Prayer (Community Basics - Week 5)

(This is an older sermon. Somehow I missed posting it.)

May 9, 2010
Josh Broward


Once upon a time, there were a group of cooks who never ate. They met together to cook. They made the most incredible dishes - adding just the right spices and holding the pan over the heat just so. But each week after they finished cooking their masterpieces, they tossed them into the trash bins and returned home.

Once upon a time, there was a Manchester United fan club. They all had the Man-U shirts and hats. They new all of the players’ names and statistics. They had autographed balls and photos. Their fan club met every week, but they never talked about soccer. They never watched any Man-U games. They weren’t even interested in the celebrity gossip about the Man-U players. Externally, they were the biggest fans in the world, but internally, their club had very little to do with Manchester United.

Once upon a time, there was an artists’ guild that didn’t do art. Artists from around the city met together to talk about the art of art. They discussed brush strokes and the tools for chiseling marble. They had heated debates about the best kind of paper to use when painting with water colors. However, the curious thing was that none of these art experts ever did any art.

Once upon a time, there was a book club that met every week even though nobody ever read the books. They would talk about this and that and have a cup of coffee or a glass of wine, while the books sat on the coffee table unopened - with fresh, uncracked spines.

Once upon a time, a Supreme Court won a reputation for hearing an amazing quantity of cases. The judges seemed to have amazing endurance. They heard cases day and night on every possible subject - everything from sexual harassment to constitutional law to internet commerce. It was quite some time before people realized that, although this Supreme Court listened intently to many complex legal problems, they never actually gave any rulings.

Once upon a time, there was a church that was always meeting and talking about God and singing about God and praying to God and working for God. They had good music and good preaching and good children’s ministries and good Bible studies and a good community service project and good partnerships and mission trips. But for all of their talk and programing, they didn’t act or feel like God was really active among them.

The Church is a human organization, and, like any human organization, it works by certain social and psychological rules. If we acknowledge and work with these psycho-social rules, we can build a strong and effective organization. If we get our style and structure and environment right, we can grow in size and productivity - just like any human organization. This is good and healthy.
The problem is that the Church is not just a human organization. The Church is also a Spiritual organism. The Church is the Body of Christ. The Church is the temple of the Holy Spirit. The Church is the in-breaking of God’s future into our present. The Church is the community of the Kingdom of God. The Church is the living experience of God’s heavenly life. The Church is God’s body for God’s mission of healing our world. The Church is the “place” where God and humanity connect. The point of the Church is to reconnect God and humanity - healing our brokenness by soaking us in God’s grace.
Like the cooks who never ate, we can spend all our time around God-stuff and be starving inside.
Like the soccer club that wasn’t interested in soccer, we can look like God’s greatest fans but ignore him in practice.
Like the artists’ guild that never painted, we can become experts in theology and speak with the highest church-talk but never live Church.
Like the book club that didn’t read books, we can come together to in the name of God without ever engaging God himself.
Like the Supreme Court that never made decisions, we can spend all our time mulling over all of the issues related to Christianity without ever touching the Christ.

One of my great fears is that we will be a church that misses the point.

