Pastoral Prayer: Sacred or Profane?

Alan C. Mermann, M.D., M.Div.

Chaplain, Yale School of Medicine

It is time to revise pastoral prayer as an element of Protestant worship. What is known to many of us as "the prayers of the church" represents a low point in the worship service for many communicants. The only category of prayer more at odds with the needs of its hearers is public prayer on secular occasions: commencements, athletic events, national holidays, and political gatherings. The argument for a radical alteration of pastoral prayer centers on the profane nature of many of those prayers. Reflection on the biblical and theological warrants for prayer presses us to assess the purposes and modes of contemporary communal prayer and the nature of the God so addressed.

What Kind of God?

Pastoral prayers offer varied images of God. The anthropomorphic picture is common in addressing God as almighty father, and in the easy use of language usually associated with the human senses of seeing, hearing, and speaking. While this imagery may seem harmless, it creates a god in our image with a central nervous system capable of receiving stimuli and acting upon them, of thinking and talking. Trying to fit the divine attributes of omniscience, omnipotence and omnipresence into that god is a Cinderella-and-the-shoe enterprise.

A more serious issue in much pastoral prayer is the definition of God implied by it. The God to whom we are asked to pray often has these distinctive markers:

1. God is unaware of what is occurring at the parish level, in our several communities, and across the globe. Our prayers inform God of incipient surgery, deaths, charitable budgetary needs, wars, and famines. We must awaken God and tell him to pay attention to what is going on down here.

2. If God is aware of what is happening in our world, then powerlessness, disinterest, or animosity toward the human condition define divinity. Surely, then, it is profane for a pastor to ask God to stop the dealing in drugs, attend to feeding the starving, and bring an end to our constant warfare. These petitions are frightening in their portrayal of God as fickle, heartless, vindictive and limited in insight. In much pastoral prayer or prayers of the church, theodicy as a terrible enigma is resolved: what we see is what there is. God either wills our condition thus or is unable to alter the course we are on.

Many pastoral prayers are more honestly extensions of exhortations declared in the sermon. Public prayers of the community of faith should not be the locus for pleas for the presence of God with hostages, the relief needs of victims of natural disasters, or our hope that political leaders have God present at their deliberations. The assumptions of these prayers, as of those for ill church members, are profanations of the nature, the very being of God. To doubt that God, as Spirit, is present to any and all creatures scandalizes the Holy One of Israel. Our concerns should be the question, "Why are we not present to those in need?"

A New Testament Perspective

There is little warrant in the synoptic gospels for prayer as an event in which one person prays aloud before a community seated with heads bowed. The Temple is called a house of prayer by Jesus and the searing parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector clarifies appropriate prayer in that place. The major thrust of Jesus's teaching is that prayer is an individual act of a believer confident in a Spirit that attends to an inner spirit mirroring the thoughts and feelings of heart and mind. While it is written that we are to pray for what is needed, such as laborers for the harvest, or strength to avoid the catastrophe of the end of the world, Jesus's actions and words suggest an intensely personal conception of prayer. It is not that we are to pray only for ourselves. We are required to pray for the welfare of others even if they are the enemy, and for children. Our common need for healing in all its forms is certainly proper content for prayer. But the picture of Jesus in the synoptic gospels is that of a young man separating himself from, not only the crowd but also from his friends so that he might pray alone, on a mountain, or in the wilderness. The depiction of these times is deeply moving, even frightening, as in the garden at Gethsemane.

When asked by his friends to teach them how to pray, Jesus replied with that epitome of piety of his day known to us as the Lord's Prayer. Reverence for the holy and only God, hope that our actions will be consonant with the will of that God, reasonable concern for our daily needs, and a sincere desire for both forgiveness and an upright life mark its sub- Although we are assured that what is sought will be received, we are cautioned to be prudent in what we ask of God. The encounter of a people with the Holy One is intensified by the expectation that prayer will be preceded by a sustained search for self-understanding.

The closing climactic scenes in Jesus's life, the Passion, are focused on that tithe of exquisite loneliness and anxiety when Jesus prayed in the garden before his arrest. The poignancy of his wish for relief froth the coming horror was transformed by the power of a faith that accepted the will of God as his own. History grimly records the repetition of that agony through two millennia of human efforts to reconcile the bitter experiences of life to the will of a God whose revelation of partnership in the human experience is often unclear.

The synoptic gospels present prayer as an emotion-laden experience of knowing the self in the light of that gospel, presenting that self to God in adoration and service, seeking the gifts of healing and faith, and the virtues of courage and compassion. Liturgical prayer in the Temple is part of worship, but gospel evidence is strongly for prayer as a person-to- encounter in profound desire and sincerity. The gospel of John does contain four references to Jesus, praying to the Father for the disciples and other believers; one is that the Counselor might come and be with us. In this gospel, theological, ecclesial and psychological concerns and interpretations of meanings, symbols, and images predominate.

The book of Acts contains many references to prayer and the act of praying by the people. Devotion, fasting, praying, breaking bread, and healing are activities linked together in those early days of the Church. The content of the prayers is not usually mentioned, although the coincident emotions, hopes, and joys are quite obvious. Our prayers of the church apparently come from these accounts of mutual concern and action. The letters to the early churches contain few references to prayer. One of the more important is in Paul's letter to the church at Rome.

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Rom. 8:26-27)

The intensity and excitement of that encounter requires careful and comprehensive exegesis.

Teach Us To Pray

What can we do to learn to pray in community? Are there ways to make prayer understandable, consuming and powerful?

1. Careful, critical and deliberate study of scripture clarifies the biblical witness to prayer. There are varied times, places, and precipitants for prayer and these can be opened tip for our understanding and practice.

2. Contemporary models of public prayer can be examined against the biblical account and those parts of prayer which are parish bulletin board material deleted. Notices to God of local and world crises in need of intervention should be returned to our human sphere for deliberation and action.

3. We must persist in efforts to open our minds to the awesome nature of the knowable universe. The indescribable majesty and beauty of both the micro- and the macrocosmos suggest a power and a spirit before which we bow head and heart, praying that the will of the self can conform, as much as humanly possible, to the will of the creator. A three-layered world with a God "up in heaven" severely limits the realm of our Creator and Sustainer.

4. If, as the gospel suggests, God acts in weakness and not in power, in sympathy with pain and poverty, in compassionate love for the unlovable, the marginal and the criminal, and will not resist the forces of evil which overcome us, then we must pray that that knowledge will be instilled in our hearts, and that the virtue of courage will be cultivated in us. It is our responsibility to transform this sick world by action in the here and now. The strength to do so shall come from an abiding confidence in the loving God presented to us by our understanding of the life, the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

We, like our Lord, must leave the garden. We have searched our hearts and minds for understanding of the self and of our duties to each other and to our God. We have wept and we now pray that God's will be done, even through us. Lord, teach us to pray.