Ole Pharaoh and his dogs are at loose in the world again.
Dismantling reality, decaying creation, twisting the goodness of things.
Preying on the weak and the poor and blaming the defenseless for all the evil of the world, finding easy targets and weak minds to bend toward destruction.
Making slaves.
That’s what Ole Pharaoh does. He makes slaves.
There is only one thing that can stop him, prayer.
Prayer makes the world real again, setting creation free from tyranny.
We treat prayer as wishful thinking, magic, and escape.
But we greatly misunderstand and dangerously underestimate the power that we connect with when we think that prayer is something so feeble and trite and fru, fru.
Prayer makes the world real again, it pulls things back together, it makes life true again.
When we pray we open a door that can’t be shut again, once that dog gets out, the neighborhood wakes up, and there is no going back.
The righteous ones who hold the world together, they are everywhere, even in Sodom and Gomorrah and they are spared for a time by Abraham talking God down, reminding God that God is just.
One of the earliest examples of prayer in scripture, prayer as intercession for the other. Prayer as talking God down, as reminding God, as bold beyond measure. Abraham and God, we see them naked together, and it makes us uneasy.
Abraham praying: making the world real again.
Teach us to pray.
Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer follows, each line a different way of saying yes to God, that the world becomes an affirmation of God, a proof of God, that the world becomes prayer itself, made real.
Teach us to pray. Make the world real again. It is being torn apart by the powerful and the predatory.
A playful story of two friends pestering each other in the middle of the night, prayer is the squeaky wheel, relentless and belligerent and playful as a true friend tends to be.
Then Jesus gives the funny story of fish and snakes, eggs and scorpions. Who would give a child snakes and scorpions? You wouldn’t.
How much more so will God give the good gift of the Holy Spirit, which in the books of Luke and Acts is a whirlwind! We ask for good gifts but what we get is goodness itself, which leaves us naked before God, the joke is on us. Prayer is funny that way.
The snake and the scorpion might be safer.
Teach us to pray, make the world real again, and what happens is that we are remade, we are made real.
Only the whirlwind of goodness stops old Pharaoh from making slaves of us all.
Jesus is God’s prayer making the world real again; setting us free from the tyranny and deception that mocks and exploits the brokenness of our humanity.
When we fall to such mockery and false logic we mock the cross of Christ which holds all brokenness and weakness and lifts it up as prayer. We become slaves indeed when we mock and exploit the broken and the weak.
Only prayer can stop Pharaoh, it opens the door, it lets loose the whirlwind of goodness which strips us all bare, opening a future that we cannot control, making things real again for the first time.
Prayer is our true home and calling, it is also a strange place, a foreign land that breaks into our lives, making us more and more a part of this life, this world, no escape, just more and more real.
Prayer is the parish theme that we will begin next month, “Many kinds of prayer many kinds of people.”
There are lists of different types of prayer: adoration, praise, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, petition, lament, contemplation, silence, stillness. Studying and practicing the many kinds of prayer is a good practice. But it is important not to limit prayer to established typologies.
Prayer always involves people and the stories of their lives and the stories of their families and communities.
Stories of talking God down, of visitors in the night, of fish and eggs, snakes and scorpions and whirlwinds, of longing to learn to pray.
There are as many kinds of prayer as there are many kinds of people and their stories.
Our lives are offered up for many different reasons and many different ways and life is made real again and Pharaoh and his horse and riders are cast into the Red Sea.
But don’t wait till the fall kick off, make it real now.
The world needs us to open that door.
Make the world real again.