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Three challenging Prayers; how they look when people pray them
The sermon title today promises that we will look in on some people praying; they use the invitation given to us in scriptural texts to stand in certain unexpected places in prayer.
To begin? A deeply religious family in the Dutch Reformed tradition lived in what was called the Beje, a famous rambling, ancient house in Haarlem, the Netherlands. The father was a watchmaker, but famous all over town for patiently hearing many people’s problems and for his warmth, his faith and his hospitality. His two daughters, who lived and worked in the family home and business were called Betsie and Corrie. Corrie ten Boom has become a storyteller who has traveled the world speaking publically since 1945, and is renowned for the book the Hiding Place. For the old house became just that. Although she downplays her own role, Corrie,who portrays herself as a slight bumbling and dowdy older spinster (to use her words), devoted to her sister and the larger family, had become the ringleader of a city-wide underground movement in the early 40’s in Haarlem, when Germany invaded and occupied Holland. Corrie states that incognito, and using the common code name, Mr. Smit, one of the most famous architects in Europe, as well as ingenious construction workers, also in the underground, came to the old house, designed and built a hidden room; disguising every wall and bookcase to look as old as the original. In it were gradually hidden 6 Jews escaping a near certain death in the concentration camps. In time inevitably the family was noticed and betrayed to the occupying Nazis. The occupying soldiers knew that there was a hiding place in the old house but searched for two whole days and never found it. The hidden people escaped after 47 hours. The family members themselves however were arrested in 1944 and sent to a federal prison. The 84-year-old father died on a gurney in a hospital hallway within a week of his arrest for hiding fugitives from the Nazi occupation. In a matter of months, as the allies were invading Germany, they were taken by train into Germany itself, to Ravensbruck. I cannot compress this wonderful book into a few paragraphs, but I do want to tell specifically how Betsie, seven years Corrie’s senior, responds to arriving at their overcrowded barracks in the women’s feared death camp, and they find the place infested with fleas. Without hesitation she prays and gives thanks for the fleas. Her guide in doing this, which I will call the first of three difficult prayers can quickly be seen here in two scriptures. First,”…addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart, always and for everything giving thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the father.” ~Ephesians 5:19, 20.
Since this prayer defies logic and sounds absurd I will not venture to give my own experience with it. Nor do I feel it should be forced or prayed if it is disgusting to us, or causes anger or resentment or feelings of betraying one’s God-given common sense. It is sometimes wise to consult an experienced pray-er or a pastor If one feels called to pray in this way, ‘giving thanks in all things’. But it does occur in many places and many forms in the Bible. The second main text that Betsie would have been using as her guide in prayer would have been I Thessalonians, where it shows up this way, “Rejoice always, pray constantly, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” I can only say that it is one of the hard prayers, of the world Jesus opened to followers, when he opens a world which has many aspects of being upside down or contrary to one’s usual viewpoint. These prayers today all partake somewhat of that inverted world.
Corrie portrays herself as being scandalized by Betsie’s giving thanks for the fleas….life in the camp goes on. Amid social difficulties, language and cultural chasms, class conflicts, near starvation, crushing workloads, untreated sickness and ghastly overcrowding, the sisters hold regular bible study groups and counsel the other women and pray with them, teaching others to do the same.
What we would say is that Betsie, in her case, was authentically in prayer, and I have no doubt, in peace and joy. We do not see someone trying to use prayer as a formula, trying to ‘get God to do something’……..but someone who has a lifelong spiritual practice, from which she does not depart according to circumstances. She appears to live in a place of trust, acceptance and really delight, and have a very surrendered and intimate relationship with Jesus of Nazareth.
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Looking in on them further along in the book we read: ‘Her eyes were twinkling’. (Corrie describes seeing her sister…)
“You’re looking extraordinarily pleased with yourself,” I told her.
“You know we’ve never understood why we had so much freedom in the big room,” she said. “Well, I’ve found out.”
That afternoon, she said there’d been confusion in her knitting group about sock sizes and they’d asked the supervisor to come and settle it. (Knitting socks for the German soldiers was the work assignment for those too ill or weak to work outside.)
