or not!

  6.       We’re too sinful and inadequate.

  5.       Or not!

  4.       We’re not “pure in heart” enough.

  3.       Or not!

  2.       God says “No” out of a higher purpose.

  1.       Or not!

            If you trust the Bible, you know that the effectiveness of prayer is not dependent on the amount of our faith.  We just use the faith we have and, even if it is no more than a small mustard seed’s worth of faith, it would be enough to move a mountain.  The key is, “Just do it!”  Just pray.  The only real issue in prayer is God’s ability to act.

Faith is trusting that God can do something.  Faith is cooperating with God and supporting God’s efforts.  Faith is wanting God’s values.  Prayer is as simple as our truly wanting social justice, universal inclusion of those who are outcasts, and to love our enemy.

Prayer involves more than just God and us.  Prayer includes the systems and powers of darkness of our world.  Free will is in play all around.  We have the choice to cooperate in God’s purpose – or not.  Every single human being has that same choice to be selfish – or not.  The systems that control so much of this world likewise have the choice to respect persons or to exploit them.  God hears our prayers right away, but the response often gets bogged down in the bureaucracy of free will and the failure of individuals and institutions to act in cooperation with God’s vision for creation – justice, mercy, and loving relationship with God.  Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, in his book Hunger for Justice, tells this story:

A man once found himself walking through the streets of Calcutta, so enraged by the poverty that he wanted to scream at God, “How can you allow such suffering?”  The he came to a painful realization:  “In the suffering of the power, God was screaming at me, in fact at all of us and at our institutions and social systems that cause and perpetuate hunger, poverty, and inequity.

            Can it be that, in the hardships and disillusionments of our lives, God is saying to us, perhaps God is praying to us, “How long?  How long will you cooperate with systemic injustice and greed in the world?”.  Only God can redeem people and systems.  God apparently does so only with our help.

How do we go about revitalizing our prayer?  First, we have to realized that God is limited, not by nature, but by choice.  And God chooses to work with us as partners and to work through us as co-creators.  I don’t think it does any good to ask “Why?” because that’s the way it seems to be.  Maybe God is telling us, “Because I said so!”

We humans are limited by nature, but we can choose to work with God.  In that partnership, miracles happen.  We are partners with God who has the vision and the power.  We join with all humanity as co-creators.  All the needs of the world, including our needs, can pass through our consciousness in prayer, but we cannot hold onto them.  We cannot fix them.  They will overwhelm and destroy us.  We send them to God and what God sends back to us is a thin slice of need for which our particular giftedness is appropriate.  This is our call.

What a congregation such as ours receives back is still a small slice, according to our corporate giftedness.  This is our call.

We find our slice – our giftedness and our call -- on the journey, at the places of our disability.  Helen Keller teaches us when she writes:  “I thank God for my handicaps; for through them I have found myself, my work, and my God.”

The secret of prayer is that God most often meets us at the place of our disability.  This is the reality of the cross.  This is the power of our own brokenness.

Author Angela Tilly, in her book Let There Be Light shows us:

“Your life, so far, is the earth you stand on, upright to heaven.  So stand still with your wounds and your damage and your weapons and all the baggage of your life.  Flawed as you are, you stand on holy ground.  This is the blessed space, the space that God the creator hollows out for you, the place where [God’s] word is spoken and heard….  God meets you here, and nowhere else.”

            Billy Graham is right, at least when he reminds us of the place where God meets us, the sacred space where God engages our prayer. 

            Just as I am, Thy love unknown has broken every barrier down.

            Now to be Thine, yea Thine alone; O Lamb of God, I come.

Romans 5: 1-5

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, ²through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.  ³And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, ⁴and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, ⁵and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.

Psalm 8

1O Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

  You have set your glory above the heavens.

2Out of the mouths of babes and infants

  You have founded a bulwark because of your foes,

          to silence the enemy and the avenger.

3When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

  the moon and the stars that you have established,

4What are human beings that you are mindful of them,

  mortals that you care for them?

5Yet you have made them a little lower than God,

  and crowned them with glory and honor.

6You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;

   you have put all things under their feet,

7All sheep and oxen,

  and also the beasts of the field,

8the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea,

  whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

9O Lord, our Sovereign,

  how majestic is your name in all the earth!