Shaping the Prayers of the People

The Art of Intercession

Samuel Wells, Abigail Kocher

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781467440677
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Rituales cristianos y práctica

This book offers a model of profound and accessible congregational prayer. At once inspirational and practical, it will empower and equip laypeople and clergy alike to offer heartfelt, informed, and appropriate prayers on behalf of the people of God. As Samuel Wells and Abigail Kocher say, "Interceding in public worship is a duty. This book is intended to make it a joy." Shaping the Prayers of the People begins by considering what public prayer is and offering practical guidelines for avoiding common pitfalls. It explores prayer as an integral part of worship and discusses the language we need (and don't need) to address God. Significantly, the book also provides an array of example prayers along with commentary.

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Speaking to God for the People

To be in the presence of God is humanity’s purpose and destiny. The whole Bible is concerned with humanity’s creation for, shrinking from, desertion from, restoration to, and preparation for being in the presence of God. The whole of the Christian life is training for, anticipating, longing for, practicing, and enjoying the presence of God.

The name we give to consciousness of being in the presence of God is prayer. The sense of being so united with God that we are almost in God while at the same time being so aware of God that we are deeply with God is what we call communion. While this can be experienced alone or with intimate and like-­minded companions, the principal place in which Christians expect to find it is in public worship, among those they have not specifically chosen, with others from whom they may personally have significant differences, in the rehearsing-­again for today the story of their redemption in Christ.

Consciousness of being in the presence of God evokes many kinds of dialogue. We may be overcome by awe, holiness, wonder, amazement, joy — words that we call praise, or that, in silence, we call adoration. We may become acutely conscious of our fragility, failure, foolishness, and folly, and thus eager to embark on a verbal process of repentance, confession, and seeking forgiveness, or an active process involving gestures of penance and a quest for reconciliation. We may be flooded with thanksgiving for the gift of creation and its myriad complexity; for the grace of God in Christ, in God’s utter faithfulness and wondrous love in spite of our hardheartedness and perverse estrangement, and in the resurrection promises of forgiveness and eternal life; or for all the blessings of our own lives.

But we may also find ourselves urgently aware of our own neediness, the plight of those we love and care about, and the trouble and sorrow of others whom we know only by hearsay, by news item, by stray conversation or a sense there was something deeper we could only imagine. Neediness can be bonding: a burden shared is a burden halved. There are few things more transforming than feeling your grief and sorrow has been heard, received, understood, appreciated, and delivered back to you with compassion, grace, and wisdom — even blessing. But neediness can just as easily be isolating. We’ve all edged away from a grieving, begging, or angry person because we feared saying something patronizing or clumsy that might make things worse or because we feared letting them get close might drain our emotions dry.

This book is about how human neediness and fragility may be (1) named before God (2) in public worship (3) in ways that acknowledge their rawness yet (4) affirm profound trust that they will be heard, received, and understood by God and ultimately (5) be delivered back as a blessing. These five dimensions together constitute public intercessory prayer.

To the Father in the Spirit
through the Son

What happens when we pray? Christians believe God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. All are equally God, but each plays a different role in prayer. Prayer is a conversation between the Son and the Father in which the Holy Spirit invites the believer to participate.

Christians imagine heaven as a place where the members of the Holy Trinity are surrounded by the angels and saints in glory. The Holy Spirit is constantly bringing the prayers of the angels and saints to the Son, and the Son is constantly pleading those petitions to the Father. This is the shape of prayer.

The angels and saints are not pleading on their own behalf; they are in heaven, after all; everything that was a cause of pain or distress or regret in earlier times has been transformed into blessing, and they want for nothing for themselves. So they are constantly interceding to God on our behalf. That’s why prayer is appropriately described as joining the praise of God by the angels and saints that is going on all the time.

