God hears our prayers - even if they are a word salad

 

Reflection Sunday 26^th July 2020 Romans 8: 26 – 39

 

I last led a service in church on Sunday 15^th March. Since then I have produced a service and reflection for each Sunday. And I will continue to do so for some time. (Even when our churches reopen, I envisage producing something similar every week for those people who feel it won’t be safe to come back to church due to their health concerns.)

I am very grateful for the messages I get from you telling me how appreciative you are of the services, and the work that goes into preparing them. I do not think of it as work or a hard task. After all, I’d be writing a sermon each week anyway. And if anything, the present set up allows me more time to think and prepare than normal. Usually writing a sermon has to come between church meetings, Bible studies, pastoral calls (whether in person or on the phone) and other things. Now I have been gifted more time to prepare these services.

But there is one thing that causes me more work than anything else in my preparations and that are the prayers. For I must confess, I find prayers the most challenging part of any service. Not so much prayers of intercession or prayers of thanksgiving but the other prayers. The prayers of praise and the prayers of confession.

In part, this is because I can’t put into words my own praises, and my confessions might be different to yours!

Therefore, I am grateful to the many gifted writers of prayers who I can draw on. I know some of you have been keeping the services I’ve prepared. If so, if you look back, you’ll see certain names feature regularly - Nick Fawcett, Donald Hinton, Neil Dixon and Christine Odell as well as the likes of Ruth Burgess from the Iona Community and the various writers of the Methodist Worship Book. These women and men have been gifted the prayers to write by the Holy Spirit, to enable people like myself to have the right words to offer as prayers. I thank God for them and for their ministry.

We all know we should pray, and we even know how we should pray  - remember Jesus gave his disciples what we call the Lord’s Prayer as a template on how to pray see Matthew 6: 9 – 13 and Luke 11: 2 – 4. (We’ll keep for another day why these versions of the Lord’s Prayer differ slightly.) And undoubtedly, many people have no issue with praying.

But some of us find prayer difficult. We want to pray but we get ourselves in a muddle somehow. Not knowing how to start, what to say, what to pray for, who to pray for. We hear of other people who find prayer easy who seem to pray as if they’ve just picked up the phone to God and that makes those of us who find prayer a challenge (or even a chore?) guilty. Why can’t we pray like them?

A few weeks ago, I was sent a little video. A kind of animation. (If you are a Facebook member, head to the Central Methodist Church Group and you’ll find it there posted on 24th June.) The animation shows a magnetic board. The kind that children sometime have to stick letters to, to make words.

A woman’s hand sticks at the top of the board letters spelling out “DEAR GOD”. The woman then starts to write various things such as “HOW DO I” and “I JUST”. They are the starts of prayers. But each time she clearly doesn’t know what to say next and she removes the letters, leaving “DEAR GOD” in place and starts again.

After a while she gets frustrated and dumps a whole load of letters on the board before writing “AMEN” at the bottom.

Then the board is cleared by an invisible hand and a message is added:

“DEAR CHILD,

I KNOW.

I LOVE YOU

GOD”

That is all. And the video ends.

When I saw the video for the first time, I found it such a comfort. It could have been me trying to write those initial prayers. As I watched the video some words of scripture came to mind. They are words we find in the passage from Romans for today – Romans 8: 26 – 27

I like how the Living Bible puts it:

²⁶ And in the same way—by our faith^[e]—the Holy Spirit helps us with our daily problems and in our praying. For we don’t even know what we should pray for nor how to pray as we should, but the Holy Spirit prays for us with such feeling that it cannot be expressed in words. ²⁷ And the Father who knows all hearts knows, of course, what the Spirit is saying as he pleads for us in harmony with God’s own will Romans 8: 26 - 27

It is encouraging to know that no matter how jumbled up our prayers are, no matter how inadequate we feel our words are, no matter if we never get past “DEAR GOD” on our equivalent of a magnetic board, God hears our prayers through the Holy Spirit making sense of our groans, our “word salad” (a phrase I’ve heard recently.)

Paul isn’t saying we shouldn’t pray and rely on the Holy Spirit to do the job for us. We still need to pray. Even if we say the prayers in our hearts and minds. We still need to pray. But we can be assured that through the Holy Spirit God hears our prayers no matter how messy or inadequate we think our prayers are.