Ceaseless Prayer

“Ceaseless Prayer”

Luke 18:1-8

Allen Huff

Jonesborough Presbyterian Church

2/9/14

          In his book The Kingdom Within, John Sanford tells the story of spending his childhood summers at an old farmhouse in rural New Hampshire.  The house and property had been in Sanford’s family for some time prior to his birth in the 1930’s, and it was 150 years old when his family bought it.  For all those years, the house, which had no modern amenities, was served by a single shallow well just outside the kitchen door.  Sanford remembers the water as particularly pure, cold, and refreshing.  The thing that really impressed the young Sanford was that the well never ran dry.

          “Even in the severest summer drought,” he writes, “when others would be forced to resort to the lake for their drinking water, our old well faithfully yielded up its cool, clear water.”¹

          Eventually, of course, the family modernized with electricity and a new deep well.  They capped off the old well, figuring that they would use it when necessary.  Several years later Sanford decided that he had to open the old well and taste that familiar water, again.  When he pried off the cap and peered into the well, he expected to see his reflection on a glassy surface of still water.  To his surprise and deep disappointment, he had uncovered nothing but a dry pit.

          After asking around, the Sanfords discovered what had happened.  Shallow wells such as theirs are fed by hundreds of tiny, underground rivulets where the water flows constantly.  As long as water is removed from the well, more water will flow in, and the passageways remain open.  But if water is not removed from the well, it ceases to flow through the passages.  So you see what happened.  Because of disuse, that beloved old well had run dry.

          “The soul of a [person],” says Sanford, “is like this well.”²

                Surely, the same is true of the church itself.  Without constantly drawing the living water of Spirit, individuals and communities will run dry.  We cap off our hearts and just kind of don’t go back.  It happens all the time.

          There are lots of reasons that we stop dipping into the Holy Spirit and try to live without connection to the Giver and Sustainer of life: We get busy and impatient.  We grow frustrated or disillusioned with God.  We grow frustrated and disillusioned with Church.

          We all have our challenges when it comes to maintaining spiritual well-being.  At the same time, however, the Spirit constantly invites us to pray, and to understand prayer as more than a devotional habit, but rather as a way of life.  And when we, for whatever reason, lay aside that vital aspect of ourselves, we not only become dry, we get used to dried out as a way of life.  And so we carry on, often unaware of our parched and dusty routine.

          In Jesus’ parable of the widow and the unjust judge we see a woman who has no credible authority in society.  Without an adult male to legitimize her existence, she is a nobody.  Because all the normal channels of communication and appeal are useless with the judge, the woman must all but live on his doorstep.  She must plead without ceasing to his shallow, selfish, and dried-out sense of justice.  If she fails to do so, the tiny streams of hope that fill the well of her faith in real justice, and in her own sense of self-worth will clog up and cease to flow.

          I have some good news: God is in no way like that deaf and spiritless judge.  God welcomes our prayers with an attentive heart.  Indeed, I think God craves our attention.  But we are in mutual relationship with God, and any kind of relationship requires constant and intentional mindfulness to thrive.  It's a communication thing.

          So we pray.  That is to say: We watch and listen.  We taste and feel, read and speak, laugh and cry.  And woven throughout our conversational life of prayer, God whispers hope, encouragement, and challenge to all of us.  God answers not with single strands of ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ or ‘do this or that,’ but with the great tapestry of the struggle and heartache, of the purpose and love in which we live.

          Sitting still and quiet, and humbly attentive to the Spirit in a place of solitude is one utterly necessary aspect of prayer.  And it is that prayer that leads us to the active prayer of re-imagining life, and then working diligently and humbly for shalom – that is, for wholeness and well-being, for ourselves and for others.  Indeed, this is to pray with the heart and mind of God.  Through such outward-focused prayer we begin to experience God in ways that escape us when, like that heartless judge, we limit God to something so totally other that we lose sight of the God so richly and even materially present within self, and neighbor, and earth.

          Another angle on ceaseless prayer: Some years ago I read a book entitled Faithful Travelers.  It is the true story of a six-week, father/daughter fly-fishing excursion.  Their trip is a quest of discovery and healing.  The father and the girl's mother are recently separated.  Having paid attention to other things, they capped off their own relationship, and it dried up.  Now, both father and daughter are trying to understand what has happened and what divorce may mean for them all.  The father does have enough faith, however, to keep asking for and expecting some sort of blessing.  He holds tight to the assurance that in spite of all the family’s heartache, somewhere and somehow something good will break through in this painful situation.  He doesn’t preach it, but he clearly trusts resurrection.

          In the next to last chapter, the father and daughter find themselves stranded for three days in the tiny town of Hinton, OK.  The engine in their pickup truck has died and must be replaced with something that will get them home.  Deciding to make good use of their time, the two settle in to enjoy the small town and its friendly people.

          On the last day they meet an elderly woman who had survived the agonizing dust bowl days of the depression right there in Hinton.  She tells them about the hardships of keeping body and soul together in a land choked almost to death by poverty and tongue-swelling drought.  Then she tells them a remarkable story.

          The woman said that one day the people saw a huge gray cloud moving toward them across the plain.  She asks the little girl, “Do you know what that was?”

          “Rain,” answers the girl.

          “Nope,” says the woman.  “Birds.”

          A fantastic, swarming, plague-sized flock of migrating birds descended on Hinton, OK one evening and was gone the next morning, but not before they had left a glaze of slurry, white droppings on just about everything.

          Not long after that the rains did return, and a year later folks began to notice an astonishing thing.  Everywhere that the birds had been, trees began popping up, mostly cedars and hardwoods.

          What the people had first considered a scourge, as insult to injury, they now interpreted and received as the first step of God’s long-awaited and ceaselessly-prayed-for response to their need.

          “We lived on scraps and faith,” the woman said.  “That’s why there are so many churches here now.  We’re so grateful. . . . [And] those trees are our blessing from the Lord.”²

          I believe that God is at work not just answering prayer, but engaging in prayer – engaging in conversation,in relationship with us, in and through one another, and in and through the creation.  So yes, even now, into our own dry pits, or into the manure that may seem to have piled up on us and fouled our lives, into all of this, living water flows.

          Here’s the thing, though: I think that we are unable to recognize God’s true fullness until we recognize our truest and deepest thirst itself.  Likewise, we tend to miss God's presence and voice until we enter real solitude and silence.  But out of that prayerful space we emerge, resurrected, not just with some defining word of God, but as ones through whom God speaks, and lives, and loves.

          It is in and through relationship, through families at home and at church, through neighboring one another in community – it is in and through love that we pray, that we listen, speak, and work, and that become brothers and sisters whose very existence reveals God's grace in and for all the world.

          I pray that each of us makes time and finds a place for solitude and silence.  We all need that.  And just as much, I pray that each of us recognizes prayer as a way of life, as something we do ceaselessly in all of our interactions with other people and with the earth.

          The well that is God never runs dry.  So, come to this well, all of you.  And may Living Water flow through you, and make of you a fountain of blessing and new life.

¹John Sanford, The Kingdom Within, J. B. Lippincott Co. 1970, p. 15.

²Ibid., p. 16.

³James Dodson, Faithful Travelers, Random House Publishing, 1999. (pages not known).