From the rule of life...
We will pray for our neighbors and for creation.

It’s our first week with prayer as spiritual discipline focus. Let’s begin with a poll.

Raise your hand if you pray.

Okay. A lot of us. Keep your hands up.

Take a deep breath, we’re about to get real.

Now who thinks that God inserts God’s self into our daily affairs, responding to our prayers of petition?--that is, asking for stuff. Fewer hands are raised, I bet. Let’s take it a step further, Who thinks God gives preferential treatment to those who pray?

Whoa, heavy.

This gets us into the nitty gritty. We have two problems at hand if we stick with old paradigms: First, should we believe in an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and omnibenevolent God, wouldn’t this God be aware of our needs, desires, and wants, thereby negating the need to ask for these things in prayer? If yes, then prayer is solely to acknowledge a God who desires our attention--this seems odd. Like the God who knows the answer but wants us to say it.

The second issue, and the more straightforward, what if I don’t get what I’ve asked for in prayer? Is God angry with me? Did I not pray hard enough, genuine enough?

So why do we pray?

First, let’s get it out: The heavy sigh, the eye roll. You liberals are always deconstructing ritual and leaving us with bupkis when it comes to belief.

Let’s put the pieces back together.

We can get some help from the ancient texts on this one: Early creation stories affirm two things about us mortal folks: God is a creator God; humans have the divine image within them.  These affirmations are close to one another (proximity) in the text, so we can infer the authors and editors of the canon were fixin’ to teach us a lesson.

Humans have the ability to create.

The people’s exhibit A., B., C., and D., a few metaphorical-historical examples: World is created then humankind is created; world is destroyed in the flood story, and Noah, a human, gets the call to re-create; Israelite community nearly wiped out as slaves, Moses, flesh and blood, leads the Exodus; Hebrew identity nearly lost to the Roman occupation in the first century CE, and Jesus, a human, preaches a message that sustains the ancient covenantal language of love and justice to re-create the faith for gentiles (and affirming the covenant for non-gentiles).

My commitment this week was to pray with my nine week old son. I do this with earnest, not because I seek preferential Divine treatment for my little dude, but because I have aided in his creation, and he has the capacity to re-create the world for love, for peace, for justice.

I suspect we should not pray petitions to God, but we ought to pray for our own transformation to transform the world.


Posted by Adam Hayden
@adamhayden