Be Reassured, and Surrender
Be Reassured, and Surrender
Sermon: October 11, 1998
A little girl kneels by the side of her bed, tears streaming down her face. “God, please make my Daddy well.”
A teenage boy, sitting in the back of church, head bent, asks, “Please, Lord, let me understand how a loving God can allow all the suffering that there is in this world.”
A 43-year-old man, unemployed for the first time in his life, asks for guidance to his next job.
A 79-year-old widow, alone in her home for the first time in more than a half-century, asks simply, “what’s next, Lord?”
Prayer.
No matter where you turn in the spiritual world, someone is encouraging us to pray. Let’s take a quick look around the Bible, beginning with the book of Genesis. The early chapters of this opening book of the Old Testament are filled with conversations between Man and God. God does most of the talking in these early chapters. He explains the rules of
But it is not until Abram that we see anything that begins to resemble what we might think of as prayer. And, wouldn’t you know it, this first prayer is an attempt to strike a bargain with the Almighty God. God has just told Abram that, in exchange for Abram’s rejection of the offerings of the King of Sodom, God will protect and reward Abram. Abram says, in essence, “let’s be specific, God: the reward I want is a son and some land.”
This, then, becomes a model for prayer in the Judeo-Christian tradition: asking God for what we want. Or, maybe, if we are really feeling full of ourselves, we negotiate: “I’ll do this, if You’ll give me that.”
As we see, this tradition of prayer as solicitation or negotiation is very old, indeed. Old ways die hard in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Pray alone
Let’s fast-forward to the New Testament. In the gospel, the first thing that strikes us about Jesus’ approach to prayer is that it is a solitary act, a private moment with God. Both in his instructions on prayer and in how he himself prayed, it is a quiet, private act. He says:
When you pray, go into your inner room and shut the door and pray in secret to your Father.
We see this solitary notion of prayer in action after Herod’s murder of John the Baptist. When Jesus heard of the death of his cousin and spiritual brother, “he withdrew . . . in a boat to a lonely place apart.”[1] The crowd follows, he feeds and heals them, then retreats again: “he went up into the hills by himself to pray.”[2]
Even the spare words of the Gospel paint a picture of a grief-stricken Jesus. We easily can imagine that, in John’s inevitable murder, he sees the foreshadowing of his own inevitable end. His sorrow over the murdered blends with his sorrow over the murderers, which in turn combines perhaps with a bit of fear of his own coming torture. So he turns to prayer to restore his own strength.
Again, in the
Pray alone.
Be Reassured
Once we are alone with our Father, what do we say? Let’s listen:
And in your prayers, don’t talk on and on, as the Gentiles do; for they think that unless they use many words they won’t be heard. Don’t be like them, for your Father knows what you need even before you ask him.[3]
Let’s stop there for a moment. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. In one, radical phrase, Jesus turns Abram’s paradigm on its head: it does not matter what you ask for, because God knows what you need.
Abu Yazid al-Bistami echoed this notion when he said, “for thirty years I used to say, ‘Do this’ and ‘Give that’; but when I reached the first stage of wisdom, I said, ‘O God, be mine and do whatever You want.’”[4]
Put another way by Ramana Maharshi, “When you pray for God’s grace, you are like someone standing neck-deep in water and yet crying for water. It is like saying that someone neck-deep in water feels thirsty, or that a fish in water feels thirsty, or that water feels thirsty.”
This seems to be an important theme of our Teacher’s view of prayer: be reassured, God’s grace, God’s gifts, are already yours. He knows what you need, and they are yours.
Be reassured.
Surrender
There is another aspect of prayer, according to Jesus. Surrender.
We see this in the Lord’s Prayer:
May your kingdom come,
May your will be done,
We also see it in Gesthemane. On the eve of his own execution, a grieving and fearful Jesus gathers his strength through prayer. What does he say? Let’s listen:
My Father, all things are possible for you. Take this cup from me. Nevertheless, not what I want, but what you want.[5]
Not what I want, but what You want.
To Jesus, then, prayer was a simple affirmation of the supremacy of God’s will. Its purpose is to focus my mind on the meaninglessness of my own egocentric desires, and the supremacy of my Creator’s will. Such surrender to the will of God promises to restore and strengthen me, even in my times of greatest sorrow.
Surrender.
Participate in the Gift
But there is more to the lesson on prayer.
Give us this day our daily bread;
And forgive us our wrongs,
As we forgive those who have wronged us.
And do not lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.[6]
So, we are to hand to God three requests: Feed me today, forgive my wrongs, and keep me from evil.
What is going on here, though? In one breath, Jesus says it does not matter what I ask for. In the next breath, he teaches me what to ask for. It makes no sense whatsoever.
Worse yet, the idea of surrender to God’s will sounds like an invitation to give up. What keeps this notion of reassurance and surrender from turning into fatalism, que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be? What keeps us from turning this into “don’t worry, be happy, give up,” from turning a blind eye to the troubles of our neighbors and shrugging – “it’s God’s will”?
How about this: What if prayer is meant for that aspect of God’s ears that are my ears – that part of me that is Divine. Steven Mitchell says of this part of the Lord’s Prayer: “Give us what nourishes our spirit; give us not what we want, but what we need. In fact, we always do receive exactly what we need though we don’t always realize it. This prayer makes us participants in the gift.”
Participants in the gift.
We are participants in the gift.
When we pray, we are speaking to the Almighty God, our Father, our Creator, who lives in our hearts and works through our hands. This is not Zeus, or Hera, living on some distant mountain in central
These requests in our prayer, then, are a call to ourselves, to our Divine Self, to take responsibility for our daily bread, our willingness to forgive, and our resistance to unloving behavior.
In a nutshell, in our prayer, we are to participate in the gift.
Participate in the gift.
So, there we have it. Jesus, the great Simplifier, boils prayer down to a few things:
Pray privately.
Be reassured that God knows what you need.
Surrender your heart to God’s will.
Participate in God’s gift-giving.
Sounds easy enough in the abstract: in prayer, pray privately, be reassured, surrender, and participate in the gift.
We all know, though, it is not so easy in practice. To the little girl whose daddy is gravely ill: pray privately, be reassured that God is with you, surrender to God’s will, and participate in God’s love by loving your daddy with all your heart.
To the teenage boy who looks at the sea of homeless brothers and sisters, humanity’s gruesome record of genocide, the endless horror of war: pray, be reassured, surrender, and participate.
To the middle-aged unemployed man: pray, be reassured, surrender, and participate.
To the new widow, pray, be reassured, surrender, and participate.
To the 33-year-old teacher, son of a carpenter, facing the most horrific torture and death known to man: pray, be reassured, surrender, and participate.
To each of us, in our times of uncertainty, grief, confusion, and fear: pray, be reassured, surrender, and participate.
Pray. Be reassured. Surrender. Participate
Sounds very, very hard to me.
I’d better do it every day.
posted by Tom Goddard at 10:51 AM
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