(Exodus 34:29-35; 2 Corinthians 3:7-4:2) // (VSF Creed)
What is prayer?
It’s not a trick question, or one with a right answer which you’re supposed to find. Tell truth, I’ve been at this whole following-Jesus business for decades, and I’m not sure I’ve ever had an answer for very long. Is prayer about asking for things, is it about God changing us, do we need to be specific and detailed, is it immature to make specific requests of God—do we know enough to even know what we really want to ask? At various points in my life, I’ve had answers to each of those questions, but they’ve never been the same answers from one point to another. What, really, are we on about when we pray?
To help us think about this, I want to draw in my favorite poem by one of my favorite poets, the 17th-century Anglican priest George Herbert. His principal poetic collection, published after his death, is The Temple; one of the odd things about it is that some of the titles, such as “Love,” “Affliction,” and “Employment,” were applied to multiple poems, and so we have poems with names like “Employment (II)” and “Love (III).” There are numerous great poems in the book—“Love (III)” is one of the greatest, in fact—but my favorite is “Prayer (I),” which offers an extraordinary response to the question “What is prayer?”
Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God’s breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth;
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.
Herbert’s view of prayer is large and expansive; you’ll note, he doesn’t try to define it, he simply offers descriptions. He gives us images, not explanations, multifaceted and open-ended, which are somewhat about what we do when we pray, are rather more about our experience in prayer, and nothing at all about how prayer “works”—or even what that could mean. The images build, and then land us with the simplest and, I think, most powerful statement of all: prayer is “something understood.” In a way that echoes the parables of Jesus, Herbert closes the poem by opening it up—what “something” does he have in mind? Logically, he at least means that we are understood, in all the aspects he images, but he doesn’t nail us down to that. Again, this is experiential language, not propositional. Prayer opens us up to experience the reality that God understands us, more deeply and truly than we understand ourselves . . . and in that, it helps us in turn to understand him and know him a little more today than we did yesterday.
I suspect if we somehow had the chance to ask Herbert to explain his poem, at some point he would point to the panels on our wall and say, “Prayer is bigger.” If God is bigger than our past, our circumstances, our culture, and—especially—our understanding of him, prayer has to be bigger than whatever definition we might offer. I think we see that in our passage from Exodus this morning, because none of our definitions or descriptions of prayer include shining faces scaring away the neighbors. We tend to focus more on content, in one way or another. To be sure, Moses and God had a lot to talk about—six more chapters of Exodus and the whole book of Leviticus make that clear; but that’s not the emphasis here. Again, the focus is experiential, not propositional. We aren’t told how many three-ring binders Moses filled up with notes, we’re told his face shone and freaked out the Israelites. Exodus has made it very clear that the Israelites only wanted to approach God by proxy, through Moses—they wanted him to get close to God so they didn’t have to—and the afterimage on Moses’ face brought God entirely too close for comfort. Which, it’s easy to bag on them for that, but if we’re honest, would we be any different? I think Michael Card hit the nail on the head in his song “A Face that Shone”: “You and me, we tend to flee from shining faces; we see the glow and then we know that we’re undone.”
At the same time, Moses didn’t meet with God so that his face would shine. In my book, the most interesting part of this passage is the second half of verse 29: when Moses came down the mountain, he didn’t know his face was shining. He didn’t know. He couldn’t see it. He only saw the light reflected in the reactions of those around him. Being with God changed Moses, but Moses couldn’t perceive the change. Only those around him could.
Now, it would be easy to leave this as one of those weird stories in the Old Testament, of which there are many, which we can learn a nice lesson from and leave safely in the past—except the Apostle Paul won’t let us. He makes it clear in our passage from 2 Corinthians that Exodus 34 has more to say to us than that. To set the context for Paul’s argument, he’s drawing a contrast between living by the letter of the Jewish law and living by the Spirit of grace. To that end, Paul points out that the glory in Moses’ face was only temporary, it was passing away, because the covenant of Moses was temporary. The ministry Moses began was an interim ministry, a transitional ministry, which came with an end date. Its fulfillment came when it was replaced by the new covenant made by Jesus Christ and by the ministry of his Spirit. The glory of that ministry, Paul tells us, is greater and is undying because that covenant is permanent, the final fulfillment of all that went before.