“But she wouldn’t. She wouldn’t step through the door and neither would the guards. And you know why?”
Betsie could not keep the triumph from her voice: ‘“Because of the fleas!” That’s what she said, “That place is crawling with fleas”.’
My mind rushed, says Corrie, back to our first hour in this place. I remember Betsie’s bowed head, remember her thanks to God for creatures I could see no use for.*
We might feel a certain childishness about’ tidying up prayer’ like this. It might embarrass us or seem to belittle adversity, or imply a pat answer to trouble. We instinctively shy away from fairy tale endings in prayer or vending machine contracts to be achieved with formulas…. Or as if we can use a certain prayer ‘formula’ and everything will turn out for the best. However….if I read it in a magazine or on a bumper sticker, I would surely think it diminishes the majesty of communication with God, or makes small or mocks the seriousness of real darkness.
But these women are serious and practiced pray-ers, and their circumstances were as far as possible from an “everything will turn out for the best” mindset. These are a family who do teach about faith, but in the most tested of possible events. Their aged father, the town’s beloved watchmaker dies in police custody in a hallway …dragged from the family home at night. He has been sacrificing his own safety and that of his family to follow Jesus, without security and into likely deadly peril. Betsie, the elder sister of the two, (who prayed the prayer thanking God for the fleas in their sleeping barracks) will soon die too, of malnutrition and an untreated medical condition.
Neither is this the philosophy ‘everything happens for a reason’. (I was told this by many families of patients when I served as a hospital chaplain). This phrase had become a mantra sometimes called forth in our times, and some folks would repeat it to me as a way of, it seemed, comforting themselves. I never knew exactly what it meant to them, other than that there was a sense of trust there and a sense that behind the outward workings of the universe there was order; that we do not live in a featureless void with no meaning or logic. That indeed did comfort some people I could see, who had no more personal, relational connection to God, and voicing it seemed to be a part of affirming it, as any creed might.
So the 2 thoughts are quite different, but they are not opposed to one another. *Now this prayer which Betsie prays comes with a cautionary label. We do not go up to someone in grief or during a tragedy and say, “I think one should give thanks for all things.” It is not the stuff to be handed out as general advice, as we can all imagine. It can sound absurd, insensitive………………..bordering on cruel, and is guaranteed to separate people at once. It is a guaranteed way to lose a friend or relative. It does not fare too well when put into words and especially not to be imposed on someone else. But we all know that…………………………………..
It is also not to be forced into service in one’s own life. The prayer means though, that we can live in gratitude and trust. If one wishes to turn to this language in prayer, a seasoned pray-er or spiritual director who shares your faith might well be brought in to the discussion first. The guidance of the Holy Spirit, we are told, is often most clear when 2 or 3 are gathered together…..
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“And thus began”, Corrie tells us, “the closest, most joyous weeks of all the time in Ravensbruck. Side by side, in the sanctuary of God’s fleas, Betsie and I ministered the word of God to all in the room”. { } And here the second difficult prayer begins to be seen. “The knitters of Barracks 28 became the praying heart of the vast diseased body that was Ravensbruck, interceding for all the camp---guards, under Betsie’s prodding, as well as prisoners. !!! We prayed beyond the concrete walls for the healing of Germany, of Europe, of the world……”
Betsie insists that they pray for the guards………………….
Betsie can pray for them even though they represent such suffering in her life and in the lives of those she daily sees around her. She can have compassion for them which is not just duty either but real; she knew that they walked, whether or not they seemed to have a choice in the matter, in the shoes of evil and followed in the footsteps of that power. “This was evil’s hour”, said Corrie. In a way Betsie could see them also as victims!
