Rhythm 3: Prayer (Pentecost)

Acts 2:1–13 NRSV

When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven living in Jerusalem. And at this sound the crowd gathered and was bewildered, because each one heard them speaking in the native language of each. Amazed and astonished, they asked, “Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs—in our own languages we hear them speaking about God’s deeds of power.” All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “What does this mean?” But others sneered and said, “They are filled with new wine.”

Prayer

Today we celebrate Pentecost, the feast 50 days post-Easter. As we trace the narrative of Jesus’ ministry, we have, for the last few weeks, been in a time of waiting, transition, liminality. As we remember from the story of Easter morning, Jesus appears to his friends and instructs them to wait until they are filled with the Spirit. This vague statement underscores a promise Jesus repeated to his followers — I will send to you an advocate, a helper, the Spirit. To be filled with the Spirit is to be prepared to take the next step on our journey.

How do we receive the Holy Spirit? How do we know that we have? Is this the outcome or end of prayer, to be filled with the spirit? Today, we look at this pivotal moment in the life of the Christian church and see that the indwelling of God’s spirit takes a common, yet variant form in us. Those gathered in Jesus’ name on this day of Pentecost experience a rushing wind, a mighty presence among them, which opens them to a new reality of Spirit in their midst.

The central marker of this story is the ability the disciples miraculously now have to speak in tongues and languages from around the known world. They speak, not only, but they are heard and understood by native speaking inhabitants of Jerusalem.

So is the marker of the Holy Spirit only our ability to speak in tongues? I know many of us struggle with that as the litmus test, because very few of us, I’d wager, have experienced this kind of outpouring of the Spirit, so as to propel us into bouts of multi-lingual prayer. So what is this mean for us? What does it mean to receive the Spirit of God, here and now? Can we?

We enter this dynamic relationship with God through the medium of prayer. Prayer, our sacred rhythm for this week, is the most consistent, repeatable, long-standing practice of the church. Along with the Lord’s supper and study of the scriptures, prayer is probably the most common, shared, overlapping, far-reaching modes for God’s people to interact with God’s Spirit in the here and now. If we want to know what it means to experience the Holy Spirit, we have to attend to how we pray.

It’s easy to get distracted in this celebration of Pentecost, by the outpouring of flaming tongues and speaking in languages beyond our understanding, so I want to root us down in simple practices of prayer today. I’ve experienced many forms of prayer in my life and formation and, surprisingly, they all trace back to a common place, or should I say, they all point us towards a common Source, the Spirit.

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Individual

First, prayer is very much a personal act, something that we each practice in our own ways, approaching God as we are, no more, no less. It is fair to say, that of the 80-90 people here today, we could find about 80-90 different ways we approach this mode of relating to God. We are individuals, unique representations of God’s image, and we approach the world from different perspectives.

Now, with this sense of individual expression, we could easily go down the path of saying “anything goes” “you do you” etc. as we approach prayer. But that’s not the sense here. Rather, it’s an acknowledgement that relating to the Divine and being with Christ, well, that’s going to take on different shapes and forms for us, and it will likely even change during our lives, the ways we connect to God evolving and shifting as we go through the seasons of our lives.

Years ago, I began meeting with a Spiritual Director. A spiritual director is someone who you invite into your soul’s terrain and share about your spiritual journey. A good director will help you unearth and explore parts of your prayer life where you experience God’s closeness and also tend to parts of you which feel spiritually dead or empty. I remember my Director asking me this simple question: What is prayer like for you?

This question attempts to trace the contour of an individual’s prayer life. What is prayer like for you?

This question can yield all kinds of answers. Well, it’s pretty boring. Or I feel really alive in prayer when I’m out in the woods. Or this form of prayer, be it silence, praying the psalms, or reflecting on an image, it’s really lighting up for me in this season. Or this practice seems to have lost its lustre…so we can wonder at that.

Individual prayer will shift and change through our lives. When I was a child, I had a rout prayer that we prayed before bed each night. “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep…” Or “bless the food, bless the hands that prepared it, amen.”

And as I grew older, I began to incorporate Scriptures into my prayers, not necessarily from memory, but by thumbing through the prayerbook of the Scriptures, the Psalms, to encounter the breadth of emotion that we experience in prayer.

These days, my individual prayer practices look like long walks through the park by myself, listening to the breath of God, the wind, blowing through the trees and coming in and out of me with each breath. Prayer also often involves ordered readings, prayer books (of which I have many), images or icons, which mirror back to us our own emotions and movements of the heart.

For some, individual prayer looks like writing, singing, or even dancing.

Hear this as permission — pray as your heart leads you.

I think we’re quick to want to make sure that we’re “doing it the right way.” And this is important, in a sense that we do not want to be distracted or taken away from the presence of God somehow. Like I said, there may be 80-90 different expressions of individual prayer — so how do we know what’s what? What’s right?

Our reading from the Acts of the Apostles helps us tease out this dynamic.

Think back to that story, especially the part about people from around the known world, living in Jerusalem, who hear their native tongues spoken as the Apostles receive the Holy Spirit. Note, the skeptics get the final word in our reading, worrying that these men were drunk on new wine. Gobbledegook, we might say. Spiritualism. Parlour tricks. Right?

