This coming Sunday I will lead worship at Pilgrim Congregational Church while Pastor Carla Bailey is on vacation. It will be the first time I pray publicly since retiring from Peace Church in January of 2021 after 30 years of ministry there. I’m surprisingly anxious about it.
I have also been thinking a lot about prayer because of the Supreme Court decision in June that blurred the lines around public verses private prayer. The Supreme Court ruled on June 27th that a former Washington state high school football coach had a right to pray on the field immediately after games.
The 6-3 ruling was a victory for Joseph Kennedy, who claimed that the Bremerton School District violated his religious freedom by telling him he couldn’t pray so publicly after the games. The school district said it was trying to avoid the appearance of endorsing one religious’ point of view. The Supreme Court held that the coach’s prayer was done after the game, on his private time and so couldn’t be restricted.
For many people prayer by a coach in uniform, holding a helmet surrounded by students doesn’t seem as private as the supreme court ruled. Anne Lamott wrote an Op Ed piece for the New York times that began,
Many of us who believe in a reality beyond the visible realms, who believe in a soul that survives death, and who are hoping for seats in heaven near the dessert table, also recoil from the image of a high school football coach praying at the 50-yard line.
It offends me to see sanctimonious public prayer in any circumstance — but a coach holding his players hostage while an audience watches his piety makes my skin crawl.
We are fighting furiously for women’s rights and the planet, and we mean business. We believers march, rally and agitate, putting feet to our prayers. And in our private lives, we pray.
She continues Isn’t praying a bit Teletubbies as we face off with the urgent darkness?
Nah.
Prayer means talking to God, or to the great universal spirit, a.k.a. Gus, or to Not Me. Prayer connects us umbilically to a spirit both outside and within us, who hears and answers. .
Clearly Jesus believed in this connection through prayer. I think that was his superpower, his unbreakable connection to the God he called Abba or Papa. To address God in this intimate way was unheard of back then. And yet Jesus does.
His first disciples witnessed this incredible bond Jesus has to the Holy. After the disciples have been with Jesus for a while, watching him teach and heal, feed thousands, they ask Jesus about prayer. The disciples have a deep sense that prayer is what keeps Jesus going and so they ask, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
Jesus teaches them what we now call the Lord’s prayer. I love that this prayer begins with Our. Our because the Holy is not mine or yours but Ours. Ours is the Holy One who sustains us day by day in bread and forgiveness. The great Our, or as Lamott says, “the not me” is the source of love from which we draw. In part I go to church to pray this prayer with others who also choose to pray it and live it.
A few weeks though ago I found church in a field outside of Winnipeg when the Blind Boys of Alabama led a Sunday Gospel hour during the Folk Festival. Thousands of people sat in the grass, listened and sang together. We sang Amazing Grace to the tune of There is a House in New Orleans. We sang This Little Light of Mine and Get On Board. There was a collective sense of the Our and it was so very good. As St. Augustine said, “Those who sing pray twice.” And it was by choice.
May you know a deep connection to the Our this week. May she sing in and through each of us.
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