Going Through the Motions: Prayer

(The following is an expanded version of a post I shared based on a discussion I was following in a social network faith group. The description does not pertain to all members of every church of Christ, but I’m sure we have seen those that this may remind us of.  I do not wish to cast aspersions on every Christian.  But we need to think hard about how committed we are to the founder of the faith, and not just the traditional trappings of of the church as an institution, but to the church as people with a mission to be the image of Jesus in a depraved world.) 

If the prayer of a righteous man avails much, how much do we avail ourselves of prayer in the more conservative churches of Christ? (That’s the group I’m most acquainted with.) Especially where it involves praying for people who don’t look or talk like us? We pray diligently for the military and their safety in harm’s way, and for our leaders who need all the help they can get, and rightly so. But how many times do we hear public prayer on behalf of the people of Puerto Rico who are still not recovered fully from last year’s hurricane season? Or the children being torn from their parents and shipped across the country with no one to comfort them? No, we pray (half-heartedly) for healing, when we know that Sis. So and So’s cancer is terminal. I don’t pray much for healing–mainly grace and comfort to deal with what will come, and come to all. Isn’t it interesting that most of the “miraculous” cures are not registered among coC members or adherents?

We don’t pray for the defeat of government measures that hurt people when heaven well knows that children, the elderly, and the disabled are in the cross-hairs of nearly every “conservative” politician. Because praying for the defeat of cruel measures would be going against the tenets of political conservatism, and we must all be conservative in all things.

We pray hollow words to a God we say we worship, but choose not to emulate in his quality of love. We go through sometimes elaborate motions to look the part of the believer in the sacred auditorium, but do we really internalize the repeated calls to justice and mercy and humility?  Our prayers are rife with pre-packaged formulas, with supplication that God will “Guide, guard, and direct us until the next appointed time.”  We pray for the preachers’ “ready recollection” of the message he has prepared for us.  We pray for God to “forgive us of our many sins,” but often forget to pray for strength and wisdom to avoid temptation. We may pray the prayers of entire services–opening prayer , two for Communion, and closing prayer–and never once acknowledge the centrality of grace to our presence and to our salvation.

I love the people I associate with, and those I have known for all my life. But as I reflect, I see so little Jesus in the lives of so many, and so much more formulaic church member. We take our five steps to achieve “membership,” then perform the five acts of worship regularly, and dismiss grace as an artifice of the denominations to get around obeying the five steps and performing the five acts. Some of us are almost never seen doing anything for the poor or the community, and certainly not as an organized outreach, because we don’t have an example as traditionally recognized, and we dare not overstep our bounds, because we can do good works to our own condemnation. No, we hide the talent in the ground, because God is a hard master, and count on grace–no, make that a graceless precision obedience–to take us to heaven, you know, just over the river, and beyond the sunset, and the second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.

When was the last time someone heard a voice break when someone prayed, or someone sob at the strong emotion they felt in the moment–so strong they poured their hearts out to God in public, even? I have cried for dead children–victims of the almost uniquely American plague of gun violence and school shooting–as I have reminded the congregation to pray for them and their weeping, heartbroken families. I sobbed as I asked the congregation to pray for a little boy, non-verbal and on the autism spectrum, killed by his father, perhaps because he was “inconvenient.” I have choked up thinking about the Christian brothers and sister in the Middle East who did not falter in their faith as the heartless evil soldiers of ISIS decapitated them before their children.

If we are not moved to tears or emotion at such suffering, perhaps it is best we don’t pray for those victims. If they mean so little to us as fellow image bearers of God that we can’t feel for them, how will God ever take the time to hear an empty, pointless, noisy fly-buzz of a prayer?

Perhaps we could start with a model as recorded in Luke 18.13: “But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!'”  But then, beating one’s breast would be undignified and not orderly in our worship services, and not approved.  So, we’ll just go back to, “Guide, guard and direct us….” As if we’d recognize it if any of those three were to actually happen to us as we leave the holy auditorium and the sacred building, and enter the world, of which we are not a part.