Matthew 5:43-45
You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.
1 Timothy 2:1-4
I urge, then, first of all, that petitions, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for all people, for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Saviour, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth.
This the last in our series on the “one another” sayings from scripture. The verses we have considered are only a handful of the full number. We are also told be at peace with one another, wash one another’s feet, be devoted to one another, honour one another, live in harmony with one another, stop passing judgement on one another, instruct one another, greet one another with a holy kiss, wait for one another, have equal concern for one another, carry one another’s burdens, be kind and compassionate to one another, forgive one another, speak to one another with psalms, submit to one another, do not lie to one another, bear with one another, admonish one another, spur one another on towards love and good deeds, do not slander one another, confess your sins to one another and offer hospitality to one another - and that’s only considering the gospels and letters. We are called to live with and for one another, and if our faith and our worship are to mean anything at all, they must lead us to do that ever better.
We end this series with the call to pray for one another. I have said a couple of times that while these “one another” sayings might momentarily fix our attention on the shared life of this community, they are not meant to make us inward looking or exclusive. To quote myself, focusing on how we treat one another is not about setting walls around ourselves, but about creating community that others want to be a part of and modelling community for the rest of society. We may be thinking most closely about how we relate to one another here, but all of these instructions must apply to how we relate to others elsewhere too. The verses I have chosen for this week are intended to really draw that out, reminding us that praying for one another does not mean praying only for those whose lives are most closely entwined with ours, but rather it means praying for every one another imaginable. It means praying for those we are in conflict with and those who are in authority over us. It means praying for those whose names and faces we encounter only in the media and those who remain wholly unknown to us but fully known by God.
I want this morning to be more about practice than theory, so I’m not going to talk for very much longer. I’m delighted that a number of people have offered to lead us in prayer later in the service, and I want to leave plenty of time for that. I also have to confess that I don’t have a fully worked out theology of prayer, so I couldn’t share it with you in a few succinct sentences even if I wanted to. But for all the questions I still have about exactly what prayer is and how it works, I am certain that it is powerful and it is meaningful. I believe that prayer of any kind connects us to God, and that connection has the power to transform us, bringing graces that cannot be found elsewhere. And when it comes to praying for others in particular, I believe it keeps them in our hearts and so increases our love for them, and it opens us to receive from the Spirit so that we may understand how to act for good in their lives.
The idea that prayer changes us so that we can change the world has become increasingly important for me as I have tried to make sense of what happens when I talk to God. It reminds me that prayer does not mean I can abdicate my responsibility to live well in the world. It is not enough for me to present the hurts of the world to God if I do nothing to try and heal them. I may not be able to directly affect a situation half a world away, but if I pray for peace on another continent I must also work for peace in my community, trusting that ripples spread and a little more harmony in the world can only ever be a good thing. It also helps me sit more easily with the question of unanswered prayer. This won’t be true of every situation, but it presents the possibility that if things haven’t changed as much as I want them to, it is because I haven’t changed as much as God needs me to. That encourages me to keep praying and keep listening, to remain active instead of becoming apathetic or antagonistic.
So as we pray throughout the rest of the service, I encourage you to be open to being changed by God so that you might change the world. Listen for what you might do to answer the prayers that are offered. Mother Teresa once said “I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that he will guide me to do whatever I’m supposed to do, what I can do. I used to pray for answers, but now I’m praying for strength. I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things.” And as Pope Francis has reflected, the bread we ask for in the Lord’s Prayer is not ‘mine’ but ‘ours’, so we must pray for the hungry and then go out and feed them, for that is how prayer works. That doesn’t mean we give up on miracles entirely, but it does mean that as God tells Bruce in the film Bruce Almighty, if we want to see a miracle then sometimes we have to be the miracle.
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