One of my favorite preachers is a fellow by the name of Peter Gomes.  He’s the preacher at the Memorial Church at Harvard University, and in his latest book he tells about the time he was on a flight from Boston to London.  He was scheduled to preach almost as soon as he got there on a Sunday morning at a church in London, and so, of course, he was thinking about his sermon during the flight.  And at one point, the plane experienced significant turbulence, people were being bounced around, and the captain came on and warned everyone to stay in their seats and keep their seat belts fastened.  People were very nervous.  Peter Gomes claims that he wasn’t all that nervous about the flight, but he was a little nervous about the sermon he had to preach in a couple of hours, so it was just coincidentally at about the time of all the turbulence that he pulled out his sermon notes and his Bible and started looking them over.  And as the turbulence increased and people continued to be bounced around, the woman sitting next to Peter Gomes looked over and saw him reading the Bible, and very nervously, she asked him, “Do you know something I should know?” 

Sometimes I wonder if we don’t look to the Bible, and think about the Bible, and consider what the Bible has to offer, only when we’re in trouble, only when we’re not sure what we should do, only when there’s a bit of turbulence in our lives.  When everything’s going just fine, when everything’s clear sailing, we can’t always be bothered with the Bible and with God, we have other priorities.  But when we’re in trouble, that’s when we think we’d better play it safe and turn to the Bible and turn to God. 

I heard about this one man who was having some real difficulty and frustration in his life and he felt he needed to hear from some power beyond himself, so he went and picked up a Bible, he hadn’t opened a Bible in years, but he decided to open it at random and see what it was telling him.  So he opened up the Bible and pointed to a passage and it said, “And Judas went out and hanged himself.”  He thought, well, that’s not very good, he’d better try that again, so he opened the Bible again and pointed to another passage, and it said, “Go thou and do likewise.”  So he thought it couldn’t hurt to try it one more time, so he opened up the Bible again and pointed to another passage, and it said, “What thou doest do quickly.” 

There are limitations in not having a well developed faith, not having a well developed relationship with your Bible, not having a well developed relationship with God.  There are limitations in not having a well developed life of prayer, in not understanding what prayer is and what it means and how prayer can shape our lives.  Prayer is really the topic for this morning.  We fall all too easily sometimes into thinking that prayer is a time when we talk and God listens, we tell God what we want from him and then we wait for God to deliver the goods. 

I remember this cartoon about a little boy who right around bedtime comes into the family room and makes this announcement to his family, he says, “I’m going up to get ready for bed, and I’m going to be saying my prayers.  Does anybody want anything from God?”  Now we should pray for others, and even pray for ourselves, pray for our own needs.  But this little boy seems to think that prayer is something of a monologue where we do all the talking, we tell God what we want and then God is supposed to give it to us.  Is this what we picture prayer to be? 

This whole passage that is our scripture lesson for today is almost impossible to comprehend, this whole eighth chapter of Romans is just full of theology and ideas that lead off in all directions, and it’s all very difficult.  It would be impossible to understand this whole passage in one sermon, or even in a lifetime of sermons.  And even these two verses right in the middle of it, on prayer, are almost impenetrable.  We read these words: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.  And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” 

What does all this mean?  These verses are very difficult, they are impossible to understand.  But as you know, my middle name is “Impossible”, and I read up on this a little bit.  And I think what Paul is saying here is that God has offered us this wonderful opportunity to pray, we are offered this singular experience of being able to communicate with God.  Imagine, we are able to communicate with the creator of the universe, we can communicate with the lord of our lives, the lord of all that is.  And yet, frankly, we don’t really know what we’re doing when we pray, we really don’t know how to do it, we will never really know.  But Paul is saying that that’s okay, it’s okay to pray and not really know what you’re doing, because it is God who is at work in our lives.  It’s not we who are at work when we pray, it is God who is at work.  It is God who searches our hearts.  It is God who knows us at a deeper level than we even know ourselves; he knows our needs.  We may know what we think we want, but God knows what we need.  I heard someone say that when we pray and ask God for what we want, sometimes God says, “Yes.”  Sometimes God says, “No.”  And sometimes God says, “You’ve got to be kidding.”  God knows our needs; he knows our weakness, and he helps us in our weakness.  It is sometimes at our weakest point in life, our lowest moment, when we are most vulnerable, that something begins to happen, we become the most open to the gentle, loving, guiding spirit of God. 

