Feast of the Transfiguration
Exodus 34:29-35
2 Peter 1:13-21
Luke 9:28-36
As he prayed, the fashion of his countenance was altered.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
A reporter went to Israel to cover the on-going hostilities. She wanted a human interest angle, something emotional and heart-warming amidst all of the horror and pain. She heard about an old Jew who for years had been going twice a day to pray at the Western Wall, the enormous retaining wall upon which the Temple stood two thousand years ago; it’s the only remnant of the Temple.
The reporter watched him pray for about 45 minutes at this most holy place. As he left, she approached him and asked for a brief interview. He agreed. “Sir, how long have you been coming here to pray?” The old man answered, “For about forty years.” “What do you pray for?” The old man said, “I pray for myself, my family and friends. I pray for peace between the Jews and Arabs, for all the hatred to dissipate, for our children to grow up in safety and friendship.” “How do you feel after doing this for forty years?,” the reporter asked. The man replied, “Like I’m talking to a wall.”
I regret that the joke reflects not only the reality in the Middle East today, but for our purposes, the way many people – Christians as well as non-Christian – think about prayer. The joke is misleading. Most people who pray a lot do not approach prayer as primarily a means for getting what you want.
Judaeo-Christian prayer is not pagan. We don’t treat God as a genie, that is we don’t try “to invoke, placate, cajole, or bribe [God] to get special favors or avoid particular dangers.”1 Christian prayer, of course, includes petitions and intercessions for healing relationships, restoring health, achieving goals, giving strength, providing sustenance and even luxuries. But we know that if God does not answer our prayers the way we’d prefer, it doesn’t mean God isn’t there or that God doesn’t love us or that we’re wasting our time.
Bishop Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham in England, points out a second popular misconception of Christian prayer.2 Prayer is not simply getting in touch with our own inner truth; it is not simply getting in tune with the deepest realities of the world. That is a part of Christian prayer. God does dwell in us, but we are not divine in our own right. When we pray, we are addressing God who is wholly other than ourselves, who created all things, who is the source of our existence. Through prayer we shall come to know our souls better, but that is only because we are looking beyond ourselves to the infinite mystery of God.
A third popular misconception of prayer is that God doesn’t care about the ordinary, nitty-gritty of life, that prayer doesn’t have any real effect on things. It’s the false view that we are “calling across a void to a distant deity. [It’s the false view that we are calling to a lofty figure who may or may not be listening, and he may or may not be inclined to help, and he or may not be even able to do anything anyway].” Tom Wright describes this misconception: “all you can do is send off a message like a marooned sailor scribbling a note and putting it in a bottle, on the off-chance that someone out there might pick it up.”3 That is false.
Anyone who has prayed very much has sometimes felt like that, like God isn’t there, isn’t listening, like we’re talking to a wall. That’s one of the most common themes in the Psalms: “Up, Lord, why sleepest thou? Awake and be not absent from us for ever. Why hast thou hidden thy face, and forgettest our misery and trouble?” (Ps 44:23-24) Christians know that God is connected, concerned, moved by our need, our troubles. We learn to expect him to act, often not when we want, often not the way we want, but God hears us. We pray with trust, knowing that God is doing for us better things than we can imagine or perceive.
When we pray, when we go and sit alone in quiet, when we direct our minds and hearts to God, we may feel strange, awkward, self-conscious, like we don’t know what we’re doing. We don’t worry about that. Everyone feels that. But as we pray, we have to keep in mind that we’re not bargaining with God, that we’re not speaking to ourselves, that we’re not speaking to a void, but to a heavenly Father who loves us.
There are a multitude of prayer methods, and I’m always happy to discuss these, but we can’t allow ourselves to get hung up with these things. We can worry too much about the ‘how to’s instead of just getting on with it. We should approach prayer by not expecting to know how to pray. That’s what S. Paul tells us: “We don’t know how to pray as we ought, but the Holy Spirit intercedes on our behalf. . . . And God who searches out men’s hearts knows what the Spirit means. . . .” (Rom 8:26,27)
Prayer is elusive, and we should never think of it as something we can master.4 We probably shouldn’t even ‘do’ much of anything. Fundamentally, what we do is give God some time, time apart to listen, to be still, to be quiet, time to be consciously in his presence the best we can.