Paul presses his argument fiercely enough that in our English translations, verses 12-13 sound like he’s throwing some serious shade at Moses. We’re bold, not like Moses, who wore a veil to prop up his self-importance and protect his image with the Israelites. That’s not actually what’s going on, though. The Greek makes clear that “what was being brought to an end” doesn’t refer to the light in Moses’ face but to what Paul calls the ministry of death and condemnation. The key to understanding that is verse 14: “Their minds were hardened.” Paul makes Moses our exemplar—“When anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is removed”—and highlights the point we see clearly in Exodus 34 that the people of Israel were not willing. It was really their faces that were veiled, it was just more efficient to do that by hanging the veil on Moses. They were unwilling either to turn to God or to face the consequences of their refusal; veiling Moses let them duck the question and carry on still believing themselves able to see.
Being with God changed Moses, and it changes us, too. That’s what the Israelites didn’t want. If we’re honest with ourselves, are we all that different? How much do we really want it? Do we use prayer to draw near to God, or to hold him at bay? It can serve either purpose, after all. It might sound strange to talk about prayer as a way to keep God at a safe distance, but that’s classic paganism, in which prayer is the tongs we use to handle the gods, to placate their displeasure and oblige them to grant our requests. Paganism is vending-machine religion, and it’s a constant temptation because it aligns with the ways the world teaches us to think and act; it will creep in, if we aren’t watching for it.
Of course, it’s easy to overreact, as many people do, into the pious-sounding declaration that prayer isn’t about getting God to do things, it’s about changing us. The truth is, it’s both. Remember, Moses didn’t meet with God to make his face shine, he met with God to talk about a lot of practical stuff. At various points we clearly see him asking God for things, and even challenging God. Moses met with God in a way we haven’t experienced—at least, if any of you have, you haven’t told me about it—but he didn’t feel the need to overspiritualize it.
Herbert is helpful here, I think, though we need a little footnoting. The phrase “engine against the Almighty” is unclear to our modern ears because the primary meaning of the word “engine” was shifted by the Industrial Revolution; Herbert wasn’t thinking of internal combustion engines, he was thinking of siege engines. For those who might not be familiar with medieval combat, an army seeking to capture a walled city would surround it—lay siege to it—and then deploy catapults, battering rams, siege ladders, and the like to try to force their way into the city. Those implements of war were called siege engines. Herbert is thinking of prayer as a way to try to get what we want or need out of God; but, of course, he doesn’t stop there. His last word, as we noted earlier, is that prayer is “something understood,” because that’s what we need most. No matter how important the substance of our requests might be, our soul-deep need in prayer is to know in our marrow that God has heard us and he understands.
If our primary concern in prayer is getting what we want, we will find our prayers disappointing, because what we want often is not what God is on about; but it seems to me if we go to God in prayer looking for the experience to change us, we will also be disappointed more often than not. Telling God what we want and what we think we need is an important part of prayer, not because God doesn’t know but because we need to tell him. The heart of true prayer is raw, open honesty. Yes, God knows it all already, but for us to know he has heard us, we have to speak. Yes, God will do what he will do, but he can’t act to grant us what we ask for if we haven’t asked. This is why Blaise Pascal called prayer the means by which God gives us the dignity of causality, because it allows our requests to be part of the reason why God does what he does. The more open and honest we are, the truer this becomes, and the more it opens us up to him; and if any honest, deep, loving relationship changes us, how much more so God?
Prayer, then, is not about saying the right words in the right way. Certainly we need to be speaking truth rather than falsehood, but there is no formula we have to follow. Prayer doesn’t even have to be words we understand. I learned that from my time in the Vineyard—y’all are at least familiar with them from the services we’ve done together with Branches—as I have had numerous friends over the years who speak in tongues, especially in prayer. Paul in Romans 8 calls that the Holy Spirit speaking from us and for us in ways that are too deep for words.