The ministry of the Holy Spirit is, as it has always been, to make Jesus and all that God has given us in Jesus (sometimes called “his benefits”) present to us; and to make us, in all our humble and naked folly and need, but also in our faith and longing, present to Jesus. (People sometimes wonder, “Why is the Holy Spirit needed? Why can’t Jesus — who is, after all, God — simply be everywhere and always alive to our needs?” The answer is that if we believe Jesus was fully human as well as fully divine — and needed to be so in order to save us — then being fully human means being in only one place at a time: and so, after his ascension, he is in heaven and not on earth. When Jesus is present to us, for example, in the sacraments or in the reading of scripture, it is the Holy Spirit that makes him so.) The Holy Spirit’s work is to take our prayers and bring them into the Father’s heart — so that we may fundamentally know that nothing is more important to the Father than us and our salvation, now and forever. And then the Holy Spirit delivers back to us the life that comes from the heart of God — not always as we want or comprehend, but always, we trust, in the long (if not the short) term, as a blessing.

Perhaps the deepest mystery is what takes place between the Son and the Father. It is common to imagine God (maybe the Father, but perhaps more commonly a non-­Trinitarian distant bearded figure looking like a truculent Santa Claus) being vaguely aware of our prayers but being too sleepy, too absent, too busy, too idle, or even too vengeful to address them. But this is not a picture of the scriptural God. The God of the scriptures is definitively met in the agonized Jesus on the cross. We can’t look at Jesus, mocked and pierced on Calvary, and any longer retain a notion of an absent-­minded, absent-­hearted God. There is a sense in which the Son who pleads with the Father on our behalf is always the Jesus we see on the cross. Because every petition is, on closer scrutiny, a plea for salvation — for safety, for healing, for reconciliation, for communion, for blessing — for all the things Christ won on the cross. So every time we pray in the power of the Spirit — every time the Holy Spirit carries our prayer to Jesus and Jesus intercedes to the Father for us, the question for the Father is the same: “How much of your ultimate glory are you going to reveal and bestow at this present moment, and how much are you going to withhold until the last day?”

We might say, in our impatience, “Why can’t we just have it all now? Why is the Father holding anything back? Isn’t that cruel, despotic manipulation from someone who must be deriving some perverse gratification from watching on as creation groans?” It’s a perfectly understandable and reasonable question. It’s more or less the petition we pray in the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy kingdom come . . . on earth as in heaven.” But what this petition is asking for is to bring creation — time — to an end, and collapse the period between the coming of Christ and the end of all things. The fact that creation is deeply good, despite the fall, and the truth that mundane, ordinary existence is profoundly valuable and suffused with God’s glory: this is what holds the Father back, because this abiding and wondrous creation is what will be swallowed up in the final coming of the kingdom, where God will be all in all.

Jesus is not asking the Father to rescue us while dooming creation; but neither is he requesting that the creation be altered leaving us unchanged. What Jesus is asking the Father is that this relationship breakdown, this ovarian cyst, this outbreak of civil war, or this sudden bereavement may be transfigured by being made integral to the story of salvation and be so touched by the hand of providence that it may become a blessing to the world and the church and be transformed from a sign of despair into a sacrament of hope.

That is the awesome process one seeks to enter when one stands up to lead prayers in public worship.

Three Kinds of Speech

Public worship is a stylized activity. Not because it’s ritualized, arcane, staged, or artificial, but because it’s a semi-­scripted dialogue that follows certain rules that those present either know or can easily follow. There’s a sense that people recognize they are “doing something” together in the presence of God and they need to act in a way that respects the common purpose.

Those leading worship — those who speak aloud in the hearing of the whole congregation — exercise three kinds of speech. The secret of leading worship is not to mix them up. These three kinds of speech direct the attention of the people and communicate the common purpose.

(1) The first kind is speaking to God for the people. The person adopts the role portrayed in the book of Exodus (and embodied by Zechariah at the beginning of the Gospel of Luke) of the Jewish priest who enters the holy of holies in the Temple and comes face to face with God. While the members of the congregation are indeed present, the person leading speaks with a focus and intensity as if there were no one involved but him-­ or herself and God. In some traditions clergy are taught, when speaking in this mode, to spread wide their arms in a posture of “gathering” so as to indicate that they are acting as a funnel for all the people’s prayers.