I heard of these three ministers who were at lunch and talking about how to pray most effectively.  They were arguing over what position the body must be in to allow a person to be most conducive to prayer.  One minister said that the best way to do it was to sit and fold your hands in prayer.  But the next minister said that no, that was wrong, the best way was to stand with your arms extended to symbolically receive the goodness of God.  But the third minister said that the best way, the way that was most conducive to prayer, was to kneel, at the altar, for example.  There was a man sitting at the next table, who overheard this conversation on prayer, which position of the body was most conducive to prayer, and he interrupted them and said, “I don’t mean to tell you your business because I only work for the telephone company, but the position I found most conducive to praying was the one day I had an accident on the job and I found myself hanging upside down from a telephone pole.” 

I wonder if a lot of us haven’t done our best praying when we’ve been hanging upside down, symbolically probably not literally, when we’ve been helpless, not knowing just precisely what we’re going to do, or where we’re going to turn.  There is this sense of weakness, of helplessness, that we don’t like really, but it does draw us closer to God, it does allow us to be more open to God, more willing to listen to God, more willing to allow his power, his strength, rather than our own, to bring us through. 

Anne Lamott, a novelist and essayist, has written that there really are only two prayers that we might offer to God.  One is “Help me!  Help me!  Help me!” and the other is “Thank you!  Thank you!  Thank you!”  Do you see?  Both are expressed out of our weakness, out of our helplessness, relying not on our power, because we have not the power we need, but relying on the power, the strength of God. 

There’s a poem by Wendell Berry called “The Peace of Wild Things”.  It starts this way, “When despair grows in me and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be.”  Have you ever done that, you wake up in the middle of the night, in fear?  Something may happen.  Something may be wrong.  Something may not work out.  And you feel so fearful and so helpless.  But then Wendell Berry goes on to say that “I come into the peace of wild things.”  I come into the peace of wild things.  He’s using this as a metaphor to say that I come, like those creatures out in the wild who have no forethought of grief or fear but who seem to have a sense of peace because they seem to have a sense that God is there, that God will provide, God will take care of them.  And then he writes, “I come into the presence of still water.”  I come into the presence of still water.  God, in my weakness, in my helplessness, leads me beside the still water, he provides for my every need. 

I remember something I heard Billy Graham say years ago.  He said, “God will provide.  It may be on the last day.  It may be in the last hour.  It may be at the very last moment.  But God will provide.”  I love these words.  I have lived these words.  You’ve lived them.  God will provide.  It may be on the last day.  It may be in the last hour.  It may be at the very last moment.  But God will provide. 

Three years ago almost, after the devastation from Hurricane Katrina, there was a special news program one day as reporters were interviewing people in New Orleans who had gone through the hurricane.  Person after person told his or her story, and most of the stories were very negative and bitter.  We can just hardly imagine the devastation that some people went through.  So you can almost feel that there was some justification for what these people said as one after another they told their stories to these reporters and blamed other people, and blamed the government, and even blamed God.  You could almost understand why they did this. 

But one young woman stepped up to the microphone, and you could just tell immediately that she had a different attitude.  She had a big smile, and her face almost seemed to glow.  The reporter, exhausted by now from all this, asked this young woman, “Okay, tell us your story.  What’s wrong?”  But the woman said, “Nothing’s wrong.  I’m not here to complain.  I’m simply here to thank God that I’m still alive and I have my health.  I thank God that my children are okay.” 

Well the reporter couldn’t quite believe it.  There was no electricity or water.  It was over a hundred degrees and they had no air conditioning.  So the reporter asked, “Well, what about your power?  Do you have any air conditioning?”  And the woman said, “No, I not only don’t have any power, I don’t even have my home.  It was swept away in the flood.”  But then she smiled and said, “I’ll tell you what I do have.”  And she reached down and she picked up her Bible, and she said, “I have my hope, I have my joy, I have my peace.  I know God is on my side.” 

I think it’s true what they say, that you only know that Jesus is all you need, when you discover that Jesus is all you have.”