I’ve been thinking about the prayers of the people that I share each Sunday. That part of the service partly acts as a foil to the message of the sermon, or as a kind of echo of the Scriptures and themes in worship. So in a way, the prayers of the people are a “fleshing out” of the community’s embrace of, and wrestling with, Scripture. Put succinctly, the prayers of the people are a wrestling with the Word of God.

With a raised voice, and with closely held prayers in our hearts, each Sunday morning we reenact the wrestling of Jacob with the Angel of the Lord on the river bank. And like Jacob, we receive our own new names. Jacob was renamed Israel – literally “wrestles with God.” Jesus renames Simon as Cephas, or Peter, meaning the Rock.

We are renamed too; in praying to God together we are called to a new life – to embrace the new, deeper self that lies within us, and to live in a way that exhibits Christ to others. We all are given a new identity in Christ. That process of receiving our new names, our new life, is played out in prayer. And we get to experience God’s abundant gift of new life together.

The scriptures speak of new life for Israel. Psalm 23 is one of deliverance from dread and fear, of taking stock of one’s life and finding oneself comforted by God’s protection. We all need to remember that God is our Shepherd, because we all feel dread at one time or another. When a 25-year-old can’t find a job in an underperforming economy, or when a 60-year-old is laid off and doesn’t know what will come next, or when a 90-year-old wonders if her life has been a good one – good to her children, good to her spouse, good to the world.

Dread, an awful feeling, tolls every so often, just when we aren’t ready for it. For the singers of the psalms, they might have been taking account of the life of Israel, of the people’s surroundings, their capabilities. The kingdom of Israel couldn’t last forever as a united people of God. People were sick and were cast off. People were poor and struggling, and they were ignored. They were sheep without a shepherd.

Healing is something we all long for. This is why I think there’s a deeper quality to prayer, something more fundamental for us than wrestling with the Word of God. It’s more existential. Some people say that our hearts are fragmented, as if made up of many strands braided together into a single, sometimes incoherent, experience.

The spiritual writer Henri Nouwen describes it as a “deep hole in your being … You will never succeed in filling that hole, because your needs are inexhaustible. You have to work around it so that gradually the abyss closes.” We have to work around the holes in our hearts, slowly filling them in at the edges. And that requires strength of an inner kind, which comes from God.

The people of Israel, the crowd at the shoreline, are lost, wondering where their God has gone, wondering why they face such struggle just to stay afloat. They fight to stay alive, let alone a people of God. Maybe they wonder: If God is truly with them, then what have they done to displease the Lord so much that they have lost God’s favor? Can they ever be restored? Can they ever be healed?

The Book of Isaiah speaks to a downcast people, and God answers them, saying: “He will feed his flock like a shepherd; he will gather the lambs in his arms, and carry them in his bosom, and gently lead the mother sheep.” That promise makes it so that we see each new day, each new minute, not as an object of concern or fear, but as an opportunity for growth and grace and joy. We will be pursued by only and surely goodness and mercy all of our days, and nothing else. It’s in this spirit that Mary Oliver writes her poem:

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering:
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Our prayer with God can turn us from despair to hopefulness. Prayer, in its deeper meaning, is the moment when we’re aware that our hearts are calling out to God, and that occasional, fleeting, spectacular suspicion that God knows our joys and our hurts, and God cradles our hearts, never to let go.

I’ve been with you a year, but I feel like I don’t know you very well yet. I’ve met with some of you, but I don’t know what you need prayer for. I don’t know who among you is jealous of a friend’s retirement from work, I don’t know whose grandchildren are having trouble in school, or whose daughter experienced a miscarriage, and I don’t know who among you needs my help as a pastor.

But I want to; I want to be able to hold you in my heart, mirroring the way Christ perfectly bears us all in his, that you would see and feel and know the depth of God’s love for you. I want to hear your burdens, and I want you to feel secure in the faith that God will never leave you nor forsake you, no matter who you are or where your walk has taken you.

Moreover I want you to know me. I want you to know how I’m growing with God and how I’m not growing with God. I want you to know that I share with you in this gift of grace and mercy. And I want you to pray for me. I want you to remember over the week that I need your guidance, your patience, your help, and your compassion. And I think the best way for that to happen is if you pray for me. So this week, will you pray for me, as I pray for you? I pray you will. Amen.