Jetta Carleton in her novel The Moonflower Vine tells the story of three adult daughters who return to the family farm in western Missouri each summer to spend time with their aging parents. Now, on the last morning as they stand in the kitchen and make great plans for a day-long outing, they hear the dog barking wildly.

One of the daughters lets out an expletive in front of her mother, who chastises her, and then the daughter groans, “Here comes the preacher!”

“Oh my goodness, he’ll stay all morning!”

“Run and hide – he’ll think we’re gone!”

“We ran for the front room, pulling Mama with us. ‘We hadn’t ought to do this,’ she protested.”

As he knocks on the back door, they remain silent. “Anybody home?” he calls. No one answers. He knocks again. As he walks away, the mother says, “Poor little thing. It’s like Jesus knockin’ at the gate and won’t nobody answer. I’m going to let him in.”

She does, and he sits down to tell them that the man most hated in town has died, that there will be a funeral today, and he is afraid no one will show up. Would they? And the parents, dutiful to a fault, say, “Yes.”

The preacher says, “Fine. I knew I could count on you folks. I must run on now and get somebody for pallbearers. Shall we have a prayer?”

“We bowed our heads,” says the daughter, “and I counted backwards from a hundred.” (p.37-39)

Prayer is not always welcome. Sometimes it is something we endure, like counting backward from a hundred when the preacher starts to pray.

But, there is something almost universal about prayer. When we host the city’s Interfaith Thanksgiving Service in November representatives of thirteen or fourteen of the world’s religions gather to offer prayers in a variety of languages, intonations, and styles, all of them having some way to express gratitude to someone or something that stands beyond ourselves . . . Muslims, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Zoroastrians, Christians. And when we gather here again in May for the memorial service for the indigent residents who have died and been buried by the county, we all have prayers to offer in the face of death.

The apostle Paul said that we should “pray without ceasing.” Of course, that would be tedious if he meant that we were to sit quietly with our hands folded, our eyes closed, and recite prayers to God. That would be irresponsible; no work would get done.

Yet, when we read the diaries of the young John Wesley in Oxford we get the idea that he prayed all of the time. He was a compulsive character. Albert Outler, the historian, said that if John Wesley had been a garbage collector, England would have been the cleanest country in the world. He wrote down in fifteen minute-increments what he was doing all day long, and much of the time he was praying. Up before 5:00 a.m. to pray, praying throughout the day as a means of marking time, and going to the prison to pray with the inmates, especially those condemned to die.

But he soon learned what Paul meant, that we are to live a life of prayer, a life shaped by our communication with God, a life strengthened and informed by God. So, it is prayer as action, prayer as companionship, prayer as thought, prayer as music, prayer as silence, prayer as intention.

Look at how many times we pray in our worship service today. There is a prayer on the front cover of the bulletin that is a classic in the Christian tradition. It is archetypal, revealing the traditional form for prayer. It begins by addressing God and describing the divine attributes upon which we depend: “Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hidden.” And then, our need: “Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit.” For what purpose? “That we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name, through Christ our Lord.”

Most hymns are prayers. So, we prayed when we sang, “Immortal, invisible, God only wise,” a hymn that praises God for God’s divine grandeur. We will pray again when we sing Charles Wesley’s earnest plea to Jesus, the lover of my soul, “Other refuge have I none, hangs my helpless soul on thee; leave, ah! leave me not alone, still support and comfort me.”

The Prayer of Confession, when we pray for ourselves, asking God’s forgiveness of our sins as a people, the spoken prayer, and as a person, the silent prayer.

The psalm is a prayer. “O God, you are my God, I seek you, my soul thirsts for you.”(Ps. 63:1) Even those mean spirited verses asking God to punish our enemies are prayer. Do not pretend that you have never prayed for that.

The Prayers of the People, when we primarily pray for others. This is not the pastoral prayer in the sense that it is the prayer of the pastor. Rather, someone, a pastor or a layperson, tries to put into words the prayers of the community. That is why, when I offer this prayer, I usually come down into the center aisle and turn to face the altar. It is not a prayer that I address to you but a prayer that we offer to God. That is followed by the Lord’s Prayer, the one that Jesus taught us to pray as an expression of our unity (though notice that the Presbyterians confess “debts” instead of “trespasses,” the Roman Catholics tend to drop out before the ascription of glory which is reserved for the priest, and the Lutherans go on “for ever and ever.”)

The Doxology is a prayer of thanksgiving; then, there is the prayer of dedication of the morning offering. In our sacramental rituals there are the elaborate prayers over the water of Baptism and the elements of Holy Communion. And finally, the Benediction is a prayer of blessing as we leave this assembly. Prayer through and through when we worship together.

