Sermon "Prayer That Makes A
Difference"
Rev. Lonnie Richardson
Sunday, October 25, 1998
Prayer That Makes A Difference
Luke 18:9-14
We have a parable of two approaches to prayer. Two persons went to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. The deed is the same - they went to pray, but behind the deed is that sub-surface, mysterious gray area that clouds and affects the deed - the reason for performing the deed. It is the mental and emotional prelude to the physical action. The Pharisee proclaims: "I fast twice a week." Yes, but why? "I give tithes of all I get." Fine, but why? The intent behind the deed is all important.
No one emphasized that more emphatically than Jesus. His attacks on hypocrisy were an uncovering of false intent on the part of the Pharisees and others of that day who did the right things for the wrong reasons.
The example here is that the Pharisee did not intend to pray to god - he prayed to himself. His prayer is really a self-congratulation. (`God, I thank you that I am not like other men --robbers, evildoers, ... Or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week and give a tenth of all I get.') the tax collector calls attention to his separation from God, not his merits. He would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast and said, "God be merciful to me a sinner!" Our coming to God should always be an act of seeking mercy. Jesus is saying to us that as soon as you start to see yourself as more righteousness than you ought, trouble is just around the corner. Intention and motive is significant in ones religious journey. So what is prayer all about anyway?
It is a problem for many of us. Does God hear prayer? Am I really talking to God or am I only speaking to myself? What difference can prayer make? The problem is not only that we are uncertain about prayer, but we have the good sense to know that, when we pray, we are really putting out faith on the line. Is there a God or not? Is there is a God who listens? Is there a God who cares for us, who hears and responds? These are frightening questions. No wonder, some prefer not even to try to pray, rather than risk it.
If you think that prayer is a peculiarly modern problem in our high-tech times, think again. Why would Jesus have told this parable to his disciples if everybody then believed in prayer's power? Throughout Luke, there is plenty on prayer. All of which suggests that prayer is not simply a modern problem--it is a problem for anyone who believes in God. Prayer raises threatening issues, troublesome questions. Is there a God? If there is, is there a God who hears and acts for us?
As your pastor I would say, think of prayer, not as asking God to do this or that for us, but rather as asking God to be God, to be who God is. When as a child you may have suffered some injustice like others picking on you, or received some blow from life, what did your mother say? She may attempted to comfort you by saying: "There, there, it's all right." What did she mean when she said that? She didn't mean that your pain was silly, for why would she comfort you if you were not in real pain? She did not mean that everything is going to be all right in that moment. You know enough of life to know that often things don't work out all right. What she meant was that finally, ultimately, in the larger picture, the world is structured in such a way that things will be right. Pain does not last forever. Even the worst set-backs can be integrated into life and you go on. In other words, when she said, "There, there, everything will be all right," she was making a statement of faith about the ultimate character of the world God has touched.
In this service we prayed, "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy kingdom come,..." See? First the Lord's Prayer talks about who God is, before it asks God to do anything like give us bread, or forgive us our sin. We wouldn't even bother God about bread were it not for our abiding conviction that we are God's creatures and that our creator cares.
Prayer, that makes a difference, shows our confidence that God hears, and cares, and acts. When we pray for something as mundane, as essential as "daily bread" it is making a rather amazing statement of faith in the goodness of God. Prayer is our way of letting God be God, of letting God care about bread, and rain, and peace, and forgiveness. And that's what the tax collector did. He wanted God to be God in his life ... `God, be merciful to me a sinner!'
Prayer is the courageous determination to let God be God. God is revealed to us, in prayer, to be something other than we imagined.
They tell us the 911 emergency system is the state of the art. All you need do is dial those numbers, and you will almost instantly be connected to a dispatcher. In front of the dispatcher will be a read-out that lists your telephone number, your address, and the name by which that telephone number is listed at that address. Also listening in are the police, the fire department, and the paramedics. Someone might not be able to say what the problem is. Or perhaps a woman's husband has just suffered a heart attack, and she is so out of control that all she can do is hysterically scream into the telephone. But the dispatcher doesn't need her to say anything. He knows where the call is coming from. Help is already on the way. There come times in our lives when in our desperation and pain we dial 911 prayers. Sometimes we're hysterical. Sometimes we don't know the words to speak. But God hears. He knows our name and he knows our circumstance. Help is on the way; God has already begun to bring the remedy. And that is the difference prayer makes for us.
Pray that God may be the difference-maker for you and that you
make a difference, in this world that God believes in. Amen.
