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How Can I Pray?
From the series: Can I Honestly Believe?
Text: Genesis 32:24; Psalm 139:23; Luke 11:1
Richard A. Rhem
Christ Community Church
Spring Lake, Michigan
July 26, 1998
Transcription of the spoken sermon
I had thought that I had entitled the message today, "Can I Pray?" and I thought
all I had to say was, "Surely. The offering will be received and let’s go to the
beach." But then I realized that it was, "How Can I Pray?" and that puts a little
different light on it, and as I speak this morning about prayer, I want to say this:
To speak about prayer is to speak about the most intimate devotional relationship
of one’s life, and one ought to do it with great sensitivity. Preaching about prayer
is not praying. Preaching about prayer is taking a step back and thinking about
prayer, and that’s a far cry from the act itself, the devotion itself. I want to say this
morning in regard to this subject, and it’s always true about every subject, that no
one can answer such a question for you. Only you know if you can pray. No tyrant
in a political role can deny you that, that inner sanctum of the person that is holy
ground and, thank God, no one can control that inward being. And in this
relationship, no preacher can tell you, either.
You may say to me, "Well, we look to you for guidance."
That’s fair enough. I’ll think in your presence. I’ll think out loud, and as I think
out loud, I hope you’re thinking silently so that we’re having a real conversation.
But I’m not an authority figure and I refuse to be that for you. If you see me as an
authority figure, I want to say to you, grow up. Get off on your own. I cannot bear
the weight of your soul. I’m going to do the best I can and honestly struggle with
the questions that I think are very, very important, critical questions in the living
of our lives and in our relationship to that Ultimate Mystery that is God. But,
don’t take me seriously. Don’t believe what I say just because I say it. Listen to
what I say. Argue with what I say. Debate me. You’re grown people, and the
church too long has fostered a kind of dependency and kept people in a state of
immaturity, as though if the minister said it, it’s so. Well, it’s just not so,
especially if this minister says it.
As I speak a bit about prayer this morning, I am conscious that there are those of
you out there who are farther along in the school of prayer than I ever will be.
And there are those of you who have a deeper experience of prayer than I’ve ever
© Grand Valley State University
�How Can I Pray?
Richard A. Rhem
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had and, when I speak about prayer this morning, I will be seeking to clarify
some questions. I’ve long since known that my greatest contribution to the
human race would not be to provide answers, but rather, to help people clarify
the questions, because what good would it do if I said to you, "Cease praying, it
makes no sense." Would you stop? Or, if I said, "Oh, indeed, it makes a lot of
sense." Would you start or keep on doing it? I wanted to say that this morning
about this particular message about prayer, but I want to say it generally. Don’t
believe everything I say. Just engage with me in some thoughtful reflection.
That’s my responsibility. And you carry yours, as well.
So, how can I pray? Well, the context for the question is the series that we’re in
and that series began with my talking about religion, in which I made the claim
that religion is a human, creative, imaginative construct. Religion is a human
phenomenon. Whatever in-breaking of mystery, whatever experience and
encounter of the sacred and the holy, whatever that may be, and whatever may be
behind that, the human family has responded to that sense of awe before mystery
with the construction of religious systems, things that are believed, modes of
worship, manner of living. Basically, that’s what human religion is. That’s what
our Christian tradition is - a set of beliefs, a manner of worship, a mode of living.
And, if that is true, then I suggested to you that it is time we worked on the image
of God. Again, not because I say so, but because generally as a part of the whole
western culture of which we are a part, the theistic idea of God has been called in
question. Maybe not by you and, if not by you, then for goodness sakes, you can
leave right now. You don’t need to listen any further. But there are a lot of our
contemporaries who are having difficulty with the theistic conception of God,
which is a conception of God which has marked the whole western tradition, that
is the God of our hymns, of our prayers, of our liturgies, of our everyday, common
thinking about God. When we talk about calling in question the theistic
conception of God, that is, a God "out there," a Supreme monarch, ruling,
directing, employing invasive processes once in a while, a God episodic in that
God dips in here and there and, what would appear from the human point of
view, capriciously, arbitrarily, monkeys in this point and dabbles in that point,
but a God supreme, omniscient, all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful - that
conception of God that I grew up with in Sunday School, that I for many years
preached from the pulpit - that God, that conception of God is in trouble.