There are two traditional ways for churches to miss the point. When I was growing up, pastors loved to preach against the church as a social club. The pastors would go on and on about how we don’t come to church just to meet people or to build relationships. That is surely part of the point of church. We need those social relationships. But when they become the primary point, we miss out on something important.
Unfortunately, most of the churches I participated in, when I was growing up, missed the point in another direction. They became religious clubs. They became escape routes out of our world. Church became the place to huddle and hide from the pain of our world. The emphasis of church became wholly spiritual. The answer to every problem was prayer. The only thing that mattered was whether you were going to heaven where all our problems would disappear.
In our attempts to avoid the errors of the social clubs and and the religious clubs, we sometimes stumble into a different error: service clubs. Sometimes, the church becomes little more than a service organization that meets for regular “pep rallies,” propaganda, and inspirational speeches. Sometimes, the church becomes a human organization of people trying to make our world better under the banner of religion. We talk about God. God is our motivation and our example and our unifying doctrine, but we don’t actually expect God to be active and present in our daily lives - much less in our organization. (This seems to be the most tempting option for our church.)
The most dangerous thing about each of these clubs is that they each have part of the truth. Each of the clubs focuses in on one of the core purposes of the Church. The problem comes with over-emphasis.
The Church exists for three fundamental purposes:
To help people connect with God
To strengthen the community of God
To shape us into the mission of God.
We need all three. The Church is all three. The Church exists for all three of these purposes. Every local church lives and breathes based on these three purposes: connecting with God, being the community of God, and engaging in the mission of God. If we leave any of these out, if we over-emphasize any of these, then we go astray. We may build a strong organization, but we build a weak church.
Let me speak frankly about our church. We have a lot of strengths as a church. We are diverse and loving. We are deeply committed to God’s mission - here and abroad. I am thrilled with our partnership with Bangladesh. We are growing in our internal organization and effectiveness. Our music is getting better and better. We are learning how to work together across cultures and expectations. We are beginning to engage our creativity more through art.
However, I think we are missing out in connecting people with God. We are trending toward the social club and service club danger zones. We need to go deeper in God’s Spirit together. We need to experience God’s Spirit more when we gather to worship. We need to see more people’s lives changed by God’s revolutionary grace. We need to make more space for the holy, for the mysterious, for the unmanaged, uncontrolled experience of God.
To be very honest with you, I’m not sure how to do that. I know what we need, but I don’t know how to get it. “Only God's Spirit gives new life. The Spirit is like the wind that blows wherever it wants to. You can hear the wind, but you don't know where it comes from or where it is going” (John 3:8, CEV). I know we need the Spirit, but I can’t control the Spirit. I know we need a deeper sense of God’s Spirit, but I can’t make that happen. “The Spirit is like the wind that blows wherever it wants to.”
To be honest with you again, I tend to be skeptical about movements or programs that promise revival. I have a great emotional resistance to prayer chains and loud prayer meetings and all night prayer vigils. That may be a strange thing for a pastor to say, so let me explain.
Many of the prayer or revival programs I’ve seen promised much but delivered little. In the end, they were cheesy little programs that we patched onto existing programs to try to convince God to do something new. (Or at least to convince ourselves that we wanted God to do something new.)
Many of the prayer programs I’ve experienced had an over-emphasis on prayer. Their philosophy was that prayer would solve everything. We could keep running our out-of-date ministries in out-of-date ways. We could keep living our same sin-filled lives. We could keep neglecting the poor and ignoring our neighbors. But somehow we believed that if we prayed loud enough or long enough, then God would do something really cool and justify our screwed up out-of-balance lives. I don’t want to be part of anything like that.
I also have a great fear of failure when it comes to prayer. I sometimes have a great doubt that my prayer will actually change someone. Sometimes, I’m afraid to pray because I’m afraid to be let down again.
On the other hand, I also have a fear of success. What if God really does answer our prayers and do something completely new and amazing among us? What if we get caught up in a movement of God that is so incredible and so far beyond us that it changes all our plans and sucks us into a whole new world, a whole new way of being? That’s exciting and scary all at the same time. Sometimes, I’m afraid to pray deeply for something like that.
Lastly, some of my emotional resistance against prayer and prayer movements stems from a basic confusion about prayer. I should really understand prayer by now. I have been a Christian for 20 years. I have 8 years of formal theological education and 6 years of pastoral experience. But I don’t really understand how prayer works. I kind of get communing with God. I get sitting in silence with God and meditating, but I don’t really get intercessory prayer. How does our asking for something make God more likely to do it? How does all of this work for a God who is in eternity? Does he already know we’re going to ask before we ask? Then, why do we need to ask? And does my prayer in Korea really make a difference for a missionary in Africa? I still don’t really get it all.

