This is the Pastor’s Blog for the Service on Sunday July 19th. This week the message is titled “Too Deep For Words”. Included here is the primary Scripture of this message and the Pastor’s notes.
Scripture: Romans 8:26-27
26 Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. 27 And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.
Pastor’s Message:
This month we’ve been digging into the heart of Paul’s letter to the early Christians in Rome. At the end of chapter 7, Paul holds up a mirror to humanity and invites us to take a long, hard look at our deep-seated fears and flaws – our internal “stuff” we spend so much energy and time trying to cover up. If we develop awareness around our stuff, it can make us groan inwardly, wondering how we can ever become the Christ-like people God has called us to be.
Last week we followed Paul in looking not just at our own groaning, but the groaning of the entire creation which waits on tiptoe for God’s redemption of the entire cosmos.
And here, this morning, we learn that not only do we groan, not only does creation groan, but the Spirit within us also groans – the same Holy Spirit which assures us that we are children of God, no matter what. The groaning, sighing Spirit within us contains the pain of suffering – all suffering – and also waits for salvation and redemption for all creation. So we have three deeply related realities linked by one theme: our impatience and disappointment with our own selves; the suffering and groaning of creation; and the sighs and groans of the Spirit within us.
The two short verses we just heard strike a deep chord: “For the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought…”
I don’t know about you, but prayer has been a growing edge for me my entire life. Many of us who were raised in the church learned short prayers when we were very young: “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food. Amen.” (Or “Oh-men”, as my two-year old granddaughter likes to say.)
Then I recall the lengthy solo prayers of church leaders when I was a teenager, some of which were of the “wejus” variety: “Oh Lord, wejus ask you to ________________…” often followed by a laundry list of asks. I also remember hearing some prayers that were somewhat like a public performance. These public performance prayers felt to me like the one praying was trying to drag the congregation’s emotions up and down and all around.
I don’t mean to make fun of the pray-ers of my past. I offer this brief personal history of prayer to help explain why prayer can be challenging for some of us.
During my last semester of seminary, I was appointed to a local church as a part-time associate pastor. The first week, the senior pastor sat down with me with the order of worship for the next Sunday to show me what parts I would be leading. He pointed to the line that said “pastoral prayer” and said that I would be doing that. I almost squeaked out loud. The notion of praying the pastoral prayer terrified me!
My mom had just retired a few years before and lived across the street from us. As soon as I got home I trotted over to her house and said, “Mom! I have to do the pastoral prayer this Sunday! How do I do that?”
She got up and went to her bookshelves and pulled out a slim volume and put it in my hands. “Take a look at this,” she said. The book she placed in my hands is called “Singer of Seasons: the Prayers of Beverly Sawyer,” published in 1982. Beverly attended seminary at SMU in the 1970s and served churches as a pastor in Arkansas. She was killed in a car accident in 1990 at age 37.
At home, I read through Beverly’s prayers, and I was immediately drawn to how her prayers sound like someone just talking to God – not just for herself, but for everyone gathered in worship and beyond. She offered everything to God in her prayers: morning coffee, world events, Razorback football games, packed family schedules, loneliness. I learned how to pray in public because Beverly taught me – not just in her book, but from the other side of the grave through the power of the Spirit.
During that first local church appointment, a parishioner made an appointment to come visit with me. She was a retired educator with a Ph.D, and had taught on a university faculty for years. She was a faithful, active member of the church who was a caring grandmother not only to her own two granddaughters, but to many children in the church, including my own daughter.
When she came to see me, her question was this: “Am I praying right?” and then she described her daily prayer practice. Every morning she read a devotional and then made a list of every person and situation she could think of who needed prayer, and she would pray over that list. And yet she felt that she somehow wasn’t getting prayer “right.” She was concerned that God wasn’t hearing her. And here I was, a recent seminary grad who was terrified of praying in public!
These are deep questions for many of us. Is God hearing us? Are my prayers “right”? Is what I’m praying for really worthy of God’s attention? Does prayer even work?
Paul must have understood all of this, and felt some of this himself, because he says that “we do not know how to pray as we ought.” Paul answers the question about praying right pretty bluntly: “no, we don’t know how to pray.” Then comes another answer that is more reassuring: “ues, God hears us.”
“We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words.”
For every follower of the way of Jesus Christ, the Spirit is given the moment we turn Godward, whether we are fully aware of that gift or not. That Spirit – the third person of the Trinity, in full and intimate communion with God and Christ – takes up residence within each of us. Elsewhere in his letters, Paul goes so far as to say that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit – such a rich image.
It is this Spirit – in relationship with us and with God all at the same time – which groans over this incomplete, now-but-not-yet-time in which we live. Maybe you’ve felt this before – a low level wistfulness or melancholy that’s not connected to any specific person or situation. It’s not depression, it’s not a specific grief or loss. It’s a dull knowledge in the pit of our stomachs that all is not as it should be, even in the midst of all the wonderful, happy events in our lives.
My friends, that inarticulate discomfort is the groan of the Spirit who seeks to offer up the pain and suffering of humanity and creation. And the God of the universe, who is in communion with the Spirit, hears this groan and receives it deep within the divine being.
Paul uses a beautiful term to describe how God is in listening to this groaning prayer without words: God is the “searcher of hearts.” The image that comes to mind is of someone with a lighted torch slowly moving around in a space full of all sorts of stuff – the stuff of our hearts. The Divine Searcher of hearts is listening for the groan of the Spirit.
This tells us something really important about God: God doesn’t stand apart from the pain of the world or our pain. In the person of the Spirit, God takes on the pain and sufferings of humanity and the world.
It is right at this point when we are struggling with what to pray, when we can’t even name what hurts, when we don’t know who or what to pray for that the Spirit is at work in us, speaking for us without words. God the heart-searcher understands what the Spirit is communicating. This is “prayer-beyond-prayer, diving down into the cold, dark depths beyond human sight or knowing,” to quote New Testament scholar Tom Wright.
Wright continues: “God understands what the Spirit is saying, even though we do not. God hears and answers the prayers that we know only as painful groanings, the tossings and turnings of an unquiet Spirit [standing with] God and with the pains and puzzlers of the world heavy on the heart.”
This is prayer that is most authentic and most true. And this kind of prayer has no words. Words aren’t needed because the Spirit is doing the praying for us.
My friends, we are in literal touch with God’s Spirit who dwells within us, who is as close as our own breath. This is our heart’s true prayer, and it is always right and good.
Closing prayer
