Bird of Pray

‘Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them…

… ‘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…

                                                            -- Jesus on prayer, Matthew 6

In my private prayers these days, often as not, there are no words involved, but an awareness of vibration in me and in the room, on the plain, under the stars…wherever it is I find myself opening to the One. It is good.

In my private prayers of other days, and quite possibly those of days to come, it was more of a conversation with God. I’d listen. I’d speak my mind. I’d listen again. It is good.

This Sunday I am preaching on prayer. This is a unique challenge in a congregation as varied as mine. There will be some listening who barely pray at all, and others who have full, rich prayer lives beyond anything I can imagine. Some no doubt prattle to God like they’re sitting on Santa’s knee, some confide over coffee at the kitchen table, others will be mindful of chakras and life energy. And there will be many others at myriad points on that circle. It is good.

I will try to impress upon all gathered that effective prayer changes things. Of course, it changes us, and how we relate in God to the world around us. It also changes that world.

Jesus warns us not to turn prayer into a public spectacle in which we crave outward approval more than inner communication with God. At the same time, as a pastor, I am often called to public prayer. How do I reconcile these potentially divergent realities?

Poet Andrea Gibson, in her piece Say Yes, sites a phenomenon: When there are two fine violins in a room, and one is strummed or bowed, the second will hum in sympathetic vibration.

Yesterday I prayed at the hospital bed of a dear friend who has suffered a stroke. Her daughter, husband, a close friend and I gathered around her. She was worn out from a day of re-learning how to talk and use her right arm and leg. She is all there, but is locked in a great struggle to find words and shape them. We all closed our eyes and I simply acknowledged God and shared love there among us. I prayed for courage, strength and continued progress. I prayed in gratitude for the miracle of medical science.  Then, after a moment's silence, I started up the Lord’s Prayer, which she has known since childhood. I opened my eyes to watch her and saw that the other three did the same. Only my slowly recovering friend kept her eyes firmly shut, and sure enough, her lips were moving along with us.

Now, for all I know, she may have been saying “Our flounder who’s sparks with Kevin,” but the cadence was there, the vibration was sympathetic in all of us. The words themselves ceased to matter. We all felt the presence and the lift, and it was good.

That is what I like public prayer to be: intimate for five or 500.  I like it to resonate not with my words, but with Presence and Love and any other name we have for God.

For a bird to fly, the air above its wing must move on more quickly than the air beneath. In doing so, the air thins out so there is less of it. For prayer to work, there must be more raising us up than there is holding us down.

When I tell you now that I want to be a bird of pray, this is what I mean.

Go Away, Little God

Isaiah 6:1-8 In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord sitting on a throne, high and lofty; and the hem of his robe filled the temple. Seraphs were in attendance above him; each had six wings: with two they covered their faces, and with two they covered their feet, and with two they flew.
And one called to another and said: "Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory."
The pivots on the thresholds shook at the voices of those who called, and the house filled with smoke.
And I said: "Woe is me! I am lost, for I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"
Then one of the seraphs flew to me, holding a live coal that had been taken from the altar with a pair of tongs. The seraph touched my mouth with it and said: "Now that this has touched your lips, your guilt has departed and your sin is blotted out."
Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?" And I said, "Here am I; send me!"


Luke 5:1-11 Once while Jesus was standing beside the lake of Gennesaret, and the crowd was pressing in on him to hear the word of God, he saw two boats there at the shore of the lake; the fishermen had gone out of them and were washing their nets.
He got into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and asked him to put out a little way from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.
When he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch."
Simon answered, "Master, we have worked all night long but have caught nothing. Yet if you say so, I will let down the nets."
When they had done this, they caught so many fish that their nets were beginning to break.
So they signaled their partners in the other boat to come and help them. And they came and filled both boats, so that they began to sink.
But when Simon Peter saw it, he fell down at Jesus' knees, saying, "Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!"
For he and all who were with him were amazed at the catch of fish that they had taken; and so also were James and John, sons of Zebedee, who were partners with Simon. Then Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching people."
When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.


In the year that Judah's earthly king dies, Isaiah is called from his ordinary life to that of a prophet, and the semi-hallucinatory experience is fraught with bold, subversive sentiment:
1.The immortal Lord is seen on a kingly throne at a time when the Judean monarchy has once again shown its frail, mortal nature.


2.Solomon's temple, in all its massive glory, can barely fit the hem of God's robe. Even this giant religious wonder of the world will not contain God.


3.God's attending angels take a hot coal from the altar and fly past high priest, attending clergy and ranking officials to recruit some punk kid as prophet.

We religious folks often fall into the mindset that our churches are something like God-dispensers. The intended effect of all this glorious architecture at such massive scale is to somehow communicate loft of concept and enormity of God. But instead, we often see it as a pinpoint location for holiness: a holy post-and-tether to keep God properly in the yard, and not digging in the neighbor's garden or wandering off into town.

Isaiah's message is not simply that the Temple is too small to hold God, but that it is also too small to hold God's will and wisdom. Those impossible seraphs flit past all those priests and politicians for a reason: God will do what God will do, and choose whom God will choose. So not only might it be better to worship under the stars of the night sky, at some precipice of the Grand Canyon, or at land's end facing out into the ocean if we want to experience the enormity of God. We also might better fall to our knees at the maternity ward or morgue with our prayers of intercession. We might better lift our voices in hymns of praise at the soup kitchen or on the shop floor. We might better offer our sacrifices to strangers on cold sidewalks and in hushed late-night conversations, staring at the bedroom ceiling with those most intimate.

So I say “Go away, little God.” I yearn beyond a God that demands only a 7th of my mornings. I hear beyond the voices of Reverend and Doctor. I see the horizon beyond the steeple, and the possibilities beyond even our most rarefied, incense-saturated air. A cathedral god seems too fixed and petty for me. I like a good show, but I prefer a good impulse. I enjoy ancient ritual, but thrive on a profoundly present Is.

Doesn't it all come down to what we learned in Mrs. Lewis' 2nd grade Sunday School class? God is everywhere – truly a revolutionary concept! God is not merely huge. God is ever-present and implicit. God is right at the tip of our tongues and at the core of our better natures; in both our grandest gesture and our smallest kindness. We are not simply of use to God, we can be most-favored conduits of holiness.

Jesus proves the point as he recruits his disciples. His prophetic ministry visited temple and synagogue, yes, but was most definitely of the streets. His was a holiness that played across children's faces and swam in widow's tears. Shouts of acclamation and songs of praise sprang best from leprous lips and hungry mouths.

The typical pictures of Jesus with his Pepsodent smile, anglo-saxon nose, and Tide-sanitized, blindingly white robes does us a grave disservice. Ours is a messiah who was no doubt caked in the dust of the road and the filth of his followers. Ours is a face-to-face Christ. Ours is a face-to-face faith.

And isn't that the core of the prophetic message? The Holy One is not limited to large buildings and the big picture, but is liquid and rampant, ready, willing and able to flow through all we say and do with each other, if only we would allow the flood gates to open and the blessings to pour out. If only we had the gall and the guts amid so much glory and grandeur to simply say: “here am I, send me!”