The Parish Church of St John-at-Hampstead

Readings:  1 Kings 3.5-12, Romans 8.26-end, Matthew 13. 31-33, 44-52
One of the earliest Latin tags that I learnt was “Laborare est Orare”; to pray is to work or Work is Prayer. It’s a quote from St Benedict and intended, as I learnt it to illustrate the use of the infinitive.
You may well think that remembering Latin lessons and talking about work as prayer is an odd theme for this holiday season. But I want to suggest that prayer is something natural, something we can start by just allowing it to happen; something which we may some effort, but which is like work, in that it is what we are made to do.
Rowan Williams speaking on the radio at about this time of year some time ago, compared prayer to sunbathing (an activity- or rather an inactivity) for which he admitted, unsurprisingly, he had a low tolerance. He had enough experience of it however to say that prayer was in some ways like lying in the sun and just allowing its warmth to penetrate your body, only prayer was allowing God to penetrate your mind. It doesn’t sound like work, although it is surprisingly hard to achieve.
To say that work is prayer suggests that prayer is in some sense contractual; part of an agreement with God. We work for reward or a result; usually for one’s self, but also for the welfare of others. It’s easy to think of a similar contractual feeling about prayer; whether it is asking God for something for ourselves or, for others; or returning the thanks that we owe; or asking forgiveness to restore us to a right relationship. In all these sorts of prayer there is a sense of give and take; a quid pro quo.
  We hear this in the story of Solomon’s dream; God grants Solomon wisdom and discretion, because they were the right things to request, and they are of course the qualities Solomon needs to keep his people in a right relation with God, they are the qualities needed for righteous living in society.
Solomon knows what to ask for; Paul assures us that the spirit will ask for us, “interceding with sighs deeper than our words”
Paul, is also concerned with righteousness or justification. Underlying what he says, he envisages a test, some trial in which we shall need to be justified. This is not so much a contractual but a similarly legalistic, even forensic, framework for our existence. Paul tells us that what we need to pass this test, to be adjudged right, is love: “all things work together for those who love God”. Impliedly it is possible to fail; it’s possible to be a fish caught in the wrong net, or just the wrong sort of fish, in Matthew’s uncompromising parable.
We can, however, take some comfort from both Paul and Solomon  because in both the suggestion is that to meet our side of the bargain, to pass the test, all that is required of us is to accept and return God’s love. It’s a question, initially, of allowing God in, like the rays of a hot sun.
That seems to me to be the starting point for prayer, but, of course, it develops and becomes the articulation of this love and the dialogue which necessarily follows from it. It is a dialogue in which we appear do all the talking as we give thanks and praise, and make confession and intercession, but as we speak we are listening hard for what God is telling us too.
It’s a dialogue which we are bound to describe in metaphorical language as we cannot conceive God other than in metaphor, and the most natural metaphor is based in the mutual love and dependence of parent and child. It sees God our creator as a father or mother, or perhaps anyone on whose love we rely. The most compelling aspect of this metaphor is its naturalness, its inevitability. It explains the need to express thanks, to explain anxieties and aspirations; it explains the need to ask for help, the need to say sorry. These are the matters which as children we could not help telling our parents and they are those which we cannot withhold from those we love; they are the substance of the talk before bedtime as they are later of pillow talk. And they are the stuff of our talk with God too, to whom, equally, we cannot help turning. To put it more philosophically, one way of seeing God is simply as the being to whom we pray; that is what he is for, and what we are for. Prayer is our life task, our work
You may recall Voltaire’s witticism; “Dieu me pardonera; c’est son metier” “God will forgive me; that’s his job or that’s what he’s for”. Voltaire was right; but he omits the other side of the coin; our job, our work, is ask for pardon, and a lot else besides.
For Benedict the monastic life was one of work and prayer, but he saw them as the same thing. Much of the monks’ time was spent on their knees. But prayer did not just happen in church; it was all the activity, all the tasks they needed to perform to sustain the life of their physical bodies and to worship God- in other words their work of all sorts was also prayer, because as work is what we do to live physically, so is prayer the work that sustains us spiritually.
We are not all called to be monks or nuns, but we can all aspire to spiritual sunbathing; we can all try to let God into our lives; letting his spirit pervade all we do. Trying to allow understanding and discernment to regulate our choices and trying to make our lives an expression of God’s wisdom. This will be allowing the spirit to guide us in the confidence that “nothing can separate us from the love of God”. Nothing that is except the refusal to allow that love in and the failure to respond to it by living and working as were made to live and work. Because to refuse god’s love is like a creature denying its creator, and because prayer and work are our natural activities; they allow us to be who we are. Amen.