Prayer Is Our Conversation With God

Exodus 3:1-15,

Psalm 130,

Luke 10:38-42

Have you ever taken the time to think about what prayer is? Growing up in the Christian faith, prayer was something I assumed but never really defined. The hard part is that prayer is both simple and huge, meaning so many things to so many people. Today, is the first Sunday in Lent. A season of somber reflection and purposeful action where we prepare once again for the events of Holy Week. Through our readings, sermons, prayer time and bible studies we will be honing in on prayer, one of the most important Christian practices at the centre of all other Christian practices. Today, I want to look at a really simple definition for prayer - prayer is our conversation with God.

Today, in our passage from Exodus, we see Moses conversation with God. God appears to Moses in a special way, in the unconsumed burning bush, and Moses draws close. This reminds me of what we talked about on Ash Wednesday. How prayer is one of the fundamental ways that we draw close to God - that we build a relationship with God. Along with Bible reading, and Christian community, prayer is the way that we spend time with God. We all know that spending time with those we love is fundamental to establishing a relationship and growing it. So my challenge to all of you this Lent is to spend more time with God through prayer. Find whatever little moment you can to think about him, thank him, ask him, give to him and so on. See if you can dedicate a prolonged period sometime in your day or week to just spending time with God in prayer. My hope is that the next few weeks will equip you in your practice and understanding of prayer so that as you dedicate these short or long moments to prayer it will become more natural, easy and the real life giving practice that it is.

You might not realize it, but prayer can look exactly like this conversation between Moses and our God in the Burning Bush. In fact, I think even better prayer can look like Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to the master, but let me get back to that. The hard part about our prayer becoming a conversation with God is that we struggle with one fundamental part of every conversation: listening. We are all meant to do a lot more listening in our prayer than speaking (as much as God wants to and is willing to listen).

I’m guessing all of us have been in conversations where someone does all the speaking and doesn’t give us a moment to say a word. Only rarely is this necessary, like in counceling or when a friend is really struggling. But if our relationship with a person is defined by someone speaking at us, it can quickly make us unimportant, belittled, and it really doesn’t feel like a relationship at all. Now this relationship and feeling gets even worse if that person consistently asks you for things and doesn’t give in return. We know these destructive practices and yet, this is so often how we approach God. We can spend a whole lot of time talking at God, asking him for things without taking the time to listen to him or for him. Most of the time, even when we do take a moment to listen, if we don’t get a response right away, we give up.

Imagine you are going to the wisest person in the world, who also has power to change things (which we are). It would be wild for us to spending the whole time speaking, if we were in the presence of such great wisdom, right? Wouldn’t it be a lot more meaningful to our lives and world to listen to such wisdom? Shouldn’t we be like Mary and just want to sit at his feet and listen?

At the same time, what do we think we gain, when we tell such wisdom what to do? Sure this all powerful person could do what we ask, but we are forgetting that this all wise person also knows what is needed far better than we do. We know God’s wisdom and yet oftentimes we trust our wisdom more than his. Otherwise, I think we would spend a whole lot more time listening.

I think this is one of the first fundamental reasons that we have such a difficulty hearing God. We don’t give God enough time and space to speak, we don’t spend enough time listening. We can so fill our prayer time with our talking and the rest of our life with so much stuff that we haven’t given a lot of space for God to speak - without having to yell over the noise. If we want to hear God, we need to give him both the time and space to speak.

The important next question is to ask: how do we actually listen to God? How do we hear his voice? How do we know when it is him speaking? This probably feels difficult at first, we don’t have the physical Jesus with us speaking to us, right? Well, we do, but I’ll get to that. If we want to know God’s voice, we should ask, how do we know anyone’s voice? I remember as a child getting lost in Disney Land. I was 12 and I had went to buy a popsicle. I saw someone who looked like my mom walking away. I could hear her voice, cadence and tone. Yet as I was catching up I began to notice the words she was saying. She sounded like my mom, but she didn’t speak like my mom. Then when I got close, I looked her in the face and new for sure.

How did I ever get to know my mom’s voice so well? How do I get to know anyone’s voice? WelI, I get to know them. I listen a lot. I spent time with them. I learned about them. I understood their character, what is important to them, who they are and more. We can and should do the same thing with God. I think this is partially what Moses is getting at when he asks for God’s name. He is asking for God’s identity, how he is known and experienced. God responds, “I am who I am”. Telling us that God is that great consistency, that I am that is and does not change. He is the I am behind all consistency in the world order, all faithfulness and loyalty. That I am who is not dependant on anything else - He does not shift with every shadow, or change in wind. That I am who is the bedrock of any other I am. I am Philip, I am a priest, I am a Father, I am a friend, a spouse, only because God is. We could go on. This name tells us a great deal about God’s character.

