Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedez Benz? ;-)

I wonder how many of us resonated with the question I asked the children this morning, when we blew out the candles on the birthday cake. What is the difference between a wish and a prayer? Do we sometimes confuse the two, and what might be lost when we do so?

This week’s readings prompted me to reflect just how far some of our latter-day prayers have strayed from those of the early Christians. In 1971, just a few days before she died, Janis Joplin parodied the growing mash-up of Christianity and consumerism in her now classic song that begins "Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedez Benz?"

It includes the verse:

Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a night on the town?
I’m counting on you, Lord, please don’t let me down
Prove that you love me and buy the next round
Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a night on the town?

This "prove that you love me" sentiment is part and parcel of the prosperity gospel, which preaches that God will reward the faithful with financial prosperity and physical wellbeing, especially if they are good donors to their church (surprise, surprise). While churches spouting the prosperity gospel may often describe themselves as bible-based, this is in fact entirely unbiblical teaching, ignoring as it does Jesus’s call to pick up our cross and follow him through a path that will often be marked by self-denial and the outright suffering that comes with being human.

I don’t think anyone here is a practitioner of prosperity gospel prayer. Certainly, your clergy and wardens aren’t. You’ll note that when Helen sends out her annual letter asking you to consider your financial pledge for the year to come, she doesn’t assure you your commitment will lead to increased money in your pocket down the road. She’s far more likely to say "Hey, while you’re at it, would you mind volunteering on a committee or with the Building and Grounds crew as well?"

So, we all understand that prayer doesn’t mean praying for a Mercedes Benz. What do we pray for here in our pews, then? There isn’t, of course, just one answer to that. But I know we here at St. Clement’s do a lot of good praying. We pray for healing for ourselves and others, we pray for the bereaved, we give thanks for blessings received, we pray for peace on earth.

But today’s readings reminded me that even these important prayers perhaps don’t open the door wide enough to the transformation that God wants to work in the world.

"Do not remember the former things or consider the things of old," we hear in Isaiah.  "I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth; do you not perceive it?"

And in his letter to the Philippians, Paul speaks of turning away from a focus on the rewards of this world and from the structure of faith he had known. Whatever he had previously considered a gain is now a loss "because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ [the] Lord," he writes.

"For his sake," continues Paul," I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law but one that comes though faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith."

And in the gospel reading, as Mary anoints him with costly perfume, Jesus teaches that truly recognizing Christ is even more important than immediately attending to the needs of the poor. It is in first entering the heart of Christ that we will be able to serve the world with added power and humility.

Instead of primarily focussing our prayer on specific needs or requests, I wonder what it might feel like to spend  the week praying first and foremost for genuine spiritual renewal. And to pray that others on our hearts are strengthened in their faith, or come to faith in a transformative way. I wonder if these are the prayers that lead to things far greater than we can "ask or imagine."

As you know, Paul spent years travelling to far-flung towns and cities, establishing or supporting fledging Christian communities; staying with believers, praying with them, guiding and instructing them. He would have come to know people well.

But I notice that Paul’s letters - letters that he had no idea would one day be collected and considered part of holy scripture - have a different ring to them than ours might. I don’t hear in them the prayers or wishes that we might extend in our own correspondence.

We don’t hear Paul say "I pray that your leg has healed since I saw you last" or "I have been praying that Lydia’s fabric convention went as well as she hoped" or "Blessings to you on your wedding anniversary, Priscilla and Aquila," or even "I pray you’ve finally managed to get out of Philemon’s living room and found a proper gathering space, preferably one with a renovated kitchen."

None of that. Whether speaking of himself or others, Paul’s prayers aren’t for improved circumstances, but for a strong and growing faith. He prays for people to know God more fully, to become more wise in God’s ways, to stay unified in a shared faith of the Resurrection, and to proclaim the gospel boldly.

It seems to me if we truly want God to work a new thing in the world, if we truly want God’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven, these are the prayers that we should be praying. I’m not suggesting we abandon our prayers for the sick, for the impoverished, for the wellbeing of Creation or for people caught up in war. Those are important, and they help us remember our part in bringing healing and hope. But Jesus told us to be assured that God already knows these prayers that are so close to our heart.

In Luke 11, Jesus says "Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles strive after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you."

I don’t think Jesus here is promising his own version of the prosperity gospel, implying that we’ll get all we want after we have sought God’s kingdom. I think he might be suggesting that after we have first sought to welcome God into our innermost being, our needs may be met in ways we could not previously have imagined.

