To pray as you can and not as you can’t includes knowing that Christ is praying in us, through us, and for us. Rowan Williams points out that as we mature, there is a growing recognition that “Prayer, more and more, is not something we do, but something God is doing in us.”
Psalm 22, sometimes called Christ’s cry of dereliction, is an important place to begin our journey of allowing God to pray within us. Its first two lines are words Jesus learned as a child and agonized over as an adult. If Jesus prayed these words with all his heart, he can pray them with all of ours.
Those of us who preach at Wheatland love to quote inspiring thinkers and writers. Here are most of the quotes from this weekend’s message:
“Let your prayer be frequent and brief.” - John Cassian
“Prayer, more and more, is not something we do, but what we are letting God do in us.” - Rowan Williams, Being Christian
“… when we are baptized into the body of Jesus, we are in him, and he is in us. Our Father hears us and sees us as part of his Son. When Jesus, the head of the church, prays, the body of the church prays. When the church, the body, prays, the head of the church prays. And this does not happen as a series of two sequential events: first, Jesus prays, then the church; or first, the church prays, then Jesus. No, all our voices are univocally united. To pray the psalms, therefore, is to hear David pray, Jesus pray, and ourselves pray as one vast choir that reaches the ears of our Father as the voice of Jesus.” - Chad Bird, The Christ Key
“Now, there is in the Holy Scriptures one book that differs from all other books of the Bible in that it contains only prayers. That book is the Psalms. At first it is something very astonishing that there is a prayerbook in the Bible. The Holy Scriptures are, to be sure, God’s Word to us. But prayers are human words.
In Jesus’ mouth, the human word becomes God’s Word. When we pray along with Christ's prayer, God’s Word becomes again a human word. Thus, all the prayers of the Bible are such prayers, which we pray together with Jesus Christ, prayers in which Christ includes us and through which Christ brings us before the face of God.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Psalms: The Prayerbook of the Bible
“Does it help to realize that as Jesus prays his sense of God-abandonment he is praying a prayer that he learned as a child? It is the first line of Psalm 22. It is a psalm that expresses excruciating isolation, emotional devastation, physical pain. It is also a psalm that ends up in a congregation, “The great congregation” (v. 25) of men and women among whom he is able to give witness that God “did not hide his face from me, but heard when I cried to him” (v. 24). Does it help to know that this psalm ends differently than it begins? I think it does.
And does it help to observe that this is the first single-sentence prayer from the cross—but not the last? Jesus keeps praying. Fragments of of prayer torn out of childhood innocence, broken shards of prayer from broken lives, have a way of coming toether again in the company of Jesus. Jesus is not done praying. And neither are we.” - Eugene Peterson, Tell It Slant
"I know this one"