Now, if religion is a human construct, that doesn’t mean that God is in trouble. It
means that a conception of God has been called into question. And if that
conception is not a problem for you, you have no problem whatsoever with what
I’m going to be saying. But, if it is a problem for you, then, you see, if God is not
that enthroned monarch out there somewhere, then that’s where this question of
prayer comes in. Then what does prayer mean? If God is not a larger-than-life
supernatural parent in the sky, then what does it mean to pray? That’s the
question.
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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I cited in your liturgy the section from Marcus Borg’s book, The God We Never
Knew. I like Marcus Borg because, when I meet him, when I talk with him, when
I read his writings, I feel he’s a person who has had a spiritual experience. Marcus
Borg speaks a language or in a tone quality that resonates with me. And yet, he
thinks about it. He’s thought about it very deeply and he acknowledges that the
old image of God made it impossible for him any longer to pray; he could not
pray to that God "out there" enthroned in the heavens, controlling things on
earth. He needed a new image of God, and so he was working at that. So, he says,
"I couldn’t operate with that old image." At that point many of our
contemporaries have ceased to pray.
You realize that; that’s why many have simply dropped out of the spiritual
endeavor at all, because that didn’t make sense, so one just gives it up.
Marcus Borg is unwilling simply to give it up. He says, "How can I image God,
then, so that prayer becomes a continuingly meaningful experience for me?" And
he is clearer at what he cannot conceive of than how it works. I like a person who
says, "I don’t know how it works. I can’t explain it." But, he says, "I know this that old thing doesn’t work. For example, in relationship to the Holocaust, if God
controls human history and the Holocaust happens, then God is a devil."
It’s time for the pulpit to do some plain speaking. How long have we hidden
behind the idea of mystery, or, God simply doesn’t reveal God’s decrees, or
someday we’ll understand. That’s ridiculous. If God could stop the Holocaust and
God didn’t stop the Holocaust, then something’s wrong with God. That kind of
God I can’t believe in. I can’t worship. Marcus Borg is quite right. Let’s get honest
about it. Obviously, that is not the kind of God that we really worship, a God
Who’s pulling strings here and there. That just doesn’t work. He says I still make
requests, but it seems to be the natural way for me to care for another, and when
I pray, it’s my attending to my relationship to God.
Well, the theologian that probably popularized in common understanding across
the church and beyond this whole idea of a God "out there" that was out of style
was John A. T. Robinson, the Anglican Bishop, and in his little book published in
1963, Honest to God, which created such a stir, obviously if he began saying that
image of God out there enthroned beyond the universe doesn’t work for me, then
obviously he has to deal with this question of prayer, and so he, too, on the cover
of your liturgy says, "What is, then, intercession?" Can we have even a nonreligious idea of prayer? Well, he struggles to say, when I care for another with an
ultimate concern, isn’t that the heart of intercession? In other words, if I open
myself up to another person, if I care about that person, if the compassion flows
out of me to another, if there is an ultimate concern in that relationship, then is
not in that relationship the presence of another? Is that not to involve God in the
relationship, or is that not what it means to have God in a relationship? And if
that does make some sense, I think it probably is what the writer of first John was
saying in the fourth chapter, when he says the one who loves abides in God and
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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God abides in that one. In the horizontal relationship there is the experience of
that other dimension full of awe. And if that is the case in a human relationship,
person-to-person, might it not be true also in that relationship one has to
oneself?
