by Rev. Thomas Disrud

A sermon given September 14, 2003

First Unitarian Church

Portland, Oregon

The topic for today’s sermon comes from that category of theological inquiry that includes bumper stickers, trivets you buy at roadside truck stops and country western songs. Sometimes these theological statements bring a smile and often they touch on some universal truths.

I was in Atlanta in January at the beginning of my sabbatical to visit two large Presbyterian churches to learn about how they are structured and how they have managed growth. But since I was in Atlanta, it was important to seek out some good barbecue.

Harold’s in one of those quintessentially American eating places. It is not much to look at on the outside. In fact there are some bars on the windows that make it a little intimidating to go into the first time. But the sign—featuring a pig dancing over hot coals—is a good indicator. As one food writer puts it, “in the south, a happy pig on the sign almost always signals a good barbecue.” And at Harold’s, as soon as you start to smell the food, you know you are in the right place.

On the inside, the walls are covered with photos of famous people who have been there, newspaper clippings, art of many kinds and a few signs. When I went from one dining room to another I noticed the sign that said, “God has time to listen if you have time to pray.” Funny how that sign, along side the food, of course, was what seemed to stay with me. Maybe it was something that I needed to hear as I was starting this journey many months ago.

Sometimes Unitarian Universalists don’t quite know what to do with words like prayer and God. Like so many words that are religious, we are often too quick to dismiss them. Prayer has been making a comeback these past few years and for good reason. When we are not sure where else to turn, it is a place where we can go to reach out.

To know that prayer is a source of comfort in many of our lives, all you have to do is read the prayer requests that are written for the prayer urns in our sanctuary every Sunday.

Prayers for love and comfort for a woman living with cancer.

Prayers as someone discerns whether to move to be with a person she loves or stay here and give up that relationship.

Prayers that suffering might be lessened for person with a terminal illness.

Prayers to help person who is very discouraged about finding work.

Prayers for one paralyzed by depression and thoughts of suicide.

Prayers for a fast recovery from knee replacement surgery.

And sometimes they are lighter in tone:

A prayer to win the baseball game. NOW!

The prayer requests run the gambit most weeks. For me they are reminders of what I know many people carry with them from week to week. They are expressions of the burdens we carry, the fears we live with, of the many things we have to be thankful for. They are expressions of how we reach out in our own times of need. They express ways we hope to grow and change.

Prayer was certainly important to me as a child. I remember saying prayers before bedtime. I remember sitting in church and focusing hard as I said the prayers there. The more I concentrated, the more likely it was my requests would be granted. But as I got older and as my skepticism about the church grew, I wasn’t quite sure what to do with prayer. It didn’t seem to even be worth the effort. It was a confusing time and I was not sure who would be there to hear them.

With some perspective, I can see that my sense of prayer was pretty narrow. I wanted my prayers to get me results. But of course I’ve come to learn that the answers we get to prayers often are not very clear. Sometimes, in fact, they only seem to make it all the more confusing.

But the inclination to pray, I’ve found, has almost always been there for me. It has, I can now appreciate, an almost primal quality. It may not always be called prayer, but it is a kind of reaching out when we don’t know where else to reach. When we get into a tough spot, we may not know what else to do. It is in those moments when we feel isolated from the world that we are most in need of reaching out. It is a need to connect, to connect with something larger, however we might describe it. We search for that connection and we search to find what matters most to us. This is how theologian Frederick Buechner describes prayer:

“The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else’s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers.”

In prayer, we go from that “a-ha” moment to feeling a connection to what is happening around us. The most basic prayer is that inner movement in us when you move towards another’s pain or another’s joy. It is a movement towards what is happening in our midst.

Prayer is not so much about how god responds, but it is more about our own response. In the voicing of prayer, we get closer to what is most important. In the voicing, we are asking the questions and hope that we might get closer to some kind of answer. The important part is not so much where they go or what the answer might be as it is what we do with what comes to us. What is most important is the door that opens up when we allow ourselves to ask the questions. 

