Bring … Prayer

Psalm 109:1-5

Bring … your whole selves to our worship service on Sunday morning, not just that part of yourself you most often present for this one hour a week, but your whole selves – your hopes, your laments, your prayer, and your praise – your joy. (That’s a little glimpse into next week, if you saw it, heard it.) That’s only four things, of course, because we only have four Sundays in July, but these four cover a lot. We’re on the third week. Let’s recap quickly.

We bring our Hope here as people who are waiting for heaven on earth and working to make that so. Our Christian Hope tells us the truth about what is wrong, so that we can imagine the world as GOD intends it to be and then take the necessary steps to get closer to that world. That’s Christian Hope. It’s active and expectant.

And one of the steps we take to get closer to GOD’s world (believe it or not) is “lament.” We know what is wrong – in our souls, in our own lives, in our communities, our country, the world. So, we name it and lament. We lament the absence of hope, trust, compassion, love. And we do that in this place. Or, we should do that here in this place. As people who have received care and nurture, life and love from GOD – Love, itself; who have been given promises of that care and nurture through this Love, and yet are experiencing grief, anger, anxiety, depression, a sense of abandonment – you name it – our faithful laments are one way we “mobilize GOD”. Through our memory of the promises we have been given and have experienced, we reactivate the GOD who blessed us and comforted us when we lament. We mobilize the GOD who promises still to bless and comfort us, so that we may convert our experience of wrongness back into rightness.

Hope and Lament … Looking back. I think we bring our Hope to this place very easily. We know we’re supposed to – we’re supposed to be hopeful and happy and joyous and faithful. So, we bring that – even if we’re faking it a bit. But we don’t bring our lament to this place very easily. Because we think we’re not supposed to. We’re not supposed to be sad, or anxious, or angry. All that gets too personal and too political. It’s too divisive and disruptive. The problem with that is, it is profoundly faithful to share all we are dealing with here. If we don’t lament together, share our experiences of “things not being right” and why, then we don’t fully engage GOD here, let alone reactivate this power of Love in the world.

So, we shared our laments last week. We don’t all agree with “what’s wrong,” but we all agree that something’s not quite right.  GOD … has something to say about that, to do about that. So … good for us. Let’s keep bringing it this month.

And this morning we bring … prayer. So, let’s be prayer …

Holy God, through the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts in this time together, teach us that prayer is more than the words we speak—it is the life we live. By your Spirit, shape our hearts so that our kindness reflects your love, our justice bears witness to your kin-dom, and our compassion reveals Christ to the world. May our work, our rest, our worship, and our service be a living prayer, offered with gratitude and humility. Help us to walk each day in faithful response to grace, trusting that even our ordinary moments can be Holy. Make our whole lives an "Amen" to our call from Jesus. Amen.

So, I hope you listened to my words as you “prayed” his morning, because we’re going to redefine what prayer is – or can be/should be – again, this morning. A long time ago I came across a Hasidic Jewish wisdom tale about prayer. In it, a certain Rabbi, Bunham by name, shared his thoughts on a certain verse in the Psalms, a verse that can be translated as “And I am prayer for them”. “Consider this,” Rabbi Bunham said. “It is as if a poor woman, who has not eaten in three days and whose clothes are in rags, should appear before the Queen. Is there any need for her to say what she wants?”  By which I understood that her life, itself, was her prayer – she was prayer. In this case, a prayer of deep need.

The verse the Rabbi was teaching from is in Psalm 109, verse 4.  In our most used translation of the bible, the New Revised Standard Version, verse 4 reads:  In return for my love, they accuse me, even while I make prayer for them.  But in a footnote after “prayer”, we read “or, I prayer.” (Take a look, if you want. Page xx in your pew bible.)  This verse in the Psalm opens up the reality that we not only “pray” in our lives, but our lives are prayer when properly lived and faithfully expressed. Prayers of need like the example from Rabbi Bunham. Or prayers of concern, prayers of joy, prayers of intercession, prayers of lament, prayers of hope. Whatever our lives need to express and need to be, we are prayer for that when we live most faithfully.

This discovery long ago changed my understanding of prayer, pushing me to think deeper about one of our most powerful (or potentially powerful) spiritual disciplines, and one of our most promising opportunities. Listen for the word of GOD from Psalm 109, using Rabbi Bunham’s interpretation for verse four. Read Psalm 109:1-5.

¹ Do not be silent, O God of my praise. ² For wicked and deceitful mouths are opened against me, speaking against me with lying tongues. ³ They surround me with words of hate and attack me without cause. ⁴ In return for my love they accuse me, even while I (am) prayer for them. ⁵ So they reward my evil for good and hatred for my love. (The Word of the Lord. Thanks be to GOD.)

A powerful song attributed to David for vindication and deliverance. A powerful reminder for us on what to do for those who “speak words of deceit and hate.” Don’t scream back at them. Be prayer for them. Read the whole Psalm later. It’s pretty relentless in its plea, in its prayer to “be prayer”. And this is not an easy “ask” for us.

In a Pew Research study done last year[1] they found that less than half of us, only 44%, say we pray every day. And that’s down sharply from 2007 when it was 58%. The study suggests that the decline is due primarily to the rapidly increasing “religiously unaffiliated” population (the “nones”), and the decline of prayer in some of the largest religious groups in the U.S., such as Catholics, evangelical protestants and Mainline protestants – that’s us, that last category.

No doubt. And, I’m going to suggest another reason: we’re not praying as much because of our understanding and expectation of prayer. I’ll bet when you pray more often than not you stop whatever else it is you’re doing, bow your heads, fold your hand, and say some words. And then, you find the power of your prayer in its outcome. We almost can’t help that, I guess. Somewhere, probably not very deep down, we think that the more earnest we pray and the more realistically we pray, the more people that pray with us or for us, the more truthful we are in our prayer, all of these things will help determine the outcome of our prayer, and so it’s power. And, more and more, we are not seeing the answers to our prayers happen. Wars, poverty, inequalities, greed, hunger, disease, natural disasters, and death persist. And seem to be getting worse. So, we stop “pray-ing”. Better to believe this is all happening because we’re not praying hard enough than think it’s because GOD doesn’t care.

But, consider this: if we are prayer, then we don’t “stop what we’re doing to pray.” And, we don’t come before GOD with a request for presence and engagement, but with a confidence that GOD is present and engaging.  We don’t wait on “an answer” to our prayer, because our prayer is being answered.  As prayer, we are already “with GOD” and GOD is already within us, acting – or waiting to act – through our own teaching and our own healing – our own presence and engagement with the world. 

Consider the life of Jesus “as prayer” – total connection with GOD, no separation. Not stopping and waiting for this GOD to act but acting as GOD would act in the world – healing, comforting, forgiving, loving. When we are prayer, as Jesus was prayer, we pray every day, all day! We acknowledge GOD’s presence through the living of our own lives, and we can renew our confidence in GOD’s guidance of those lives.  And as our confidence, our faith, is renewed and strengthened, our own vision and hope is increased, our lives are given new life and we are empowered not by what might happen afterward, but by what is happening right now.

So … bring hope, bring lament. And bring prayer. Not simply “a prayer”. But yourself as prayer. Let’s consider this together a bit more experientially this morning …  (Ashia leads us as prayer …)

Pray and be prayer this week.  Let your prayers not be filled with requests.  Rather let them be full of life. Lead and guide, teach and heal, empower and enable others to do the same. Bring it.

Amen.

Joel Weible and Ashia Stoess, Pastors

Pewee Valley Presbyterian Church / July 19, 2026

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/prayer-and-other-religious-practices/