A primer on praying and preaching

LOUISVILLE — Exploring the ways that preachers’ prayers impact their preaching was the task on Wednesday for the Rev. Dr. Cláudio Carvalhaes, professor of worship and practical theology at Union Theological Seminary. Carvalhaes spoke for about 90 minutes as part of the Synod of the Covenant’s monthly preaching workshop. Watch his presentation here.

Image

“What a world we’re living in! In a time of fascism, prayer is more important than ever,” Carvalhaes said. We either “want to go to the streets and fight or coil back in our beds and never leave.”

Taking in news reports from places like Gaza, which Carvalhaes called “a laboratory for cruelty,” can leave us feeling paralyzed and hopeless, he said. “We need to create opportunities for our people to do something,” he said, showing a recorded clip of a line of Buddhist monks on a 123-day prayer walk for peace. “We could do something like that. We could have a peace walk around the block every Sunday before worship,” he said.

From people in cities such as Minneapolis, we are learning the importance of group singing as resistance, he said. “St. Augustine said that singing is praying twice,” Carvalhaes said. “There is a whole theology being developed on the streets.” Our lives, he said, “are one whole prayer, and our prayer ends only with our last breath. Our spirituality comes from the breath of God, so while we’re breathing, we’re praying.”

Nearly five years ago, Carvalhaes published “Praying with Every Heart: Orienting Our Lives to the Wholeness of the World.”

“Today, I want to develop this notion of ‘praying with,’” he said. It’s a title given to him by a Buddhist friend at Union Theological Seminary.

Most Presbyterian worship services begin by calling people to worship, he noted. “We start with the belief that God is already there,” he said. “But so many other traditions believe you have to call upon God to come [to the service]. They have prayers or singing to ask God to come.”

Increasingly, Carvalhaes finds himself thinking and talking about Lex Natura, the law of nature, as it relates to worship. “We have never talked about the Earth in our theologies and in our spirituality,” he said. In our worship spaces, nature previously took a back seat. “But with climate disasters, the Earth has taken over the stage, and we [preachers] have become the supporting actors,” he said. “We have to put into the fold of our preaching and our songs the presence of the land.”

If liturgy is the work of the people, “our main mission [in ministry] is to do the work of the people who live near us,” Carvalhaes said. “From there we go out to the world, but the local community is our main call.”

Capitalism has taught us that “we are on our own” and “have the freedom to be ourselves,” he said. If all the people on Wednesday’s call were applying for the same job, the one who got hired “would be praised for the strength and power” that got that person hired, Carvalhaes said. “The rest of us, our families would tell us ‘you’re not good enough.’ The system blames us individually for what the social system can’t give to us, and we just buy into it.”

In our churches, if something happens that “takes us off the grid of living well,” such as a job loss, we may survive for a few months off our savings and our unemployment checks. After that, in an example Carvalhaes presented, we may get anxious about paying our bills, and so we go to our church for financial help. The pastor may ask the session to authorize some money to help us, but it’s not enough, and we begin to ask for prayers each week during worship, which annoys our fellow worshipers. “You can do better,” they tell us. “Why do you have to ask each week?” Eventually the pastor tells us, “Sorry. We already helped you. The session says that we don’t have enough money for everybody.”

“In this example, I am trying to show how committed we are to each other, but capitalism keeps us from going all the way to help people,” he said. “There are limits and boundaries we have clearly posted but we don’t talk about.”

When we are ‘praying with,’ he asked: what is the length of the ‘with?’ “Sooner or later, we will have to leave the church,” he said, returning to his example. “We have lost the ability to fend for ourselves.”

Early on in his ministry, Carvalhaes said he preached at a small, poor church in his native Brazil that hadn’t been served by a pastor for eight years. He thought the church might call him to serve there, but no call was offered. The session told him, “we cannot pay you what you want.”

“I had to have a whole conversation to ask them to consider me,” he said.

“I eventually went there, and it was the best ministry of my life,” he said. Three months into his time there, a deacon told him the church didn’t have the money to pay him. “Are you going to leave us?” Carvalhaes was asked. No, Carvalhaes told the man, and that good news spread quickly throughout the church.

Beginning the next week, church members sent him home every day with bags of food. Somebody would slip $5 into his jacket pocket for bus and train fare.

“To me, that was ‘praying with,’” Carvalhaes said. “My dream is for a church that will pray with me until I die, not matter what situation I’m going through … That’s the community I’m looking for. They’ll take care of me, and I will take care of them.”

He concluded his talk with thoughts on mercy and gratitude.

“We say, ‘God have mercy,’ because we have gone too far, or don’t know how to return, or we have lost all hope. The prayer is the hope we will find the God who lives in those far places as well,” Carvalhaes said. “At the end, God will be with us — either for new beginnings or a full end. It’s a scream to a God who lives outside the gates and can provide us a welcome no one else will,” such as the psalmist in Psalm 121.

Carvalhaes recounted the plight of his brother losing his job and being unable to find another one. One day he rang their mother’s doorbell. His brother had his head down when their mother opened the door. “Lift up your head. Lift up your eyes,” she told him, quoting Psalm 121. But his brother was too exhausted and began to cry. He laid his head on their mother’s shoulder. She insisted he say along with her, “I will lift my eyes up to the hills. From where will my help come?” He finally said the words, and she told him keep going. “It’s good to know your Bible,” Carvalhaes said.

“That’s where we are now. Your head might be down, but we as a church will hold your head and say, ‘lift up your eyes. Your help will come from God, who put us here to take care of you.’”

Image

“We are God’s mercy to the world,” he said. “We go to church together and we sing for and with people, even if they aren’t there. God have mercy. When I see people are praying with me, I feel there is a cloud of people praying and being with me. That’s the power of mercy.”

But if we stay in mercy too long, “there’s too much heaviness. It’s also about gratitude,” he said. We wake up and realize God has given us another day. “Be like a 5-year-old. Be grateful,” Carvalhaes suggested. “Look, mommy! Look, daddy! That’s what we need — being in awe of God and with God’s Earth.”

Developing a sense of awe can enrich our prayer life, he said. Without it, our prayers can become perfunctory and mechanical.

In Portuguese, men say “Obrigado” when they’re thankful. It’s from the same root as the word “obliged.”

“I am obligated and obliged to take care of Chip [Synod of the Covenant executive the Rev. Dr. Chip Hardwick] for giving me the opportunity to speak today,” Carvalhaes said. “It’s a layer of commitment. … Prayer will lift up mercy, and mercy will not allow our gratitude to be aloof.”

The way we understand and articulate our prayers is the way we will preach, Carvalhaes said.

“It’s the way we renew our lives, and the language we use in prayer is the language we will use in our sermons,” he said. “That’s why I’m pushing for a different vocabulary, a different grammar, for our preaching. It’s about ‘praying with.’”

The Synod of the Covenant’s monthly preaching workshops are available to frequent preachers living and working both inside and outside the bounds of the synod. The next webinar leader is the Rev. Dr. Dave Davis, the senior pastor at Nassau Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey, who will speak on “Preaching From Font to Table” from 10 a.m. through 11:30 a.m. Eastern Time on March 4. Learn more here.