4th Sunday after Pentecost / Great-martry Procopius; Kazan Icon of the Mother of God / Romans 6.18-23; Matthew 8.5-13
F/S/HS. Brothers and sisters, a meditation on prayer. The bottom line: Find time for prayer; prayer that worships and honors and gives glory to God; prayer that confesses the stains and sins of our heart; prayer that asks God for what you need; prayer that laments the sorrows and pain of this earthly life; and prayer for others and for this hurting world of ours, and even prayer for your enemies. Prayer, says Elder Cleopa of Romania, is what makes the world go around; prayer is what keeps this world from perishing.
There are several different kinds of prayer, and one kind especially that I want to reflect on this morning—the type of prayer found at the center of this morning’s Gospel reading. But first, some of the different kinds of prayer.
There is, first of all, prayer of adoration and praise, thanksgiving and worship. Just after the Great Litany this morning, our hearts and voices break into prayerful praise: Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is in me, bless His holy name (Ps. 103). Then again after the first Small Litany, this time praying Psalm 145: Praise the Lord, O my soul. I will praise the Lord as long as I live.
Two women in our Scriptures offer breathtakingly beautiful prayers of thanksgiving and praise. The first is Hanna, in 1 Samuel 2: My heart is strengthened in the Lord … I rejoice in Your salvation. Because no one is holy like the Lord, no one is righteous like our God, no one is holy but You (vss. 1-2). And the second is of course our Panagia or Theotokos, the Mother of our Lord, who, upon realizing that she will bear the Christ Child in her womb, prayerfully declares: My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior (Luke 1.46-47).
Dear ones, I cannot walk along our river trail, or go out into the dark of night and look up at the starry heavens, without praising and worshipping God for His divine presence in the flora and fauna of this earthly world; for His majesty in the starry night. I cannot look at our grandchildren, or any newborn child, without my heart giving way to blessing and praising God for the purity of His presence in children. I cannot attend our divine services without prayerfully praising God for the beauty of our church hymnology and music.
A second kind of prayer: prayer that is of the nature of petition or supplication, where we turn to God with certain requests. Ask and it will be given to you, Jesus says in His Sermon on the Mount. For everyone who asks receives (Matthew 7.7-8). In 1 Chronicles, Jabez called upon God, saying, O that You would bless me indeed, and enlarge my territory, that Your hand would be with me … Then God made it all happen as [Jabez] requested (4.10). God gave because Jabez asked.
Utterly important to asking God to meet our needs is that we end our prayer in the same manner as did Jesus, when He knelt down in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked of His Father: Father … take this cup from me; nevertheless not My will but Yours, be done (Luke 22.42). Which is why prayers of petition are sometimes referred to as prayers of surrender. Yes, prayerfully ask our Lord for what you need. But surrender to His way with you if that need is not met as you want it met. Otherwise our prayer is revealed as selfish and self-serving.
A third kind of prayer is prayer of lament, where we prayerfully turn to God to express our pain and struggle, even our wonderment as to why He does not seem to be there amidst our pain and struggle. Dear ones, did you know that fully one-third of the prayer book of the people of God—the Psalms—are in the category of prayerful lament. If the psalmist’s heart can lament, so can ours. If our Lord, hanging on His cross, can lament—My God, my God, why have You forsaken me? Why have You abandoned Me? (Ps. 22.1)—so too can our own heart cry out in prayerful lament.
A fourth kind of prayer is confessional prayer, where we come before our Lord, sometimes with our priest beside us, and pour out our sins. David’s Psalm 50/51 is the quintessential model for confessional prayer. Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your great mercy; and according to the abundance of Your compassion, blot out my transgression (vss. 1-3). And the tax collector publican is our model of prayerful confession, standing before God, head bowed, his heart humbly and prayerfully confessing, O God, be merciful to me a sinner (Lk. 18.13).