We can go even further and say prayer doesn’t necessarily have to be words at all. Emily’s opening sermon on discernment some weeks ago put me in mind of a couple quotes from one of my favorite books, The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold. At one point, after a deeply unnerving time of prayer, the protagonist, Cazaril, reflects,
On the other side of the Temple plaza . . . what waited him was a nice soft bed. That his brain had reached this feverish spin was a good sign he ought to go get in it. This wasn’t prayer anyway, it was just argument with the gods. Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.
Later, after the climactic scene—involving a divine visitation which is beautifully written—Cazaril starts trying to write poetry. His friend Palli observes, “Dangerous stuff, this poetry. I think I’ll stick to action, myself.” Cazaril responds, grinning,
“Watch out, my lord Dedicat. Action can be prayer, too.”
He’s right. Putting our will in gear and engaging our bodies in response to God, doing what he lays on our hearts to do, draws us near to him and opens us up to him just as surely as any words.
At the same time, Palli is also right: this is dangerous stuff. It’s not eternal danger, of course, but for our lives in this world prayer is perilous indeed. It’s good, deeply good, but that very goodness is why it isn’t safe. The goodness of God is deeply perilous because we’re accustomed to this world. His goodness is bigger than our safety, our comfort, our predictability, our stability, any of the things on which we may rely. Prayer opens us to the wild, crackling potency of the goodness of God and puts us in his hands—and from there, who knows what could happen? Annie Dillard captured this vividly in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk when she wrote,
On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.
This is not a view of God, and thus not a view of prayer, which tells us he wants to give us our “best life now,” or that suffering and failure must mean we’ve sinned. Quite the contrary: God will sometimes bless us with triumphs and rejoicing, but sometimes his blessings come as seasons of shattering defeat and scalding disappointment. What God is doing to purge us, to prepare us, to position us, to be and do what he wills for us, requires the severe mercies as well as the gentle ones. Our hope in God is not that he won’t give us anything we can’t handle, it’s that when he does give us things we can’t handle, he’s right there with us. We don’t need to be enough; we need to accept that being enough isn’t our work, it’s his.
That’s humbling, but there’s a flip side to it: we’re part of what God is on about in this world. When we think and talk about discernment, it’s easy to do so just in external terms. Yes, God is working and speaking in the world around us, and we want him to open our eyes and our ears to hear his voice and see what he’s doing, but putting it that way can position us as passive observers of something disconnected from us, discerning God from the outside. Discerning prayer is not just about seeing what God is doing around us, it’s letting him open our eyes to see his work from the inside, with ourselves right in the middle of it. God isn’t just acting around us, or on us, or even in us, he’s acting through us. As prayer opens us up to him, it opens our eyes to see God’s hands and feet when they’re our hands and feet, and our ears to hear God’s voice even when he’s using ours to speak. We’re part of the great story; seeing this is part of true discernment.
At the last, I guess there’s one thing I can say I know for sure about prayer—and about discernment, for that matter. If our focus is on ourselves—whether we want stuff, we want to know stuff, or we want God to change us, if we’re trying to “do it right” or determined to do it our own way—we’re missing the point, because the ultimate point is to seek God for his own sake. There’s nothing wrong with seeking his hands for what we want to receive from them, but the more we draw near to him, the more we learn to seek his heart first and trust him to be faithful to bless us with the gifts of his hands.
In that spirit, let us come to the table this morning. Let us receive from our Lord the gifts of his hands, not for their own sake, but so we can look through them to see his heart for us. Let us understand this as prayer made physical in the bread and the cup, and in our bodies as we come forward. We come to the table to draw near to him, whether or not we feel worthy, whether or not we feel assured, whether or not we feel blessed, whether or not we feel good; even when we cannot find words to pray, we can pray with our steps, putting one foot in front of the other, moving all the same.
“Separate Reality” © 2006 Heinz Zak; image has been cropped to fit. License: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International