And sometimes the door doesn’t open. The only response is silence. We are alone and don’t know where to go. We are called to sit with it and see what will emerge. That can be a hard place to be in. But that itself may be the answer. That we are not ready for it yet. We need to sit with the questions and have faith that what emerges will be what we need.

Elie Wiesel tells the story of a young boy in a small East European town in 1941. One day the combination town fool and wise man, Moche, approaches him as he is praying.

“Why do you pray?"” he asked the young boy.

 “I don’t know why,” the boy said.

“And why do you pray, Moche?” the young boy asked him.

“I pray to the God within me (to) give me the strength to ask ... the right questions.”

Opening ourselves to the right questions means opening ourselves to change more often than not. It has been my experience that we usually don’t do that with a lot of enthusiasm.  The present situation may not be great but it certainly is better than some unknown. Change, no matter how much we might know we need it, is hard. Coming to accept the reality before us, sometimes, is hard.

In our culture, it is easy to find all kinds of distractions to keep us from finding those answers. We drive with cell phones. We go from this to that. But in the end we can still be pretty isolated. We don’t want to sit with that silence. 

Finding our way to the right questions means that we have to be open to how life is different, or how we might change. Before we get to that place, we have to be willing to go there. There is an act of faith that it will be okay, that no matter what comes our way we will find the strength to come to peace with it.

We all have times when we can look back on something in our lives that at the time was very difficult and not at all what we would have wanted, but when we can look on it with some perspective, we see that there were good things that came from it. But what happens is that we are opened up to things that we can’t quite imagine. We are made aware of connections that we did not have before. And as we are changed the world—and even god—are changed in the process. But at the time it may be anything but clear where we are going.

And sometimes we have to leave what is most familiar in order to find those things.

On my sabbatical I traveled for three months in Southeast Asia. First I went to Vietnam, then Cambodia, and then on to Thailand. I was not originally planning on going to Laos, but I seemed to keep meeting people who were talking about their experiences in Laos. Finally I decided that there was a message in all of this. One option for getting there from the border with Thailand was to take what was billed as a slow boat. This, of course, prompted me to ask if there was a fast boat option. I was conditioned, after all, to get from one place to another as quickly as possible. I learned that the slow boat was two days with 8-9 hours of sailing each day. The fast boat, by contrast, only took 3-5 hours. The problem with this option was that it was difficult to discern just how safe it was. Sailing down the Mekong, you come upon your share of rocks, and other fast boats, and apparently there are a fair number of accidents. The advice that I got, in the end, was to take the slow boat.

The boat was a fairly large vessel, an old wooden thing with a canopy roof. It held 50-60 people. Backpacks and other bags were tossed on top of the roof of the boat. Inside were small wooden benches, not the most comfortable for a long voyage, and one toilet that everyone used, that I would describe as pretty rustic. The boat’s schedule was a little mysterious. Nobody quite knew when the boat would leave. The rules and regulations at the Laos border were also a little fuzzy. Truth was, I think, that the boat didn’t leave until it was as full as possible. After some waiting we took off, cramped in our spaces.

Before long it seemed we were even more in the middle of nowhere than we had been when we left. We sailed through Laos, down the Mekong river, through beautiful remote places. Occasionally there would be a herd of cattle or some children playing along the water. But once the noise of the engine became the norm and moved into the background the beauty and the quiet of the place took over.

What I found in these couple days was that time opened up for me. Once I got past the anxiety that comes from being in a remote place I seemed to settle into the remoteness and the beauty of it all. The hours passed by, with some conversation with other travellers with a novel and a guidebook in hand. And there was plenty of time just looking and thinking and yes, praying. I found that I was filled with thoughts of people I missed, people here in Portland, people I had met on the trip. Thoughts of my life and where I was going.

