Bible reading: Romans 8:18-27.

I’ve never found it easy to pray. Monks and nuns seem to spend entire days in fasting, prayer and meditation, John Wesley rose long before dawn so he could spend several hours in prayer before his busy day of ministry, Jesus sometimes went off to isolated places so he could spend an entire night praying to his Father. But I struggle: I soon find my mind drifting, I start repeating myself (or, alternatively, running out of words), or else I simply drop off to sleep. If you want to know what a good prayer life is like, don’t look at me! – although I do try.

Yet there is so much I could be praying for. I could be caught up in rapt contemplation and joyful gratitude, thinking of God’s glory and his salvation. I could be asking the Holy Spirit to examine my soul, enabling me to seek forgiveness for sin. I could be praying for those I love or who may be finding life difficult: my family, my neighbours, all you good folk in this church. And that’s before I get to the problems which are so evident in our world: war, poverty, disease, malnutrition, the consequences of earthquake or other natural disasters … There’s certainly no shortage of raw material for prayer, especially as we have more access to news and information than any generation before us.

I wonder if St. Paul found it hard to pray? It doesn’t seem likely, does it, as he talks about his spiritual experiences, such as being “caught up into the third heaven” – whatever that may mean. Yet here in Romans he says that we are “weak” and “do not know how we ought to pray” – although that might mean “we don’t know what to pray for” rather than “we don’t have a good technique for praying”. What I suspect (and I may be quite wrong) is that Paul was writing on the one hand to Jewish Christian converts, possibly more used to formal liturgies than reflective and spontaneous prayer; and on the other to Christians from a pagan background whose experience of religion was based on appeasing and charming the Roman and Greek deities. The early Christians must have known Jesus’ response to the disciples’ plea “Teach us to pray” but may still have been working out exactly what prayer – corporate or personal – was in their new faith.

Of course there are many varieties of Christian prayer. Anglicans and Catholics seem to like formal prayer, often following set patterns from a book. Most Nonconformists, on the other hand, tend to condemn that as being dry, dusty and impersonal, and prefer prayers which are extempore or “off-the-cuff”. (However, as most of us know only too well, these can easily become rambling, repetitive and clichéd!) Some of our Pentecostal friends seem to like loud, almost aggressive, prayers which sound as if they’re trying to browbeat God into answering (please forgive me if that’s a bit of a caricature) while Catholic and Orthodox Christians may go in for contemplative, silent prayer, aided by images and icons. And any of us can simply make a list of situations and topics which concern us and quietly bring them to God – after all, he doesn’t need to be told the details as he knows about them already! I’m not convinced that any of these prayer styles or techniques is more or less acceptable to God, nor if our fervour or formality (or lack of them) actually affect his response. Surely being sincere and honest before him are what matter most.

Let’s get back to the question of “not knowing what to pray for”, which Paul makes so explicit in this passage. How do we know what to pray for? Well, I think there are several easy answers to this question. One is to recognise that God loves justice and hates inequality – so it must be right to pray for people who are suffering because of poverty or living under oppressive regimes, and for those who are working to right these wrongs. We know too that God wants all people to hear about his love and respond to it – so it must be right to pray for missionaries and evangelists who are seeking to proclaim the Gospel, often in situations where few seem to show any interest. And we can also be sure that God wants people to be healthy in body, mind and spirit. Together these must give us a good basis for our prayers.

Another good guide to our praying must surely be to seek the advice of other people and agree on the content of our prayers. This seems to be what Jesus says in Matthew 18: “Whenever two of you on earth agree about anything you pray for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven”. However we may have struggled with the promise contained in that verse, which appears to guarantee an automatic positive response from God. Must we say to ourselves, “Yes, we can agree about the object of our prayers – but we may all be wrong”? We can think we know God’s will, but it’s all too easy to be mistaken.

This brings me to the heart of what Paul says: no, we don’t always know how we should pray but, yes, the Holy Spirit comes to our aid. However it’s not entirely clear how he helps us, although I’m pretty certain that he doesn’t suddenly drop a heavenly shopping list into our minds! What we are told is that he “intercedes with sighs too deep for words”. The problem of course is to work out just what this phrase means – a phrase which one commentator says, “sticks out like a sore thumb”! Are we being led into the mystery of the Trinity, with the Holy Spirit somehow praying on our behalf to the Son and the Father – what we might call a “behind-the-scenes divine dynamic”? Or are the sighs or groans that Paul mentions part of our own human experience? What in fact is Paul trying to say? It’s not at all obvious.

