“New
Light on an Old Prayer”
1.
Doors and Metaphors
Psalm
63:1-8
First
Presbyterian
The
Reverend Thomas A. Sweet
February
25, 2007
Lent
1
Sacrament
of Holy Communion
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On the one hand, a
series of sermons on an old prayer we all know sounds a little less than
scintillating. I agonized for a
couple of weeks about whether or not to preach such a series.
Frankly, I was not as concerned about whether you might get bored with it
as I was that I would. On the other
hand, I have been learning a little Aramaic recently on your behalf because I
believe that one of the sacred trusts I have with you is to keep learning and
growing and maturing as long as I am with you.
There is so much to discover and experience about God and life and
Spirit, enough to last a thousand lifetimes, that for me or for any of us to get
complacent or satisfied or lazy may well be the unforgivable sin.
Aramaic is the language that Jesus spoke and I am finding that
trafficking in its original language sheds some new light on what we call “The
Lord’s Prayer.” I am saying
and singing it with renewed meaning these days and so I have decided to go ahead
and cook up a seven course Lenten meal of sermons on the Lord’s Prayer, but
with a twist. I’ll be using the
Aramaic text as the door by which to enter into it.
I want to introduce
the series by suggesting a metaphor for prayer that is indicated by the Aramaic.
The Aramaic word for prayer is slotha that
comes from an Aramaic root, sla, that means “to set a trap.” (1) Prayer,
then, in its most basic sense, involves “setting a trap for God.”
That seems an odd metaphor, I’ll grant you, so we need to be careful to
understand it in the way the Aramaic intends.
Listen to this confident poem by Rainer Maria Rilke that comes from his
collection called Book of Hours: Love Poems to God:
All Will Come Again into Its Strength
All will come again into its strength:
the fields undivided, the waters undimmed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong and varied as the land.
And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
and a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.
No yearning for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.
I love that poem as
it sings of a resurrection of hope for this world and this life.
Did you catch Rilke’s insistence that such a resurrection has no use
for the church as it is too often constituted, of a church that traps God like a
wounded animal so that it can use God for its own purposes, agendas, and
survival? Of a church that tries to
hold God hostage in the prison house of its own creeds and credos that are
always too small and so also too exclusive and divisive?
While churches all too frequently do that, that is not the meaning of the
Aramaic metaphor for prayer of setting a trap for God.
The metaphor means something else.
The Aramaic mind
sees God as a creative, cosmic Presence that courses through all of life.
It is similar to the Hebrew sense of God expressed in Psalm 139: “Where
can I go from your spirit? Or where
can I flee from your presence? If I
ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.
If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of
the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me
fast.” The Aramaic sense of
God is captured well in the words of the Heather McHugh poem that many of us
have treasured this winter: “God is no fixed point or central government,
but rather is poured in waves through all things.” (2)
God is Spirit and so we cannot get our hands, much less our
theologies, around Spirit. We do not
shape Spirit. Spirit shapes us.
Prayer, then, in the Aramaic sense, involves setting our minds and hearts
like a trap so that we may catch the flow of Spirit who is all the time “being
poured in waves through all things.”
Perhaps a second
metaphor, also suggested by the Aramaic, will help.
There are radio waves that incessantly are bombarding us including those
we really need to hear; for instance, those that carry news of closings and
cancellations on snowy days. But we
cannot hear them without setting a trap for them.
So we acquire a radio and tune it to a frequency that can receive the
waves and turn them into discernible sound. If
I adjust the tuning knob just a little bit to the point where, as we say, we no
longer are tuned to the right wavelength, we are not able to unscramble the
waves and hear what is being sent through the air to us.
Just so, in prayer we set a trap for divine thoughts and energies by
attuning our minds and hearts to God’s omnipresent Spirit.
If we do not hear the intimations of God in our lives, it is not because
God is silent or absent but because we have not adequately set a trap to
apprehend God’s glory or, to use the other metaphor, we have not tuned in to
the right frequency. Either way, the
problem is fixable and The Lord’s Prayer, as we shall see in the weeks
ahead, shows us how.
A few weeks ago, one
of the participants in our Thursday “Aging and Saging Group” remarked that
she rarely prays. I was about to
howl in protest when she added the caveat, “At least not in the way we often
think of prayer.” So I exhaled and
relaxed a bit because this woman’s life, as do so many of yours, gives
bountiful evidence of being immersed in prayer in the sense that we have been
talking about it, in the sense of trapping the core and quintessence of God’s
vision for the world and, as a result, living a holy life (which Mary Baker Eddy
defined as “bringing goodness into the world”).
Too many people
think of prayer as telling God what to do as if God either is clueless or will
not do it unless begged. Or they
envision God as a Supernatural Vending Machine who can be cajoled to dish out
cars and homes and money and health and whatever else our hearts desire if we
pray right and pray enough. (5)
But those conceptions of God are so fraught with problems that I call
them theological felonies. Unfortunately,
the penalty for committing them is that, in the inevitable times of trouble we
all suffer, they leave us reeling, confused, and bereft of understanding and so
we end up either being angry with the God of our illusions or explaining away
God’s incompetence and underperformance.
Prayer is not our
way of getting what we want. That
is, at its root, the problem with many of the common conceptions of prayer.
The fact that we usually ask nicely for what we want does not lessen the
reality that most prayer wants to make God our errand boy.
Prayer is not our way of getting what we want.
Prayer is God’s way of getting what God wants.
In the process, we grow more completely and fully into our humanity and
so also more fully and completely into love for the world, for others, for
ourselves.
The psalm we read
today conveys the overarching and undergirding purpose of prayer:
“O
God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you; my flesh
faints
for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.”
-Psalm 63:1
Prayer seeks after
God. So, pick your metaphor.
In prayer, we set a trap for God so as to be able to catch and wrestle
with and finally yield to God’s dream for world and life and our lives that is
all of the time available to us since God is Spirit and Spirit is everywhere.
Or, if you prefer, in prayer we attune our lives to holy Spirit.
In either case, setting a trap or tuning in, the methods are similar and
involve a combination of silence and meditation and contemplating the life and
teachings of Jesus and even, as poet Sheri Hostetler writes,
“Find(ing) god in rhododendrons and rocks,
passers-by, your cat.”
(3) (That
last one
is
a stretch for me!)
In the weeks to
come, we’ll look more closely at The Lord’s Prayer through the lens
of the Aramaic language and I think you might be surprised in a good way by what
we find. We shall see in the various
parts of the prayer what Jesus discovered when he set a trap for God.
But, for today, the good news, the gospel is this:
God is not remote or removed or aloof from us.
God is near. In fact,
Amen.
(2) from a poem by Heather McHugh entitled “What He Thought”
(3) from a poem by Sheri Hostetler entitled “Instructions”
(4) Acts 17:28
(5) Errico, p. 5.
© 2007 First Presbyterian Church