Prayer against the Machine

Preached at Wayside Friends Church

January 25, 2026

The question I want us to think about is this:  Is prayer the most important act of resistance to evil that we can take? I think it is. 

Prayer is a gift to us from God, a means of grace, a grace. It is a gift we need to open and to use for our own sakes but also for the sake of our world—both the world of humanity and the wild world. We need to pray, and everything else needs for us to pray. God tells us to pray, God helps us when we pray, and God can speak into us when we pray.

There is so much praying going on in the Bible.  I invite you to look through the Old and New Testaments to see just how often people talked with God—and heard from God.  Prayers make up the longest book in the Bible, the Psalms, and remind us that hymns too are prayers. Some of the prayers are raw with anger and sorrow, and others dance with joy. 

We can see from the Biblical examples that no subject is off limits and no emotion is out of bounds.  In fact, the best thing to do with our joy, our contentment, our sorrow, our rage, and our despair is to tell God about it.  But just telling is not enough.

There is also listening to God. This is hard work since God rarely speaks aloud, but if we have the faith to pray, we can have the patience to sit with God until God speaks into us in one way or another.  

Jesus had a lot to say about prayer.  He counseled privacy, simplicity, persistence, and trust in God’s character. He also had some things to avoid: vain repetitions, showing off, hypocrisy, calling down fire on other people. 

When his followers asked him to teach them to pray, the prayer we know as the Lord’s Prayer was his answer.It recognizes our close relationship to God with the word “father,” and also signals respect with the idea of God’s kingdom arriving and the need for our obedience with “Thy will be done on earth as in heaven.” 

This prayer recognizes that God forgiving us for our errors and trespasses is intertwined with our forgiving others for their errors and trespasses. 

It includes a request that God care for our daily needs. It asks God to guide us away from temptation and to rescue us from evil. 

As with all other fixed prayers, this prayer can be said mindlessly, without noticing how far-reaching it will be when God answers it.  But it has worldwide implications.

Though Jesus prayed much in private, he had several prayers that were public enough to be written down.  I won’t include John 17, though it is well worth reading and taking to heart. But here are 5 short examples of public prayer, 3 of them from the cross itself.

When Jesus came to the home of Mary and Martha after Lazarus had died, they bemoaned his tardiness in getting there. “If you had only been here, my brother need not have died,” they reproached him. “ When Jesus arrived at the tomb, he looked up and said, ‘Father, I thank you that you hear me. I know that you always hear me, but I’m saying this for the benefit of the people standing here so they  may believe you have sent me.” And then he called Lazarus out of the tomb (John 11).

It just may be that sometimes God asks us to pray our prayer out loud, taking the risk of public humiliation if the answer is not immediate or not what we hoped for. Whatever follows our prayer may be spectacular in the moment or ignite a slow burning fuse for later illumination. 

Jesus also invited three disciples to watch with him in the garden on the eve of his crucifixion, telling them to pray that they not fall into temptation. Then he prayed aloud, perhaps essentially for the same thing: “Father, if it be possible, if You are willing, let this cup pass from me; yet not my will but Yours be done.” He prayed this earnestly, sweating blood. God sent him angels to strengthen him, but the cup did not pass away from him. And the disciples slept through it, exhausted from sorrow (Luke 22:42). 

Three other public prayers were from the cross.  I don’t know the exact order but intuitively, this is how I see them.  “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34). “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” (Matthew 27:46). “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit” (Luke 23:46). These three prayers out of extreme suffering from which God has not delivered him illustrate that for Jesus, and for us, the priorities are generosity of spirit issuing in forgiveness, despair honestly expressed, and the choice to trust through it all.

Prayer cracks our hearts open to God, and as we make ourselves present with God, as we present ourselves as living sacrifices to God, God enters through that crack and changes everything.  

We learn we can trust God. We become more open to hearing God and more willing to do what God tells us to do. We invite God to fulfill God’s will on earth—praying against the injustice and greed and selfishness and violence, praying against the worship of power and money, praying against our own tendencies to repay evil for evil, an eye for an eye or worse, and praying in combat with the systems by which humans oppress and depress each other.

We do not know how far these prayers reach, only that we must pray them.  And we don’t have to fear getting them wrong, because, as St. Paul tells us, God’s Spirit prays through our prayers, even though we don’t know for sure how to pray.  St. Paul also tells us to pray without ceasing, carrying our hearts throughout the day open to God as much as we can, listening as well as telling.  

I’ll tell you a couple of stories about prayers and pray-ers in the Bible.

