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Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's August 13, 2006 Sunday worship service. The De Profundis Prayer Ephesians 4:25-5:2; Psalm 130 Bethel 8/13/06 Rev Marc Sherrod, ThD If you haven’t recently brushed up on your high school Latin, the title of today’s sermon might throw you a little. It reminds me of an experience when I was in graduate school and we worshiped at a small membership Presbyterian congregation which still had a large physical plant . . . small but very active is how I remember that congregation, and I figured as a compromise in terms of music, there was both an old denominational hymnal and loose leaf notebooks with a variety of folk tunes, rounds, camp songs, and songs some members of the congregation had written. One favorite was the Latin song, “Dona Nobis Pacem.” Dona=give Nobis=to us Pacem=peace. Often, we’d sing it as a round, those three Latin words over and over, and it was quite beautiful as the sound reverberated through the sanctuary. Well, my children very much enjoyed singing from that loose leaf hymnal. I learned, after we left that church, however, that my oldest daughter Hannah had been doing a bit of very free translation when it came to Dona Nobis Pacem. For her, instead of Give us Peace, the words, she thought were supposed to be, “O me, o my, Christ is risen.” What she didn’t’ have at the time, and only got from Roane County High School and Mrs. Crossnough, was the correct translation of the Latin. You may have figured out De Profundis already. “De” a preposition meaning out of and “profundis” a noun meaning depths. “Out of the Depths.” Borrowing from Jerome’s Latin Vulgate, many of the Psalms and prayers in scripture have received a title based on the first words of the prayer, and so here, de profundis is both the type of prayer and the title given Psalm 130. My topic is prayer this morning. It’s all around us; it’s within us; it’s what, the mystics would say, holds the universe together. It’s a recovering alcoholic reciting the Serenity Prayer, a Catholic nun telling her beads; a child’s folded hands saying grace before a meal; a quaking Shaker; St. Francis receiving the stigmata, a bookie crossing his fingers before the final race; Ebenezer Scrooge pleading for just one more chance. In the world of prayer, one may sit, stand, run, kneel, fall prostrate, dance, faint, whirl or roll on the ground; chant, sing, shout, mutter, groan, or keep silent. As one Russian mystic has put it, prayer is “the breath of our soul, our spiritual food and drink.” (quoted in A History of Prayer, 10). There are also so many types of prayer that one could hardly name them all: formal and spontaneous, some composed for the ages or others fresh off the tongue in a personal or national crisis; some that sparkle in poetic beauty, while others that lie close to the ground, crusty and dry, still begging for divine reply. In their recent book, A History of Prayer, Carol and Phillip Zaleski comment that “for those who have contemplated the subject, prayer is a cosmos whose center is everywhere, in every human heart, and whose circumference is nowhere, in the infinity of God” (p.11). But by far, I think, the most common type of prayer is the De Profundis prayer, out of the depths, a cry for help, a cry for mercy, a cry for refuge and shelter when life’s storms threaten. It’s Joseph at the bottom of the well or Jonah in the belly of the whale, or even Jesus on the cross, or us whenever we face the dark underbelly of life and feel despair creeping in. A powerful visual image from our own time for this type of prayer is the picture of an ash covered car windshield in New York City on September 11, 2001, in which someone had etched the word, p-r-a-y. In fact, a check of written prayers reveals that the word “help” appears in more prayers than any other word, outpacing even more religious sounding words like “save” and “bless.” While the Psalmist does not divulge the specific circumstances of his spiritual angst, Psalm 130 has served for millennia as a template for pilgrims who cry out for divine intervention and rescue. Basically, the first lines of the psalm state the profound need that the Psalmist experiences; the second stage of the prayer, verse two, articulates the Psalmist’s plea for divine intervention; and in the third and final phase, the Psalmist describes his time of waiting for a response. I hit bottom; I call for help; I await a reply. Who has not been there at some time or another? I hit bottom. One of the most vivid examples of this first stage is Bill Wilson, founder of AA, Alcoholics Anonymous, whose struggle against the demon of drink is both legendary and instructive. Wilson, born with alcoholic tendencies in his bloodline, resisted his first drink until he was 21 years old, when in 1917, as an officer in the army, he began bing drinking and so began his slide into hundreds of alcohol-induced blackouts and hopping from one job to another. It got so bad for him in the 1920s, that he retrospectively described himself as a “rumhound from New York.” In a singularly desperate act of self-preservation, he moved his mattress out onto the sidewalk beneath his bedroom window so that wouldn’t be able to commit suicide by jumping. But in 1934, through the intervention of a friend, he encountered the power of prayer, and despite his early held atheism, after sinking into a deep depression and feeling at the bottom of the pit, he finally shouted out, “if there is a God, let Him show himself: I am willing to do anything, anything.” He described what followed in this fashion: “Suddenly the room lit up with a great white light. I was caught up into an ecstasy which there are no words to describe. It seemed to me . . . that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. And then it burst upon me that I was a free man . . . . All about me and through me there was a wonderful feeling of Presence, and I thought to myself, “So this is the God of the preachers!” A great peace stole over me and I thought, “No matter how wrong things seem to be, they are still alright. Things are all right with God and His world.” Wilson, of course, devised the famous 12 steps for overcoming alcohol addiction, which has become the model for a host of recovery programs. The opening verse of Psalm 130 aligns with the purpose