Prayers Matter: May 8 Sermon

Acts 16:16-34 
Psalm 97 (12)
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21 
John 17:20-26

Please pray with me: Gracious God, you gave us your son to show your great love for the world.  Through him you have taught us so much of who you are and who we are called to be.  Help us to continue our learning and be open to his teaching, through you, your Son, and the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

Prayers matter.  Prayers make a difference.  Many of you have told me you believe this to be true.  You have told me that you have felt the prayers of others surrounding you and known the comfort and peace that they bring.  You have told me stories of praying for others and feeling the presence to the Holy Spirit moving through you.  I have been with families as they were comforted and uplifted by your prayers.  In my own lifetime, through challenges and trials, I have felt prayers strengthening me to get through.  Prayers really do matter.

Prayers have the power to change things…and not just things…prayers have the power to change people.  Just look at our Apostles in Acts.  Paul and Silas thrown in jail for the crime of liberating a slave girl from a spirit—thrown in jail for making the slave girl’s owners lose their income—a sin against empire, not one against God.  Two men innocent of the crime of which they have been accused, men of God, praying and singing hymns to God such that the earth moves and the very foundations are shaken, so that the doors open and the chains fall away.  But they don’t leave.  Not just Paul and Silas but the other prisoners as well, all remain.  Why?

Why stay in the place of imprisonment when one has been released?

For the sake of this story, it is about the transforming power of prayer.  The jailer is ready to take his own life, he knows that if the prisoners have escaped on his watch, he will be killed.  But the prisoners did not use the freedom to run.  Instead they stayed to share liberation with others, both the jailer and his whole family.  Paul and Silas brought them the Word of God, the story of Christ, and the man and his entire family were baptized.  Many lives transformed and the story of Christ continued through prayers.

It still works to this day.  Lives are still being transformed by prayers.  Christ is still being brought to people through prayers.  It is as Jesus knew it would be.  In the Gospel today we see that even as Jesus cared for his disciples while he himself was facing death, he also was caring for us. 

“I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word…”  Jesus is praying for you on the night before his death.  Jesus is praying for you right now.  Jesus is praying for you.  You are not unimportant.  You are not insignificant.  Your needs matter.  Your life matters.  You matter.  Right now, and for all time, you are in the prayers of Jesus.  Prayer changes lives.

Lives are changed every time the story of God in Christ Jesus is shared.  Just as Paul and Silas changed the life of the jailer and his family, so, too, have lives been changed for over two thousand years in the telling and retelling of the story of Jesus and the love that God has for the world.

This isn’t a Mother’s Day sermon.  It is a sermon being given on Mother’s Day.  Still, I will tell you, it was my mom who first brought me to church.  I did not know God until I knew the story of Jesus.  I would not have known the story of Jesus had I not been told the story.  I imagine each of you has one person (or perhaps many people) to thank for your faith in God and Jesus.  I don’t imagine you awoke one day suddenly believing in a God you had never heard of: Someone introduced you.  Someone told you “There’s someone I want you to meet.” 

We know as Lutherans that we do not choose God, rather God choose us and continues to choose us, and use us, time and again.  We know that it is the Grace of God and nothing within our own ability or understanding that brings us into that relationship.  But we also know we cannot have a relationship with someone we have never met. 

As Vicar JA said in our clergy meeting, “As Lutherans, first we belong, and then we believe.”  We are invited to hear the story not because we do believe but because we do not know.  The Holy Spirit moves us in faith.  We are changed.  Because Jesus wasn’t just thinking of what was going to happen to him the very next day; he was thinking of, thinking on, praying for, generations yet to be born who would share in Jesus through their word.

He prayed for you and for me.  He prayed for all those who will hear the story through us, and those who will hear the story through them, and those not yet born who will hear the story because you shared it. 

We don’t know all the lives that have been or yet will be changed by the story.  We are human beings, flawed and sinful: We make mistakes.  Maybe we forget sometimes that though it is God who chooses us, and not the other way around, we are still in a relationship that we must tend that it may grow.  How will we teach Grace if we do not know Grace?  How will we know Grace if we do not show Grace?

“The world does not know you but I know you.”  Jesus knows God and came so that we may know God through him.  The Love and Grace of God are informed and transformed to us by Jesus.

Where do we start? 

With a prayer.  Because Jesus prayed for us.  We pray.  We pray for each other.  We pray for those we hold in our hearts.  We pray for those we do not know to name.  We pray for the ones who do not believe, for those who may yet believe, those who one day will believe.  We pray.

That they, that we, may all be one.

Amen.