How Do You Start Your Conversation?
Gettysburg Presbyterian Church
Matthew 6: 5-15
Mark 2: 1-12
March 4, 2011

“God is great, God is good.  (And we thank him for our food.  By his hands, we are fed.  Thank you God for daily bread.)”

“Good food.  Good meat.  (Good Lord, let’s eat.)”

“Now I lay me, down to sleep… (I pray the Lord my soul to keep.  If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.  God bless…”

How do you start your conversation with the Almighty?
How do you begin a dialogue with the Creator of the Universe?

Maybe these previous prayer prefixes are too elemental for your tastes.
Maybe you find yourself at a place in life which calls you to pray prepared prayers (our fourth grade son has been learning about alliteration in his fourth grade English class).
Maybe you find yourself at a place in life where previously prayed prayers provide promising potential.  Prayers like that of St. Francis of Assisi –
[9:30 a.m. – show embedded clip “A Prayer to Guide Us”]
[8:15 & 11:00 a.m. – read St. Francis of Assisi’s prayer:]

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
where there is sadness, joy.
Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned.
It is in dying that we are born to eternal life.  Amen.

Or something like Reinhold Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer:

God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Living one day at a time; enjoying one moment at a time;
accepting hardship as the pathway to peace.
Taking, as He did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it;
trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will;
that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
and supremely happy with Him in the next.  Amen

Or in the words of Jesus’ model prayer:

Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come. 
Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.

How do you start your conversation?

The reality of faith is such that however we begin our conversation with God is perfectly okay.
It doesn’t matter how we start.
What matters most is that we start.

Part of prayer’s appeal is that anyone can do it.
We don’t need to have the rhetoric of an orator like Cicero or faith of an evangelist like Billy Graham to be heard by God when we pray.
All we simply need to do is pray.

One of the great quotes on prayer I’ve heard is, “…too often we spend more time reading and researching how to pray and not enough time praying.”
We think we need to have just the right words.
The reality of prayer is that when we pray – God isn’t looking for us to put together some pontifical poetic prose – God is not interested in our using words which will win us the Pulitzer if others found out we spoke them.
Instead, God is looking for us to open ourselves up and bring our lives to God – our concerns & joys, our hopes & dreams, our fears & doubts. 
Prayer is talking to God…like we were talking with a good friend – in normal, conversational style. 

Maybe an even greater appeal of prayer is that as we engage in praying we get to know God.
As we pray, we encounter the presence of God’s spirit more clearly in our lives.
For in a sense, a very real sense, that’s what we get when we pray – we get God.
Prayer isn’t so much about getting what we want or changing God’s mind – rather prayer is developing a relationship with the God of the universe.

High school musicals are in full swing right now:
Fairfield closed Back to the 80s Saturday night with their 7:30 show.
Gettysburg drops the final curtain on Oklahoma this afternoon at 2:30 p.m.?
Littlestown presents Grease March 11th & 12th.
South Western presents Guys & Dolls March 17-19th.
Did I miss any high schools represented in today’s congregation?

If you’re a fan of musicals and even if you are not, I wonder if you’ve seen or at least heard of The Music Man.  There is a scene in the musical in which the lead male character, Harold Hill, is standing with Marion, the Librarian, out on the foot-bridge.  The moon is shining.  Marion has fallen in love and sings about it, “There were bells all around, but I never heard them ringing, no I never heard them at all, ‘til there was you.”

Prayer is like that.  God close enough to touch.  Right there, but we don’t or we can’t even see him – until we pray and then we realize– God is right there – “I never heard them at all ‘til there was you.”
Prayer is like falling in love with God.
I wonder if this is what Joseph Scriven, the composer of our closing hymn/song this morning meant when he penned the words, “What a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.”
Or what Charles Wesley meant when he said, “Jesus, lover of my soul, let me to the bosom fly.”
Alfred Lloyd Tennyson describes it this way, “Nearer than hands and feet, even nearer than breath, that’s how close God is to us when we pray.” 

Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly, speaks of a friend who says this of prayer, “I [pray] because I can’t help myself.  When I am overwhelmed by the death of a friend or the wonder of walking through the woods at midday, the expression of grief or thankfulness is simply squeezed out of me.”

We don’t pray because God needs it, we pray because we do.

Keen puts his friend’s thoughts into his own words, “Maybe the measure of love is how many unspeakable things we manage to express within the sanctuary of intimacy.”

Prayer is intimate communion with God. 
When we pray, it’s good to remember that we’re not talking to other people; we’re talking to the God of the universe – the God who created us – the God who wants to be involved in our lives – even though God already knows everything about us.

And isn’t that refreshing?
Isn’t it refreshing to know that the God of the universe – the God who knows the desires of our hearts – and while God already knows all this stuff about our lives – isn’t it refreshing that God still wants to know about what’s going on in our lives?
Isn’t it wonderful when someone you know wants to share intimately what’s going on in your life – even if that person already knows?

A mother and father were saying good-bye to their son as they dropped him off at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.
It was the hardest thing they’d ever had to do – to let their child go.
They were instructed along with their son that during the initial days in the Naval Academy students are not permitted to make phone calls home.
They go through an initial period of time when they are called “plebes,” which means basically they have no rights whatsoever.

You can’t call them and they can’t call you.

As they said their final good-byes, these parents asked their son’s superior, “When would he be able to call home.”
The superior said, “Next Sunday afternoon.”

This was on a Monday.
They had flown into Philadelphia and rented a car.
Their plan after dropping their son off at Annapolis was to take their other son on a college tour through some of the New England states and back down through the Washington DC area.
They were then going to visit close college friends on Saturday for whom this mother was going to sing The Lord’s Prayer on the occasion of their friends’ daughter’s wedding.
They would attend the wedding on Saturday – the reception Saturday night –visit with their dear friends on Sunday – then on Monday they would drive back to Philadelphia and fly home.

Yet, the words of their son’s superior rang in their ears, “He can call you Sunday afternoon.”

These two loved their friends very much.
They loved their child even more.
So, without a word being spoken among them, just a look in each other’s eyes, she picked up the phone and called the airline to inquire about flights leaving 6:00 a.m. Sunday morning.
They attended the wedding, kissed the bride and their dear friends.
They thanked them for their hospitality and told them how much they loved them.
They also told them that they really needed to get home.
They got in their rental car and drove through the night, arriving at the airport at 5:10 a.m.

They returned the rental car, raced through the airport and made their 6 a.m. flight.

Friends met them at the airport when their plane touched down and drove them home.
When they got into the house, she unpacked then sat by the phone.
He went out, did some shopping and came back.
While they sat eating lunch – the phone rang at 12:20 p.m.
It was their boy.

He wouldn’t have missed that call for all the money in the world.
She would have driven all across the country to be their when that phone rang.
This father – this mother – neither one would have missed that call because the one on the other end of the line was their child.

Do we get it?
We may be young or old; we may be 4 or 10 or 14; 20, 25 or 30; 40, 50, 70, 90; it doesn’t matter how old we are – we are still one of God’s children.

And God wants to talk with us.

For God is a loving parent – a father and a mother the Bible says.
And because we are God’s children – because God has claimed us as God’s own, we can trust God to be there for us and we can bring our concerns, we can bring our desires, we can bring the deepest thoughts of our hearts to God.

When we go into our rooms –
when we close the doors –
when we make space in our lives to pray –
when we foster the environment needed to experience God’s presence – what do we find?

We find God.
We find the One who helps us discover direction in our lives.
We find the One who is nearer than hands and feet and breath.
We find the one who is present around this Communion Table.
We find the one who longs to know us and be known by us.
We find God.

What could be better than that?

Amen.


Excerpted from the article “Capture Your Prayer Flags” by Sam Keen in the periodical Spirituality and Health, March/April 2003, p. 54.

Ibid.