The Seventh Sunday of Easter Acts 1: 6 – 14
The Rev. Bambi Willis John 17: 1 – 11
“And now I am no longer in the
world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that
you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
John 17: 11
I remember the very first time someone asked me to pray for them. I was a chaplain intern at a small hospital and this was my first day. I had come to the hospital at the urging of a wise mentor who thought I might learn something being a hospital chaplain and convinced me to give it a go. With some bemusement and great fear and trembling, I took her up on her offer. The first day I met a woman whose husband had had a stroke, a very bad stroke, and who was now bedridden. She asked me to pray that he might get up and walk. And I knew and all the doctors knew he would never walk again. She was asking for a miracle and I knew that no words I might say would make her husband walk. I knew prayer was not magic; what I had yet to learn was that prayer is the very bread of life.
On this, the last Sunday of Easter,
Jesus prays for us: “Holy Father, protect them in
your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” The close of Easter marks the end of the earthly
ministry of Jesus. And in our reading
from Acts, we hear the story of the Ascension, that
Jesus was “lifted up” into heaven. The
Ascension of Jesus means that what Jesus did once on earth, Jesus now does
forever in heaven. Jesus’ earthly
ministry of love and compassion for the poor and the powerless never ends. As Jesus prayed for all those who suffer
while he walked the ground of
And when we pray, we eavesdrop on Jesus’ prayer for us. When we pray we are listening to a prayer already being prayed for us.
“There are many people who warm to the Christian faith and yet find the idea of prayer perplexing or even intellectually suspect,” former Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey wrote in 1982. “Amidst the vast range of human need can we believe that a God of love and compassion gives selective favors to certain people because some other people may have prayed for them?” he continues. “Are we sure that the praying that goes on in churches and elsewhere really affects the course of events in the world around us?” What good does prayer do?
Ramsey suggests that is the wrong question. The question we should be asking is: “What good does a praying Christian do?”
Prayer is, in Ramsey’s words, “opening a space” for God to speak. Prayer exposes us to God’s presence, an encounter in which words are far less important than is our desire to be with God as God desires to be with us. Prayer changes us, not God. When we pray, heaven and earth meet for a moment. We pray because we believe that the suffering and the injustice and the pain of the world is wrong, out of keeping with the way the world should be, the way God created the world to be. In prayer, we expose ourselves to a vision, a vision of God and a kingdom of love, justice, and joy. And through prayer we are given vision, the capacity to see ourselves and others as dearly beloved creatures of God, whose suffering is not what God desires for us. Prayer changes the way we see the world around us, sending us back out into this dearly loved world to be God’s mercy in the world.
“Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.” The Greek word our evangelist John uses that we translate as “protect” is probably better translated as “keep.” “Keep” is what God asked Adam and Eve to do with the Garden of Eden when God placed them in the garden and told them “to till it and keep it.” “Keep” is what we do with something we cherish, something that we prefer to be with rather than without. “Keep” is what we do with old family photos and the pictures the kids made in kindergarten and the letters we received from the people we decided to spend the rest of our lives with before we decided to do that. Jesus asks God to “keep” us. Forever and always, Jesus makes this prayer on our behalf.
Prayer is listening to Jesus pray for us, knowing Jesus’ prayer will always be heard by God but not always by us. And if prayer is more about listening than speaking, then silence and solitude are where we must begin. We live in a busy world and live frenetic lives. We are encouraged to be “multi-taskers” and try to do four things at once. We cannot seem to live without some sort of noise – we come home from work and being with other people all day and turn on the television. We switch on the radio or plug in a CD when we are driving. We have telephones we can attach to our ears so we can talk all the time. About the only time we are quiet is when we are asleep. And even then, for many of us, the noise doesn’t stop, and we continue to stew and fret and think about what we must do tomorrow.
Being still in this world seems to be a forgotten possibility. We are at risk of forgetting, I believe, how to be still. We all want to be Energizer bunnies because time is money and we must make every second count. We abhor silence, we loathe doing nothing, and we fear that if we really did stop talking, we might hear things we would prefer not to hear. And prayer, if we pray at all, becomes a frantic and last ditch effort to wean from God what we cannot make happen ourselves.
We are called to be people of prayer. In the absurd busy-ness of this world we are are called to be still. In silence and solitude we are invited into God’s very glorious presence. If you and I do not take time or find time or make time to “Be still and know that I am God” in the words of the psalmist, who will? And if we cannot or will not, what will become of us, what will become of the world? We expose ourselves to God in prayer so that we might be changed and through us this world in which we live. We pray not for ourselves alone but for the sake of the world.
In our baptismal covenant we promise “to continue in the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers.” And every Sunday after we hear readings from scripture and affirm our faith in the words of the creed we offer up to God our prayers as we join in the Prayers of the People. In these prayers we pray for the church, the nation, the world, this particular community in the West End of Richmond, for all who suffer and for those who have died. In the Prayers of the People we are “keeping” the whole world, cherishing and treasuring all that God has made because we would rather live with this world than without it. These prayers reflect our desires and our hopes and our longings.
Is God going to somehow magically stop all the murders this week or make those among us who are sick, well or suddenly deposit money into my discretionary fund to help pay someone’s overdue light bill because we have prayed for all these things? No. But as we pray we are affirming that we do believe that God does not want children to go hungry or families not to be able to live in a decent place or people to suffer from debilitating and chronic illness or anyone to be ashamed of who they are and the burdens that they bear. We live as we pray and we pray as we live. If these really are our prayers, then this week may just be a little different.