William H. Willimon - "How to Do Prayer Right" (August 12, 2001)
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| - | Please join in the prayer for illumination | 0:07 |
| that is printed in your bulletin. | 0:10 | |
| Open our hearts, O mind, O God, by the power | 0:13 | |
| of your holy spirit so that as the Word is read | 0:17 | |
| and proclaimed, we may hear your message | 0:20 | |
| with joy this day, amen. | 0:23 | |
| The first lesson is from Isaiah:1. | 0:27 | |
| The vision of Isaiah, son of Amoz, | 0:31 | |
| which he saw concerning Judah, and Jerusalem, | 0:33 | |
| in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, Hezekiah, | 0:36 | |
| the King of Judah, hear the Word of the Lord your rulers | 0:40 | |
| of Sodom, listen to the teaching of your God, | 0:44 | |
| you people of Gomorrah. | 0:47 | |
| "What to me is a multitude of your sacrifices," | 0:49 | |
| said the Lord, "I've had enough of burnt offerings | 0:52 | |
| "of rams and the fat of fed beasts, | 0:55 | |
| "I do not delight in the blood of bowls, | 0:58 | |
| "or of lambs, or of goats. | 1:01 | |
| "When you come to appear before me, | 1:03 | |
| "who asked you from your hand? | 1:05 | |
| "Trample my courts no more, bringing offerings is futile, | 1:08 | |
| "incense is an abomination to me, new moon and Sabbath, | 1:12 | |
| "and calling of convocation, | 1:16 | |
| "I cannot endure solemn assemblies with inequity. | 1:18 | |
| "Your new moons and your appointed festivals, | 1:21 | |
| "my soul hates. | 1:24 | |
| "They have become a burden to me, | 1:26 | |
| "I am weary of bearing them. | 1:27 | |
| "When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes | 1:30 | |
| "from you, even though you make many prayers. | 1:33 | |
| "I will not listen, your hands are full of blood. | 1:36 | |
| "Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean, | 1:40 | |
| "remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes, | 1:42 | |
| "ceased to do evil, learn to do good, seek justice, | 1:46 | |
| "rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, | 1:50 | |
| "plead for the widow." | 1:53 | |
| This is the Word of the Lord, thanks be to God. | 1:55 | |
| - | I should have mentioned that this is the beginning | 2:08 |
| here at Duke, of employee appreciation week. | 2:11 | |
| Therefore, the majority of our choir | 2:14 | |
| and about everyone helping to lead this service today | 2:18 | |
| is an employee of Duke University. | 2:21 | |
| Well, they have been having a ruckus at Clemson University. | 2:27 | |
| If there is, and the controversy, interestingly enough is, | 2:34 | |
| not over the favorite Clemson subject of football, | 2:41 | |
| but it is over prayer. | 2:47 | |
| Over prayer before the football games. | 2:48 | |
| If there is one tradition that is beloved | 2:52 | |
| at Clemson University, it is having a prayer | 2:55 | |
| to begin the football games. | 2:58 | |
| The ACLU that believes that prayer anywhere other | 3:01 | |
| than safely tucked away at church, | 3:05 | |
| is an attack upon the government. | 3:06 | |
| The ACLU is opposed to the Clemson football prayer. | 3:08 | |
| But, the president of Clemson says this tradition | 3:12 | |
| is going to continue. | 3:16 | |
| And he's looking for clergy now who can pray appropriate, | 3:18 | |
| tasteful, generic prayers before the Clemson football games. | 3:23 | |
| I remember I was at a Clemson football game a number | 3:27 | |
| of years ago, and I was caught standing in the isles | 3:29 | |
| before the game, holding a soft drink in each hand, | 3:34 | |
| and there, my head bowed, | 3:37 | |
| 50,000 people with their heads bowed, | 3:40 | |
| standing there before the game, | 3:42 | |
| it seemed odd to me, an odd place for prayer. | 3:45 | |
| And I remember the prayer was something | 3:50 | |
| about good sportsmanship and something about | 3:51 | |
| no injuries and everything. | 3:55 | |
| I also noticed that the Clemson football team appeared not | 3:57 | |
| to notice the prayers, they beat the brains | 4:00 | |
| out of Duke, during the game. | 4:02 | |
| (laughing) | 4:05 | |
| But, does prayer belong at a football ball game? | 4:10 | |
| These football prayers, | 4:18 | |
| they seem to me a kind of trivialization | 4:19 | |
| of that tough business of Christian prayer. | 4:23 | |
| Because Christian prayer is that difficult task | 4:27 | |
| of trying to do business with God, | 4:31 | |
| and letting God do business with us. | 4:36 | |
| It's enough to make you ask, | 4:39 | |