There are a number of moments when one person speaks to God on behalf of the people. In many traditions the minister says one or more “collects” — which, as the name indicates, are intended to gather together the congregation’s prayers, and are accordingly often preceded by a period of silence. In most traditions the Great Thanksgiving said over the bread and the cup is spoken by the pastor alone, addressing God on the congregation’s behalf. The intercessions, sometimes known as the Prayers of the People, take their place among these other such moments when one person speaks to God on behalf of the people; but what may be unique about them is that they may be led by a layperson, either a congregation member or one of the church staff in a congregational care role.1

(2) The second kind of speech in public worship is speaking to the people for God. This is a very different role. Examples of speaking to the people on God’s behalf include giving the greeting, pronouncing the absolution after the confession of sins, reading scripture, preaching the sermon, and pronouncing the benediction. In very traditional liturgies, such as Roman Catholic masses following the tradition existing before the Second Vatican Council, the contrast is sometimes vividly portrayed by the priest turning eastwards when speaking to God for the people and westwards when speaking to the people for God. In this mode the person speaking assumes a confidence — and a freedom — that comes from trusting that the Holy Spirit, rather than the speaker, is doing the real communicating.

(3) The third way in which one person speaks in public worship is in helping people speak to (or participate with) one another — in general facilitating the process by which the members of the congregation come face to face with God and one another and enter, as participants, the mystery of God’s story and promise of salvation. How and how much this happens is largely a matter of local custom, but examples to be found in most traditions include inviting people to stand, sit, or join in prayer; introducing the confession; introducing the sharing of the peace; introducing the acclamations in the Great Thanksgiving (for example, “Let us proclaim the mystery of faith . . .”), and making the announcements.

At several points in the liturgy there can be a subtle shift as the speaker slips from one mode of speech to another. For example, at the sharing of the peace, the minister flips from speaking to the people for God (“The peace of the Lord be with you”) to helping the people participate with one another (“Let us offer one another signs of peace”). In some traditions the confusion of address involved in this uncomfortable shift is overcome by having a second minister give the “stage directions” that help the people speak to each other — for instance, “Let us confess . . . ,” “Let us share . . . ,” “Let us proclaim . . . ,” and “Let us depart . . .”

It is vitally important to understand the difference between these modes of speech, to value each one for what it alone can do, and wherever possible to avoid letting them blend into one another. Why is this so significant? Because allowing them to blend into one another is a sign that something’s wrong — perhaps seriously wrong. Here are some of the things that might be amiss.

Blending these forms of speech indicates, at best, that the person speaking lacks confidence either in the shape of the liturgy or in colleagues leading other parts of the service. When a person doing the greeting launches into a prayer for some things currently going on in church or world, it suggests that person doesn’t trust that those issues will be adequately addressed later on in the intercessions. When a preacher starts advertising an upcoming course or social event within the sermon, it implies the preacher doesn’t believe the congregation will really be listening when it comes to the announcements. When a person leading intercessions reels off a list of things for which to be thankful, it seems the intercessor doesn’t feel the thanksgiving prayers elsewhere in the service are adequate to do the job.

Blending the forms of speech, at worst, represents a manipulation of the congregation or an instrumentalizing of God. The introduction of the confession of sins is not the place for an editorial comment about particular ways in which a political party or a faction within the church has behaved or betrayed or in some way disappointed the speaker: the confession has to be something the whole congregation can wholeheartedly say, and any words that inhibit some or many members from doing so are to be studiously avoided. Likewise if the sermon or intercessions turn into a manifesto for a particular initiative in church or world (which would at best belong in the announcements), they’re being turned from an encounter with God to the promotion of an agenda. When news reporters say, “The bishop used his Easter sermon to . . . ,” they’ve misunderstood the nature of a sermon. Sermons aren’t a means to an end; if they’re truly an encounter with God, th...