of the first step of the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and entry on the road to recovery, which is to admit that one has hit rock bottom: “We admit that we are powerless over alcohol – that our lives have become unmanageable.” “Out of the depths I cry to thee, Lord, hear my prayer!” After hitting rock bottom, the Psalmist cries out. Nothing is more basic than a call for help. I call for help. After falling into the abyss, his desperation becomes a prayer for rescue and deliverance, and thus the second phase, he says: “Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!” Perhaps the hardest thing about prayer, next to those times when prayer is not answered as we desired, the hardest thing is to be persistent, to keep at it. If we think about the teachings Jesus offered about prayer, perhaps his most important lesson was not to give up. He taught that, God is like a friend you go to borrow bread from at midnight. The friend tells you, in effect, to drop dead, but you go on knocking anyway until finally he gives you what you want so he can go back to bed again. Or, prayer is like the widow who keeps hounding the judge until he finally gives in and hears her case just to get her out of his hair. (Beuchner, Wishful Thinking, 70). God, Jesus believed, was like that, always open to being badgered and hounded with legitimate requests, until finally, God just might give in. There is always something to be said, then, for sanctified nagging. And it may be, like all parents who know what their children need, nonetheless, the parent rejoices when the child approaches them and asks for help. So it is for God, as well, since such asking and such seeking engenders an atmosphere of mutual and reciprocal love. The Psalmist seems to infer that, if God doesn’t hear and respond, that his own iniquity is what stands in the way. Maybe, deep down, he really doesn’t believe that God holds grudges or withholds forgiveness, but when you’re trying to figure out, “WHY ME?”, when you’re down in the pit, it seems reasonable enough to assume that I did something to warrant God’s disfavor, and that God, might just be petty enough to try and get even. It is not a rational thought, theologically speaking, or one that you are particularly proud of, but it creeps first into the sub-conscience and from there can play like a broken record on the mind. One of most memorable moments of my journey was when I found myself a week or two after college, not sure what was next, even though in the short term I had made a commitment to serve as a VISTA volunteer, which I did. But beyond that wondering what lay ahead – graduate school, seminary, a job, more volunteer work, travel? Not one to live too long in the ambiguity of not knowing, I can remember, even now, long wrestling matches, like Jacob by the Jabbock, with God or with what I thought was God, trying to exact a plan that I could live with and live into. And more than once I pleaded with God to give me an answer, a resolution to my not-knowing. That resolution came, for sure, but not when I most wanted an answer. Prayer is like that. It’s not always what we want, when we want it. The lesson of the Psalmist is that the personal will has to be surrendered to the will of God, and thus, the act of prayer itself can bring solace even though the crisis itself may continue. The one in distress has called upon the name of the Lord, and in that calling, there is acknowledgment that a power greater than one’s self is in control and in charge. The third phase, which the rest of Psalm 130 is given to, is to give one’s self over to waiting. Waiting, as the Psalmist knows quite intimately, is synonymous with hoping, or at the very least, waiting and hoping are two sides of the same coin. “I wait for the Lord, my soul waits, and in his word I hope.” The intertwining of waiting and hoping is another way to say that prayer should continue, even when it goes unanswered in the immediate moment. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once said famously that “prayer does not change God, but it changes [the one] who prays.” Or as St. Augustine said long before Kierkegaard, The very effort involved in prayer calms and purifies our heart and makes it more capacious for receiving divine gifts which are poured into us spiritually . . . there is brought about in prayer a turning of the heart to [God], who is ever ready to give, if we will but take what he has given. . . . (quoted in A History of Prayer, 100) I wait for a reply. Any patient, or anyone who has waited in a waiting room, knows how excruciatingly difficult is the waiting. And then finally, for the Psalmist, his solitary waiting and hoping gives way to a sense of communal solidarity, as he says, “O Israel, hope in the Lord” While prayer may originate in our own desires, it quickly moves beyond them, into our life with others, and toward the greater society. A 6th monk named Dorotheus of Gaza has a wonderful image: He saw the world as a circle with God at the center and our lives as lines drawn from the circumference toward the center. The closer the lines crowd toward God, the closer they are to one another; and the closer they are to one another, the closer they are to God. Prayer bridges the distance, not just between us and God, but potentially between us and others as it draws us close and blends our lives with their lives. Prayer is finally not about what I want but rather what the community and the world need, since we and our world are always, as the old spiritual says, “standing in the need of prayer.” I close with a quotation from the contemporary writer on Christian spirituality, Kathleen Norris, who says, “Often, all I can do is to ask God, ‘Lord, what is it you want of me?’ Prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine . . . people who are in the habit of praying . . . know that when a prayer is answered, it is never in a way that you expect.” Some of the greatest prayers of the church, like the Psalms, are actually treasured hymns. Our hymn of response to the Word proclaimed is a hymn we rarely sing in the morning because it is an evening hymn, but a hymn that speaks quite profoundly of our prayerful trust in God as the shadows lengthen and the busy world is hushed and the fever of life is over. Hymn #543 Abide with Me
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