Prelude to Prayer: His Word Runs Swiftly (Psalm 147)
Prelude to Prayer: His Word Runs Swiftly
First UMC of Pocatello
January 5, 2025
The Second Sunday After Christmas
Psalm 147
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During the first two months of this year, I will be preaching a series on prayer in our worship services. Two of the Church’s holy days, Baptism of the Lord Sunday, which is next week, and Transfiguration Day, which is on March 2nd, will bookend the series. We’ll be using the versions of those stories from Luke’s Gospel. Luke was a brilliant author, and he wrote these particular stories so that they “talk” to one another in illuminating ways. One of their common elements is prayer. They show us what happens when Jesus prays.
From Luke’s story of Jesus’ baptism: “And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit descended on him…” (3:21-22).
From the transfiguration: “Jesus…went up onto a mountain to pray. As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightening” (9:28-29).
When Jesus prays, God shows up.
When Jesus prays, a channel is created between heaven and earth, a channel through which love and power flow.
When Jesus prays, we look at him and see our destiny as people who pray in his name and through his Spirit. We see what it means for us to be the Body of Christ, continuing his praying life here and now through our own prayers.
In between those opening and closing movements of the series, I’m going to guide us through one of my favorite psalms, Psalm 16. It’s only got 11 verses, so we’re going to take just a verse or two at a time and dig deep. Of course, as a psalm, it’s a prayer in and of itself, a I have found it to also be a helpful teaching tool about prayer; it covers a lot of ground very concisely and contains a lot of the essentials in simple terms. The final verse of Psalm 16 says this: “You show me the path of life. / In your presence there is fullness of joy. / In your right hand are pleasures forevermore.” Life, joy, and pleasure because of the nearness of God! That’s what prayer is about and makes possible. It’s also exactly what’s on display when Jesus prays after his baptism and before his transfiguration. He prays and God reaches out to him as the beloved child that he is. He prays and he begins shining like the sun.
I always try to remind myself that Jesus prayed the Psalms. They were his prayerbook. We should try to imagine what he felt and imagined and learned as he prayed them. More than that, we can trust that when we pray them, he is there praying them with us. The Psalms provide a special situation where our prayers, Jesus’ prayers, and the prayers of all God’s people coincide.
Our scripture for this morning is Psalm 147, and Jesus would’ve prayed that one, too. Psalm 147 is song of praise – a Hallelujah Psalm, named after its first and last word, Hallelujah, which means “praise the Lord!” Reasons for why God is worthy of prays are strung like beads between those hallelujahs. Did you notice the verbs? When it comes to the hurting, God rebuilds, gathers, heals, bandages, helps. When it comes to creation, God covers, prepares, causes to grow, and provides. When it comes to the community, God strengthens, blesses, makes peace, and satisfies. You can imagine Jesus reading this Psalm and thinking, if this is what God does, then this is what I will do.
How does God do these things? “He sends his command throughout all the earth,” says verse 15 of Psalm 147. “His word runs swiftly.”
His word runs swiftly. What a great phrase. The word that was there in the beginning, speaking all creation into existence. The word that has sustained creation ever since. The word that came in a special way as Torah to the Israelite tribes. The Word that took on flesh in Jesus Christ. That same powerful word that orders creation and makes the seasons come and go; that same word that scatters snow and frost and hailstones and later melts them into flowing rivers; that word which reaches out to name the stars and reaches down to heal the brokenhearted – it runs swiftly to us, to meet us and transform us when we pray.
A moment ago, I said that when Jesus prays, we see our destiny as people who pray in his name and through his Spirit. Let me be more straightforward: Our prayers, and the fruits of our prayers, should really not be all that different from his.
There is a theological term that’s relevant here called theosis. It’s a central belief in the Eastern Orthodox Christian world. Theosis means becoming like God, sharing in God’s life and God’s nature by becoming more and more unified with God. Those who write about theosis say that we become like God through prayer, by abiding in Christ. If you were here when I preached on John Wesley’s teachings about Christian perfection, you have a foundation for understanding this in our own tradition. Because Jesus has given us his Holy Spirit, we can become more like him every day. We can think his thoughts, feel his feelings, speak his words, do what he does. Many of the earliest Christian writers used to repeat the saying, “God became human so that humans might become God.” One of them, St Irenaeus, put it like this: “The glory of God is a human being fully alive.”
