“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11.28-30 (NIV)
Imagine going to your email (or mailbox) and discovering that you had received an invite to a formal dinner party, wedding reception or important gathering, that you would never have dreamed you would have been invited to? You knew that invitations were going out, but you figured there was no way that you would have made the short list. There would be many other people who would be invited before you because others were more important, more connected, more worthy of the honour. How would you react? Would you accept? Would you make the necessary preparations to go to this event? Most likely you would!
A couple of Sundays ago, we were privileged to have the president of the Evangelical Covenant Church, Tammy Swanson Draheim, remind us about an invitation that is too good to pass up. One that we would never imagine, if we took time to ponder it, that we would have been invited to. There would be others that deserve that honour more than us, who were smarter, better and had more to offer. But, yet, we have been invited and we have to decide what we are going to do with that. Her invite was to all of us to join with her in accepting the invitation as a church and as individuals into the grand party.
That invite is into a deep, transforming relationship with Jesus. In spite of our sin, our failures, our inability to stay focused on Jesus, each day we are invited to open ourselves to God’s grace through prayer. The gift of life that comes with knowing Jesus is an invitation to cultivate that life in prayer. We are invited to allow ourselves to be transformed, to be rooted in God’s love and to be used for God’s Kingdom purposes. That is done in prayer. Prayer is what unifies us with Christ and with each other. But prayer is not about our work – it is about God’s work in us. It is not about technique, it is not about what words we use, it is not about getting it right. This kind of deeply rooted prayer is simply putting ourselves in a place where God can do what God is going to do in our life and church. We aren’t putting the roots down, God is. We aren’t responsible for the results, God is.
So for the next six weeks or so we will be joining other churches in the Covenant on exploring a sermon series on prayer – as Pastor/President Tammy invited us to do. The sermon series is described in this way: “Prayer is a continual back-and-forth conversation with God. It comes from a deeply rooted place that is honest, trusted, and even tested. But sometimes, as followers of Jesus, we ask ourselves, ‘Does prayer work?’ ‘Is God listening?’ ‘Am I praying the right way?’ ‘What should I pray about?'” We will explore that together over the next few weeks.
On Sunday, in the first go at the sermon series, I shared a few thoughts on learning to prayer from Joan Chittister, a Benedictine nun who wrote the book, Wisdom Distilled from the Daily. I did not have these on the slides, so I thought that you might appreciate having them written down.
- The function of prayer is to change my own mind, to put on the mind of Christ, to enable grace to break into me.
- Prayer is intentionally opening ourselves and our actual life as we are living it to God as a response to God’s movement in love toward us.
- Prayer is not designed to take people out of the world to find God. Benedictine prayer is designed to enable people to realize that God is in the world around them.
