A Fourth Church Sermon by Victoria G. Curtiss

September 19, 2010 | 4:00 p.m.

History Belongs to the Intercessors

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Romans 8:18–27
1 Timothy 2:1-7

We are urged by today’s scripture to pray “for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions.” Why? “So that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity.” In other words, there is a direct relationship between our prayers, especially for leaders, and the kind of world we live in. Praying has an impact on our present and our future.

Biblical scholar Walter Wink writes that “history belongs to the intercessors.” Intercessors are people who pray to God on behalf of others, who plead for those in difficulty.

Abraham was an intercessor. When Abraham discovers that God is about to destroy the city of Sodom, Abraham haggles with God: “Suppose there are fifty righteous people within the city—will you then sweep it away and not forgive the fifty who are righteous? What about forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten?” God relents, even though ten righteous people cannot be found, and Abraham’s relatives are spared (Genesis 18:22–33).

Moses was an intercessor. While Moses was on the mountaintop with God for forty days, his people below were making a golden calf and making God angry—so angry that God told Moses, “Now let me alone, so that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them.” But Moses argued with God, “Yahweh, why should your wrath blaze out against this people of yours whom you brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand? Why let the Egyptians say, ‘Ah, it was in treachery that he brought them out, to do them death in the mountains and wipe them off the face of the earth’?” And God repented of the destruction God had been ready to bring on their heads (Exodus 32:14).

Jesus taught us to be intercessors. He taught us to pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The phrases in the Lord’s Prayer are imperative: we are ordering God to bring the kingdom near. God has commanded us to command God! God wants us to haggle for the sake of the sick, the obsessed, the weak, and to conform our lives to our intercessions.

Walter Wink says, “Intercession is spiritual defiance of what is, in the name of what God has promised” (Walter Wink, “Prayer and the Powers, Engaging the Powers). Intercessors are not satisfied with the way the world is. They can imagine a future quite different from current reality. Intercessors believe the future into being. Intercessors are those to whom God has given a hope, a vision beyond what is, and a yearning for it. History is made by those who plead and cry out to God, “Thy kingdom come . . . on earth as it is in heaven.”

Sometimes we don’t know how to pray.We listen to the evening news, turn off the TV, and shake our heads helplessly. We read the headlines with a sigh too deep for words. Our children and grandchildren seem lost. We ache inside over the poverty and the violence in the world. As Romans says, “The whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves . . . groan inwardly while we wait . . .” (Romans 8:22–23).

In such times God’s Spirit prays for us.The Holy Spirit becomes our intercessor: “The Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God” (Romans 8:26).

The Spirit intercedes for us. As Walter Wink wrote, “All this about our role as intercessors in creating history is arrogant bravado unless we recognize that it is God rather than ourselves who initiates prayer. It is God’s power, not ours, which answers the world’s needs. We are always preceded in intercession. God is always already praying within us. When we turn to pray, it is already the second step” (Engaging the Powers, p. 304). Our sighs actually are God’s sighs, groaning through us. Our yearnings are truly God’s longings being expressed through us.

Praying, in one sense, is not something we do. Praying is something God does through us. Our responsibility is to pay attention to what God is saying from within our hearts. Says Walter Wink, “We learn to pray by simply listening to the prayer already being prayed in us. And what we hear is a strange kind of help. The Spirit groans in us inarticulately, wordlessly. Our task is to bring the Spirit’s utterances to language, to consciousness, to awareness” (Engaging the Powers, p. 305).

Gail Godwin, in her novel Evensong, describes a woman who allowed the Spirit to come to consciousness. She had a niece, Nancy, who was troubled. As she interceded for Nancy, “she emptied her mind of all thoughts and pictures; she held it empty till the sudden change in it gave her the consciousness of the spreading out of the stronger will within; then she allowed that now unimportant daily mind to bear the image and memory of Nancy into its presence. She did not, in the ordinary sense, ‘pray for’ Nancy. . . . She . . . held her own thought of Nancy stable in the midst of the Omniscience” (Gail Godwin, Evensong, p. 324).

Our task is to bring our consciousness to God, to articulate God’s longings, to let the Spirit pray for us and through us.

Whether we pray or not makes a difference to God and to what God does. That is difficult to understand. There is much about prayer that we don’t understand. For instance, why is it that we can pray for something day after day, even year after year, and nothing seems to change? Surely it is God’s desire that all people live in harmony with one another and that all God’s children have enough to eat.

In his book Engaging the Powers, Walter Wink writes,

God does want people to be free to become everything God created them to be. . . . But when one race enslaves another to labor in its fields, or to dig its mines, or when children’s lives are stunted by sexual abuse or physical brutality, then what is God to do? We may pray for justice and liberation, as indeed we must, and God hears us on the very first day. But God’s ability to intervene against the freedom of these rebellious creatures is sometimes tragically restricted in ways we cannot pretend to understand. It takes much spiritual maturity to live in the tension of these two facts: God has heard our prayer, and the ‘Principalities and] Powers [of this world] are blocking God’s response. (Engaging the Powers, p. 111)

God may be limited by our freedom, for a time. In some ways, God’s ability to intervene, uninvited, is confined. We find Jesus, teaching us to pray with persistence and tenacity, hammering away in faith until a breakthrough comes.

Prayer changes what is possible for God. Prayer somehow creates an opening for God to move. And our intercessions sometimes change us, opening us to new possibilities we had not imagined. No doubt our prayers reflect back upon us a divine command to become the answer to our prayer.

When we pray, a new force field appears that before was only potential. An opening is created, permitting God to act without violating human freedom. The entire configuration changes as a result of the change of a single part. The change in even one person changes what God can thereby do in the world. Prayer helps liberate the universe from everything that frustrates God’s purpose.

Writes Wink,

Praying is rattling God’s cage and waking God up and setting God free
and giving this famished God water and this starved God food
and cutting the ropes off God’s hands
and the manacles off God’s feet
and washing the caked sweat from God’s eyes
and then watching God swell with life and vitality and energy
and following wherever God goes.
(Engaging the Powers, p. 303)

Prayer changes history. So let us pray for everyone, particularly for those in high places, opening a way for God to act.