The first is the story of Jonah. I think it’s fair to imagine that Jonah prayed to God to aid Israel against their enemies, as anyone might do. Instead, Jonah heard from God that he should go preach to Israel’s worst enemy, Assyria. Jonah ran the opposite direction. Famously, his ship nearly went down in a storm, and he confessed that they would have to throw him overboard to stop the storm. When they did, a fish swallowed him, at which time Jonah prayed, from inside the fish. His prayer, summarized, went something like this, “In despair, from the depths of the grave, I called for help; you hurled me into the sea and your waves swept over me.  Worse than that, I feared I had been banished from your sight. But you saved me from the grave. Even as I was drowning, I prayed to you, and I will do what you say when you save me from this mess I’m in.” 

After the fish vomited him up, Jonah went to Nineveh in Assyria and preached that the judgment of God would fall on them in 40 days.  To his shock and horror, they all repented and changed their ways. So God changed course and didn’t destroy them.  

Jonah was very displeased and angry and said to God: “This is exactly what I expected, and that’s why I ran away. I knew you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending disaster. Now kill me, for I’d rather die than live.”  And because of the character of God, a lesson about compassion comes to Jonah rather than punishment.

And there are lessons here for us, too, about prayer and action. When we pray, we open ourselves to God, and what God will say in that opening may surprise and shock us. Our action comes out of what God tells us to do. We may not love it. We may run from doing it. But it will still be waiting on the other side of whatever ordeal we put ourselves through to avoid it. When we pray for God’s will to be done, we are opening ourselves to being the ones to do that will.

The second is the story of Saul, later to be known as Paul (Acts 9). A devout Pharisee, Saul prayed several times daily for the redemption of Israel. Saul was therefore full of anger at those who exchanged their loyalty to Israel for their loyalty to the risen Christ. They preached sermons accusing their own community of faithlessness and murder, and Saul made it his job to punish them. He began to destroy the church, dragging men and women to prison. 

It doesn’t take much imagination to think that the church prayed mightily to God as they scattered from Jerusalem. They likely prayed along the lines of Acts 4: 24-31, something like this: “Sovereign God, you made the heaven and earth and the sea and everything in them. You spoke by the Holy Spirit through David, saying, why do the nations of the earth rage, and plot, and take their stand, and gather together against the Lord and the Christ? They conspired against Jesus, whom you anointed, and carried out their will against him, with violence you allowed and even wove into your plan.  Now, Lord, consider their threats and enable your servants to speak your words with great boldness. Stretch out your hand to heal and perform miraculous signs and wonders through the name of your holy servant Jesus." And this prayer shook the room where they met, and they were filled with the Holy Spirit and spoke the word of God boldly.

So the believers in Damascus waited for Saul, bringing with him his authorization to arrest them and haul them off to prison. Do you think they prayed to the sovereign God, calling God’s attention to the rage and violence of those opposing the Way of Christ, and opening themselves to be agents of God’s Spirit, speaking God’s words with boldness? I’m sure they did.  

And what happened? The risen Christ confronted Saul directly, called him to account, explained to him just who and what he was doing, and told him what to do next.  The light of Jesus blinded him for three days, making him helpless, rather than powerful. 

And one of those praying in Damascus, Ananias, heard also from God, heard something he didn’t want to hear.  “Go to the house of Judas on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying.  He has seen a vision that you will come and restore his sight.” 

Like Jonah, Ananias was reluctant.  “You know, Lord, that this is the man responsible for violence against your church and that he has come here to continue to oppress your followers.”  

But God insisted:  “This is my chosen instrument to carry my name to the Gentiles and their kings, and even also to the Jews."  

So Ananias obeyed, Saul received his sight, both physical and spiritual, and he was baptized into the Way and set about right away preaching to the Israelites to prove that Jesus is the Christ.  In a nice reversal, they conspire to kill him.  He fled Damascus, and the rest of his world-changing life is in the book of Acts.  

But you know, what Saul, now Paul, was called to do was alien to his natural yearnings.  In Romans 9-11, he expresses his heartbreak over his nation. He says he would be willing to be accursed if they would only see the light and welcome the Christ.  He says, “My heart’s desire and prayer to God is for the Israelites to be saved. Their zeal for God is misguided, based on their own rules for right living, not on God’s, and they refused to submit to God’s righteousness. They did not recognize that Christ is the end of the law.” In other words, they refused to present their bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God, true worship, and to be transformed by God’s spirit by the renewing of their minds.  Instead, they remained conformed to the world’s systems of power and violence. 

