Fishhook Sunday School Convention
May 2003
I always get to Fishhook early…horse…John Deere 50
Touring Europe.. great cathedrals and historic landmarks.. I wonder someday if looking down from heaven, the real landmarks won’t be places like this… where people found Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. I want to talk about prayer today… I have a Fishhook connection with prayer.. but it’s not a proud one.. Steve Manley.. a Fishhook boy.. read Bible and lunch hour and pray… while I kidded him. He’d smile and go right on.
Kids pray a lot in my school…meet twice a week in my room before school… they meet for prayer after every play practice.. Thursday morning I held a sobbing 8th-grade girl who was being picked on and we prayed together… That all sounds very good and noble but often as I encourage prayer with my students and watch them pray and thank God that they pray, I think of Steve.
I’ll leave the trickier subjects up to Mark and the other clergy..today I just want to talk about prayer.
Prayer is a tricky subject.. everyone thinks that they know how they should pray.. and everyone is secretly and terribly afraid that they don’t know how to pray.
Reminds me a great deal of the fellas who meet every morning at the Arenzville coffee shop when they talk about their trucks. There’s no doubt that each of them is the expert but they secretly wonder what the other guy knows that they don’t.
I’m not sure what I know about prayer…except that I’m still learning. Two days ago I got a phone call from a young friend in Springfield. 16 years old…discovered that he had a tumor at the base of his brain. He’d no sooner got the words out of his mouth than my front door opened.. you don’t knock in Arenzville…you just come in.. a freshman boy with his 7th-grade sister. They saw that I was on the phone so the boy mouthed the words, “Do you care if we pray?”
I’m not sure what I know about prayer…except that I’m still learning. Several years ago… Valentine’s Day.. call at 6:30 in the morning.. an elderly lady from Chapin.. “Don’t worry, beloved, I’m praying that angels surround you.” Hung up. Strange. Ten minutes later…head-on collision on the ice. .paramedic.. hit so hard my shoulder harness broke lose from the car.. I had the steering wheel stuck in my leg but I walked away… I’m not sure what I know about prayer …except that I’m still learning.
Perhaps the most powerful prayer I’ve ever heard: 5th-grade boys ready to dance at camp… Jason.
A young girl at camp once shared… dances in her back yard as she prays.
Family who come to my house on Sunday evenings to pray when I’m doing a play: 4 kids, Mom and Dad. The youngest is in second grade… Jansen.. we stand in a circle and hold hands… he squirms.. “Dear Jesus, my hand is asleep, please wake it up.”
Some believe in the trickle down theory of prayer…first proposed …I think…by Pope Ronald I. If you throw up enough prayers, surely one or two will stick and the blessings will trickle down to you. This theory says that God is impressed by quantity. As if God will forget your name unless you remind Him frequently.
Some adhere to the hotdog theory. If it’s longer then it must be better. If that were the case, then heaven would be filled with long-winded blowhards and I don’t much want to go there.
Instead…consider the simplest theory you can imagine… friendship. The scriptures say that God made man because He wanted fellowship and that, my friends, hasn’t changed one whit since the creation of the world.
My scripture this morning comes from a version of Genesis that you don’t hear very often. As the black poet, James Weldon Johnson put it in his great poem, The Creation: Then God walked around, And God looked around On all that He had made. He looked at His sun, And He looked at His moon, And He looked at His little stars; He looked on His world With all its living things, And God said, "I'm lonely still." Then God sat down On the side of a hill where He could think; By a deep, wide river He sat down; With His head in His hands, God thought and thought, Till He thought, "I'll make me a man!"
Simple friendship. A relationship with God.
Do you have friends like mine? Let me name a couple…Jerry and Rich. I see them once a year as we show up to do our Christian Performing Arts Camps at Green Pastures. It has sometimes literally been twelve months since I’ve seen them..yet the moment we meet, we have everything in common. I’ll bet you have friends like that. And I also have people whom I speak with every day with whom I have very little in common. Does the frequency with which I talk to them speak to the depth of our relationship?
I guess this is my message. God is not impressed by the number of our prayers or by their length or volume (I emphasize the length part for any clergy in the audience this morning.)
What touches His heart is the depth of our desire to get near Him..
The scriptures say that God knows our need before it even reaches our lips. God wants but one thing …a relationship with each one of us. …
We do not pray to get our prayers answered. We pray so that we may take another step closer to the living God.
We pray to praise Him and thank Him. We pray to ask forgiveness. Those are the two things God can’t do on His own. He can heal your family problems in a minute… but He can’t take a step closer to you…. That’s your job.. that’s my job. God simply wants you to get to know Him better… and that’s why we pray.
The noon shift is now coming in at the Arenzville coffee shop. They will talk about their trucks. They will disagree with everyone present about the way a Dodge can lug it out in mud and the way the Ford has an indestructible transmission. The GMC owners, (who are the Presbyterians and Methodists of the automotive world) will knowingly shake their heads and not even enter into the conversation, knowing full well that no one has a truck like theirs.
But when their coffee’s done, they’ll pay their tab and they’ll return to their truck..usually alone. And from that point on, it’ll be just them and their truck. You might laugh to call this a friendship or a metaphor for prayer, but you don’t know what some of these trucks are like. The driver can find every knob blindfolded. He knows exactly how hard he can press on the accelerator when there’s ice on the Arenzville hill. His seat cushion fits his bottom exactly and no other cushion fits that particular bottom quite as nicely. He knows his truck. Silly as it might sound, it’s a friendship.
We could do worse today on this morning in Fishhook to at least start a relationship with God that’s as comfortable as our truck.
Lay Witness Mission… elderly lady.. finally spoke, “You’re going to think this is silly. My husband died four years ago…miss him most at meal time where we’d sit across the table from each other and talk. I put Jesus in that prayer.. we just talk.”
Johnson ends his poem with this: Up from the bed of the river God scooped the clay; And by the bank of the river He kneeled Him down; And there the great God Almighty Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky, Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night, Who rounded the earth in the middle of His hand; This Great God, Like a mammy bending over her baby, Kneeled down in the dust Toiling over a lump of clay Till He shaped it in His own image; Then into it He blew the breath of life, And man became a living soul. Amen. Amen.
Prayer? A simple Friendship with our God. Be blessed. Pray.
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