It is not surprising that again it is Betsie ten boom who begins to introduce us to an amazing example of our second ‘difficult’ prayer. The scripture below is a familiar one to us, and various dimensions of the same theme are woven throughout the teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
As she slowly draws near to dying Betsie begins to speak of seeing a large house they will have when the war is truly over. It has tall windows, with light streaming in, and a long curving staircase. They will welcome people in for healing from the horrors of Germany’s war crimes. People will come to live there and work in the wonderful gardens. Corrie is glad to see Betsie still able to plan and dream. She looks forward to their life together after the war and although they are both exhausted and ill, she too can imagine resuming a life of hospitality and activism, really. As that has been the whole belief overarching their lives, as taught to them by their parents. But to her amazement she finds, by a question or two she puts to her sister that her sister is talking about the guards in the prisons! Once again she has leaped over what we would see as logic and order into another world. Her vision as we know is Matthew 5:44, “But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you……” among other scriptural references.
“Corrie I pray every day that we will be allowed to do this! To show them that love is greater.”
“And it wasn’t until I was gathering twigs later in the morning”, says Corrie, “that I realized that I had been thinking of the [prisoners] and Betsie of their persecutors”.
I do not mean to imply that prayer is about being an athlete…..a star at it. There is a small story in Genesis where it says that God hears the prayers of an infant crying. And Jesus speaks of going into your 'closet' to pray; private, in solitude, and not a sensational term. I have spoken before about a man I met in Pittsburgh when I worked for the Dept. of Aging, and I went to his home to help him fill out his utilities rebate form. He and his mother had lived in their house until she died. The house was filled with softly ticking clocks, with green plants and of all things, in a few cases, stuffed animals. He took me into the den and showed me two comfortable chairs sitting on the braided rug. He said, “This chair is mine. And this is the Lord’s. Every morning I come down here and we talk together.” It was simplicity.
The third prayer, which I call difficult is often called the prayer of faith. Amid several verses on prayer we see the unusual advice from Jesus in Mark chapter 11, verse 24: “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.” The woman we read about in our opening paragraph today, the As We Gather section, although she does not call it prayer, is praying what is often called ‘the prayer of faith’. She is using her gift of her own imagination to picture her little son well. And in the future. His future life! She uses detail. Her ‘prayer’ is non-verbal. We do know that this is exactly what Jesus means when he says the odd lines in the gospel of Mark. But again, this is a way to co-author with Jesus; we imagine part of the story. We help, in our mind, to write part of the script! We find the boldness to do so, however, only because he specifically invites us to do it. It does not mean everyone is called to do it. One should not feel compelled or forced into ways of being with God. And it does not mean that we are in charge or are claiming some kind of power.
We do not always know what is going on in the journey God is taking with a loved one who is ill. All we can know, as Denis and Matthew Linn would say is that ‘God will always do the next most loving thing.’ And we can also know that we are welcome to take part in that, and to enter into that….and we call that healing prayer.
Again that important note of caution: it is possible that tragically some believers might convey to someone ill that if their faith had been stronger, they would have gotten well. This is not what Jesus means. It would make us all-powerful and 100% in control of our own and other’s life and death! So we know that he cannot mean that. This would interfere with the sovereignty of providence in our lives, and the mystery of suffering that is part of our journey here, and the personal walk each of us has with God. And it is mechanical thinking. As if we would just have ‘enough’ of ………something……..called faith, and we could control our being and that of those around us. No.
It does mean, however that we are invited and encouraged to take a full part in picturing healing. And doing so can feel quite unlike anything else we are used to doing. Anyone who has tried this will know what I mean.
If you will look back in our bulletin for today, at the As We Gather section you will see a wonderful example of exactly what Jesus means:
Agnes Sanford who wrote the classic the Healing Light, gives her own directions on praying the ‘prayer of faith’ as it is sometimes called. In the Healing Light Agnes addresses the ills of the body, emotions, or spirit, I noticed, in a similar way to Jesus calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee. It is found in all 3 of the synoptic gospels. As we will see she addresses them as confused or worried children almost, or misbehaving children at times. She does not plead for God to ‘fix’ something, ever, (in her particular case). The mood is all about the use of our imaginations (like the young Filipina mom in our reading this morning). And it is all about gratitude for healing, expressed sometimes directly, as we will see to the healing forces in our bodies and minds…..themselves. Gratitude even when healing is not yet visible!
