A vicar’s daughter watched her father preparing to go into the pulpit. She saw him bow his head in prayer and asked ‘Mummy, what’s Daddy doing’. ‘He’s asking God to help him’. There was a pause before the reply came: ‘Then why doesn’t God Help him’?

We come to our second in our series this Advent of talks addressing thoughts about prayer. Today I want to think about our prayer together in church. Hopefully, you have come to the end of your first week of working through the Advent prayer book; hopefully you have come to the end of your first week of reading together the Gospel of Mark.

Praying in church together, ironically, can be one of the hardest places to pray: we are not saying our own prayers; we get distracted by the loud speaker system; by the fact that the coffee urn is steaming away; by the traffic going past and the noise overhead and the people coming in late and by the strange ideas of the people leading the intercessions. Some of them seem to have very some weird notions; that the intercession is the time to bend God’s ear about something that’s particular to them, or possibly even to get the message through to the vicar – ‘We pray today Lord for Madge who’s still in hospital and would just love a visit’. And then or course there’s doubt: did I turn the oven on, or did I turn the iron off? And it’s all those kinds of distractions when we come to church together that are keeping us from being able to pray.

Bishop John Pritchard said

There is a strange distance that gets set up between ourselves and the reality of our praying.

Why is this? Why is there, when Christians gather for worship, a difficulty in praying together?

Well, we are not on our own ground. Our own prayers at home usually happen in the same place, with the same things around us, in the same format. We have a candle, a book, a seat we like to sit in. I know someone who enjoys the same view out of the same window.

It’s our routine and that’s good. But when we come together, we are trying to find ‘common ground’, within us and between us, And we are never the same community twice. Those who were here last week, aren’t here this week; those who are here today, won’t be here next week. And even those of you who do come very, very regularly aren’t in the same frame of mind.

This isn’t a criticism, it’s just a fact. As we try to create that space within us and between us for our prayer, we cannot have the same routines, the same things in the same place at the same time.

And then, of course, much of our prayer in public worship is given:

Almighty God to whom our hearts are open …

We can’t pray the words as easily as we pray our own words, because those prayers have been prescribed by someone else. And then, of course, the prayers in church sometimes seem to carry an unspoken message, and seem to be more about pushing whatever is on their particular heart, rather than trying to discover, within the community, the heart of God.

And then there are our personal differences, our personal moments that we bring to church: ‘Oh! I must check with Val about …’; ‘I can’t come next Sunday so I’ve got to check my duty roster and hopefully I’ll be able to check with Maggie!’; ‘There’s someone new over there so …’

And all these things put us off our spiritual stride. So what do we do?

Well, before answering that question, another quote from John Pritchard:

When did you last go to worship expecting to be blown out of the water by the power and the glory, by the love and the kindness of God?

In his book on prayer, Bishop Pritchard draws on another book by Annie Dillard. Her book is called A Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, in which she compares the low expectations that we seem to have of our encounter with God, to the high octane, fuel injected experience it should be.

This is what she writes in her book -

Why do people in churches seem like cheerful tourists on a package tour of the Absolute? Does anyone have the slightest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no-one believe a word of it? The churches are like children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill off their Sunday mornings. It is madness to wear straw hats in church – we should be wearing crash helmets. Sidemen should be issuing life preservers and signal flares and lashing us to our seats to keep us safe during our encounter with the Almighty.

She exaggerates a point! But we need to come to church longing for, looking for, God. We need to come to church in the expectation that here, within this community, we shall meet God. We need to come with our ears straining to hear his word speaking to this community. We need to come in on tiptoe, eager to catch a glimpse of the Divine within our midst.

If we come with eager expectation, if we come with that attitude, then we can be sure of one thing: God is here, waiting for us and longing to have a relationship with us.

So what should we do? May I suggest three practical things for us to do.

Focus Yourself. Be more bothered about your behaviour in church, be more bothered about your praying, and less concerned about the behaviour of others. Role model good behaviour and others will pick it up. Good behaviour is a virus that can infect a community like any other.

You can pray when it is noisy … and there are times when this church gets a little bit noisy. You can pray when there are children running around … and there are times when there are children running around in this church. You can pray when there are adults near you gossiping about people you know … and yes, that also happens here in the middle of our acts of worship.

Choose to pray rather than expecting others to lead you to pray.

Secondly: Prepare Yourself Before church, whilst getting up, on the way to church; preferably, ideally, the day before. Read the readings, pray for those who are going to be leading our act of worship: for the priests, myself, David or Susan; for those who will be reading the lessons; for those leading the intercessions; for our choir, our servers, our Sunday School teachers, the people doing refreshments and those on welcome; for our churchwardens; for those who will be coming new to St Nicolas and for yourself as you come into the presence of the Almighty. Pray that the life preservers and crash helmets will keep us safe during our great encounter with the living God.

Thirdly: Settle Yourself. When you sit to eat, how do you sit? When you sit to watch television, how do you sit? When you sit with a friend for a conversation over a drink, how do you sit? Three moments when you are sitting, but all three postures will be different.

It is the same in church. For the most part, we have lost the kneeling posture. I think that’s sad. I think it would be good if more of us got down on our knees more often. But many of us can’t, and (as I was told after the 8 o’clock service) it’s not the getting down that’s the trouble, it’s the getting up. And I do understand. Nevertheless, I still think it’s a shame that we are losing that posture of prayer. But if you can’t kneel, or you won’t kneel, what do you do?

What is your prayer posture? It shouldn’t be the posture you’re in now as you listen to me. It shouldn’t be the posture that you’re in as you listen to the readings. It shouldn’t be the posture that you have when you’re sitting having a conversation over coffee. It needs to be distinct.

As you seek to come face to face with God in prayer, how do you sit? One suggestion is that you sit upright, with your back straight, your feet directly beneath your knees, your head upright and looking forward with your eyes closed and your hands – oh! the hands, so important – on your lap, open in a receptive position, palm upward and relaxed. It will feel strange if you chose to adopt this posture. But it is an ancient posture of prayer – much more ancient than ‘hands together, eyes closed and crash to the floor’ – and the prayer posture favoured by the Bishop of Oxford. And if he’s not ancient ….

Whatever you do, whatever your prayer posture is, choose – make a conscience decision. Because we all must have our ‘hands together, eyes closed, kneeling down’ position.

Settle Yourself.
           Prepare Yourself.
                      Focus Yourself.

We cannot make anyone else pray. We can only show them through our prayers that this is the gateway to God, and that prayer is essential for our life of faith.

From John Pritchard once more

The essential first move is to orientate our hearts in the direction of God in clear expectation that he is around and that we can meet him in some way or other. Lack of expectancy is one of the main obstacles to a lively encounter with God. He, after all, is always hanging around, almost embarrassingly indiscriminating in his availability.

Or as Martin Luther put it

We ask for silver. God would give us gold