On being prayed for.

Clements, Keith

Dear sisters and brothers,

We have just heard the apostle Paul, writing from a prison cell, telling his friends in the church at Philippi: "Yes, and I will continue to rejoice, for I know that through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this will turn out for my deliverance" (Phil. 1:18b-19). Here Paul speaks about "your prayers", the "help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ", "my deliverance".

Most of us, I imagine, at one or other point in our Christian lives, or for a lot of our Christian life, wonder about prayer, and especially about praying for others. We ask about whom we should be praying for, what we should be praying for on their behalf, how we should best pray for them. And maybe also, if we are honest, we wonder how, if at all, our prayers work, or if they really make any difference, whether to a friend's personal problems or to violent conflict in the Middle East. Due to a personal circumstance which befell me last year, I've been made to think a lot about prayer, but from the other end. I've been reflecting on the experience of being prayed for.

Of course I've always known and appreciated that people have remembered me in their prayers. But this was an especially intense experience, as I lay in a hospital bed and day by day more and more get-well cards got stacked on the bedside cabinet, nearly all of them with the message "You're in my (or our) prayers." Many of those first messages came from people in this Ecumenical Centre, including people who are here this morning. Then, during the following days of convalescence, came cards and letters and e-mails from much further afield, from Britain and Germany to Sweden and Greece and Russia, from North America to South Africa. Some of you will no doubt have had a similar experience at a crisis-point in your life.

It's a strangely exhilarating mixture of comfort and discomfort, to know that you're suddenly the focus of such intense loving spiritual concern, the target of prayer-missiles aimed at you from every quarter. The comfort of course lies in discovering that you evidently do mean so much to others. Even people who don't believe in God admit that. The great painter Pablo Picasso was not a believer, but he was very hurt when one day a cousin of his, a devout Catholic, told Picasso that as he was an atheist he didn't see any point in including him in his prayers. Picasso might not have believed in God, but he believed in love and wanted love, however it was expressed.

But being made intensely aware of others' love can also be slightly discomforting. It was almost embarrassing. I ransacked my store of memories to find a parallel, and eventually unearthed that recollection of early adolescent experience--which again some of you also doubtless recall--of being told on the way home from school or after church: "You know so-and-so? She's really keen on you." And you didn't want anyone to be keen on you--well, not her at any rate, and not just now. It was nice to be an object of admiration, but you didn't want a disturbance of your life-programme, the claim of another invading your life which you wanted to be under your own control, and which is what you thought growing up was all about. Similarly, to be prayed for brings home to us that in fact we don't belong to ourselves. We are part of a community in which others do have a claim on us, want something from us, even our very existence and survival. Perhaps embarrassment at being prayed for shows we are still, spiritually, early adolescents.

This is where Paul is so fascinating. "Through your prayers and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ this crisis of my imprisonment will turn out for my deliverance"--whether a deliverance of release from captivity, or the deliverance of a triumphal sharing of the cross of Christ into eternal life. He--the great missionary and theologian and founder of churches!--does not present himself as a completely self-sufficient hero of faith, in total command of himself and without need of others. He rejoices in being in fellowship with others, in the fellowship of Christ. So he has no qualms about asking for others' prayers. Time and again in his letters he asks for prayers for himself and his fellow-workers, or rejoices that others are already praying for him. As a person in Christ, he is a person in community, with all the mutuality which that means, the sharing of sufferings and consolation and joy in Christ. From beginning to end, the letter to the Philippians is a celebration of the miracle that through Christ we are given a new life in community. In it, Paul's Greek nouns and verbs are saturated with the prefix sun--"with". It's a "with-life" into which we are baptized, with the Christ who made himself one with us, and who enables us to be one with his risen life in the power of the Holy Spirit, and so one with each other. From the imprisoning illusion of our individualistic self-sufficiency we are released into the joyful creativity of life together. We grow up, in Christ.

Praying, and being prayed for, both flows out of and recreates our life in community in the Spirit: which is why it's at the heart of our ecumenical life too. Therefore as churches and Christians on a world-wide level we should also ponder more deeply the significance of being prayed for, as well as praying for other churches and communities. During the German church struggle in the 1930s and 1940s, Dietrich Bonhoeffer once overheard some of his students making rather flippant remarks on learning that Roman Catholics were including the Confessing Church in their intercessions. He rounded on them sharply, saying that he didn't consider being prayed for by others a trivial matter.

How do we really regard the Ecumenical Prayer Cycle? Today we shall be remembering the churches of Turkey, Greece and Cyprus. We shall do our best to imagine their situations of being a fragile minority in Turkey, of being a great historic Orthodox church and a minority evangelical church in Greece, and of being on a still bitterly-divided island in Cyprus. But what happens when it's the turn of our own church and country to be remembered? How do we feel when we realize that Christians in the Pacific are praying for us in Scandinavia, or the churches of Cuba and Guatemala are praying for us in the United States, or the churches of east Asia praying for us in Africa? Do we really believe we need their love and concern at least as much as they need ours? Or do we still live in the illusion of sell-sufficiency? Perhaps if we tried to imagine how they imagine us, how they view and understand us in their praying, we would be both humbled and liberated into a deeper sense of who we are and what we are called to do, and how we do belong together: just as I, an English Baptist, found it moving to picture the Orthodox and Catholic candles burning on my behalf in far places, and so was led to cherish more deeply the diverse ways in which the Holy Spirit sets love alight. Our times of prayer should be times when we not only pray ourselves, but consciously give time to allow the prayers of others for us to find their way into our minds and hearts and bodies.

We will shortly be gathering at our Lord's table, to celebrate the feast of communion, of koinonia with and in our Lord and with one another. We meet in joy, yet also not without pain, knowing that as yet not all who confess Christ as Lord feel able to share at the one table. But the joy and the pain meet one another as hope, the hope that we are nevertheless on the way to that full communion, the mutual indwelling of Jesus and his Father in the Holy Spirit which they desire us to share and enjoy.

Praying for one another is an anticipation of that time. And so with Paul we continue to rejoice, knowing that through our praying and being prayed for, and the help of the Spirit of Jesus Christ, this will turn out for our deliverance. Amen.

* Keith Clements is general secretary of the Conference of European Churches. This text is adapted from a sermon preached in January 2001 at morning worship at the Ecumenical Centre, Geneva.