Now, I don’t know about this, but I’ve been thinking about the story of Jacob
wrestling with the angel, or with a man. It’s an old, old tale of patriarchs. Jacob’s
been a cheat and a deceiver and a manipulator. Now he’s on the threshold of
facing his brother and it’s as though the film of his life runs before him and he
wrestles all night. I don’t think there was anybody out there. I think Jacob was
wrestling with Jacob, don’t you? Jacob had a relationship to Jacob. There is a
self-consciousness about us. That’s what marks us as human beings. We jump out
of our skin and look at our self. We survey our life; we examine our self, our
motives, our reactions. We look over the story of our life; we get out of ourselves
and look at ourselves. There is also a relationship between myself and me, and is
not that perhaps what it means to wrestle with God? Is that just a mumbling
monologue within my own psyche, or is that precisely the area? Is there a kind of
objectivization of myself, where I am able to see myself, and in that seeing myself,
see myself not off in some dark corner, but conscious that my life is an open book,
and before some objective reality greater than myself, I stand either in integrity
or without integrity, either in wholeness or in brokenness, either with some sense
of serenity or total disarray. And is that not to pray?
The Psalmist was aware that he didn’t make himself. The Psalmist was aware that
there is something rather than nothing. The Psalmist, in beautiful poetic fashion,
marvels before the wonder of the whole of reality into which his little life is laced.
And then, something of that human rises in him, that hostility, the anger, and all
of a sudden he becomes self-conscious and says, "Search me, O God," which is
that searching more than my own coming to awareness of myself in the presence
of a mystery that is greater than myself. What could be more effective in regard to
prayer than just that?
Well, it’s easier to say what doesn’t seem to work than to come to understand
what does work. We have poets who are struggling to say it in a new way, the
universe that Marcus Borg or John A. T. Robinson couldn’t come to terms with in
terms of the old image of prayers expressed marvelously well by an English
scientist, Richard Dawkins. He is at the other end of the spectrum from a Marcus
Borg or a Robinson; he is a reductionist who believes that everything is simply
electronic charges and energy and so on. He says, "If the universe were just
electrons and selfish genes, meaningless tragedies like the crashing of a bus are
exactly what we should expect, along with equally meaningless good fortune,
such a universe would be neither evil nor good in intention. It would manifest no
intentions of any kind. In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic
replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky,
and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice."
© Grand Valley State University
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Richard A. Rhem
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Don’t you love it? I love smart. That’s smart. That’s clear. That’s a hard-headed,
honest statement. No religious, foggy mumbo-jumbo. And Richard Dawkins is
not a demon. He would stand here and he could pile evidence upon evidence
upon evidence to support this conclusion. There is nothing. Nobody. No mind, no
purpose, nothing’s going anywhere, it’s all a chance kind of a thing popping off
here and there, and where it will go, who will go. You can choose that with
reasonably good data, or you can find others who will say, "That doesn’t say
enough for me. I choose to believe that there is operative something more in the
whole cosmic process into which I have come, have emerged into consciousness."
And some of those others are poets who are trying to say it in a new way.
Did you catch the hymns this morning? You did, didn’t you? You were grumbling,
I could see. Well, you can complain to Betty VanTil because she passed along to
me that opening hymn a long time ago. "Praise God Whose Providential
Awkwardness." Have you ever thought of providence being awkward? Well, take
one look at the world. This God of ours is not very handy. Wouldn’t you think that
God could do a better job of putting things together? Praise God whose
providential awkwardness defies our human scrutiny, whose wisdom looks like
foolishness, whose purposes seem cloaked in mystery. And I love the fact that he
says, "Praise God for what we fail to comprehend, for silence. Praise God for the
fact that we are not God. Praise for the fact that our arrogance is often reduced to
silence, where we would better stand in awe, not knowing. And praise God Who
gives us restless hearts and minds, Who still is both our Source and Resting
Place."
Now, that’s an image I can live with. I like that. The Source, Resting Place. The
poet is trying to figure out how to say something in a manner which honors the
data of which we are aware, of our world, which is so vastly different than the
data out of which the old system was constructed.
