Silences

A Sermon by Nada Sellers

February 10, 2008

Exodus 19:16-25, 20:1-21
Matthew 6:5-15

Prayer is one of those subjects that almost everybody seems to have an opinion about these days?  I was in the supermarket the other day, standing in line, trying to make sure I’d gotten everything on my list, when I looked up at the magazine rack, and there it was, right in front of me was this booklet: “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Prayer” I kid you not!!  ‘Discover how prayer connects you to God and yourself!’ the cover urges the reader.  Turns out the guide is written by some pretty well-connected Christian types from the publishing world, so at least there’s some hope for decent counsel.  I snatched it up and placed it on the conveyer belt with the rest of my groceries; my checkout person found out that I’m a minister and seemed somewhat incredulous!  More on the Guide and our discussion later…

I’m sure you’ve been noticing as I have, the way in which religion and spirituality have been injected into the current round of presidential campaign fervor, fueled as things have been by the diversity of candidates and their search for votes.  A recent edition of Hampshire Life in the Daily Gazette, carries the bold headline, “Praying for a Win” and shows candidates Obama, Clinton, Edwards and Huckabee doing their thing in religious settings.  In a related vein, I even heard a comment made by President Bush recently, in which he told survivors of the tornados in the South that “prayer can help and so can the federal government.”  Made me wonder just exactly how those folks were supposed to interpret such counsel: what can prayer provide – something more than the federal government when it comes to natural disasters?  Well, hopefully, but then maybe that’s not aiming for very much! Maybe the praying is supposed to be for the federal government’s ability to get it together in the relief effort?! How will prayer fill the void of flattened houses, ruined hopes and evaporated dreams; what can prayer do that will help stem to flow of the streams of grief caused by losing loved ones, or pets and belongings and the place where belonging added joy to life?  So just who is doing the praying here?  Are these traumatized people the ones praying or is it us or Mr. Bush who are supposed to be praying for them?

Obviously, prayer means different things to different people. People pray to different beings or divinities, seeking different paths or insights. Piety and reverence in the many different religious cultures and traditions across this world, lead to all sorts of rituals and patterns of praying...  If someone were to ask you what prayer is and how you pray, what would you say? Just what is prayer and what does it mean in the Christian believer’s life?  Is there a right way and a wrong way to pray, and when are we supposed to pray?  Does the Bible have something to say about this, and how can we live this going forward?  Most of us have the awareness that prayer is important in our faith journey, that we ourselves need to be doing more of it, and that from time to time we definitely need the prayers of others; it’s a large, somewhat complex and disorienting subject, isn’t it? – it’s something so basic and yet, so full of layers.  “I’ll pray for you,” we say, or “we’ll remember you in prayer,” or even “You’re in our thoughts and prayers.”  Some people have prayer books with written prayers, while others never read a prayer, they just say them from their hearts or think them up as they go.

The season of Lent offers special opportunities for renewing our practice of prayer; rich metaphors and dramatic scenes in the biblical account move us through the last weeks of Jesus’ ministry toward Jerusalem and the Last Supper.  It seems like the right time to immerse ourselves in the study and practice of prayer – whether as a congregation, pursuing God’s direction in moving us to serve and to grow; as people, wanting to grow in Christ-likeness; as witnesses, bearing stories of our experiences of God’s presence in our lives.  In these forty days of Lent, there are five Sundays not included in the Lenten count, five chances to gather in worship where prayer is always a part of what we do.  Over these next Sundays, Pat and I invite you to explore various dimensions of prayer; to listen, to learn, to try some new things, yes, to practice some new “practices.”    Let me offer a few considerations as we begin.

Biblically speaking, there are all sorts of things that can be applied to prayer.  Within Scripture there are prayer books like the psalms, shaped and recorded as a permanent record of worshipping life in the temple at Jerusalem; or like Lamentations, a short book in the Hebrew Scriptures which preserves the prayers of a grieving people dealing with the pain of exile and destruction and loss.  The particular prayers of biblical figures like Deborah and Queen Esther, like David and Moses, and Saul and Abraham & Sarah, as well as prayers of Jesus and the disciples most definitely reveal things about the nature of God and the nature of prayer, yet we must also draw upon the counsel of the apostles and later disciples, such as Paul and early church figures. They lived and prayed in the time when the Spirit had come to the people of the new covenant, the church.  Much of what we can glean about prayer, has to do with the nature of God, and our efforts to know more about the fellowship of the Three-in-One, the Trinity, where Spirit and Son and God the Parent, abide as the Divine.

This is the God, who delivers the ten commandments, revealing God’s self to the whole gathering of the people of Israel.  As Barbara Brown Taylor writes,

Not one of them missed it: God’s own voice, with thunder in it and lightening cracking all around; the sound of a trumpet none of them know how to play, with notes that made their scalps crawl; the mountain itself, smoking like a kiln, shaking so violently that the ground slid beneath their feet.  It was an encounter with the living God, and in about five seconds they decided they had had enough.  Turning to Moses, they said, “You speak to us, and we will listen; but do not let God speak to us or we will die.”  They were not up to direct encounter.  They wanted a mediator… someone to take the heat, veil the light, buffer the noise, deliver the message in a human voice, so that people could hear it without fainting from fear.¹