What makes this prayer experience authentic is how it spans across language barriers to reveal understanding among strangers. Hear that again — authentic prayer crosses boundaries like language to find understanding among strangers.

How do we know our reception of the Spirit, in prayer is authentic? Others can look at us or hear us, and somehow, recognize it. Ahh, yes…I understand…I see. See, what I’m getting at here is that while our prayer experiences are unique to us, as we relate to God from the individual image we bear, they ALSO share common themes and resonances with other peoples’ experience.

What you might call a warm light, I might experience as a smile on my face, but we both know something of this “otherness” in the experience of prayer — we share our wonder at that which moves our souls. We hear words out of the mouth of a stranger that resonate with the heart of God, words that while we may not always understand, reveal truth, clarity, sight.

Prayer and the receiving of the Spirit have common manifestations throughout cultures and history.

Some examples:

Dancing

Singing

Playing music

Visions

Healing

A sense of “presence”

Confirmations from Scripture

While our prayer experiences might differ individually, we can witness the “fruit” of prayer and the presence of the Spirit, in others. You know it when you see it, perhaps, is the best way to describe how we connect to each others’ experience of the Spirit.

Corporate

We cannot talk about prayer as only individual. Prayer and the reception of the Spirit through prayer, is clearly something that must be encountered corporately, too. These apostles were gathered, experiencing a collective movement of God’s spirit. They were gathered, like we are here. Corporate prayer is vital to our spiritual formation, in that it ties together our individual acts of devotion into a great cloud of witnesses, all of us sharing in a common experience of prayer, where God moves through our gathered body, here and now.

Through the ages, the church and spiritual communities like monasteries or convents, have coalesced around common prayer practices and rituals that seem to “work.” What I mean is, we have historic, living examples of corporate prayer practices that we uphold and share in common because, over time, we have found that these are consistent ways for us to gather together in prayer and receive wisdom and presence from the Spirit.

Here’s an example: the Book of Common Worship Daily Prayer book. Our denomination has a collected resource of daily prayers and Scripture readings that, at any point in the cycles of our days and weeks, we can gather and collectively pause to spend time in prayer with. The Episcopal Church has the Book of Common Prayer, which similarly structures devotional services for throughout the day, which can be practiced corporately as a gathered group, or invidiually in solitude.

One of my favorite memories from the chaos of the Summer of 2020 was leading Daily Prayer over Zoom at midday. A few of us would gather on Zoom or through Facebook and pause to read the daily scriptures, pray for the needs of our world, and spend time together in silence listening for the Spirit. This was a corporate gathering of prayer, where God’s people came together to pause and be.

Hear that, pause and be. Really, if you hear nothing else about corporate or individual prayer, hear this as the takeaway: Prayer is about learning how to Pause and Be with God throughout our days. We do this alone and we do this together. Pause and be.

As we hear in our Scripture story today and we witness here and now — being together in prayer serves to unite our individual journeys into a shared experience, where we follow common patterns, repeated, to come back into pausing and being with God.

Hearing the Voice

What happens when we pray? We can overcomplicate this practice, this rhythm, by qualifying it with lots of different ways, modes, or hoped for outcomes. So let’s be very clear and very simple: Prayer is about learning to hear God’s voice.

Think about it: in the absence of Jesus, the apostles are waiting, and in the reception of the Holy Spirit, they are able to hear God’s voice. They speak out in the tongues of all nations as a united group, hearing God’s voice.

Prayer is our opportunity to hear God’s voice. This is generally not an audible thing, though it can be. Rather, to hear God’s voice is to notice the subtle shift in ourselves where the ongoing tapes and narratives and worries and thoughts and chatter can be stilled and we hear/feel/notice the presence of the Holy One here, now with us.

Recently, one of you gave me a short book on welcoming prayer, a practice of welcoming that Voice to speak to us. This book speaks of the Divine Voice as something already dwelling in us. It is that which we already possess, but must tend to and open ourselves to hearing above the cacophony of the rest of our lives.

Being with Christ

Perhaps hearing the voice is difficult for you, as it often is for me. Another helpful way to think about what happens when we pray, therefore, is this: Prayer is being with Christ. Simply. Be. Prayer is this time to silence ourselves, be still, and let the Christ who dwells in us…let Christ be with us.

We are so bound up by the need to do stuff….do do do. Don’t just stand there…do something!! Don’t just sit there in silence…get to work…right??

But prayer is this invitation to silence and being. Just be. Return to the simplest movement in yourself, your breath, and remember that that breath is your most basic act of prayer, speaking the name of God as you inhale and exhale. Being with Jesus.

Silence/Stillness/Closing

I want to invite us into some silence and stillness, together, to close. In these few minutes, you can do a few things. You can sit and breathe. You can write on your bulletin, sharing words of prayer to God. You can grab a Bible and turn to a Psalm or other passage and slowly, perhaps in Lectio Divina fashion, as Jessica spoke about last week, pour over the text in prayer.

In this silence and stillness, welcome Christ to pour our his Spirit upon you. Expect very little and anticipate very much. Open yourself to the Presence — this is prayer.

I’ll close us in a few minutes, but for now, step into the joy of spirited filled hope as we each, together, seek God in prayer.