Now I wouldn’t pretend to understand the internal workings of the Holy Trinity! That would be presumptuous of me and, in any case, it probably wouldn’t seem to have any relevance to real life as we know it. However what does seem to be happening with the “groans” is that we are attuning ourselves to the anguish which God himself feels as he looks at our chaotic and pain-filled world; as we pray we begin to see things with a divine perspective rather than merely a human one. Perhaps I can illustrate this by thinking about what happens if we send up a drone to take photographs: it will give us a comprehensive overview of a landscape which we can never get from ground level. In the same way we only have a very limited understanding of what’s happening in the world, whereas God’s knowledge is not only complete but even extends into the future. The Spirit may not give us a list of things to pray for, but he helps us to identify with God’s feelings. Does that sound too fanciful or “over-spiritual”? I hope not.

But there’s more. In this passage Paul is talking about all of creation, which he sees as distressed and suffering. People are suffering instead of flourishing, evil rather than righteousness seems to be rampant, even the Church is beset by unholy selfishness and bickering. Paul believes that the entire world is out of kilter, distorted and straining; it is groaning, he says, in agony, waiting desperately for Christ to return, release the tensions and bring into being a new creation of harmony, peace and freedom. The magnitude of the world’s despair can overwhelm and depress us too: we see so much need and have no idea of how to even begin praying. All we can do is cry to God for help.

And it appears that God will accept our prayers even if they don’t contain beautiful words, well-crafted phrases or eloquent language. If the sheer enormity of what we must pray for strikes us dumb, we can still pray without proper words, asking the Spirit to take our inarticulate cries and fill them with meaning. I don’t know why this kind of prayer should work, whatever “working” may mean. But I think it does help us to express our deepest yearnings and despondent helplessness to God; and, as I’ve said already, it aligns us with the pain he himself feels for creation. As one writer puts it: “When the Christian’s prayers have reached the boundary of language as a vehicle for the conveyance of thought, when such prayers become more of a heavenward sigh than a formal utterance, then the Christian may know that the inward Intercessor is fully able to convey the soul’s true desire to the Throne”. Our formless but heartfelt prayers can draw us close to God.

Everything I’ve said so far sounds pretty abstract, completely divorced from the nitty-gritty of daily life. (That, by the way, is the argument I have with monasteries and convents that are closed to the outside world). So I must say that prayer, however fervent and anguished, is not enough in itself. What it should do is prod us into action – action that may, in part, turn out to the way God answers. That’s not a way of saying that God is ineffectual or our praying is worthless, far from it. But, if you think about it, God does usually answer our prayers by human agency; and, of course, it is as our thoughts become aligned to his that we sense the urge to “do something”.

Nevertheless there are many world problems which we can do nothing to solve. These anger and frustrate us deeply, especially if they are not natural calamities but man-made situations of death, destruction and horror. When we see refugees fleeing a war zone or children maimed because a bomb has hit their house, when we see, villages buried under mud because a dam has been poorly constructed, or an overloaded coach crashing off the road because its greedy owner has put profit before safety, we cry out to God, “Why?” even though the answer is patently obvious, because there is nothing else we can do.

This has been a calamitous week in southern Europe. People have died of heat while Greece, Turkey, Italy and north Africa burned. The dire warnings of the climate change scientists and activists have come home to roost, yet the vast majority of people are still unwilling to change their behaviour. We have also seen newsreel shots of Yemeni children innocent, casualties of a forgotten war, whose legs have been blown off and lives shattered. We know too that Putin’s lust for power has once again imperilled and destroyed the Ukrainian grain supplies on which so many nations depend; for us that will mean yet another increase in the price of bread but for people scraping out a living in an African shanty-town it could mean starvation. And here in Britain we’ve heard that the number of children with no permanent home is at an all-time high.

I confess that it’s easy to move on to the next programme once the news has finished, and I think we do that because we are unable to cope with the pain and despair we have just seen. But God has to cope with it; and, as Christians who say we care for his world and its people, our proper response ought to be intense and agonised prayer, with or without words. But that’s rarely what we do; most of our prayers are perfunctory and concerned with small-scale and personal matters. The big ones are so huge that we ignore them.

This hasn’t been an easy message to prepare. That’s because it’s not easy to know exactly what Paul is saying, because it’s hard to relate to ordinary life, and also because – as I said at the start – it goes way beyond my normal experience of prayer. But perhaps I’ve complicated things too much. Perhaps all we really need to do is look at our world, allow ourselves to be moved by its woes, and cry, “O God, do something – please”.

I’d like to finish with a prayer by John Bell of the Iona Community, a Christian fellowship which, from its beginning in 1938, has always combined prayer with the harsh realities of human life.

Lord God,
teach me
the precious insignificance of prayer.
Teach me the value
of its hiddenness in my public life;
its wastefulness in the world’s eyes;
its disregard for eloquence
if my spirit can only groan.
Let my prayer be filled
with the enjoyment of you
for your name’s sake
and for none other.

Amen.