Trinity 9
Are the only prayers that have any meaning and efficacy the prayers authorised by the Church of England and appear in the style of Cranmer’s English?
Another question arises from this consideration, when we pray are we in the depths of weakness? Paul suggests that the spirit is moved to intercession when there is need, when we are without strength in this world of ours. There are times when I despair when it comes to my own prayer life. What good does it do me to set aside time to say prayers or read the bible? My discipline each week is confined to preparing for this hour every week, when I am to speak with my friends about matters of moment arising from the readings appointed.
Well, what about prayer? What is it? How should it be done? When is it answered? These insistent questions beset us day by day, throughout the whole of our lives. However, I am afraid I don’t know any of the answers, and I have been perplexed as much as you have been.
My prayers are often the inarticulate groanings of a spirit in trouble, just as Paul speaks about his prayers in today’s reading from his letter to the Romans. Luckily, he must have had an interpreter with him, to help him understand what the intercessions of the Spirit were. But even if we moan as though in travail, like the world in its troubles (as our reading last week had it), we must not lose heart. We must remember the words of Paul, that the Spirit intercedes for us. The lamentations of times gone by and today are ever the same, for we are sunk in our human weakness, assailed from every point with pain, all we can do is utter our grief. But the hope is still there, given to us through Jesus Christ our Lord, through the Spirit. We should be able to rejoice because of what Paul is speaking about in this passage.
But Paul is speaking about predestination, God’s knowing beforehand. Predestination? How can that be? We don’t speak about that nowadays do we? No, we don’t. We don’t think about providence at all today. Everything is done by the sweat of our own brow. There is no excuse for any God to have a hand in my life, people normally say. “We have to take care of ourselves.” That is the usual verdict about everything in our experience.
Do we actually know what this predestination is? Sadly, I think we have got it wrong for years. The predestination Paul speaks of in this chapter is that of God’s plan for creation – remember “he saw and thought ‘it is very good’,” back in Genesis.… and Paul here is speaking of the help the Spirit gives us through its prayers and thus Paul gives us a fuller picture of what Providence is, the good care that a loving God had shown him.
Predestination has had an awfully bad press, and it seems to have the effect of cutting humanity off from God, in spite of the incarnation. The people who hold a strict doctrine of predestination lock us all into a very narrow orbit. But the foreknowledge which God has is not the sentencing of the preachers of fire and brimstone, whose conception of God is one of a final judge who must condemn sinful humanity. Even the saints would not be gathered round the heavenly throne, for in heaven there is only pure divinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
That notion of predestination is not Paul’s idea. Paul presents God as knowing beforehand all that humanity could and would do with its freedom of choice. Paul tells us of another God, a God who will never abandon those who have faith (however small, as that grain of mustard seed about which Jesus speaks).
What a thrilling verse, “Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Those words from Paul are the most stirring I remember.
Thus neither trouble nor hardship, not persecution, famine, nor nakedness, neither danger nor the sword could possibly keep Paul away from his destiny, to conquer the sinfulness of life through the life of faithfulness in the one who has conquered even death for the sake of all of us.
Paul’s argument is very clear in this section of his letter to the Romans. God, he says, is for us – there can be nothing to fear, nothing can be against us. We are to comfort ourselves, our sinful selves as Paul made abundantly clear in the chapters up to this point, we are to have comfort in the fact that Jesus Christ, God’s son, was given up for our sakes. Each and every one of us has the guardianship of God. Who will gainsay such care? – Only ourselves! Only we ourselves can disengage ourselves from the love of God. Therefore God cares for us, no charges through prediction are brought. – Isn’t there an advert for a movie with Tom Cruise in it, suggesting that such a possibility is coming, that we will know each other’s actions before anything has ever happened? – Even so, I am willing to say that the predestinarians got that all wrong. The only foreknowing we have is revealed in the life of our Lord, the foreknowing we know is that of love, the love that intercedes on our behalf through the groaning of a spirit in great pain, a pain of separation from its essence – the divine. We know that before all else because of our inherent love of God and man.
The foreknowing of God is the patient understanding of a loving parent or friend. With such a start in life, how can anyone fail? Jesus paves the way forward for humanity, since he is the first-fruits of the general resurrection. All of life that Paul wishes to confess to us here in the twenty-first century is summed up in the final sentence of our reading. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life … will be able to separate us from the love of God.” All which humanity knows is life and death, and if neither life nor death is strong enough to tear us away from God, what is possibly left? We are predestined to become the likeness of Jesus Christ, Paul tells us, we are predestined to be justified, we are predestined to become glorified.
Thus we continue to groan in our prayers because the inarticulate intercession on our behalf is beyond our ken, that low whisper which calls us to be justified, and to be glorified as the children of God. All prayer is efficacious, if done in faith. We must remember that God is praying for us through that spirit, even if we are not.