| what is real prayer, true prayer. | 4:42 | |
| You'll note that in this service, as most services | 4:48 | |
| of worship, is mostly prayer. | 4:53 | |
| The hymns, prayers, most of what we do is prayer. | 4:56 | |
| You can look at the bulletin and see that | 4:59 | |
| it's as if the scripture reading and this sermon and all, | 5:01 | |
| is to get you ready to pray. | 5:04 | |
| Most of what we do as worship, is prayer. | 5:11 | |
| I once taught courses at the divinity school | 5:14 | |
| on the leadership of Christian worship. | 5:18 | |
| And because Christian worship is mostly about prayer, | 5:22 | |
| I would announce to my seminarians, | 5:26 | |
| the beginning of the semester, course and worship, | 5:29 | |
| I'd say, "now by the way, during the semester, | 5:31 | |
| "you're going to write me half a dozen prayers | 5:33 | |
| "and hand them in." | 5:36 | |
| And then one of them would say, "what are you gonna do | 5:38 | |
| "with these prayers?" | 5:40 | |
| And I said, "I'm a professor, I'll grade them, of course." | 5:41 | |
| And someone would be shocked and say, | 5:45 | |
| "you can't grade somebody's prayer!" | 5:47 | |
| And I said, "watch me!" | 5:51 | |
| (laughing) | 5:52 | |
| You see, they were thinking that, oh prayer is just | 5:54 | |
| when we have a little free wheeling chat with the Lord, | 5:57 | |
| and who can put a grade on that? | 6:00 | |
| Who is to say that your prayer is like above average | 6:05 | |
| as a prayer or below average. | 6:08 | |
| Well, the prophet, Isaiah, for one. | 6:12 | |
| Isaiah, Jesus favorite prophet begins his prophecy, | 6:17 | |
| you've heard read, Isaiah:1. | 6:22 | |
| He begins his prophecy with an address | 6:24 | |
| to people in Sodom and Gomorrah. | 6:29 | |
| Which are bible code words for New York, New Orleans, | 6:32 | |
| but for today's service we will take this as Durham. | 6:36 | |
| "O people of Durham, your countless sacrifices, | 6:41 | |
| "what are they to me?" says the Lord. | 6:45 | |
| Here we've got a prophetic critique of worship, of prayer. | 6:49 | |
| Isaiah lists all the things that we do | 6:56 | |
| for God when we worship. | 6:58 | |
| Sacrifice, offering, praise, everything that we do | 7:00 | |
| as Isaiah says, "when you enter the presence of the Lord." | 7:04 | |
| Isaiah is educating about right prayer. | 7:09 | |
| What is right prayer? | 7:16 | |
| Fellow Methodist pastor, Kirbyjon Caldwell was asked | 7:18 | |
| to go to the inauguration of President Bush, | 7:22 | |
| and offer a prayer. | 7:25 | |
| Friend of mine, Peter Gomes, has prayed at the inaugurations | 7:27 | |
| of President Reagan and President Bush Sr. | 7:30 | |
| Maybe it's because I don't do it quite right, | 7:36 | |
| I've only been asked to pray outside of here, | 7:38 | |
| at the faculty dinner dance, and at the opening | 7:42 | |
| of the Washington Duke Hotel. | 7:46 | |
| (laughing) | 7:48 | |
| However, I've been privileged to offer sacrifice, prayer, | 7:51 | |
| to come into the presence of the Lord | 7:56 | |
| at some great services of worship. | 7:58 | |
| I remember High Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. | 8:00 | |
| I remember an even song | 8:05 | |
| at King's College Chapel in Cambridge. | 8:07 | |
| There was that sense that here is prayer, right. | 8:10 | |
| And maybe you'd be surprised, | 8:19 | |
| a lot of people come out of here | 8:21 | |
| on Sunday morning and they tell me, "I've driven | 8:22 | |
| "a long distance to come here to worship | 8:25 | |
| "because, well, here is worship done right." | 8:27 | |
| If you haven't been here in the chapel on a Thursday, | 8:32 | |
| on a February evening and Thursday for one | 8:35 | |
| of our choral vesper services. | 8:38 | |
| If you haven't been here on a Christmas Eve, | 8:40 | |
| or, on a bright Easter with the trumpets and the glory, | 8:42 | |
| you may not have seen Christian worship done | 8:47 | |
| in its fullness, in its glory, | 8:50 | |
| maybe we oughta put that on a billboard out front. | 8:53 | |
| Duke Chapel, prayer done right. | 8:57 | |
| Surely God Almighty just smiles on such prayer. | 9:04 | |
| "Not necessarily", says the prophet Isaiah. | 9:11 | |
| It takes two to have a conversation, | 9:16 | |
| it takes someone to speak, our Father who art in heaven, | 9:20 | |
| hallowed be thy name, and it takes someone else to listen. | 9:24 | |
| And our conversation partner protest, | 9:30 | |
| "your countless services, what are they to me? | 9:34 | |
| "I am sick at my stomach of your praise. | 9:37 | |