Henri Nouwen, a great, recent writer about spiritual life, described time apart not as being one--
of deep prayer, nor a time in which I experience a special closeness to God; it is not a period of serious attentiveness to the divine mysteries. I wish it were! On the contrary, it is full of distractions, inner restlessness, sleepiness, confusion, and boredom. It seldom, if ever, pleases my senses. But the simple fact of being for one hour in the presence of the Lord and of showing him all that I feel, think, sense, and experience, without trying to hide anything, must please him. Somehow, somewhere, I know that he loves me, even though I do not feel that love as I can feel a human embrace, even though I do not hear a voice as I hear human words of consolation, even though I do not see a smile, as I can see a human face. Still God speaks to me, looks at me, embraces me there, where I am still unable to notice it.5
Prayer is being in the presence of someone who loves us, and over time that fills us with a quiet, but profound joy and enthusiasm. Over time, it causes us to shine. In today’s lesson, Moses goes up the mountain to speak, really to listen, to God, and he comes down from the mountain shining. He’s been in the presence of God for six weeks. “To be in the presence of someone who loves us puts a shine on our faces.”6 Moses’ time with God has transformed him. He is being changed into God’s likeness. He is reflecting God’s love, his glory. We all know people – we can see them in our pews – whose faces shine reflecting God’s glory. Cultivating an inner life transfigures us, makes the light shine in us.
When I read today’s gospel what grabbed my attention was Jesus’ face began to shine as he was praying. Jesus links just about every major event in his life with prayer: receiving the baptism of John the Baptist (3:21); choosing his apostles (Lk 6:12); announcing for the first time about his impending death and passion (9:18); teaching his followers how to pray (11:1); encouraging faith from Peter at the Last Supper (22:32); enduring agony in the Garden of Gethsemane (22:41); hanging on the cross (23:46).
Prayer is at the heart of Jesus’ ministry. Prayer is at the heart of following Jesus – not something we should see as obligation, but as a privilege, as an opportunity to be with someone who loves us, as a way God shines in us and changes us.
Prayer changes who we are. One of the most profound marks of a prayerful life is the ability to live with tension. Christians live with great hope and joy, but we know that life is full of sorrow and suffering and weakness, we know that we and our institutions don’t always measure up to our ideals. There’s a fundamental tension between what is and what ought to be. Prayer can point us to what is noble and positive and direct us away from becoming cynical and skeptical, away from succumbing to darkness and despair.
Jesus’ prayer life, his constant communing with his Father, kept him focused on what should be and on what he is. Fr. Richard Rolheiser writes of Jesus’ life.
He was hated, but he hated no one; he was met by anger, but he did not respond in anger; he was killed by jealousy, but he was jealous of and hurt no one. He was on the receiving end of murderous anger, jealousy, and hatred, but he never passed them on to others. Instead, he carried hatred, anger, jealousy, and wounds long enough until he was able to transform them into forgiveness, compassion, and love. Only someone who has already sweated real blood [in prayer] in order to remain true to what is highest and best will be able to look at his or her own murderers and say; ‘[Father,] forgive them, for they know not what they are doing.’ (Luke 23:34) This is what constitutes true nobility of soul.7
The tension between how others treated him and how he treated others isn’t resolved. Jesus carries that tension with him. It’s never resolved, never diluted. Maybe that’s what the disciples saw shining in Jesus. That’s the light we follow. No matter how others treat us, we treat people with forgiveness, compassion, and love. No matter how nuts, how desperate, how unjust the world is, we have hope. That’s the light shining in us.
+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
- Tom Wright, Simply Christian, HarperCollins (2006), p. 163.
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Simon Tugwell, Prayer in Practice, Templegate Publishers (1974), p. 3.
- Henri Nouwen, Gracias: A Latin American Journal, Harper & Row (1982), p. 69, quoted by Richard Rolheiser, Seeking Spirituality, Hodder & Stoughton (London: 1998), p. 207.
- John Goldingay, article in The Lectionary Commentary: the First Readings, Roger E. Van Harn, ed., Eerdmans (2001), p. 112.
- Rolheiser, p. 212.
© 2006 Lane John Davenport
