Sermon:  "Asking On Their Behalf"
Date:   June 5, 2011
Minister:  The Rev. Charles Ensley

Lesson:  John 17:1-11

Nearly every church has some prayer ritual in Sunday worship.  Oh, I don’t mean the opening prayer, or the prayer just before the sermon, or the prayer of dedication after the offering.  I mean the prayers offered by you, the congregation, on behalf of others.

In my last church in Corning, New York, and the church where I was raised in Los Alamitos, both congregations called out their concerns from the pews.  At my daughter Amy’s church in Sonoma, the deacon passes around a microphone so people may share their prayer concerns.  I’ve seen the deacon bouncing back and forth all over the church, as first a person over here has concern, then one over there, then one back over here again.  When Amy became a deacon, it was her goal to make the rounds of the congregation just once. 

The custom predating my arrival here was these blue prayer cards.  On any given Sunday, we receive about two dozen, sometimes more, rarely less.  I read the names, but due to privacy concerns do not reveal too much about the particulars of the request.  Although the circumstances are helpful to know as we ministers formulate our prayer.  Someone visiting once said, “You sure have a lot of sick people in your church.”  I told them that very few of the names read are of members, maybe three or four.  The rest are your family members, friends, neighbors, co-workers, or world concerns you lift before God in prayer.

In that sense, you are praying on their behalf.  And that is exactly what Jesus was doing in his prayer for the disciples on the last night of his life, before he departed to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray for himself.  We heard the first half of his prayer from John’s Gospel just now. 

The Gospels often report that Jesus prayed, but we are not privy to most of his prayers.  We read that he sometimes went off by himself to pray, but no Gospel writer was there to record his words.  Prior to this prayer, there was the Lord’s Prayer in response to the disciples asking him how and what to pray.  And shortly after today’s prayer, there is his own impassioned plea in the Garden of Gethsemane for the cup of suffering to be removed from him.

But this farewell prayer is offered and recorded not as a response to the disciples’ request, but in response to his impending departure and as an intercession on their behalf.  In this first portion of the prayer, Jesus’ purpose in coming to earth is reiterated:  to make God known, and to glorify God through obedience, and to gather together those the Father gave to him.  He then prays for the protection of the disciples from the world now that he will be drawn out of the world.

And if at that time Jesus prays for the protection of the disciples who followed him early in the first century, why wouldn’t we believe he prays for us who follow him in the 21st century?  There is something wonderfully comforting about Jesus praying for us.  Knowing that Jesus is motivated out of pure love, whatever his prayer be for us, we are thankful for it.  Surely, if anyone has the ear of God the Father, it is Jesus the Son.

If he prays on our behalf, so too do we ask prayers on behalf of others:  surely every Sunday here in worship as we read the blue prayer cards, but at other times during the week.  In my opening prayer with the Board of Stewards, in weekly meetings with the staff and monthly meetings with the moderators, I usually lift before God prayers for those in our congregation in special need.  A dozen people on our prayer chain receive weekly updates of those in need of prayer so they may pray on their behalf.

Do the prayers work?  Are they answered?  Only the person for whom we pray could adequately answer that question.  But this I know:  When I tell people we prayed for them, many times they tell me they could feel it.  Last Sunday, a woman who asked for prayers for a friend going through a medical crisis stopped me in the hallway after worship and profusely thanked me for our prayers the past several weeks on her friend’s behalf and gave me an update.  There is no one I know who is not happy to hear that they are being prayed for—by me, by you, by our prayer chain, by other prayer chains.  You may not know the persons whose names you hear read on Sunday or their needs; I may not know them or their needs if only a name is listed.  But God knows them, and God knows what they need.

Earlier in worship, we already prayed publicly the words “Thy will be done,” the same words Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane not long after today’s prayer in John:  “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet, not my will but yours be done.” (Luke 22:42)  In our praying—for ourselves, for others—we, too, may come to understand that what God the Father wills is what we need, even if it is not, necessarily, what we want.  And in a strange ‘this-makes-sense-if-you-follow-Jesus’ kind of way, that’s what we want.  What we want is to glorify God by following God’s will, even if the particulars of God’s will and our desires don’t match. 

All of which leads us back to Jesus asking, praying on behalf of the disciples and likewise, asking on our behalf.  We need his prayers and the Spirit’s prayers.  We need the prayers of our sisters and brothers in the faith, we need everyone’s prayers, whether we know them or not.  It is the only way that we can faithfully follow the will of God, known or to be made known to us.

Paul Sabatier in his biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, claims that a simple prayer of submission preceded Francis’ first vision and intimate connection with Christ.  His prayer was:  “Great and glorious God, and you, Lord Jesus, I pray you, shed abroad your light in the darkness of my mind . . . Be found in me, Lord, so that in all things I may act only in accordance with your holy will.”

That’s all any of us can honestly ask when we pray to God, for ourselves, or on behalf of others.