| "I've got no desire for your liturgical extravaganzas, | 9:40 | |
| "who told you I wanted a mass? | 9:43 | |
| "Your gifts are useless to me, stop tramping into my house, | 9:45 | |
| "the smell of your burnt offering make me sick, | 9:49 | |
| "your prayers have become a burden to me, | 9:53 | |
| "your countless prayers." | 9:56 | |
| And then God says something | 10:01 | |
| that I think is one of the most severe, | 10:03 | |
| tough things said by God | 10:09 | |
| in all of scripture, "I will not listen." | 10:12 | |
| Oh, when I was a professor of worship at the seminary, | 10:21 | |
| I may have graded down my seminarians on their prayers | 10:25 | |
| for poor grammar or excessive use of clerical cliche. | 10:29 | |
| But I never wrote down on those papers | 10:34 | |
| anything as negative as this, | 10:36 | |
| the Lord says to all those church going, hymn singing, | 10:40 | |
| tithing, praising folk at Sodom and Gomorrah, | 10:43 | |
| "go ahead, say your prayers, I'm not listening!" | 10:47 | |
| Years ago the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, | 10:55 | |
| said, "God doesn't hear the prayers of Jews, | 10:58 | |
| "wrong religion, just don't know how to use the right words, | 11:04 | |
| "can't say Jesus like we say that." | 11:07 | |
| But according to Isaiah he was wrong. | 11:13 | |
| Sometimes God gets worn out. | 11:18 | |
| Sometimes God just refuses | 11:22 | |
| to bother with our pregame chatter, | 11:24 | |
| but not for our reasons, God's got God's own reasons. | 11:27 | |
| What reasons? | 11:34 | |
| What is the acid test of good prayer? | 11:36 | |
| The sort of conversation that Almighty God | 11:41 | |
| will condescend to engage in. | 11:43 | |
| Isaiah hears God say, | 11:48 | |
| "put away your evil deeds, | 11:52 | |
| "pursue justice, champion the oppressed, | 11:55 | |
| "give the orphans his rights, plead for the widow." | 11:58 | |
| The divine test of prayer is not the right words, | 12:05 | |
| the right grammar, the right intonation, it's ethics. | 12:09 | |
| Bad deeds silence the most eloquent religious words. | 12:15 | |
| The test for what we do here on a Sunday from 11 until noon, | 12:19 | |
| is what we do out there, from Monday through Saturday. | 12:25 | |
| God goes so far as to say, "pray yourselves until | 12:31 | |
| "you drop dead, I won't listen to those of you | 12:36 | |
| "who pervert justice, who champion the cause of the rich | 12:39 | |
| "and the powerful, who take advantage of the vulnerable | 12:43 | |
| "and the powerless, go ahead, have yourselves a service, | 12:47 | |
| "but don't save me a seat, I won't be there." | 12:51 | |
| We come together and we pray. | 12:57 | |
| And I expect as on most occasions, today during our prayers, | 13:00 | |
| we will intercede for the less fortunate, | 13:04 | |
| and yet we are those, who just this last month, | 13:08 | |
| most of us have received our tax rebate check | 13:11 | |
| from the government, we who live in a country | 13:16 | |
| where something like two million children | 13:20 | |
| are without adequate healthcare, there are problems | 13:24 | |
| of food and housing, for those who don't vote, | 13:27 | |
| God says, "sorry, I don't listen to prayers | 13:33 | |
| "of people who pile up goodies for themselves | 13:37 | |
| "and let the orphans and the widows go to hell." | 13:40 | |
| When I was grading those prayers in my seminary classroom, | 13:47 | |
| I graded for grammar, theology, syntax, | 13:51 | |
| but Isaiah says, there's only one test for prayer | 13:55 | |
| that makes any difference to God, "justice!" | 13:59 | |
| Doesn't say that we're to believe in justice, | 14:04 | |
| the idea of it for the poor, rather we're to do justice. | 14:06 | |
| Make the calls of the widow and the orphan our own. | 14:11 | |
| And if we don't we're just sailing our pretty words | 14:17 | |
| out into the silence. | 14:20 | |
| Christian prayer is a hard thing to do, | 14:25 | |
| it doesn't come naturally. | 14:28 | |
| Years ago I remember a book entitled, "Religious Roulette: | 14:31 | |
| How to Pray Like a Christian." | 14:37 | |
| Religious Roulette, the pastor who wrote this book | 14:39 | |
| said that in church you get basically two kinds | 14:42 | |
| of prayer, you get Christian prayer | 14:45 | |
| and then you get Pagan prayer. | 14:47 | |
| Pagan prayer is when prayer becomes another technique | 14:49 | |
| for getting what we want, it's like a roulette wheel | 14:53 | |