Taylor goes on to notice that God never spoke to all the people again: “The pillar of fire and the cloud that led the people through the wilderness gave way to the tabernacle they could carry around with them.  The hot lava of God’s voice cooled into the 613 commandments of the law [and] in time, books, clergy and institutions of worship became substitutes for the presence of the living God…²   Silence is somehow a characteristic of many aspects of religious and spiritual life, as evidenced throughout Scripture.  Here at Sinai, God’s direct speech terrified the people and they begged for silence – no direct voice of God, only through a mediator like Moses, please.  How interesting that in our time, silence is at such a premium.  How difficult it is to choose silence when communication is such an ever-present option, and true silence is difficult to achieve.  And how often we long for enough silence to have a direct encounter with God. Taylor observes,

“To let the telephone ring, to leave the e-mail unread, to unplug the fax machine – these amount to acts of social sabotage.  To choose silence for even an hour, we must risk the loss of connection with other people, who may have a hard time understanding how anything could be more important to us than responding to them.  We must also handle our own sense of anxiety.  What if that is a call from the fire department?  From the hospital?  From someone who wants to invite me to dinner?  For some of us, silence provokes so much internal chatter that it cancels itself out!”³  

Most of us prefer to speak when it comes to relating to God; staying preoccupied with our own words, “seems a safer bet than opening ourselves up to either God’s silence or God’s speech, both of which have the power to undo us.”⁴ But it’s the silences and the listening that point to the beginnings of prayer.  This is something theologian and author Henri Nouwen writes about extensively in his book entitled, With Open Hands.  It’s no accident, that the first chapter is entitled ‘Prayer and Silence.’  “We know,” he writes, that “there is a connection between prayer and silence, but if we think about silence in our life it seems that it isn’t always peaceful; silence can also be frightening.”⁵ Maybe we have become alienated from silence, as Nouwen asserts.  In our word-heavy culture, where there are “so many words that some days it sounds as if we live our lives against a wall of constant noise,” noise rather than sound keeps many of us preoccupied.  For others, it’s more like an addiction, and one of the side-effects of all this noise, is “that many of us have become hard of hearing.”⁶

It might be hard to grasp then, that silence can be full of sounds; silence is not just about the absence of all sound – there are all kinds of silences.  If you listen carefully in silence, there are noises all about; Nouwen writes:

The wind murmuring, the leaves rustling, the birds flapping their wings, the waves washing ashore.  And even if these noises cannot be heard, there is still the breathing of a quiet person… We have somehow become deaf to this thundering silence.  It seems that it can’t be heard anymore without the help of amplifiers…. [Still] more difficult than getting rid of the surrounding din, is the achievement of inner silence.⁷  

To be calm and quiet in our inner world, isn’t the same thing as sleeping; it actually means being fully awake and following with close attention the movements going on inside of you.  Listen to Nouwen’s description of the interior silence:

It is the freedom to stroll in your own yard, to rake up the leaves and clear the paths so you can easily find your way.  Perhaps there will be much fear and uncertainty when we first come upon this “unfamiliar terrain,” but slowly and surely we begin to see developing an order and a familiarity which summon our longing to stay home.⁸

Setting aside our inner chatter, our fear of silence and our nearly constant consumption of words and noise, maybe we can regain our perspective of our own “yard.”  Once at home in our inner world, accustomed to the silences and the spaces, this sort of silence is a gift, one which in Nouwen’s description, is “promising” in the true sense of the word:

The promise of this silence is that new life can be born.  [This is the silence] of peace and prayer, because you are brought back to the other who is leading you.  In this silence you lose the feeling of being compulsive and you find yourself a person who can be yourself… Then you realize that you can do many things.. In this silence the false pretenses fade away, and you can see the world again with a certain distance.⁹

Maybe as such pretenses fade, and the world comes into perspective with enough distance to allow us breathing room to be at home with our own selves again, we can notice our seeking after things which satisfy; and this is a starting place for prayer. The ancient theologian St. Augustine, writing in his famous autobiography, Confessions, prays “Lord, you stir us to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”¹⁰   Prayer begins with silences and silences sometimes characterize what we learn in prayer; prayer begins with whomever we are, wherever we may be, with whatever we can give.  In that moment where we sense there is something more to life and to faith, than what we now know, prayer can happen.¹¹   Yes it’s about communication with the Holy One that deepens the relationship far beyond what we have the capacity to develop on our own.  But often, it all starts with silences and with the deep listening or yearning that silence allows.

Remember that Complete Idiot’s Guide to Prayer I mentioned earlier?  The back cover reads, “You’re no idiot.  You understand that occasionally reciting the Lord’s Prayer isn’t enough to establish a fulfilling relationship with God.  This insightful guide shows you how to make prayer a part of your daily life and through it, find peace and healing.”  These are good goals, actually; to establish prayer as part of our daily lives, and through prayer, to grow in peace and wholeness.  When I mentioned at the supermarket checkout, that I was thinking about prayer for a Lenten sermon series at my church, the woman checking me out said, with a smile, “Oh really? Boy, things are different than they used to be!” by which she went on to say, she realized that women were now able to be clergy and this was a good thing.  I just smiled as she looked at me, and I thought about all the many times in my life that without my saying much at all, my identity as a minister has really flummoxed people; my prayer for us is that we learn to deepen our lives as praying people, without feeling as if we need any particular words… That our identities as children of God and ministers of Christ’s healing power, can be strengthened in the deep silences that we will share throughout Lent.  Amen.

Endnotes