Stephen
Terry, Director
Prayer
Warriors
Commentary
for the May 9, 2026, Sabbath School Lesson
"But when you pray, go into your room,
close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who
sees what is done in secret, will reward you." Matthew 6:6
Prayer is one of the most misunderstood
aspects of Christian faith. It is often seen as a magical incantation that will
summon angels or deities to appear and contend mightily to fulfill the
supplicant's desires, but such a definition is fraught with problems. There are
only two possible responses. Either the petition is granted or nothing happens.
Some argue that there is a third answer which is "Wait." But that answer is still
the first case with the petition eventually granted. Delay does not change the
outcome. When an answer is not forthcoming, the temptation is to walk away from
faith as one would from Santa or the Easter Bunny on finding the rewards,
although tangible, were based on chimeras. While this has shattered the faith
of many an immature believer, is it reasonable to think that God is just our
parents buying gifts to place under the tree each Christmas, hiding colored
eggs for Easter, or placing some tooth fairy change under a pillow in exchange
for a tooth no longer needed? While it is true that we inherit our early ideas
of faith from our parents and we abandon them when we become adults, then why
do we persist in playing out the same fantasies for our children in turn? Is it
an echo of a deeper understanding?
The idea that the practice endures
across generations argues that rather than a trap we stumble into because of our
yearning to believe in something greater, a Deus ex Machina to resolve
our problems that seem too big to confront otherwise, there is instead a thread
of conviction that our hearts tell us witnesses to something greater here. We
are told that humanity was created in God's image. (Genesis
1:27) If there is no God then that foundational statement of who and what
we are is nonsensical. But the Bible presupposes God's existence and our own as
well contingent on that assumption and builds its entire narrative on that straightforward
assertion. Granted we do not appear to be divinely imaged. We are like little
children who have been playing in the mud all day, our visages barely
recognizable for our dirty clothes and faces. But even then God's image reveals
itself, for as parents reveal their love and attachment to their children by
bathing them and dressing them in clean attire, so God is repeatedly seen to do
throughout the Bible. Those who understand God's heart in this will even boldly
come before him and ask for that cleansing and the bonding it creates. Despite
his great injustice toward Bathsheba and her husband Uriah, David came before
God defiled and broken because of what he had done, and asked God, "Create in
me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me
from your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of
your salvation and grant me a willing spirit, to sustain me." (Psalm 51:10-12)
This all hearkens back to a time
when God and humanity walked together in Eden, talking and sharing in a manner
only familiar to those whose hearts are bound in love. Love is the key element
of the image that links mankind and God, for "God is love" (1 John 4:8), and
love is the conduit for the understanding and bonding that walking with God
brings, whether in Eden or day to day in the present. It can be hard to
maintain that love in the absence of interrelationship. When I was away in the Vietnam
War for a year, those serving in the military would sometimes receive "Dear
John" letters from back in the states. A young woman who had pledged her
undying love before the young man went off to war found that the attentions of
another young man back home were more real than those of someone slogging
through rice paddies in Southeast Asia and announced she had found someone
else. He had no longer become real in her daily life, and she had moved on. Often,
she did so without even sending a letter closing out the relationship. Instead,
the letters from home and the boxes of homemade cookies simply stopped coming. Thomas
Haynes Bayly, who penned the phrase "Absence makes the heart grow fonder" toward
the end of the Romantic Era in the 19th century, failed to understand
the role of presence in any relationship and its continuation.
Presence is as essential today
as it was in Eden. Prayer maintains that presence just as face-to-face
interaction with God did back then. But like those young women with their "Dear
John" letters, we are beset with many suitors who vie for our attention and our
affections. They are quick to point out that they are present and willing to
fill in the emptiness left by the others' absence. And God's absence is often
dwelt upon. Instead of acknowledging our responsibility for the evil in the
world, it is attributed to God's indifference and remoteness from the problem.
We pray to him trying to maintain the relationship that is under assault, but
we are fixed on prayer as an incantation, even using formulaic phrases as
though saying the right words in the right order will magically bring about
fulfillment. Even Christ's disciples struggled with this, asking Jesus to give
them the correct formula for prayer. He responded with what we call "The Lord's
Prayer." (Luke
11:1-4) Thousands of years later, we still recite this as though it were a
magical incantation, and we wonder why our prayers never seem to rise higher
than the ground around us. Of course, those other "suitors" are quick to remind
us that since our prayers are not producing the expected results, God either
does not exist or does not care. Either way, if we accept that then God gets
our "Dear John" letter, and we walk away in the arms of someone else. According
to the New York Times, if such relationships proceed to marriage, over 40
percent will end in divorce. This is because when the attention of the new
suitor begins to flag, the process repeats itself with an endless chain of
others ready to step in and seize the opportunity. The problem then is how to
have a genuine relationship that will not repeat that pattern.
The key to that kind of a
relationship is communication and intimacy. That intimacy should be shielded
from all others seeking to interfere with that relationship. In our opening
verse, in our communication with God we are told to go into our room behind
closed doors and pray to God. Jesus contrasted this with those who love to make
flowery public prayers so people would see how holy they were. But there is
another reason. In the seclusion of our private chamber, others cannot become
party to breaking that bond of intimacy. We can open our hearts to God in ways
that we could never do in a public setting. We have all done those things that
make us little different from those young women who heartlessly walked away
from those frightened young men in far off Southeast Asia. Some of those boys
died never having the opportunity of seeing those they loved again. War is
heartbreaking. Seeing the light go out in a young man's eyes whose last words
have been the names of those he loved back home is something I will never
forget.
It is tempting to become
indifferent to those scenarios. They are a hard burden to carry. We may tell
ourselves that that young man was not really involved in what we were
struggling with back home, so it is almost as though he really did not exist
anymore anyway. After all, is not that how we treat God. He is seen to be
distant and irrelevant, and we have gotten out of the habit of intimacy that
allowed us to share our deepest, most private confidences with him. If we talk
to him at all, we think of prayer as the "Now I lay me down to sleep" of
childhood, the bombastic prayers from pulpit or conference lectern, or the oft
repeated prayers of the lectionary. If I were God, how tedious all of that
would seem to me. I would instead want to hear about the lives of those I love with
a love so deep that Jesus willingly endured the cruel cross to show that it is
all about love and nothing else.
While some think that if God exists,
he is indifferent, Jesus is evidence otherwise. If God were truly indifferent,
he would have walked away and let this planet become a self-destructed cinder.
He could have started anew somewhere else. He even offered to do that with
Moses when the people of Israel rejected his love and went after another
suitor. (Exodus
32:10) But Moses recognized this as a test and refused to accept that as
God's character. When we are intimate with God and come to know his character
is love, we also will come to an enduring relationship built on love and trust.
When we do, we will not be counting coup to prove our relationship based
on how many answers to prayer we can tally up. Once we remove those
constraints, the blessings will flow freely.