| in a casino, you spin the wheel, the number comes up, | 14:56 | |
| if your luck is right, you get what you want. | 15:00 | |
| But Christian prayer, | 15:04 | |
| is when we lay ourselves open | 15:08 | |
| to what God wants, and we engage in that risky practice | 15:09 | |
| of coming into the presence of a God, | 15:17 | |
| who as Isaiah said elsewhere, who's ways are not our ways, | 15:19 | |
| thoughts not our thoughts. | 15:23 | |
| We often think of prayer is when we all get silent | 15:27 | |
| and then somebody tries to speak, | 15:30 | |
| where we reach out to God. | 15:33 | |
| But prayer is God's risky reaching into us. | 15:37 | |
| Sometimes in prayer is where we discover | 15:46 | |
| that God does not want some of the things we want. | 15:49 | |
| In the light of today's scripture, what does God want? | 15:54 | |
| Justice, compassion, activity for love and mercy. | 15:57 | |
| Now, I was hiking with a man this summer, | 16:06 | |
| who told me that his father was a rather amazing person. | 16:10 | |
| His father grew up poor in Anson County, North Carolina. | 16:14 | |
| His father didn't get much formal education | 16:18 | |
| but he said, "as a boy I remember going to bed at night, | 16:20 | |
| "and late into the night, my father would be there | 16:23 | |
| "at the kitchen table with law books open, | 16:25 | |
| "he taught himself the ways of the law." | 16:28 | |
| And he said, "my father had a deep burden on his heart | 16:32 | |
| "for the plight of tenant farmers in Anson County, | 16:35 | |
| "particularly, African American tenant farmers. | 16:39 | |
| "My father used to say: 'the situation | 16:43 | |
| "'for these tenant farmers, is no better than | 16:46 | |
| "'when they were slaves! | 16:47 | |
| "'they barley make it through the winter by borrowing enough | 16:51 | |
| "'to get food for their families, they have to borrow | 16:54 | |
| "it from the land owners at 6% interest, | 16:58 | |
| "'then they're supposed to pay it back when their crops | 17:01 | |
| "'come in in the summer, but the crops are never enough, | 17:03 | |
| "'and so they go deeper and deeper into debt, | 17:05 | |
| "'into a kind of slavery.'" | 17:09 | |
| Well then the depression hit, | 17:13 | |
| and a lot of those big land owners lost those farms | 17:15 | |
| and the bank hired my friend's father | 17:18 | |
| to manage that property. | 17:21 | |
| And he set up a program where he got these tenant farmers, | 17:24 | |
| he gave them instruction and advanced farming techniques, | 17:30 | |
| he taught them how to keep record books. | 17:34 | |
| He charged them fair interest for their loans. | 17:36 | |
| He got them the best results | 17:40 | |
| for their labors and their crops. | 17:44 | |
| And he said that, "when my father died, | 17:47 | |
| "there were 200 sharecropping families in Anson County, | 17:49 | |
| "most of them black, who for the first time | 17:54 | |
| "in their lives, owned their own land, | 17:57 | |
| "were living off the fruit of their own labors. | 18:01 | |
| And then he said, "at my fathers funeral we had to have | 18:05 | |
| "it at the home, we were members | 18:08 | |
| "of First Presbyterian Church, but we knew that there would | 18:11 | |
| "be more black people than white people at that funeral, | 18:15 | |
| "and we knew that they wouldn't feel welcomed at the church, | 18:19 | |
| "so we had the funeral at the house, | 18:23 | |
| "and everybody spilled out into the yard, | 18:24 | |
| "all out into the street." | 18:26 | |
| He said, "my father was a good man, | 18:29 | |
| "but he couldn't stand to go to church, | 18:32 | |
| "because he said he just couldn't stomach sitting there | 18:35 | |
| "as the offering plates were passed, | 18:38 | |
| "and to watch these people who were so dressed up | 18:41 | |
| "and looked so good on Sunday morning | 18:43 | |
| "and he knew what scoundrels they were | 18:45 | |
| "in their business practices." | 18:48 | |
| Prayer, Christian prayer, | 18:53 | |
| is not something that one hears all that often. | 18:57 | |
| Chances of hearing it in a football stadium | 19:02 | |
| on a Saturday afternoon are slim. | 19:04 | |
| When you come to think about it though, | 19:10 | |
| it's not that easy to hear truly Christian prayer | 19:11 | |
| even on a church, and on a Sunday. | 19:15 | |
| The Lord says, "when I can hear really good prayer, | 19:20 | |
| "right prayer, I love to listen, | 19:25 | |
| "I love to join in the conversation, | 19:31 | |
| "otherwise I just don't bother." | 19:35 | |
| Amen. | 19:41 |