04/21/05

Sermon Preached at Northbrae Community Church, October 23, 2005 By Ron Sebring

It’s interesting to reflect on the culture of prayer.

How popular notions of prayer work.

When people from diverse traditions get together, they bring different ways of going about it.

A car races through the streets.

It pulls onto the hospital emergency room entrance.

Frantic parents rush in, carrying an injured child.

And then they sit in the waiting room.

A head bows. You can see lips move.

Maybe they cross themselves.

Prayer comes naturally in a crisis. And in its variety of forms.

Or walk by the slot machines in a casino.

As the token is inserted and a person reaches for the button or the lever, you may hear a prayer uttered.

Someone says, "Lord, if you’re going to bless me, do it now!"

Or when a person wants something. Or wants an event to go a certain way.

There’s a song that was popular years ago, entitled "Gimmie God Blues."

"God, give me this. God, gimmie that. Lord, I got the gimmie God blues."

Parents pray for their children.

And O how we pray!

At every stage of a child’s development, countless prayers drift heavenward.

"Lord, give me patience!" "Lord, be with my son!" "My daughter!"

We pray for disaster victims. Tsunamis. Hurricanes. And the suffering they leave in their wake. And we develop "prayer fatigue."

We light candles for a loved one who is sick.

Sometimes we send our prayers clear across the country.

Sometimes we pray for justice.

And not as widely employed, but every bit as important, is prayer used in daily devotions and spiritual disciplines.

Taking the time, maybe once a day, twice a day, to go to a sacred place and spend some time in prayer.

Perhaps 20 minutes, twice a day, as in Transcendental Meditation, or Thomas Keating’s Centering Prayer. Or in some other disciplined form.

When we pray, we reach for something bigger than ourselves … a Power, Source of Being, a Supreme Intelligence. It’s universal, all over the world, in every culture. It’s been studied.

Between you and me, between you and who is sitting next to you: many events going on.

· There are bands and orchestras performing everything from classical to hard rock.

· There are all kinds of sports events: Football games and soccer matches.

· There are people talking in languages from around the world.

· There are movies and advertising and quiz shows.

Right out here in the air and the empty space between us.

Locked in radio waves and TV waves, all around us, ubiquitous, 24/7.

The problem is that we don’t have the sensory mechanism to pick it up.

But if we had a radio or a TV, we could tune into it.

Some of the signals would be weaker than others … the better the set, the more we could track.

A tuner works by filtering out stuff and concentrating on one frequency.

Larry Dossey, in one of his works, says that the human brain is like this. [Healing Words]

He comes down on one side of the great mind-brain debate among scientists.

Is consciousness created by the brain, or does the brain "tune-into" consciousness?

· He claims our brains do not create consciousness by chemical and electronic means.

· Our brains, with chemical and electronic processes, are receiving mechanisms that tune into a "mind field," ubiquitous, all around us.

· Our brains are a complex sensory organ, like our other senses, and Hindu philosophy classifies the brain as such.

Brains work on the same principle as radio and TV receivers.

From the mass of sensory input, they filter out what we concentrate on.

We experience this especially when we concentrate … everything else fads into the background except what we are focusing on.

And more than just receivers.

As I hear him, Larry Dossey maintains that the human brain can broadcast into this mind field.

· This is what makes prayer work.

· This is what makes our blessings work, when we bless someone.

· This is why it is so important to maintain positive thoughts and images when we pray.

· This is why LOVING GOD and LOVING NEIGHBOR are so important.

Hindu philosophy says that we are so very lucky to be born with a human brain.

Of all the things in the universe … rocks and trees.

Of all the animals … bugs and zebras and giraffes. Stars and galaxies.

The human brain is a very rare commodity.

Something to be appreciated. Developed. And used in the right way.

In Chicago, 1969 to present, a research project has studied prayer and non-local healing … It is called the "Spindrift Research."

"Spindrift" is an interesting word. A Scottish word.

It refers to the mist that the wind lifts off the top of waves and scatters into the air. The mist dissipates into the wind.

The metaphor suggests the cusp between the visible and invisible world, where the Spirit of God lifts our concerns and carries them to heaven.

The Spindrift Research set up double blind experiments to test prayer.

They used everything from mold, yeast, beans, plants, pets and people.

They set up groups of prayed-for cancer patients and compared the results with groups who were not prayed-for.

The results have created serious debate about the whole idea of experimenting with prayer. But the statistical results are compelling. Prayer works.

They’ve isolated various things about prayer.

Distance is not a factor.

Rituals, like lighting a candle, help ground images in the mind.

Positive, rather than negative, imagery is critical to effective praying.

Prayers have two kinds of intentions: goal directed and non-goal directed.

- In goal directed prayers, there are specific outcomes for which we ask, according to our particular belief system.

- In non-goal directed prayers, we pray for general well being. We pray for people’s highest good, whatever that might be.

While both kinds of prayer work, non-goal directed prayers are far better.

It’s better to create our most positive images, release them to God’s history, and not try to tell the universe what to do.

For me, the most striking conclusion is that the power of prayer is in direct proportion to the LOVE or EMPATHY we hold for that which we are praying.

Prayer is the glove the fits the hand of love.

The picture I get from the text read this morning is one of accusation.

The Sadducees and the Pharisees are trying to bait Jesus into saying something that will get him in trouble.

· Jesus and his follows are milling around the market place.

· The Sadducees scurry up and stand face to face with him.

· They ask questions, like they are trying to throw down the gauntlet.

· And Jesus gave them no ground upon which a gauntlet can land.

The Sadducees give up. Totally silenced. So they clench their teeth and step back.

The Pharisees step up to try their hand.

Pharisees were people who spent hours studying the law, and how people "should" behave. And since the Torah is vast and they were the "authorities," they resented the intrusion that Jesus represented.

The Pharisees ask in effect, of all these laws, of all these rules and regulations, which is the most important?

With this, Jesus gives his famous twofold commandment.

Love God.

Love Neighbor.

And he goes on … upon these two rests all the laws and everything that the prophets had to say.

These two commandments are basic to what religion is about.

H. Richard Neibuhr once observed that the whole purpose of the church is to increase among people the love of God and neighbor.

Churches word their purpose variously, but this is what it comes down to.

These two commandments are universal among the world’s religions.

Drawing close to God is what religion is about.

The spin-off from that is to love neighbor as self … the "golden rule" is found with but slight variations in the many faiths of the world.

But I’ve often wondered, did it make any difference to Sadducees and Pharisees?

Does it make any difference to anyone stubborn in heart?

There is a story about an explorer who just came back from the Amazon.

[Paraphrased from Anthony de Mello, The Song of the Bird, p. 32ff.]

People gathered about him to find out all about it.

"I can’t explain it," he said. "It’s just too overwhelming.

"Please," they insisted, and proceeded to ask him a thousand questions.

The explorer thought to himself,

· "How can I explain the fragrance of forest flowers."

· "How can I explain the sound of rain on the forest canopy."

· "How can I explain the music of the night-sounds,

· Or the exuberance of wild danger.

· Or the thrill of paddling a canoe over bubbling rapids.

So the explorer said: "You’ll just have to go yourself."

The people continued expressing great interest, so he said, "I’ll draw you a map. And I’ll make for you, a guide book." And this he did.

The people framed the map and they made many copies of the guidebook. They distributed it widely.

They revered the book. Called it sacred.

Some felt every word of it was literally true. Others argued that the author was writing in metaphor.

Scholars studied the book and became experts on the river and the jungle.

They knew about every sound and every bend in the river.

How broad it was. How deep. The location of each waterfall.

But so very few actually undertook the journey.