First Baptist Church on Littleton Common    

On a Wing and a Prayer

Matthew 6:5-14, 25-34

We made it through….on a wing and a prayer.

You may have found yourself saying that cliché during a time that you barely wrapped up a report – moments before the deadline and a presentation before an important client.   You worried you could have done it better - but you had to go with what was ready.   “Phew (you think) ….just made it through on a wing and a prayer.”     Or maybe you were out having a nice Sunday drive (back in the days when the gas was .99¢ a gallon) and you hear something under the hood of your car.   You pull over and discover that the steering belt is thin and frayed and about to break …so you turn around head back home, praying all the way until you pull in to your local garage.   Later you comment that you made it home …on a wing and a prayer.   It is a cliché attributed to a World War I pilot coming back home from a mission on an early airplane that had some war damage.  He made it back but when he landed, he stated that he done so on a wing and a prayer.  

It is a cliché that seems to express at times that we were on shaky ground or in a situation where we wavered between uncertainty and hope.   Uncertainty and hope.  Is that also the state of our prayer life?    

We Christians are a praying people.    Prayer is a practice of our faith.   Do we believe it – or not?   Jesus prayed all the time.  Abraham and Sarah, Moses, David and the prophets were a praying people, as were the disciples and Paul.   The men and women in the scriptures prayed often in a myriad of ways or forms.  Sometimes they were eloquent, but most of the time they just muttered their thoughts and wrestled with God.  

In our prayer life do we waver between uncertainty and hope?   Yes and no.  God seems to answer our prayers and other times God does not, which makes us mad and can make us doubt the presence of a loving God.  We all know of times when someone received a medical healing while someone else did not – and both people were being prayed for by 30 different people in 6 churches in 2 countries.   Sometimes there are answers to our prayers of petition and intercession – and other times we do not receive the answer that we want.  

What is prayer though?  Prayer is a conversation with God, it is listening to God, and it is simply being with God.   We can pray to God or we can pray to Jesus.  We can ask the Holy Spirit to help us in our prayers.  One of my favorite passages about prayer is Romans 8:26 where Paul says:  “We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs to deep for words.”  Prayers can be spoken out loud, to ourselves or in silence.  They can be public or private.  There are centering prayers, responsive prayers and ways to pray the scriptures.  We can write them down in a journal that we keep for a long time and then hold the journal up to God in prayer.  We can take the email prayers that come to us and read it in a spirit of prayer - or we can stop for a minute and think through the persons’ name on the email and ask for God’s presence to be with them.    

There are all kinds of prayers – too many to talk about in one sermon alone.  The Lord’s Prayer was taught to the disciples by Jesus himself and is a guide for how we should pray.   Jesus first reminds us not to pray like the hypocrites, cautioning us not to show off our big words or our self righteousness attitudes and to stop babbling as the hypocrites do.  Jesus says, “your Father knows what you need before you ask Him. Therefore pray then like this…”

Our Father, Who art in Heaven,

Hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done.

On earth as it is in Heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread

And forgive us our debts, As we forgive our debtors

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil –or from the evil one.  (Matthew 6)

This is where the prayer ends in Matthew and Luke in some versions.  In our prayer life  here in worship we include what is referred to as a doxology.  “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory, forever. Amen.”  This doxology is not in the earliest manuscripts and it is not used in the Catholic Church.   

The Lord’s Prayer models different forms and types of prayer within it.   Our Father who art in Heaven hallowed be thy name is a prayer of adoration and praise.  It is a good idea to begin our prayers by acknowledging God, God’s majesty and power and give honor to that whom we come to talk to and be with.  In this case we begin by acknowledging a relationship with God…when we start with “our Father.”    We also offer prayers of adoration and praise when we celebrate the greatness and majesty of God.   We are out walking and it is a crispy sunny day and there are little tiny buds peeking out of the branches and we give thanks to God. We see a young beaver swimming his way around a pond with his little head sticking up out of the water and we are so moved that we give thanks to God.  We see a majestic mountain or the power of the ocean, we see the birth of child and we utter words of praise that acknowledge God’s majesty.    We are in awe of God and since we are in a relationship with God – we express it.     The song Our God is an Awesome God and the hymn  How Great Thou Art come to my mind as prayers of adoration and praise.   Music is so often a prayer of our heart. 

