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.