Perhaps we don’t aim as high as we should in our prayers because we fear God won’t find in us sufficient material to work with. How can our tired, cranky, over-scheduled flawed selves be part of God’s promised "new thing?" (Let alone those flawed and cranky neighbours we pray for!) How can faded or fractious councils, committees or communities provide the seedbed for something life-giving, wise and wonderful?

That’s the cool thing about God (well, one of the cool things). Time and time again, in scripture and in life, God shows us that transformation can come when and where we least expect it, using shop-worn materials that have been stirred up by the Spirit. We can’t always imagine what it will look like, but we know it when it happens.

Many of us, of course, have been holding the Hanney family close in our hearts this week, as we all grieve Ken’s passing on Monday evening. Like some others of you here, Ken was a stalwart in parish life even when, back in the 90s, the church was going through challenges aplenty. People had left, finances were tenuous to the extreme, and chemistry between congregation and clergy was shaky.

But those like Ken who stayed were people of strong faith, and I wonder what their private and collective prayers sounded like. Praying that they could pay the heating bill wouldn’t have come amiss. But I wonder if they also lifted their prayers higher than that, and prayed that God would do something transformative with this place. That God would fill it anew with the holy spirit of love, peace, and justice that would spill out into the community and welcome people into our doors.

When I think of some of the wise and wonderful people who were here at the time - not just the Hanneys, but the Terraces, the Boardmans, the Lynne and Gordon Graham family, Sandy Hawksworth, Joanne and Dave Graham, the Kozoris’s, Tally Keir and Deacon Elizabeth among them - I imagine that their prayers weren’t for a brand new shiny church and congregation, but for God to use what was already there to build up something in a new way. And God did.

Like a fresh sapling growing out of an old stump, God constantly creates new life from that which has gone before. Here’s another analogy for you - my grandson Jax loves building Lego models. Anyone who has been through that kind of phase with someone knows that before long, your household is awash with random bricks of various shapes and sizes that have long become separated from the model they were made for. They seem good for nothing except getting inadvertently sucked up by the vacuum cleaner.

Enter an app called Brickit. Now, you can lay out all those hundreds of random Lego pieces on the table, scan them with your phone’s camera, and the app will give you design plans for a brand-new model you can build using the pieces you have.

So if the lost Lego brick you painfully trod upon last Tuesday can be an essential piece of a new model made Wednesday, I think there is hope for all of us. What new creation might you or I be part of, I wonder?

In the spirit of embracing the new and putting it to God’s good use, just for fun I turned to an artificial intelligence app on my phone as I was starting to prepare for this sermon. I typed into it "Could you please tell me what things St. Paul prayed for in the Bible?" (I am always very polite when I use AI, just in case the robots do rise up and take over one day!) 

Within about two seconds, it offered up a list of seven major prayer categories, complete with scripture references. Paul prayed for spiritual wisdom and understanding, love and unity, spiritual strength, maturity and holiness, peace and encouragement, boldness and opportunities to proclaim the gospel, and thanksgiving for believers. Those are pretty good categories for us to emulate.

The app then said "Would you like these organized as a chart or used for a devotional or study?" And I said, "Yes, please, organize it as a devotional!"

And in two more seconds, it had created a thoughtful seven-day devotional offering a daily verse, reflection and prayer for each of those seven prayer themes.  I looked at it and said "Could you please replace the masculine language for God and use inclusive language in this devotional?" Two more seconds and it fired back to me:

Absolutely! [by now we had become friends, I think.] Here is the revised 7-day devotional with inclusive language for God and for people. I’ve carefully reworded references to God using inclusive, non-gendered terms like "God," "Holy One," or "Spirit," while still preserving the message and biblical foundation.

So I thought, why not? Let’s aim high this week. With willing hearts and the aid of this new technology, let’s focus our prayers on spiritual transformation for ourselves and for others. Because machines may now be able to write prayers, but they can’t pray. That will always be our job.

I copied the devotional into my newly updated word processing program, which now offers an AI tool that will create images on demand. I discovered it has the capacity to base the images on people in my photo library, and … sorry, St. Clement’s, I just couldn’t resist. There is a stack of these devotionals at the back, and anyone who can correctly identify the person in each image gets a birthday jujube.

Friends, this week let us seek first the kingdom of God, knowing that God already knows the hopes and needs dearest to our heart. I’ll conclude with this prayer from the baptismal service, in the hope you will carry it within you in the days to come:

Sustain us, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit.
Give us an inquiring and discerning heart,
the courage to will and to persevere,
a spirit to know and to love you,
and the gift of joy and wonder
in all your works.

Amen.