And maybe because of that, it was a time to let go of expectations. It was a time to be in the place. It was a time to enjoy seeing children playing in the sand along the river. Their lives looked free and open and simple. We spent the night in a small village that only had electricity a few hours a day. The next morning we were on the boat again.

At the end of the second day, we arrived in Laung Prabang, Laos, which was the French capital there. It is one of the most beautiful places I have ever seen. It is filled with old French colonial buildings, very beautiful in their now-decayed state. It is a place where there seems to be a temple every few yards. I walked around there, a little wobbly on my legs after the time on the boat. It was early evening and the monks in the temple were chanting. Children were playing in the streets and life in that moment seemed to hold all that it could hold. It was one of those moments of being connected to all that is. I felt a kind of peace there that I had not felt before my journey.

It felt like this was the place that I had been led to. That there was a reason for the two days on the slow boat, that I might experience this place and the people there. The people have very little materially, and yet to my western eyes they seem very, very happy. In that moment I was there and there was no place else I wanted to be.

I’m not sure what led me there. I’m not sure why I had such an experience there; I think it had something to do with the journey there, which as I look back on it took on almost a prayerful quality. I was out of my usual element—even more so than on most of the rest of my trip—and this opened me to see things in a different light. I had a feeling of being open to what I might experience in a way that I could seldom remember in my life. It was a time when I felt full of gratitude and hope. It was a time when I felt open to ask questions and open to what answers might arise.

It is so often the case that we need to go away from what is most familiar in order to come to a place of appreciating it and also seeing it in a fuller light. In this far-away place I was more able to see how blessed my life is here.

I found in this that the world both seemed much bigger than it had been before but also smaller. Smaller in how I was able to see all that essentially connects us. Smaller to see that our lives are different but also that we flow from that same source of life that none us will ever fully know.

We don’t need to go far away for this, of course. The same things are right here in front of us most of the time, but it may be harder to see them. What I have come away with is a desire to live prayerfully, to live in gratitude, to not take the blessings that I have in my life so much for granted. I come away from it with the desire to be called out of myself, to see how my own hurts and my own joys are also the hurts and the joys of the world. That in seeing life fully around me I might also know life more fully inside.

The writer Kathleen Norris says that prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine. It is not a matter of traveling far away, although that so often seems to help. It is a matter of having the courage to take ourselves from what is most familiar and most comfortable and see life in a little different light.

It is not that we say a prayer and all is made right. But what changes is the way we see it. We are changed because we are opened to seeing something in a new way. So often when we hear what someone is going through, we say that all we can do is pray. But indeed that act of holding up, of going inward, is very important. We cannot know all the ways that we are changed, but something moves and shifts—for us and for what it is we are holding. 

But prayer does make a difference. I can’t tell you how important it was as I headed off for several months on sabbatical your messages that you were praying for me. When I was off in foreign places, there were many times that this awareness meant a lot to me. I knew that I was not alone. That was very important to me. It takes intentionality to put ourselves forward, to not take things for granted.

We are reminded that we are part of how the world moves and changes every day. As we are moved and changed, so is the world, so is god. It is an on-going conversation. If I can life prayerfully, I am taken out of myself in a way that I am more aware of my own connection with all around me. My pain is also the pain of the world. My joy is also connected to the joy present in the world. It helps me to have some better perspective on where I am in the world. I know that this is where I am and where I am supposed to be.

The poet Czeslaw Milosz says that prayer constructs “a velvet bridge and walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard, above landscapes the color of ripe gold, transformed by a magic stopping of the sun.”

God does have time to listen. All we need to do is pray. Amen.

PRAYER

Spirit of life and love, hold us in all the days we live. Help us to bring all the stuff of our lives to you, that we might be changed, that we might be opened to possibility. Hear us, that we might be better able to hear others. Open us always to grow, in love, in hope, in understanding.

BENEDICTION

Pray without ceasing, good people. Go this day in love and in hope and in peace. Amen.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  Copyright 2003, Rev. Thomas Disrud.  All rights reserved.