Seeds of Prayer

Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, March 17, 2024
John 12:20-32

    Have you ever wondered if God is really listening when you pray?  Most of us as Christians go through periods of what we might call “spiritual dryness” where we wonder if our prayers are doing any good.  This is our last Sunday in Lent to focus on different faith practices, and today I would like to focus on the most basic spiritual practice, which is prayer.  If you’ve been listening closely, you probably recognize that every other faith practice I have mentioned involves prayer– fasting, self-examination and repentance, sacrificial giving, and works of love.  Prayer ought to underlie everything we do.  At its most basic, prayer is a conversation with God – both listening to and talking to God, building upon and strengthening our relationship with God. Admittedly, sometimes prayer can feel one-way – like we’re doing all the talking and God is doing all the listening and not much responding.  I think this is why we call it a faith practice – prayer takes persistence, and practice.
    I have a book called 50 Ways to Pray which is a good reminder to us that there is no one right way to pray.  You are welcome to borrow it or talk with me further if you’d like to explore a new way to pray.  Sometimes we don’t pray as much as we know we should because we don’t get much out of it.  Sometimes we may have the impression that we aren’t good at praying – we don’t have nice flowery “God words” like better Christians (like pastors) do.  Sometimes we just get busy or neglect our prayer life.  This book can be an encouragement that prayer makes a difference.  We may need to explore a better “fit” for our lifestyle – praying while exercising, journaling, praying with scripture or with a prayer partner are all different ideas that can help us build on this basic spiritual practice of prayer to strengthen our relationship with God.
    As we look at our gospel for today and as we prepare for Holy Week, notice how often Jesus prays.  Jesus takes time to pray ALL the time.  He is in constant communication with God the Father.  What I love about our passage here in John 12 today is that he seamlessly goes from speaking with these disciples and Greeks who are curious about him to speaking directly to God.  “Father, glorify your name,” Jesus prays.  And God responds right away with a voice that sounds like thunder.  Some people it seems don’t understand that it is God speaking back to Jesus. They explain it away as thunder or an angel.  One thing we can learn from this small example of Jesus’ relationship to God the Father in prayer is that we might dismiss or explain away God speaking back to us as something else.  A discipline of prayer helps us pay attention to when God is responding.  This is one reason we are sharing God sightings during worship, because we dare to believe that God is still speaking and acting in our every day lives today.  We encourage one another that in fact prayer does work, and God does listen and respond to us through prayer.
    The other thing our gospel passage can teach us about prayer today is that Jesus consistently asks God for strength to do God’s will, not for what he wants.  Oof, this is a difficult lesson.  “What should I say – ‘Father save me from this hour?’” Jesus asks rhetorically.  Rather his prayer is that God’s name might be glorified.  He knows that what God is asking him to do is incredibly difficult.  He is going to go to the cross, suffer, and die so that he might be lifted up to draw all people to himself.  Jesus demonstrates in this simple prayer his understanding that prayer allows us to let go and let God.  Prayer focuses us beyond what we want to seek God’s guidance.  The seed can’t grow unless it is placed in the ground, buried in the dirt.  God in Christ comes down in the muck and mire of our human situation, bears our sin, descends into hell itself, as we say in the creed.  Only in letting go, in dying, can he rise, can God’s salvation be revealed to us in all its glory.  
Just like in a conversation with anyone else, are we open to being changed by our prayerful conversation with God, or do we come with our own fixed ideas of what God should do for me, with an expected, already planned out outcome?  To live according to God’s will and not our own is sometimes a very difficult thing to do, and a regular practice of prayer to rely on God helps us do so.  Jesus helps us do so.  After all, Jesus himself prays in the garden of Gethsemane before his crucifixion that if possible the hour might pass from him, that he would not have to die, but “not what I want, but what you want,” Jesus prays to his heavenly Father.  And the disciples all the while struggle just to keep awake, much less pray for God’s will, not theirs, to be done.
    Let’s return to that image of a seed that Jesus shares with us today as encouragement for our prayer life.  Cultivating a relationship with God through prayer is like planting seeds in the ground.  We lift up to God different concerns and areas of our life that need God’s attention, and we release them to God.  If we hold on tightly to those concerns like seeds in our hands, not entrusting them to God our good gardener, they cannot bear fruit; they remain just seeds of possibility.  Just like our daily prayer life, we can’t see exactly when those seeds open up to sprouts – some days it may look just like a bare patch of dirt in the ground.  But then, just like we have the daffodils blooming and first signs of spring around us, one day we will look, come to God in prayer, and realize God has been there all along, tending to our prayer concerns, helping us bear fruit and grow in faith.  There might even be some surprises  - a fruit, a color, a kind of plant we didn’t know was there in our seed packets.  Any way we find to connect to God in prayer on a regular basis will bear fruit, Jesus promises us. 
    As we approach Holy Week, we have this blessed reminder that God in Christ comes down to us to meet our deepest human need, to save us, to restore us, to love us completely.  Jesus dies so that we might live.  Jesus humbles himself to obedience on a cross so that we might be lifted up with him, for the glory of God.  May we give thanks and glory to God in prayer.  Amen.