So here's a day dedicated to something I know next to nothing about...prayer. I'm serious. I do pray, but I'm not very sure at all I know what's going on.  

It's like driving a car, for me. I get in.  I know that turning the key in the ignition switch gets the engine started. I know pulling the gear lever so the little red line is on "R" puts it in reverse so I can back out my driveway.  I know if I put my U2 CD in the slot, the slot will eat it and start playing a song.  And I can do some other stuff: adjust mirrors, adjust seat, roll down window.  I can even replace the blue water when it runs out and my windshield's getting dirty...

But what happens under the hood...where the car really works...is a total mystery to me.  Ask me to explain internal combustion, pistons, fuel injection, carburetor, linkages...and you'll get a blank look, shrugging shoulders, and incoherant mumbling.

That's prayer for me.  I know enough to get in and drive but don't ask me about what really makes it go.  And I've been to seminary!  I've preached and taught on prayer.  People come up after worship, "that was a meaningful prayer."  At dinner parties they ask me to pray like I know how to do it better than anyone else.  But it's been, consistently, the place where I get the fewest bars in my spiritual life.

Here's where I keep getting hung up: I know that prayer is a relational communication with God...but God is mystery and infinite.  How does that work?  For example, why am I encouraged to pray in the morning that God would bless me and that I would be strength to be faithful...when God already knows everything about the coming day, including how faithful or unfaithful I will be?  Like I said, that gets me hung up.  How about you?

This is a day of prayer for Jesus - the fourth day of Holy Week the church has come to call Maundy Thursday.  It is a traveling prayer, moving from an upper room in Jerusalem to a grove on the side of the Mount of Olives.  I'm thinking that if I knew what was coming on Friday, as Jesus did, my Thursday would be filled with prayer too.  Or with running away.

Celebrating the Passover, then and now, is essentially gathering for a symbolic, participatory prayer of thanksgiving to God for making the salvation and deliverance of his people the most central act of his relationship with them.  It commemorates the final plague against the Egyptians, the one which finally freed the Hebrews from their slavery to return to their promised land. It is also a prayer of dedication - living life as a grateful and faithful response within that freedom.

For the disciples, all of whom were Jewish, Passover was an annual ritual, and well-known to their experience.  The words were unchanging.  What they pointed to was the same.  The only thing that changed, Passover to Passover, was themselves.  But as Jews even personal identity and existence had a constancy - each generation passing to the next.

But Jesus used the meal to invite his disciples into a new prayer, a new way to experience companionship with God, and loads of new mystery.  Passover, for them and for me, would never be the same again.   The Egypt deliverance story was replaced by Jesus with his new story.  Now, the work of salvation would be completed through the body broken and the blood poured out for the world. Dedicating myself to this covenant would take a new kind of prayer: a prayer borne out of completed grace which is at the same time renewing me each time I come to the Lord's table.  How does that happen?

The 'famous' prayer of Jesus occurs at a place called Gethsemane.  Here, Jesus himself experiences the tension of prayer.  He enters into companionship with God through an intense prayer of longing and questioning..."remove this cup from me."  But he acknowledges the mysterious will of God and his faithful submission to it, even without understanding..."not my will, but yours be done."  So great is his struggle with the tension of prayer...the intimate companionship with God brought together with his untouchable mystery...Jesus says his soul is made sorrowful, even to death.  Another gospel says that the sweat rolled off his face as great drops of blood as he prayed.  But despite the difficulty, being pulled apart at the seems and roiled in a tornado of emotions blowing around and against each other, Jesus entered the tension of prayer wholly and full-force.  No mystery kept him from praying for God's companionship.  No intimacy overshadowed the presence of mystery.

And so Jesus teaches you and I about prayer.  It is not an act to be figured out and mastered. Ever, at least in this life.  It think maybe even in the beyond-life as well.  Perhaps there will be "thin" times when the companionship feels strong, when we feel loved and safe.  But I know there are also "thick" times when the mystery drops like a thick fog, and all I have is a faint glimmer of trust.  I don't get it.  But, like Jesus in the garden, I shouldn't let that keep me from entering in.

When a tightrope walker slowly shuffles out over the abyss between two fixed points, she or he only worries about two things: keep moving forward, and stay in balance.  To worry about the stability or strength of the points keeping the cable in tension is a moot exercise at that point.  They just are.  You wouldn't be there if they couldn't keep the line rigid and tight.  So take the next step.  Stay in balance. 

That's prayer.  Getting out on the line kept taut by companionship and mystery.  I go, because that's where God is truly met.  Why pray at all if it were otherwise?

Gracious Lord, we no longer look for Jesus among the dead, for he is alive and has become the Lord of life, king of our hearts. Increase in our minds and hearts the riesn life we share with Christ, and help us to grow as your people toward the fulness of eternal life with you, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.