After last week’s article on how to write a prayer of consecration, I began thinking about pastoral prayer during a worship service. If you are enjoying content like this and would like more, leave a comment below.
The Case Against Co-opted Prayer
I saw it—faces glazed over as I said, “Amen,” after my sermon. It was clear that I had violated the space. My sermon was good (at least that’s what I thought), and my prayer afterward was polished. What went wrong, and why did it feel like I had broken an invisible, spiritual rule?
My prayer after my sermon sounded a lot like my sermon, as if it were the conclusion. But is this the true function of prayer in a worship service? My big question has become this: Is prayer a means to an end or an end in itself?
Why This Happens
Part of my role in the world is as a pastor. In this role, I spend much of my week preparing for the Sunday sermon. As someone who cares deeply about words and language, I often spruce up my vocabulary and practice the delivery. This is where much of my energy goes.
A sermon is a mix of things. It is technical: you are interpreting ancient accounts about God’s action in the world. I search my mind for what I already know that could provide some illumination, and I seek sources that can help shed light on what I don’t know—which is often a lot.
Then I move from the intellectual to the pastoral: I think about how the Scripture might spark hope, challenge, or invite the listeners. I think about those weary places that the text addresses. I dig into my own personal story. I think about the stories of others. A sermon ends up being a truly strange combination of technical skill and a journey that awakens emotions.
For a preacher, the sermon becomes part of them. I can read sermons I wrote years ago, and after reading the first paragraph, I can remember each one so clearly because my heart was in it. My seven years of formal theological training taught me a lot about preaching, but not as much about prayer.
Prayer is so personal. It has to do with the deep matters of the heart. It is a mystery. It only makes sense, then, that my prayer, and sometimes yours, might sound like the sermon because it is familiar. Prayer feels unknown, unfixed, wild. My sermon fits onto a page. A praying life does not.
The Difference Between Preaching and Prayer
It’s clear when you put prayer and preaching side-by-side that a distinction is made. These are not similar things, though they interact with the same subject, the same dilemmas, and the same challenge of staying rooted on shifting ground.
The English word “preach” comes from the Latin praedicāre, meaning “to proclaim publicly or to make known.” One of the Greek words in the New Testament for preaching and proclaiming is kērýssō. It appears in the following verses and among others: “And [Jesus] went throughout all Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out demons.” (Mk 1:39); When Jesus restores the demon-possessed man in Lk. 8:26-38, the delivered man becomes a preacher. Jesus says to him, “‘Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.’ And he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him.” (8:39). When Paul makes an appeal to the Christians in Rome to support his mission throughout the Roman Empire, he asks these rhetorical questions: “How then will they call on [Jesus] in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Romans 10:14.)
The origins of the word prayer are a bit more confusing. Most of the Latin and French words from which the English word prayer is derived mean “to plead, beg, or ask.”
The Jewish understandings of prayer are incredibly rich, and align with what many Christian mystics have taught. Jewish sages taught that Jacob’s ladder, with angels going up and down, was the symbol of prayer. Prayer is the ladder that connects people to God. That ladder has steps, and the highest step on that ladder is “Attachment.”
Nissan Mindel on chabad.org describes this desire for attachment in this way:
“Our soul is ‘truly a part of G‑dliness,’ and it therefore longs to be reunited with, and reabsorbed in, G‑dliness; just as a small flame when it is put close to a larger flame is absorbed into the larger flame. We may not be aware of this longing, but it is there nevertheless. Our soul has, in fact, been called the "candle of G‑d." (Prov. 20:27) The flame of a candle is restless, striving upwards, to break away, as it were, from the wick and body of the candle; for such is the nature of fire—to strive upwards. Our soul, too, strives upwards, like the flame of the candle.”
The Psalms, too, are known as the great prayer book. Most of the methods of prayer taught to me were derived from the soul-baring posture of many of the Psalmists before God.
From this brief discussion, we can see that preaching is about proclaiming and bearing witness to God and God’s acts, and prayer is about connection.
The Unspoken Spiritual Rule and the Undefended Heart
The unspoken spiritual rule that is broken when our prayers become the summary or closing statements of the sermon is that prayer becomes transactional—a means to an end. In that moment, I, as a preacher, am making it clear that what matters more than connecting with God or baring one’s soul before God is the sermon points. A true posture of prayer is coming to God defenseless. When our prayers end up being the closing argument of the sermon, we are defending ourselves and not truly opening ourselves to the God who cannot be contained.
Step back and ask: “This sermon that I’ve been poring over throughout the week—is it truly the most important thing? Is it more important that people listen and remember my sermon, or is it more important that people wake up Monday morning and pray?”
When we begin asking this question, we realize that our sermons are a means to an end, as beautiful and inspiring as they might be. They are in service to helping other people love God and love neighbor—and genuine prayer will expedite that process more than any sermon we preach. Ouch. I know. We can’t forget this. What a preacher does is so important. We need good preaching. But we also need preaching that is aiming toward supporting people in their connection with God and neighbor.
In The Contemplative Pastor, Eugene Peterson shares something that George Arthur Buttrick said,
“Pastors think people come to church to hear sermons. They don’t; they come to pray and to learn to pray.”1
Moving Forward
So, it’s Sunday morning. You’ve delivered your sermon, or you're about to; everything within you wants to start repeating or introducing the sermon. You so want to share what you’ve been preparing. You are about to burst, or you already have—how will you pray?
First: Be vulnerable. Speak to God as you do in the secret place. Be defenseless. Seek attachment to God.
Second: Take a deep breath. Think about what you personally learned about God, about yourself, or about your congregation or world through Scripture and share that. If, for example, your sermon was about Jesus’s command to love your enemy, you could pray, “Jesus, what I’m learning is that you love way beyond what I can understand. We desire, in some small way, to embody your love and to be the balm in a world torn apart by hate and division. Grant us the courage to turn the other cheek and to always bless those who give us a hard time. Amen.”
Third: Analyze your sermon. Is your sermon more about God, or is it more about you or about the duties of the Christian life? No judgment. There’s a whole range of things, and most of us are constantly mixing and blending. When your sermon is squarely aimed at sharing something about God and helping people see God more clearly, prayer flows more naturally. Think of it this way: you are meeting someone you have never met for coffee. You want to know them, their story, the way they see and interact with the world. Once you know the person, it is easier to develop a relationship. Likewise, a sermon can work the same way by answering these questions: “What is God like, what does God do, who does God spend time with, and where is God?” When we describe God in the best way our limited language can, doing so often leads people to want to develop that relationship more. If your sermon leans more toward what we should do, or be doing, prayer can be a bit more difficult—not impossible, though.
This picture is a stone carving of Mary and Jesus. Different versions of the Madonna and Child have been sources of Christian meditation for centuries. What it depicts is a relationship. There’s no agenda. There’s no plan or five preaching points; there’s no theological agenda—there is just the fact that Jesus’s incarnation became the ladder upon which we can have oneness with God.
The Contemplative Pastor, VIII: First Language.
Thought-provoking and instructive. Thanks!