Against those systems, prayer is our most radical resistance.

Here’s my hope. This sermon will have challenged you to pray, to pray humbly, authentically, vigorously, asking God, who is just as well as merciful, to intervene on behalf of humankind. Pray as specifically as you want for the results you believe to be on God’s agenda for nations, for neighbors, for yourself. Let there be space in your praying for God to move in and on you. When God moves you to act, do what you’re told. 

Prayer affirms our hope in God; obedience affirms our faith in God; and love affirms our kinship with God.

Chaos, Hope, and Meaningful Action

 Preached at Silverton Friends Church

Jan. 11, 2026

I’ve been saddened and dismayed by current events, and the chaos unleashed on the world, disruptions to long-held friendships between individuals and nations, violations of norms, and disregard for human dignity. Given the disorder of our external social and political world, the disruptions to family and friend relationships, the sense of powerlessness for the individual, it is no wonder that we have often internalized the mess, adding it to whatever there is of disorder in our inner selves. Our emotions rise up and can manifest as fear, anger, or sorrow, even as we continue to live in this beautiful world. Our systems and order are crumbling out of our control, and we fear the unknown. This chaos makes our worlds completely unpredictable.

Often we attempt to control chaos by finding someone or something to blame for it. We like to know cause and effect, so that we can, we believe, erase negative effects by removing known causes. And for religious people, disorder is more than distasteful; it undermines the structures by which we understand the world.

Power that works beyond our control and violates our expectations introduces chaos. Even our inner worlds are “like the ocean, mysterious and dark,” to quote a song by Bob Dylan. And the inner worlds of other people are not available to us to know directly; we mostly observe their actions and feel our feelings. Though we can inch toward some kind of understanding of another person, what they will do next is not entirely predictable, even if we’ve been married 50 years.

The “Chaos Theory” article in Wikipedia had this surprisingly profound comment: “What is clear is that the world is chaotic and outside of our control, beyond a certain threshold, and that our place in the world hinges in some ways upon our readiness to accept this.” God give us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change, the courage to change the things we can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

You’ve probably heard of the butterfly effect, a popular way to refer to the ideas in chaos theory.  To oversimplify to what I can understand and express, many natural systems show sensitive dependence on initial conditions. So, for instance, the weather is notoriously unpredictable over any length of time longer than a week because weather events are sensitive to initial conditions, and we can’t keep track of those.  So we use statistics and almanacs and watch how thick the squirrels’ fur is. 

 

My daughter gave me Mavis Staples’s new album, Sad and Beautiful World.  This whole album has been speaking to my heart, beginning with the title.  Both sadness and joy, as well as the perception of beauty, are rooted in the individual’s perception, rather than being essential attributes of some thing or event outside us. 

I want to encourage us to approach chaos with curiosity and interest, rather than fear and anger. God is not afraid of chaos, having shown that it has a place from the beginning of creation.

In human mythologies, darkness, the ocean, and the eternal feminine are often associated with chaos, and this is certainly the case with the creation narrative of Genesis 1.  In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was without form and void, And darkness was on the face of the deep. All of these are ways of saying, the beginning of God’s creating was chaos.

And then, the spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters, like a hen brooding over an egg. ( A feminine image, to be sure.) And God said, Let there be light, and there was light. And God saw the light, that it was good, and God divided the light from the darkness, calling the light Day and the darkness Night.

It is crucial to notice that God doesn’t call the night evil, even though the darkness (from a human perspective) is prone to chaos.

Next, God separates the air from the watery expanse, calling it the sky or heaven. Then, God gathers the waters together and allows the dry land to emerge, calling the waters Seas and the land Earth, and God saw both as good.

It is crucial to notice that God doesn’t consider the mysterious dark ocean evil, though its power and unpredictability make humans consider it chaotic.

Indeed, the Voice from the Whirlwind in Job asserts, “I shut in the sea, clothed it in clouds, and swaddled it in darkness….Tell me if you know where light dwells, and where darkness has a place…everything under heaven is mine.” Job responds: “I’ve been speaking about things I don’t understand. I have heard of you, but now I see you and I melt away and find comfort in being only dust and ashes.” (For reference see Genesis 18:27, where Abraham says, “I have taken upon me to speak with the Lord, I which am but dust and ashes.”)

As Christopher Linkiewicz writes in The Philosophy of Chaos: From Chaos Theory to Existentialism (medium.com), “It is in the nature of thinking that we never have all the information…we rarely even approach a complete picture of anything…Errors can, will be, and must be made in our calculations.” The lovely Wikipedia article on chaos theory continues, “Small changes in initial conditions can lead to unpredictable outcomes challenging traditional views of causality and order.” 