All of life is a prayer, we might say, but to be honest, there are times when we are uneasy with prayer. Back in the days when clergy were invited to give invocations at high school graduations, the principal introduced me, and as I walked toward the podium he smiled slyly and whispered to me, “You may invoke, but don’t excite!” A playful reminder, “This prayer is a formality; don’t overdo it.”

It still is the case that we clergy are asked to pray in public settings, and that poses a challenge. What can we pray that includes everyone present, not only those of other faiths but also those of no faith? And how can we pray honestly without sounding as if we are offering a commentary or pushing an agenda? The last time I prayed at the County Board meeting I began with John Wesley’s instruction, first, to do no harm, and second, to do good. The next time they called the office for someone to pray they stipulated that it be anyone but me. Maybe the “do no harm” was setting too high a standard.

Sometimes we are uneasy with prayer because we learned what to do as a child, but we have not grown in the discipline. There is another story about adult children returning home to spend time with their parents. This time it is two brothers sharing their old bedroom. At night one kneels down next to his bed to pray, and the other says, “Do you still do that?” From that night on he never does it again.

What are we doing when we pray? It has to be more than self-motivation or self-improvement. Though it all takes place in our mind, it has to be more than mind games that we play on ourselves. But to get it beyond ourselves we must conceive of the Other with whom we are communicating, the mysterious Other.

Last Sunday in our informal discussion series we are calling “Christianity 101” we talked about, “Who, or what, is God?” When we pray, with whom or what are we engaged? There are all sorts of answers to that, but historically the Church has expressed the images of God in three ways, in the traditional language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, in the functional language of Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer.

God in three persons, the Church has said, here borrowing an image from the theater. It is the same actor playing three parts, three “personae.” As a member of the audience each one of us might relate more to one person than another, but that is okay since behind it all is the same actor.

So, some of us can get into a praying mindset if we see as our communication partner a God who is the creator of all, the initiator of action, a power that is, at least in some way, “in charge.” Others of us can pray if we see ourselves engaging in conversation with a humanizing figure, familiar, familial, the lover of my soul. Still others of us are not moved by such personalizations, but if we can sense that we are enveloped by some sort of energy, that there is a force field of prayer that we tap, then we can make sense out of prayer.

Prayer is idiosyncratic in that way. I contend that we all are Unitarians of one person of the Trinity or another. That is, in the traditional cast of characters there is one that most engages us to the point that we can imagine ourselves in contact, formally or informally, directly or indirectly, with the Other.

For what? For what do we pray? Sometimes we pray for something. The psalmist sings out, “My soul thirsts for you, my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where no water is.” Prayer is no time to be shy. We pray for good health, for a job, for food on the table. But, we always remember Jesus in the garden praying specifically, “If it is your will, let this cup pass from me.” Save me, God, from this awful death, yet “your will be done.” The ultimate prayer of wanting – that God’s will be done and that we be faithful enough to accept it.

Sometimes we pray to open ourselves up, to sensitize ourselves to a larger reality than the smallness of our daily lives. When we pray for others, like when we name the names of those who are sick or troubled or in distress, it is not to inform God of something of which God otherwise would be ignorant. Rather, it is to connect ourselves with them so that their lives are invited to have an impact on our lives. The mystic of the 14th Century, Julian of Norwich, wrote, “Then our Lord opened my spiritual eyes and showed me the soul in the middle of my heart. The soul was as large as if it were an eternal world, and a blessed kingdom as well.”(True Prayer, Kenneth Leech, p.4)

Sometimes we pray in order to make a commitment. When we pray for peace we are enlisting ourselves in God’s army to battle over against all cruelty, violence, treachery, and false patriotism in the world.

Sometimes we pray simply to say “thank you.” That may be the basic prayer of all faithfulness. “Thank you, God, for this day which we did not earn but you have granted it to us, anyway.” Remember that the prayers we say over the water and the bread and cup are called great “thanksgivings.”

And then, we sometimes pray because there is nothing else that we can do. Without words, without posturing, without guile. Harry Emerson Fosdick was a great preacher of the last century. As a young man he suffered from depression and had a nervous breakdown. He writes, “For the first time in my life, I faced, at my wit’s end, a situation too much for me to handle. I went down into the depths where self-confidence becomes ludicrous . . . In that experience . . . I learned to pray, not because I had adequately argued out prayer’s rationality, but because I desperately needed help from a Power greater than my own.”(quoted by Emerson Colaw in Beliefs of a United Methodist Christian, p.87)

We have a plaque on the wall at the entrance of our home. Translated from the Latin, it says, “Summoned or not summoned, God is present.” It was the inscription that psychologist Carl Jung had carved over the front door of his house in Zurich. Prayer is not a means of conjuring up God, but a way of opening up ourselves to God . . . in order to plead, to commend, to commit, to thank, and to make it through the day. Thanks be to God for listening. Amen.