I grew up believing that “real” prayers were extemporaneous. 

We had some liturgy in our worship; there were responsive readings and calls to worship.  We had the occasional litany.  We all knew that, “It is right to give Him thanks and praise;” but we also knew that a real, honest-to-goodness prayer had to come from the heart, with all the hesitations, repetitions and ungrammatical parts left in so God would know we really meant it.

When I was a college student our pastor made a practice of reading his prayers in the Sunday service.  At first, this was troubling to me.  I knew, thank goodness, that he could pray ‘for real,’ because I had heard him pray spontaneously on other occasions.  But I wondered why he didn’t pray ‘for real’ in church.  So I asked him.  And he changed my life.

He explained that a pastoral prayer in church was not just his private prayer that we were overhearing; it was a prayer designed for everyone to enter into in their own way and so he wrote it carefully to be the common prayer of all God’s people.  He helped me see that his prayer was no less “real” because it was first conceived in his study and first uttered through the staccato of his Underwood typewriter.

He urged me to write prayers myself, even for no other intended audience but God.  And he invited me to read prayers that other people had written – most of them hundreds of years previously.  He unlocked for me the treasure trove of the Book of Common Prayer (first published in 1549) and invited me to plunder the prayer books of the Anglicans and Lutherans and Orthodox.

I want to share with you some of what he taught me.  The great prayers of the church, written by saints and ordinary sinners like you and me, can help us pray using their words.  Their words and images can invite us to new avenues for confession and thanksgiving.  They can challenge us to focus on areas of concern that our spontaneous praying might overlook (or unconsciously avoid).  And perhaps best of all, when we just can’t pray or can’t find words, these prayers can lead us to prayer.  Through them sometimes the “Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8:26)

I am not only helped to pray by reading prayers written by others.  Sometimes those prayers confer a fresh awareness of how Christ’s life can be at work in my life.  The prayer concluding these thoughts today is just such a prayer.  I didn’t write it.  It is found in Common Worship – a newer prayer book of the Church of England (published in 2000).  I hope it blesses you as it has me.

Prayer: 
Lord God,
your Son left the riches of heaven
and became poor for our sake:
when we prosper save us from pride,
when we are needy save us from despair,
that we may trust in you alone;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.