Other prayers are also prayers of petition and intercession.   Prayers of petition are when we ask God for something…such as give us Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done,  on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread is a request that we make to God. We ask for something for ourselves.  But we don’t say “give us this day the biggest loaf of bread on the block” or give me bread for 36 long months.  Notice we asking for a portion.  Give us Lord what we need for today.  It is alright to ask for things for ourselves – but that doesn’t mean we are to ask God to win the lottery or to help us get that new Cadillac SUV.   Give us this day…our daily bread.  We ask simply for the portion that God desires to give us.

And lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil.  We petition God to guide us and to protect us and we also ask God to protect others whom we love.  This is intercessory prayer – and this is the form of prayer we do in worship, that we ask of you on our prayer page and on our email prayers.   We practice intercessory prayers when we offer up prayers to God on behalf of someone in need.    In church when I say, “This is the day that the Lord has made, we will rejoice and be glad in it” we begin together, corporately as a gathered community, in a time of intercessory prayer.  We are all praying and when you say your prayer request - you are praying – which is why I don’t repeat them when I close in prayer.  I simply turn them over to God’s hands as an act of worship.   You are also doing intercessory prayer when you are walking down the road with your dog and you might say prayerfully, “Lord please help my friend Sally during her surgery.”  You could say it out loud.  You can say it to yourself.  You can hold Sally in your thoughts and create an image of her being held in the hands of God.  You could do that for 5 seconds or 5 minutes.  

Prayers of Forgiveness and Lament are those times when we ask for God’s forgiveness which we should all probably do more often.  And prayers of Lament are those times when we pour out our sorrows, our fears and our tears to God.  We give our sadness to God and allow ourselves to just be in God’s arms.  We can also get mad at God and talk to God about some things we disagree with.    We can wrestle with God in our prayers - which happened all the time in the Scriptures.   

Philip  Yancey in his book entitled Prayer, Does it Make Any Difference,  tells a number of stories of people of faith that have an ongoing wrestling match with God in their prayers and they do not pull any punches with God when they aren’t happy with how things are going.   One story is about Jenny, a woman who remains single and mourns the fact that she is still single.  She grew up with an alcoholic father and depressed mother and found love looking at a cross in a church when she was 10 years old.   She says that her continuing struggle now that she is older is her singleness and her prayer sounds like this “God, if you are really more than enough, then why don’t you just take care of my problem?”  God doesn’t answer, and the fight goes on. “okay, if you’re really enough, then why is it harder today that it was twelve months ago to be single?  And God still doesn’t answer and the fight goes on and on.   The truth is, 49 percent of the time God isn’t enough.  It hurts, it is hard to drive home alone all the time.  But 51 percent of the time God is enough. Meanwhile, we keep fighting, God and I.”  [1]

It’s alright to have times in our prayers where we argue and wrestle with God.  God can take it.  

Lastly there are also prayers of supplication.  For me these are prayers when we simply and humbly cast our worries and fears and our doubts to God and then let ourselves be in God’s hands.  Supplication means being supple, flexible, and pliant.  We have to be able to bend and we have to be able to say “never-the-less thy will be done” as Jesus did in his anguished prayer in the garden of Gethsemane.    Philippians 4: 5b--7 says: “The Lord is near.  Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God and the peace of God, which surpasses all comprehension, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” 

Passages from Isaiah and Deuteronomy also give us images of an eagle with a strong and powerful wingspan that can catch and carry its children to safety.   In our prayers we can turn our shakiness and our wavering and our doubts that prayer even works over to God - to be carried.  “Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength.  They will soar on wings like eagles. They will run and not grow weary; they will walk and not faint.”  Isaiah 40: 31.

Which finally begs the question – do we believe in all this prayer that we are doing?  Is our prayer page and requests more than just gossip?  Do we believe that prayer makes a difference?  If Jesus says that God knows what we need before we need – why do we pray?  I think we pray to join ourselves to that “flow of God’s grace” as John Mogabgab states, that “flow of grace” that is already coursing its way through our lives and our world.[2]

There is much we don’t understand about prayer.  All I know even with my own doubts -  is that I will always choose to stay within the faith and in the arms of God as I wrestle and question, as well as believe and hope in the healing love of God through Jesus Christ.    It is all we can do.  “ For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face; now I know in part, but then I will know fully just as I also⁾have been fully known.” (I Corinthians 13: 12)

Let us pray……

 Amen.