INTERCESSORY PRAYER: TO EMBRACE AND HOLD THE WORLD UP TO GOD

I admire the work of Methodist theologian Don E. Sailers. In Worship As Theology, Foretaste of Divine Glory (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994), he considers liturgy as prayer: (ch.5) praising, thanking, and blessing - gratitude as knowledge of God: (ch.6) invoking and beseeching; (ch.7) lamenting and confessing: truthful prayer; and (ch.8) interceding: remembering the world to God.

Our prayer relies on the Holy Spirit. "Boldness and reticence in approaching God are the earth of invocation, knowledge of God its fruit. The name we so easily call upon veils and reveals a reality beyond our religious projection...Without the life-giving, memory-conferring, and priestly-prophetic power of the Holy Spirit, no true thanks and praise will arise. Prayers will meet a 'brazen heaven' unless we enter ever afresh into the epiclesis; "Come, Holy Spirit.' The gesture of this vulnerable utterance renders Word and sacrament open to the presence of Christ, yet never controls that presence. We cry out to God in our sense of absence--whether in private desperation outside the church, or in communal faithful gatherings about the book, the font, and the table. The eschatological (=the final, end-time) dimension of invoking the Name and Spirit of God is thus made clear: we take God's promises seriously. This...reveal(s) the mystery hid from our eyes and the plain view of the world--we are the 'absent' ones: absent from God. The Spirit of God who searches all human hearts is the only power able to make us present to God in the midst of our forgetfulness of being (p 117)."

We attend to the Holy Spirit in voicing praise and thanks. This prayer is refreshingly easy and positive. It affirms God's mighty deeds worked within us and our world. Consequently, we invoke a trustworthy God. We petition because "we take God's promises seriously." The Spirit make us present to God and connects that presence in the enactment of our lives, the doing of daily tasks, the offering of work to better our world, and the holding up of human effort to build up the reign of God.

However, we can be practical atheists in our everyday world and work, in play and relaxation, in family and social-political decisions. Do we evade or embrace the world as the arena of God's grace? Does our intercessory prayer squarely look to the world's lacerations? Do our petitions pass through visionary gates much too narrow for contemporary, full bodied adults?

We pray: "Remember, Lord, your church throughout the world." How much of the world do we embrace, hold up to God? Genuine petition helps us face and speak "the truth about ourselves and about our complicities in the very evils we deplore and find excruciating. Hence, praying truthfully...requires naming the realities of our social-political world as well as the realities of our 'inmost being'....intercession...shows kinship with lamentation. We are to pray for the world in all its suffering. But this requires looking clearly and honestly at the world and at ourselves as we really are. To join Christ in his ongoing prayer for the world is to be plunged more deeply into the densities of social reality, not be taken out of them (p. 126-7)." Authentic intercessory prayer enlarges our sight and our sensibilities.