She says:
1.) Sit comfortably and think about God in the way that makes God most real for you.
2.) Find some way to ‘say’ that you know there is healing energy within and outside of our bodies, and simply ask to receive more of it.
3.) Say if you can, “I want you to do this. Thank you, I believe that you are doing it.”
4.) Make a picture in your imagination of the “leg”, i.e. well. See a light on it, warming it and flowing all up and down it.
Note from Agnes, “Could you make a table, for instance if you didn’t first see in your mind the kind of table that you are going to make?
5.) Thank and encourage the healing forces in the body. Congratulate them and tell them that they are doing good things…..well.
6.) Then “Thank you, God I believe it is going to be OK”.
Agnes Sanford clearly has a gift for healing prayer, which St. Paul tells us some members of a congregation are more specially called to…….among several other gifts. But she also tells us she studied long and hard to learn more about the ‘prayer of faith’. She says that we can all do it well. (The mother in As We Gather does it with her son instinctively). The book the Healing Light is challenging to read in terms of her personal style of expression. I guess I might say that it is partly because saints can be both delightful but also annoying. They are just so good at some things which we only long to understand or experience! I am not going out of my way to call a Mr. Rodgers, a Betsie ten Boom or an Agnes Sanford saints, but when one studies their practices and words, they and their entire personalities stand out as unique. I recommend reading all of them. But few people who live around saints could have found them to be ‘business as usual’ folks in any way shape or form. She can sound quite eccentric when you read her, but also enormously fun in a way. Again I want to say that this message today is not about heroics in prayer. Mr. Rodgers had the spiritual practice of kneeling by his bed each night and going down a carefully kept list of names to hold up in prayer. They were men and women, children, employees, friends, family, people he met, young and old. It is a simple practice. It depends not on us showing that we have more faith than someone else or have studied harder to learn a method. It is based on a feeling of being in God’s family, or invited at all times as a friend into God’s presence.
Agnes was born in China, with a father who was a Presbyterian missionary. Much of her adult life she lived in New Jersey as the wife of an Episcopalian rector. As one who wrote an introduction on her book puts it, “Anyone who steps into the presence of Agnes Sanford steps into the right kind of climate for healing.”
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I want to conclude by talking about a most unusual prayer I experienced recently. I had a Celtic ‘knot’ of worries. (They were all centering around a holiday immediately coming up. They involved Covid (of course) , a lie I had told (!)about a family pet, which had seemed necessary to spare someone needless suffering, a sick dog, a ton of work I needed to do and regarding which I didn’t feel emotionally able, some health issues, etc.) Nothing earth shaking. But I could get no peace. I prayed over and over about the tangled list but could feel no consolation. It made me feel worse……… I felt I was speaking to a wall. The minute I allowed myself to admit the ‘wall’ feeling there was a shift within me. I was embarrassed and disappointed to hear myself ‘feeling’ that way about God, and felt like a failure and guilty for saying it…….. And yet as soon as I let myself admit it to myself I felt this shift! Many pray-ers, especially in the OT speak to God about’ the hiding of God’s face’…..a similar topic. They criticize God for allowing this feeling they have; of God ‘hiding’ or not ‘answering’. But I felt unexpectedly called to accept it. I felt called to accept the feeling of a wall; the visual image even of a wall.
I did not feel, in this case, it was really because of anything I had done. I simply felt called to embrace it. The wall suddenly felt like a friendly place! Although still agitated, and unable to sleep, I found I could lie down next to the ‘wall’. (Using a metaphor) The ‘wall’ felt safe and part of God’s relationship with me (?), and I went happily and peacefully asleep with it. There were no answers. The knot remained unbreakable and dark, full of dread, and unfriendly. But God’s silence, and lack of changing it, had shifted into a ‘place’….an object even. And I felt at home there! The wall had become a sanctuary! Amen
Rev. Elizabeth Wrightman
May 15, 2022