“Praying Without Words: Kept”

Psalm 121 and Luke 18:1-8

Oct. 20, 2019 

Sermon by Rev. Caela Simmons Wood

First Congregational UCC of Manhattan, KS

The lectionary committee served up two passages about prayer today. First, the parable from Luke, which is a little unusual because it seems to leave very little up to interpretation. Jesus says at the beginning what the parable is about “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” It’s pretty unusual for us to be told, up front, what the point of the parable is, but there it is. Jesus goes on to tell the story of an unjust judge who is terrible at his job. He ignores the pleas of a widow, which would have been truly horrific to Jesus’s hearers, because widows, in Jesus’s culture, were seen as some of the most vulnerable people in society...people that everyone shared the responsibility to care for. 

The judge doesn’t care about doing right by God or anyone else, so he just ignores her. But this unnamed woman is persistent, coming back day after day to beg for justice. Eventually, just because he’s annoyed with her tenacity, the judge gives in and give her what she needs. 

The point of the story is NOT that God is like the unjust judge...but that God is completely different than this character. Jesus says, look, if even an unjust judge eventually gives in, look how much better - how different! - our God is. Our God is the one who always wants what is good for us, who listens before we even find the words, who always seeks justice on our behalf. 

The Rev. Dr. Joy Moore says that she loves this parable because it reminds us that we have permission to beg God. [1] You know, as I have had the privilege of accompanying people who are dealing with unbelievably difficult trials, I have often heard them say something like, “I feel bad bothering God with all of this,” or “I’m sure God is tired of hearing me complain,” or “I feel like a hypocrite because before this terrible thing happened, I never prayed. I’ve only started praying now, when everything is so bad.”

Knowing that God is nothing like that unjust judge...knowing that God wishes only good things for us, knowing that God hears the deepest desires of our hearts even before we find the words for them, knowing that we have permission to BEG GOD is incredibly freeing and healing, isn’t it?

Whereas the parable from Luke is explicitly about prayer, we have to dig a little below the surface to see how today’s Psalm is about prayer. The word prayer isn’t mentioned in the 121st Psalm, but when I read it to myself earlier this week, prayer was the first thing that came to mind. Because this particular Psalm echoes the same word over and over again, in Hebrew “shamah,” in English “keep.”

The one who keeps you will not slumber.

The one who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

God is your keeper...the shade at your right hand.

God will keep you from all evil; God will keep your life.

God will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.

This “being kept” is all about prayer. The understanding that is is within God that we “live and move and have our being” [2] The deep knowledge that we belong to God. Thomas Keating famously said, “The chief thing that separates us from God is the thought that we are separate from God.” [3] The realization and remembrance that we are kept by God is prayer. 

When I was a child, I was taught that prayer is “talking to God” or sometimes the adults around me told me that it was “listening for God.” Whatever it was, it was clear to me that it was words. Whether memorized or extemporaneous, fancy or plain, silent or aloud, alone or as a group, sung or spoken or written, WORDS were the starting place for prayer. 

Imagine my surprise as an adult when I figured out this was only part of the story! Sure, many prayers are made up of words...but prayer goes way beyond words, too. My working definition these days is: prayer is orienting ourselves towards God. We often do this through words, but my own prayer practice is, more often than not, wordless.

Each morning when I wake, I try to find at least five minutes of silence before I get out of bed. Emptying my mind completely, watching my breath move in and out, I center myself for the day ahead. I try very hard not to think about anything at all, but to just be….gloriously and imperfectly human...kept by God.

When I say, “I prayed for you today,” I sometimes mean that I spoke to God conversationally, asking God to give you strength and care. But sometimes I didn’t say any words at all. Sometimes I practiced prayer in a way inspired by the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Tonglen…..sometimes I sit and envision my soul reaching out to yours, breathing in your pain or anxieties, holding them for a moment, and then breathing out love and peace...sending it to you on the wings of the Holy Spirit. We are both kept by God. 

Not as often as I would like, but SOMETIMES, when I’m doing a task like chopping vegetables for soup, or walking out to check the mail, or folding laundry, I take a moment to orient myself towards the Divine. I extend my spirit beyond my own location, aware of all the ways I am connected to the farmers who grew my food, the person who sent me that junk mail, the people I will never know who sewed together my clothing. And I become aware that when Keating said our separateness from God is only an illusion, he also meant that our separateness from one another is ALSO only an illusion. We are all kept by God...together. 

Sometimes, when I’m rushing from one place to another, I remember the wise words of Shug Avery, as brought to us by Alice Walker. Shug taught me that when I walk past the color purple in a field somewhere, it’s right and good to stop and take notice. [4] So when I come home from a meeting at night and the full moon is peeking up over the horizon, I stop and look up at her. And then I remember that all of creation is kept by God...purple flowers in the field, the moon as she shines overhead. 

And when I lay down at night, the last thing I do as I drift off to sleep is try to find myself in God’s presence once again. For many years, I imagined myself as a small child curling up in soft, warm arms. Kept by God. Lately I’ve been working with an image of God as the ocean. I float out into warm waters and feel my entire self enveloped. The salt water gives me a sweet buoyancy as I float in gentle waves, my eyes fixed on the horizon...all that the future holds is unknown, but I am kept by God, bobbing up and down without worry. 

Kept. 

Thomas Merton said that prayer is the practice of returning to our deepest foundations….and that when we pray it should be a conversion of our entire selves to God. [5] And this is why I think the 121st Psalm is all about prayer. 

When we lift our eyes to the hills, asking the deepest questions that trouble our souls, we find that we are kept. We are met by Love before we even have to ask. We discover that God has been with us all along, closer even than the air we breathe. We feel again the promise of baptism….that though the waters may threaten to overwhelm, nothing can separate us from who we are: beloved children of God, created in Love’s own image. And we remember that reality that we celebrate each time we come to the Table of Christ: God is arriving even now to dwell among us, in the most unexpected of places. When we are invited to “take and eat” bringing Christ’s body into ours, we are filled with joy and surprise, discovering Christ is there already. Permeating every bit of you, every bit of me, every bit of God’s creation. 

This, too, is prayer. May God bless you and keep you through the gift of prayer. 

Amen. 

NOTES:

[1] Sermon Brainwave podcast for Oct. 20, 2019

[2] Acts 17

[3] Keating, Thomas. Open Mind, Open Heart. 

[4] Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. 

[5] Merton, Thomas. Thoughts in Solitude.