The next hymn was written by W. H. Vanstone, an Anglican clergyman who wrote
a book about God, who also could not believe in this God of omnipotence and
omniscience and all of the omnis and all of the aura that we ascribe to the God
that we want to be there, to be in control so we don’t have to take responsibility
for our own lives. Vanstone says, no, He’s not that way. God is not that way. God
is an abyss of love that is continually giving of itself in an anguishing, agonizing
way to bring forth. You can meditate on this hymn for the rest of the week. "Open
are the gifts of God, gifts of love to mind and sense;" ... that’s obvious, he says.
"Hidden is love’s agony, love’s endeavor, love’s expense. Love that gives, gives
evermore, gives with zeal, with eager hands, spares not, keeps not, all out-pours,
ventures all, its all expands. Drained is love in making full, bound in setting
others free, poor in making many rich, weak in giving power to be." And finally,
here’s God, "no monarch he, throned in easy state to reign; here is God, whose
arms of love, aching, spent, the world sustain."
The poets are working at it, and you’re going to have to work at it, too.
© Grand Valley State University
�How Can I Pray?
Richard A. Rhem
Page 6
How can I pray? Well, begin by simply stopping long enough to be aware,
attentive, in communion with your own soul. And, in communion with one’s own
soul, there may appear to be that other dimension, call it what you will. But, you
see, prayer is the language of the soul. Prayer is the utterance of the heart. Prayer
is that expression to which we must give expression, lest we burst. And so, how
can you pray? Just be human, I think. And we’ll keep thinking about it.
But, can you pray? Surely.
References:
Marcus Borg. The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a More
Authentic Contemporary Faith. HarperOne, 1998.
John A.T. Robinson. Honest to God. Westminster John Knox Press, 1963; 40th
Anniversary edition, 2003.
© Grand Valley State University
�
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Richard A. Rhem Collection
Description
An account of the resource
Text and sound recordings of the sermons, prayers, services, and articles of Richard Rhem, pastor emeritus of Christ Community Church in Spring Lake, Michigan, where he served for 37 years. Starting in the mid 1980's, Rhem began to question some of the traditional Christian dogma that he had been espousing from the pulpit. That questioning was a first step in a long and interesting spiritual journey, one that he openly shared with his congregation. His journey is important, in part because it is reflective of the questioning, the yearnings, and the gradual revision of beliefs that many persons in this part of the century have experienced and continue to experience. It is important also because of the affirming and inclusive way his questioning was done and his thinking evolved. His sermons and other written and spoken materials together document the steps in his journey as it took a turn in 1985, yet continued to revolve around the framework and liturgies of the Christian calendar.
Subject
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Religion
Interfaith worship
Sermons
Sound Recordings
Creator
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Rhem, Richard A.
Source
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<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/514">Richard A. Rhem papers (KII-01)</a>
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Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives.
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Kaufman Interfaith Institute
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English
Type
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Sound
Text
Identifier
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KII-01
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1981-2014
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audio/mp3
text/pdf
Sound
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Event
Pentecost VIII
Series
Can I Honestly Believe?
Scripture Text
Genesis 32:24, Psalm 139:23, Luke 11:1
Location
The location of the interview
Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI
References
John A. T. Robinson, Honest to God, 1963
2003
Marcus J. Borg, The God We Never Knew: Beyond Dogmatic Religion to a MoreAuthentic Contemporary Faith, 1998.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
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KII-01_RA-0-19980726
Date
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1998-07-26
Title
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How Can I Pray?
Creator
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Richard A. Rhem
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
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Clergy--Michigan
Reformed Church in America
Christ Community Church (Spring Lake, Mich.)
Sermons
Relation
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Richard A. Rhem - An Archive of Sermons, Prayers, Talks and Stories: http://richardrhem.org/
Language
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eng
Type
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Text
Sound
Format
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audio/mp3
application/pdf
Description
An account of the resource
A sermon given by Richard A. Rhem (Dick) on July 26, 1998 entitled "How Can I Pray?", as part of the series "Can I Honestly Believe?", on the occasion of Pentecost VIII, at Christ Community Church, Spring Lake, MI. Scripture references: Genesis 32:24, Psalm 139:23, Luke 11:1.
Natue of God
Prayer
Religion as a Human Construct