I’m guessing that most of you are kind of like me. We have a whole lot of mixed feelings about prayer. We want prayer to work, but we’re confused about how it works. We want prayer to work, but we’re afraid that it won’t and afraid that it will - all at the same time. We want more prayer in our life and in our church, but we’ve seen prayer abused and misused, so we’re afraid to go down that road again.
In many ways, we’re kind of like the people in Acts chapter 12. Listen to their story.
About that time King Herod Agrippa began to persecute some believers in the church. He had the apostle James (John’s brother) killed with a sword. When Herod saw how much this pleased the Jewish people, he also arrested Peter. (This took place during the Passover celebration.) Then he imprisoned him, placing him under the guard of four squads of four soldiers each. Herod intended to bring Peter out for public trial after the Passover. But while Peter was in prison, the church prayed very earnestly for him.
The night before Peter was to be placed on trial, he was asleep, fastened with two chains between two soldiers. Others stood guard at the prison gate. Suddenly, there was a bright light in the cell, and an angel of the Lord stood before Peter. The angel struck him on the side to awaken him and said, “Quick! Get up!” And the chains fell off his wrists. Then the angel told him, “Get dressed and put on your sandals.” And he did. “Now put on your coat and follow me,” the angel ordered.
So Peter left the cell, following the angel. But all the time he thought it was a vision. He didn’t realize it was actually happening. They passed the first and second guard posts and came to the iron gate leading to the city, and this opened for them all by itself. So they passed through and started walking down the street, and then the angel suddenly left him.
Peter finally came to his senses. “It’s really true!” he said. “The Lord has sent his angel and saved me from Herod and from what the Jewish leaders had planned to do to me!”
When he realized this, he went to the home of Mary, the mother of John Mark, where many were gathered for prayer. He knocked at the door in the gate, and a servant girl named Rhoda came to open it. When she recognized Peter’s voice, she was so overjoyed that, instead of opening the door, she ran back inside and told everyone, “Peter is standing at the door!”
“You’re out of your mind!” they said. When she insisted, they decided, “It must be his angel.”
Meanwhile, Peter continued knocking. When they finally opened the door and saw him, they were amazed. He motioned for them to quiet down and told them how the Lord had led him out of prison. “Tell James and the other brothers what happened,” he said. And then he went to another place. (Acts 12:1-17)

We pray, but we’re surprised when God answers. We ask for a miracle, but at the same time, we think miracles are kind of crazy and unlikely. We don’t really know what to pray or how to pray, but we keep on trying because we are God’s people and God’s people pray.
Next week, we are beginning one week of 24-7 Prayer. We don’t have any big promises here. We aren’t claiming that this is going to start the next worldwide revival or that our church will double in size if we’ll just pray hard enough. This won’t solve all your problems, and it probably won’t make our church into a miracle factory. We are doing this as part of our over all participation in God’s community and God’s mission.
The 24-7 prayer movement is kind of an “accidental” movement that just kind of happened to a bunch of people who love rock music and tattoos. We are joining in as part of our attempt to connect with God.
There will be all kinds of things happening in our prayer room. There will be a repentance station, a wailing wall, a simple quiet space, a whole wall with prayer request cards posted all of the place, a place to write our thanksgivings and praises, a cross for us to kneel in front of, a CD player for music.
But in the end, this 24-7 prayer room isn’t about praying for a long list of things or even praying in a bunch of new ways. 24-7 Prayer is about our Church being the Church - helping people connect with God. This is about each of us giving one hour to be with God. You can cry, laugh, draw, talk, journal, read the Bible, sing, play a guitar - whatever you want. How you do it isn’t the point. The point is to be with God. We are all going to be with God - for one unbroken string of time. 24 hours a day for 7 days. 168 hours. Our church connecting with God.
What’s going to happen? To be honest, I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I do know this. We are going to connect with God. We are going to connect with God, and that is why we are here.