We know so little and actually control even less. How then shall we go about our daily lives? 

I think that recognizing the limits of our knowledge, our understanding, and our ability to control anything can be paralyzing or it can be freeing.  I want to speak in favor of freedom.  Indeed, every positive action we take is energized by hope and faith, and can be grounded in love.

Surprisingly, this chaotic mystery makes openings we did not expect for our small daily actions to have an effect we could not have expected. Each positive action may be the initial condition for untold and unforeseeable positive events.

Forty years ago, I heard Bill Vaswig preach, and I actually remember something he said.  Bill was the founder of a ministry dedicated to emotional and physical healing, a Lutheran evangelist, and a founding member of Renovaré. What he said was this: when you pray and ask the Holy Spirit for guidance, take some time to listen, and then do what comes to you, simple as it may be.  Essentially, why ask if we’re not going to listen for an answer and do what comes to us?

I’ve tried this, and, to be honest, it introduces an unpredictability into my life that isn’t very comfortable and can be embarrassing.  I’ve prayed out loud for a stranger on the street, prayed out loud for healing among strangers and for lost causes. Since no one rose from a sick bed or from the dead, these prayers were humbling to me, though I don’t regret them. I do not know, in a universe where chaos theory pertains, what these tiny acts of attempted obedience may have set in motion somewhere in time.  But I can see that these little efforts to listen and obey have changed me in ways I can hardly know and cannot describe.

I also know that my inner self is not by itself a reliable guide, since I barely know my inner ocean and can often act out of self-interest or herd mentality.  Thus it is useful to have external advice as well.  Jesus and the Jewish law said, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This requires some imagination to live by.  What am I doing to my neighbor? Would I do this to myself? And what am I doing to myself? Would I do this to my neighbor? In Romans 12, St. Paul beseeches us to give our bodies to God as a living sacrifice, embracing transformation rather than conformity.  This is what transformation looks like.

Think realistically of ourselves

Recognize our connection to others, what Paul calls being members of each other, as part of Christ’s Body

Use the gifts we have, make space for the gifts others have

Love others without hypocrisy

Be kindly affectionate to each other

Give to those in need and be hospitable

Rejoice with those who rejoice

Weep with those who weep

Give preference and honor to each other

Associate with the humble

Don’t puff ourselves up

Be diligent, fervent, hopeful, patient

Continue steadfastly in prayer

As much as is up to us, live peaceably with all

Give our hungry enemies food

Give our thirsty enemies water

Bless those who persecute us

Don’t repay evil for evil

Don’t avenge ourselves

Abhor what is evil

Show our respect for good things

Cling to what is good

These are externals by which we can measure our internal promptings.  As retired psychotherapist James Finley (Center for Action and Contemplation contributor) says, “What is the most loving thing for me to do in this moment?” Or as George MacDonald says, “It is a happy thing for us that this is really all we have to concern ourselves about—what to do next. No one can do the second thing, one can do only the first thing.” (David Elginbrod) And as he encourages us, “God sits in that chamber of our being in which the candle of our consciousness goes out in darkness, and sends forth from thence wonderful gifts into the light of that understanding which is His candle. Our hope lies …in the wisdom wherein we live and move and have our being.” (“The Imagination: Its Function and Its Culture,” A Dish of Orts, 1867). 

Thanks be to God who is not afraid of the dark and has provided for both order and disorder. May our prayers and small daily actions move the world’s systems toward love.

Let’s end by celebrating our finiteness and our freedom to choose love. Listen to this excerpt from Psalm 104 (NKJV):

O Lord, how manifold are your works!

In wisdom you have made them all.

The earth is full of Your possessions—

This great and wide sea,

In which are innumerable teeming things,

Living things both small and great.

There the ships sail about;

There is that Leviathan

Which you have made to play there.

These all wait for You,

That You may give them their food in due season.

What You give them they gather in;

You open Your hand and they are filled with good.

You hide Your face, they are troubled;

You take away their breath, they die and return to their dust.

You send forth Your Spirit, they are created;

And You renew the face of the earth.

May the glory of the Lord endure forever;

May the Lord rejoice in His works.

He looks on the earth, and it trembles;

He touches the hills, and they smoke.

I will sing to the Lord as long as I live;

I will sing praise to  my God while I have my being.

May my meditation be sweet to Him; 

I will be glad in the Lord.