“Wrapped in Prayer”

The Rev. Dr. Sandy Selby

(Acts 1:6-14)

 For twenty years I worked every Sunday night as the on-call chaplain at Akron Children’s Hospital, getting paged when a child had been badly injured, was seriously ill, or had died. In addition to being a regional children’s hospital, Akron Children’s is the regional burn center for both adults and children. So occasionally I was paged to be with an adult patient.

On one particular night my pager went off at midnight. It was the Burn Center alerting me that a 45 year-old woman who had been severely burned in an accident a week earlier had taken a turn for the worse. The woman, whom I’ll call Susan, was not expected to live. The family had asked for a chaplain.

 I arrived at the Burn Center to find several family members in the waiting room. They asked me to go with them to their sister’s room to pray. We all left to walk down the hall–all of us, that is, except one of Susan’s sisters—whom I’ll call Deborah–and her husband. They stayed behind in the waiting room.

When we had finished our prayers at the bedside I left the family there and went down the hall to see Deborah. She and her husband were sitting quietly, gazing at the television. Glancing up at me she said, “I suppose you’re going to tell me that she’s going to a better place.” After a pause I said, “No, I wasn’t going to say that…May I sit with you?” She nodded, and I sat in the chair next to her. After a few minutes of silence she said, “A year ago when our mother was dying everybody prayed to God that she would get better. And she died. When Susan had her accident a week ago everybody said, ‘we have to pray for Susan, that she’ll get better.’ So we prayed for Susan. And now she’s gonna die too. So my question for you, Chaplain, is why bother to pray at all? It doesn’t seem to make any difference.”

Good question, Deborah. It’s a question many of us have asked, at some time in our lives. I certainly have. When I was 30 years old, my sister, who was 34, died, leaving behind an infant son and a four year-old daughter. I forced myself to go to church every week out of habit, more than anything else, and for the next three years spent much of the time during the sermon with my arms crossed, thinking, “Oh really, God? Prove it! Where are you, God, when prayers aren’t answered, when things just don’t make sense?”

We ask that question when we are uncertain, and disillusioned, when life as we have known it has changed, the future is unclear, and we don’t know what God has in store for us—if there even is a God.

That’s where the disciples are in today’s lesson from the 1st chapter of Acts. Jesus has been raised from the dead. He has been with them for 40 days. He has walked with them, taught them, broken bread with them. And now, just as they are beginning to feel steady following the trauma of the crucifixion, he is leaving. He gives them two promises about what is to follow: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and, you will be my witnesses.” Then he is lifted up, and a cloud takes him out of their sight. And just like that, they are left staring into the sky.

Two figures appear and ask, “Why do you stand looking up toward heaven?” The disciples want to hold onto the moment, their eyes fixed on the past, hoping it will return. But the life of faith doesn’t unfold by clinging to what has been. It unfolds in what comes next.

So what do the disciples do, after Jesus ascends to heaven? Do they scatter, running away in fear, as they did after Jesus had died on the cross? No, they return together to Jerusalem.  The disciples, Mary, and the other women go to the upper room, where Jesus had prayed at length with the disciples on the night before he died. They go to that upper room, together, and wait. Luke tells us in the reading from Acts, “They were constantly devoting themselves to prayer.”

The disciples and the women become a community of waiting—prayerful waiting. They don’t know what will come next. But they stay. They wait. They pray. They hold one another in that in-between time and space.

           Jesus does not promise the disciples a painless future. In fact, many of them will suffer greatly. He promises them that: “You will receive power…”“You will not be abandoned…” So they wait. And they pray. Constantly. But what does their prayer do? What does our prayer do?

“PRAYER MAKES THINGS WORSE!!!” So said the headlines several years ago when the results of a study on the effects of prayer on recovery from coronary artery bypass surgery were announced. The patients in the Templeton Foundation study were separated into three groups: in one group patients were prayed for by strangers, after being told they might or might not be prayed for. In a second group patients did not receive strangers’ prayers, after being told they might or might not be prayed for. In the third group patients received intercessory prayer after being told they would receive it.

The results, published in the American Heart Journal, were surprising. The group that did the best—measured in terms of the incidence of complications from surgery—was the group that didn’t get prayed for. The patients that did the worst were those who knew they were being prayed for.

In reporting on the Templeton Foundation study, the New York Times said that ten recent studies on the effectiveness of prayer have yielded only “mixed results.” Most of us would say that from our own experience. But we would probably add that it’s hard to measure the consequences of prayer, because prayers are often answered in unexpected ways.

The basic theological confusion occurs when we think that prayer puts God at our disposal—that prayer is a lever that we use to nudge God in a certain direction. But a God who worked in that way, as constantly at our disposal, wouldn’t be God. Indeed, the way in which we pray says a lot about what we believe and feel about God—who God is, and how God works in the world. 

Often prayer is seen as a way of talking to God in order to get a desired result. Prayer “works” if we get what we asked for. But Jesus suggests that prayer is something else entirely. He suggests that prayer is not our talking to God in order to get a desired response. Rather, prayer is our response to God’s presence in our lives, a response that opens us to pay attention to the ways God is working in our lives and in the lives around us, and the ways in which God is calling us to join in God’s work of love, justice, well being, and peace.

            The disciples, Mary, and the other women wait in the upper room without knowing what will come. They are not given guarantees about outcomes. Perhaps they are so overwhelmed by the events of the crucifixion and the forty days after the Resurrection that they don’t even know what to ask for, when they pray. They are given only presence, community, and promise. The promise that, no matter what, they are not alone. The promise that God’s love will abide. In their waiting, they pray constantly.

           Presence, community, and promise. As I said earlier, after my sister’s death I sat in church for three years, doubting God’s existence—at least, the God I had known for the first 30 years of my life. And then I heard the stories of a few people in that congregation, stories of tragedy and loss that connected with my own experience, and I knew that I was not alone. I started to feel God’s presence in my conversations with those in the congregation who had experienced traumatic loss, and knew that I was part of a community that was walking through the valleys and the peaks of life, together. I experienced the promise Jesus had given the disciples: “You will receive power; you will not be abandoned; and, you will be my witnesses.”

           In that church community, I came to grow into a new kind of faithfulness, trusting in the presence, community, and promise of Christian community—knowing that, if I was too overwhelmed to pray, someone else would be praying for me.  I was not alone. That congregation has a prayer shawl ministry in which some of the women and men of the church gather monthly to knit shawls for people in need of prayer. Before they begin their time of knitting, they pray over the yarn and needles, and they bless the shawls, when completed.  That ministry is called “Wrapped in Prayer”—a fitting description of life in community, when we lift one another up, and surround each other, in prayer.

           I don’t remember all that I said to Deborah that night in the waiting room of the Burn Center at Akron Children’s Hospital, after she asked me why we should bother to pray at all. Mostly we sat quietly together, for I sensed that she was struggling with the silence of God, with only the chattering of late-night TV speaking into the void. The best I could do, I thought, was bear witness to her struggle by sitting silently beside her. After what seemed hours she glanced over at me, and I said, “Mostly we wait on the Lord and then, sometime way down the road, we’ll glance into the rearview mirror of our life and recognize God in the strength we found to endure what we never thought we could live through. And we’ll see Jesus in the faces of those who journeyed with us through the valley, and formed the community who were God’s presence with us, until we ourselves could trust God’s promise that we are not alone, and that God’s love will have the last word.”

           Presence, community, and promise. These are God’s precious gifts to us, now and always.

            Amen.