Pray Without Ceasing
Rev. Lee Ann Bryce
Community Christian Church
February 5, 2012
As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.
That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him.
In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, ‘Everyone is searching for you.’ He answered, ‘Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.’ And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons. -Mark 1:29-39
Every morning my alarm goes off at 5 AM. I get up, get dressed and head to the gym to work out for an hour. I come home, eat a nutritious breakfast, and head to the meditation room in our house for a full hour of quiet prayer. Then I shower and am in the office by 8:30.
Or I should say that is what I dream my life could be like(!) especially when I read today’s scripture text about busy, exhausted Jesus who wakes before sunrise and goes to a deserted place to pray. My real life is nothing like that. My real life is more along the lines of – church meeting at night, home by 9 or so, have dinner, do the dishes, wind down in front of the TV, go to bed around 11, lay in bed playing Words With Friends on my iphone, fall asleep after midnight, and getting a late start on the next day. That is my real life.
Our passage from Mark says Jesus is driven to seek out a place of solitude after he has healed Simon’s mother-in-law. The day before he had been at the synagogue in Capernaum casting out the demon from the possessed man. (That was last week’s text.) As people learn that he speaks with authority, that he has the power to deal with their difficulties like this dramatic healing of Simon’s mother-in-law, people begin to bring to him everyone who is sick. The entire city was gathered around his door, can you imagine? They came one after another after another. Dozens of people plagued with emotional, psychological, physical problems, all of them dumping their troubles on Jesus. And Jesus dealt with them one by one. Good Lord, Jesus must have been burned out at the end of that day.
And then the next day, he’s not lying in bed hitting the snooze button on his alarm. No, he gets up early way before the sun is even up. He probably hadn’t gotten much sleep. You know how it is when you’re exhausted. You have a few hours to rest but your head is still spinning and your body doesn’t respond well when you say, “Go to sleep NOW!” Have you had those days when the work snowballs and the more you do the more it seems there is to be done. Even Jesus needed to regenerate, to connect with the source of all life, healing, and strength so that he could go on to the next town and do it all over again. And so Jesus slips away to a deserted place without human crowds or multitudes.
It was for this reason that Jesus had come to earth, after all. His mission was to meet the needs of humankind but there were so many of them. Where would he get the strength to keep up the pace, to continually face the crowd with this fresh, new teaching that they so desperately needed, to keep on giving of himself in limitless ways?
Does this sound familiar to anyone? There are such demands that are placed on our time, our energies, our resources. Every day there are tasks to accomplish, needs to be met, decisions to be made, business to attend to. Every day there are people to relate to, conflicts to be resolved, actions that require more than we in our strength alone can achieve.
Let’s be honest, shall we? Even though we all live busy and demanding lives, and even though many of us realize the need for prayer, I doubt many of us observe a discipline of arising before sunrise each day in order to pray. To be certain, some do and the practice adds much to their lives. But I suspect far more of you are like me and tend not to withdraw for significant daily.
Hopefully you are able to take blocks of time for rest and renewal with a vacation or sabbatical. But as far as a daily prayer discipline, sometimes I wonder if our definition of prayer is too limiting. We imagine a daily prayer would mean setting aside time only to pray, sitting or kneeling, folding our hands and closing our eyes and imagining words we want say to God or silence in which we listen for God. That is prayer, of course, but is there something broader that is also prayer? When Paul urged the Thessalonian church to “pray without ceasing” (I Thessalonians 5:17) surely he didn’t mean that they should say prayers without ceasing. Maybe Paul was talking about prayer in a broader sense. If prayer is the way we regenerate and connect with the source of life there are many ways to do that that we don’t necessarily consider to be prayer.
John Shelby Spong tells a story about his early days as an Episcopal priest. He went to visit a young woman, a mother with three young children, who was dying of cancer. They knew each other well and Bishop Spong describes a long conversation they shared one afternoon when her death was near, recalling her life experiences, facing the tragic reality that she would not see her children grow up, and speaking of the upcoming funeral arrangements. He describes it as an intimate, expansive, holy conversation. After two and a half hours as he prepared to leave, he shifted into his ordained capacity and asked if he could pray with her. She didn’t object; her attitude seemed to say, “Well, if you need to do that, go ahead.” He offered a prayer he described as typical for the situation, stringing together one pious cliché after another, trying to cover his own sense of sadness and awkwardness. When he had finished, he felt diminished and he suspected that she had too. And driving home that day he compared the two experiences – the long visit and the prayer. He felt they were very different situations. One expanded life and one contracted it. One opened him to relationship to an intimate God and one closed him. Which experience really was the prayer? Sitting with her for two and a half hours sharing God’s presence in a very painful situation or the words he rattled off under the guise of praying?
Prayer is withdrawing with intention to meet God. But prayer also can be doing anything that regenerates us and connects us with the source of life. Spiritual Director Jane Vennard offers this illustration. When she was a child, she often hiked the mountains of Colorado with her father. With the exuberance of youth, Jane would set a fast pace, headed up the mountain, leaving her father behind. Soon she would flop to the ground in exhaustion and here would come her father with his steady pace. She asked, ‘How do you keep going?” and he replied, “Well, Jane, I rest as I walk.”
Pray without ceasing. It’s about living a life of prayer rather than doing the activity of prayer. How do you channel God’s energy so that you can be in touch with it, live out of it, and become an agent of life and love?
Prayer can be folding your hands and bowing your head. Prayer can also be taking a walk or eating good food. Making love with your partner can be prayer or serving a meal at a soup kitchen. Prayer can be reading poetry or listening to music. The list is endless.
Pray without ceasing and the peace that passes all understanding will sustain all that you do. Amen.
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