Finally, we turn to a fifth kind of prayer—intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is where we intercede before God on behalf of another, especially when that person is suffering in some way or another, and is therefore in need.
When Deacon John makes his way through the list of names during the Litany of Fervant Supplication; when we offer up that special prayer for Russia and Ukraine, and the land of Israel and the Palestinian lands, we are offering our intercessory prayers to God, on their behalf.
Scripture is full of examples of intercessory prayer! Abraham intercedes before God on behalf of a city that God wanted to destroy—Sodom. His intercessory prayer saved Sodom. Time and again Moses offers intercessory prayer on behalf of the needs of Israel.
In a remarkable—truly remarkable!—passage in Job, we find Job interceding on behalf of the sins of his friends, sins committed against him. And because of Job’s intercessor prayer, the Lord not only releases Job from his captivity and suffering, but he forgives the sins of Job’s friends. Ch. 42, v. 10: Then the Lord restored Job’s losses when he prayed for his friends, and [the Lord] forgave their sin. [Then] the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.
In his letter to the Ephesians, the Apostle Paul intercedes before God on their behalf, asking that God grant to them a spirit of wisdom and revelation, that the eyes of their understanding be enlightened, and that they may know of the hope and riches of God’s high calling (Eph. 1.17-19).
On behalf of the Philippians, Paul tells them that he prays that their love may abound still more and more, that they may approve the things that are excellent, and that they may be sincere and without offense till the day of Christ (Phil. 1.9-10). Similarly, to the Colossians, Paul prays to God that they may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing Him, and that they be fruitful in every good work (Col. 1.9-10).
And in this morning’s Gospel story, a Centurion—a Gentile leader in the Roman military—comes before Jesus, prayerfully pleading, prayerfully interceding on behalf of his servant who is lying at home dreadfully paralyzed. Because of your remarkable faith, Jesus tells him, your servant has been made well this very minute.
What is it about this Centurion’s intercessory faith and prayer that Jesus so extols? It is his humility and his repentance. I am not even worthy that You [Jesus], should come under my roof. Only say a word and my servant will be healed (v. 8).
Sisters and brothers, there is something astonishing here, a lesson about the depths of intercessory prayer. Intercessory prayer is unlike any other form of prayer in that during it we strive to empathetically indwell, and take on, the pain and suffering, even the sin, of the one we are praying for, giving it to God, asking that He intervene and heal and forgive that person.
There is a deeply moving passage in the book of Nehemiah. Nehemiah has just learned that the walls of Jerusalem have been broken down and its gates burned. Such destruction, we learn, was due in part to the sin of God’s people. And Nehemiah’s response to that sin? First, he sits down and he weeps and mourns for days. Oh the empathy of Nehemiah!
And then Nehemiah enters into intercessory prayer and fasting, on behalf of God’s people. He begins by praising God, while at the same time acknowledging his own sins and the sins of God’s people. Both I and my father’s house have sinned, he pleads to God. We have departed from you, and have not kept Your commandments, the statutes, nor the ordinances which You commanded Your servant Moses (Neh. 1.6-7).
Because of his intercessory prayer, God then answers Nehemiah’s pleas, just as Jesus answered the pleas of the Centurion on behalf of his suffering servant, all because of his humility and contrition of heart, his indwelling empathy for his servant.
Dear ones, our saints are known worldwide as humble and great intercessors before the throne of God, on our behalf. They mystically indwell our suffering struggle, even our sin.
So too should we do likewise with those whom we bring before God in our intercessory prayer. We take on, we bear the yoke of their struggle, praying that God would intervene in and heal and forgive that person.
And so dear ones, five different kinds of prayer. Our task? Our task is to truly pray. Prayer that gives glory to God. Prayer that supplicates God to fulfill our needs. Prayer that laments the sorrows of this earthly life. Prayer that confesses our sins. And prayer that intercedes on behalf of others who are afflicted and struggling. Pray dear sisters and brothers. Pray! F/S/HS
