Questions for the Pulpit

with your rector, Harold Munn
April 7, 2010

What is the purpose of petitionary prayer if we believe God is a mystery beyond our full knowing and that She gives us free will and does not necessarily intervene to prevent difficult and even severely traumatic things from happening? To whom am I addressing the cry of my heart?

This is a very interesting question and one that a teenager in the congregation recently asked me.

Many of us were taught as young children to make a list of people to pray for each night, so we naturally fell into the idea that it is our job to tell God things that God might not otherwise know. When we get a bit older, we realize that God already knows everything we know, and much more. So, praying for people isn't about bringing God up to date. It must be about something else.

Think of it as if you were telling someone your heart's desire. Perhaps you have a child who is sick, and you say to the person closest to you, “ I so much want my child to get better.” You haven't given your partner information – he or she already knows you want that, but you tell them anyway because you love your child and can't help sharing your deep concern. So it is with God. We pray for victims of an earthquake, or for someone in difficulty, simply because it is our way of loving them. In fact, one of the outcomes of such prayer is experiencing God in us loving them. We join our love with God's love.

That's why prayer can never be allowed to become just a list of things we ask God to do, as if that was the end of it. If our concerns in prayer arise out of our love entwined with God's love, then in some circumstances we will want to put our prayers into practical action . That way prayer never becomes simply a way of naming our wishful thinking — which wouldn't be loving if that's all it was. Prayer of this kind is to be passionate — as passionate as our care for an elderly parent, or for a friend in trouble. Prayer is telling God about our deep concerns and listening in case God would have us do something.

The second part of this question is what we expect God to do about things. On an everyday level, it's strange but true — God had to create a world in which there had to be the possibility of accidents. If there were no consequences to our actions, the world would become chaotic and one could never count on anything. So we don't hold on to the child's view of God as a divine Santa Claus who makes everything nice.

What is God's solution to loving us infinitely but not jumping in to fix things? It's really the same as the way we treat those we love. You may be aware that an adult child is making a risky decision but there comes a time when one can only look on and out of respect and love allow the decision to be taken. Letting a child ride a bicycle can lead to dangerous consequences but we do it in the name of the child's growth into wholeness. In some way it must be like that for God except that God already is aware of all the consequences that will ever happen, or have ever happened, and God experiences them with even greater intensity than we do with our families.

The issue is different when we are talking about terrible evil. In that case it is mature to demand that God act, and to put God on trial when God doesn't act. Those are ways of insisting that overcoming evil can never take second place to something else. When we encounter some horrific evil, our best side urges us to sacrifice whatever is necessary, even our own life, to repair that evil. At our best we would snatch a child out of the path of a bus, even if saving the child meant our being killed. That is one of the ways in which we understand the crucifixion. God did whatever was necessary, even losing God's own life.

There are of course problems with that. Why did God not prevent the accident, the abuse, whatever, in the first place? I don't think anyone has ever come up with a successful answer to that. We try to understand as much as we are able. Some things make sense – growth always involves some degree of pain, but in other ways it is true that there is no way to make sense of some kinds of evil and of God's lack of preventative action. Some people just leave this as a mystery, without stopping to rail against the evil. Some people have come to think that our image of God needs adjusting. But the one thing Christianity refuses to do is to minimize or avoid the evil — the cross remains a central symbol in our faith. Whatever we end up thinking about God and evil, we refuse to suggest that evil isn't really evil and we refuse to ignore it. We insist on challenging evil and repairing it wherever we can.

I think it is necessary to demand that God take action. Otherwise we aren't taking God seriously. The fundamental claim is that God loves, even to the point of death, and we are to claim that love. God's apparent lack of action in response to evil challenges our belief that God is loving. To believe, actively, that God is loving is to become very vulnerable since it doesn't always seem to be true. We don't often in fact see the outcome. One implication of believing that God is loving is that God's own suffering, in experiencing our suffering, is eternal. That's at least part of what John means when in his gospel he speaks of Jesus as existing always – God's commitment to us, which involves suffering, means that God always suffers in love for us.

It is no wonder that we don't understand. And if we did think that we understood, we would need to be very suspicious of our understanding. Yet our belief that Love is the fundamental reality is strengthened when we consider the alternative. So the basic posture of our lives, moment to moment, is grounded in our vulnerability and our courageous trust that God loves. This basic stance is what we call faith.