This points us to something important. When we are struggling to recognize God in prayer, Scripture becomes essential. It is the way in which God has revealed himself and spoken to us throughout history. If we want to listen to God, spend time with him, learn about him - his character, wisdom, etc. Scripture should be something that accompanies our prayer. In Scripture Jesus is with us, speaking to us. One of my favorite practices is to read through Scripture very slowly and pray over almost every line - asking questions and listening - allowing Scripture and the Holy Spirit to speak back to me. If you haven’t spent time like this, I can barely describe how special it is.

Moses' attitude shows us another thing that gets in the way of our ability to hear God: sometimes we don’t want to hear God or sometimes we aren’t open to his solution. Moses is at least in a conversation with God, but we can see him consistently pushing back on God, creating problems, not realizing who it is that he is speaking to and who it is who will go with him. Moses, like many of us, is struggling with his littleness, compared to such a big task as delivering people out of slavery into God’s promised land. A huge task that you may be surprised to hear we are all given in this life. Yet, what Moses doesn’t want to hear or believe is that it doesn’t matter how little Moses is, God is the one that will do it in him, God is the one that made the voice and words, and the ears, and communication in general. He is bigger than any task. Thankfully Moses does listen, but only to a point, only once God has to answer and make a few caveats that don’t work out the best for Israel in the long run.

We may resist hearing God’s answers for a lot of reasons, not just our littleness. Probably the biggest reasons we don't want to hear God's answers is that we are naturally very adverse to suffering, illness or death. This makes sense because God also wants to do away with suffering and death - they are not what God wants for us in the long run. As much as we think suffering and death are natural, they are not and they don’t feel like it either. That being said, suffering, illness and death do serve important purposes in this life. We see that in Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross, we see that in the crosses we are called to pick up, we see that in the labour process, we see that in the work of our hands, we see that in the way that suffering and death point us to God and lead to further creation. Sometimes we don’t realize it, but we need suffering, illness and death. We shouldn’t want suffering or death. We should want our loved ones to stay with us healthy, strong and peaceful. We should struggle with suffering and death, and search for another way. Just like Jesus did with the Father in the garden before his suffering and death. Jesus said, “Father, if you are willing, please take this cup of suffering away from me, yet not my will but yours be done”. Jesus says everything right there and though it is hard to live into those words, they show us where we are meant to live in relation to these things.

Sometimes our resistance to these things stand in the way of us even seeing the sheer bounty that God is trying to give us through them. I remember talking to a young man at the former Ryerson university. He didn’t believe or like God because his brother, “the nicest person in the world” had to suffer through cancer. It is hard to know what to ask in these scenarios, but I kept feeling spurred by the Holy Spirit to look for redemption. So I started small by asking, “What did this do to your faith community?” - he responded, “Well, they rallied around my brother and they prayed for him consistently”. I felt a little more confident, so I asked, “Well, what about your family? Do you feel like this changed your family?” - he responded, “Yes, it brought us closer than ever before. There was even a few who we never talked to who came back into the fold”. So, I asked the hard question, “What happened to your brother?” - “He got through it and he is healthier and stronger than ever before”. I followed “and his faith”. “He still believes, even stronger than before”. I was blown away with the sheer gifts this young man had seen that most of us would long for. I was lost for words for a few moments. Finally, I said, “So, why don’t you believe?” and he said, “I just can’t understand why God would make my brother suffer”.

Now, I don’t think this is all of our stories, but I think it is our story in the way that we should all trust and watch for God’s redemption to work in every situation, all suffering, all illness, all death. The more we trust, the more we watch, the more we will experience it, even if it isn’t always in the ways we want - though often it is more than we could imagine.

I will close by saying that Prayer as a conversation with God is actually both a simple and a profound statement. In prayer, God, the the creator of everything, the one beyond time and space, the one who is above all things, capable of all things, knower of all things, is willing to come down, listen to, whisper to, guide and become present to anyone who faithfully turns to him. This is more than we can imagine, which makes it difficult to perceive sometimes. This conversation of prayer is such a gift, because it gives us an opportunity to listen to the one who knows exactly what we need and wants to lead us to it. Let us all dedicate more time to listening so that together we might know and live into the will of wisdom itself. AMEN