Theosis.
God wants us to be our fullest, best, most beautiful selves by allowing the Word to become flesh in us. Just as Jesus, in the waters of baptism and on the mountain of transfiguration, experienced his own beloved identity while praying, just as he received the power of the Spirit for his ministry, so we can, too.
And let me tell you, our world needs people who pray.
The world needs channels between heaven and earth to open up in its homes, its neighborhoods, its workplaces, its ecosystems.
The world is stuck in patterns of belonging that exclude, in systems of power that oppress, in stories of wrongdoing that seed hatred generation to generation.
But deeper than all that people crave to know their belovedness in God’s eyes; they crave to step into their personal power as creatures who bless and heal others.
If we as a church are going to experience solidarity with the agonies and longings of our own community, then we need to pray, because prayer means paying attention.
If we are going experience the abundance of God’s resources in what can often feel like a fragile material situation, then we need to pray, because prayer means trusting that our daily bread will always come.
If we are going to be a community where wrongs are confessed, labels are dissolved, and divisions are overcome, then we need to pray, because in prayer we meet the God who releases us from shame and debt, who forgives us, and calls us to forgive others.
And if we are going to create space for new generations to come to know the love of God, we need to pray, because in prayer we meet the God who is living in the today and not stuck in the past, whose mercies are new every day; a God who helps us let go of what no longer serves the coming of his kingdom by praying, Your kingdom come.
Now, a lot of the language I just used echoes the Lord’s Prayer, and any extended teaching on prayer would be incomplete without those words that Jesus taught his disciples. Since I’m not going to deal with the Lord’s Prayer directly in this series, I’m instead going to have us pray it in worship in some versions different than the King James English that we’re used to. I’m not out to be a troublemaker. There’s something undeniably good about having a prayer so deeply inscribed in your heart and memory that you can call upon anywhere and anytime, that it becomes a living prayer, part of the fiber of your being.
But there’s also something healthy about doing a familiar thing in an unfamiliar way so as to focus on it freshly and explore the essence of what’s really there. Today, we had the prayer as it appears in the First Nations’ Version of the New Testament, a recent translation prepared by indigenous scholars from around the country. Jesus taught the “Our father” to the disciples in his everyday language, Aramaic, and I think it’s powerful to hear how the prayer can be said in the everyday language of people alive now. That’s really what this whole series will be about: Helping you – helping us –present ourselves to God just as we are so that he can transfigure us into more than we ever thought we could be, for the sake of others.
But here’s one thing I will point out about the Lord’s Prayer: It shows up later in Luke’s Gospel than it does in Matthew’s. Matthew places the teaching much earlier in Jesus’ ministry, embedding it in the Sermon on the Mount. But Luke holds it until his eleventh chapter, two chapter later than the Transfiguration. Luke has the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray after they have seen him do it day after day, after they’ve seen what his prayers make possible.
This is what’s next for First United Methodist Church of Pocatello. We’re going to ask Jesus to teach us to pray. This has to be our work; everything else we might want to do is secondary; everything else we’re called to do will flow from it.
And you know what’s wonderful?
If we ask Jesus to teach us, he will teach us.
His word runs swiftly to meet us.
I’d like to end by reading a few promises about prayer from the scriptures:
Deuteronomy 8:3: “…people do not live by bread alone; rather, we live by every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD” (NLT).
James 1:21: “…humbly receive the implanted word, which is able to save your souls” (CSB).
Colossians 3:16: “Let the word of Christ dwell richly among you, in all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another through psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing to God with gratitude in your hearts” (CSB).
Isaiah 55:10-11: “As the rain and the snow come down from heaven, / and do not return to it without watering the earth / and making it bud and flourish/ …so is my word that goes out from my mouth: / It will not return to me empty, / but will accomplish what I desire / and achieve the purpose for which I sent it” (NIV).
May God’s purposes be accomplished among us.
Lord, teach us to pray.
Amen.