Sermon: Psalm 145, 88, 23. 3 stages of prayer.
Years ago I had a very simple acting role in a University play. The term play is a rather lose
description of the event, it was sort of a cross between a musical and a farce.
It was the last of a series of plays written by a well-known comic duo in Christchurch at the time, and
they all had a similar structure.
The play started out well, then some sort of crisis occurred in the middle act, and in the last act all
was resolved in typical comedic style by the intervention of some sort of outside agency. In the play I
acted in, a large company of pirates turned up towards the end of the play and put all to rights,
seemingly in the play the year before in was a large group of Nuns.
Drama only works when the audience suspends their disbelief. When they believe, against all
rational thought, what is happening on stage. These plays, which were eagerly looked forward to by
many in Christchurch – you needed large dollops of this to watch these plays.
But it is the structure I’m interested in. The simple three part structure of everything being OK, then
some sort of crisis, then a resolution of that crisis, so that normal life can resume, modified by what
the person or people have learned in the crisis.
We understand this and at the most basic level we have all been through such a process.
Let’s use the most difficult thing that we might have had to deal with, the death of someone close to
us. First stage, all is well, the loved person is in good health, enjoying life, we have this belief that
they will be with us for ever, then crisis, they become unwell, obviously the story here can become
complex, but at the end of this story they die. We are left grief stricken, devastated, we don’t know
how we will cope or live now they are gone. But the sun comes up the next day, and somehow we
integrate this new reality into our lives.
So this process can happen in many different levels, from the death of someone close to us, to the
loss of our own health, to the breakdown of a relationship, to the maturing of our children and their
leaving home, to the Christchurch earthquake and the loss of buildings and so on.
This stage from equilibrium, to crisis, to new reality, it is a basic part of life. Our managing of this
process well is the mark of a mature adult. Can we accept the loss of equilibrium, the advent of
crisis, and the reintegration and renewal of change into our lives in a positive and healthy way?
Walter Brueggemann reads the psalms in such a way. He talks of their being psalms of orientation,
psalms of disorientation and psalms of re-orientation. Not all psalms fit this pattern. But for those
that do, this is a helpful way of understanding the psalms, and understanding prayer.
Let’s read our first psalm: 145.
This psalm talks to us of a settled faith, all is well with the world, and we can praise God in
confidence, because we know that nothing will change or move God. It is a psalm that has an almost
simple naivety. The world is well, God is on high, the future rosy.
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Sermon: Psalm 145, 88, 23. 3 stages of prayer.
It is a psalm of youth, of clear-sighted trust, of confidence in God.
It reflects of echoes how we begin our prayers: We praise God, we talk of God as Creator, and we
talk to God in simple trust that all is well in the world.
This psalm and others like it are reflective of a settled and unchallenged faith. They have a place, and
as we read them we are reminded of the wonder and majesty that is God, and we are reminded of
the beauty of the world. They are psalms that cleanse the mind almost.
I see in this psalm echoes of how we begin worship. Our prayer of praise and confession at the start
of service, sometimes our opening hymn is a hymn of praise. We begin worship in this state of
simple confidence and trust. God is here, all is well with the world.
We need to read our next psalm: Psalm 88.
There are a reasonable number of psalms of this nature. The confident faith of the first psalm has
had a battering. Something has happened, the person reading, or writing this psalm feels abandoned
by God, unsure of God, cut off.
Another way of looking at this is that the person talking here is telling God the truth.
Life sucks
You God also suck.
So this is the language of despair and hurt and bewilderment, this is 3am language. When we cry out
to God, even when we are unsure if there is a god to cry out to.
We know that this psalm is realistic, parts of our lives are like this, and we cannot gloss over this or
hide it. Instead we should face these moments. They are real.
What is also going on here is the understanding that talking about our deepest hurts is a part of
coming to terms with them, so this is not an expression of utter loss of hope, but a realisation that
even in the pit, there is still the opportunity to talk to God.
Prayer has these moments. No all the time, but it does.
This is the middle stage of our three stage schema, the phase that is challenging, upsetting, and the
stage that for many people is a shifting of the goal posts or the ground underneath. In life some
people struggle to cope at this stage, and as well as yelling at God, they seek help. There is no harm
in doing this.
Indeed you should.
How we experience worship also has this middle phase, the phase of challenge and upset. This for
me is the readings and preaching of the word. Hearing the bible read should not always be about
comfort, often it is about challenge, when long held ideas are challenged by scripture.
But we should not and cannot sit in the pit all the time.
We need to hear our next psalm. Psalm 23.
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Sermon: Psalm 145, 88, 23. 3 stages of prayer.
Here I want to bring my sermon to a close.
When we are confronted by the difficulty of a major crisis in our life, or a minor one, or some change
of circumstance and so on, eventually our life or we adjust to the new circumstances, we come
down from the mountain, or up from the pit, we take something away from the experience we have
had, integrate that into our lives and renew our daily walk.
This is a most dangerous moment. It could go badly wrong and we could be left bearing scares,
hurts, resentments ill feelings for the rest of our lives.
This psalm 23, shows that with gentleness, love and grace, we can move on, more mature in our
understanding of the world, more at ease with adversity.
Prayer leads us to this. As we realise those things inside ourselves that we need to accept and those
we need to change, we grow, we become different people, and in a way become the answer to the
prayers we prayed.
Psalm 23, unlike the 1st psalm we read, is not over brimming with chauvinistic confidence, a sort of
she’ll be right attitude, instead it is realistic about the trials of life. But unlike the 2nd psalm, there is a
quiet trust that in the midst of trials, God is alongside us. Not shielding us, but standing with us as
we face the hurts of the world.
This is a journey of prayer. Prayer is truth speaking, hope gathering, renewing and redemptive. We
should come away from prayer, not protected from the realities of the world but able to face them
with confidence and hope.
Like worship really, after the challenge we should go out into the wold renewed.
Amen.
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