The Heart's Cry: Psalm 129

Psalm 129

While I don't necessarily like the fact that this Psalm is one that is a prayer for vengeance, I do think that it can remind us of a very important concept, and that concept is communal prayer. Communal prayer, or a prayer for and by the community, is something that we often lack within our Church families. You may disagree, but I think that the reason you disagree is because we seem to do it, but we don't actually do it. What we normally do is that someone, usually the pastor, gets up and says a prayer out loud. This prayer is usually some combination of blessing, request & praise, it may have other components that are either usual or random, but by and large that is the contents of the prayer. This prayer occurs somewhere within the confines of the worship service, it is scheduled and completed and then the worship service continues to the next line item.

I'm pretty sure that you are nodding right now, either in your head alone or in actuality. You are most likely thinking, 'yep, that's what we do, and it's all right with me.' I would like to say 'good', but alas I cannot. This is not actually a communal prayer, it is a pastoral prayer that is spoken in front of the community. I say this because these prayers usually lack any sense of community in them, we pray for individuals, we pray for the church, we may even pray for our city or country or world but we often do it in generic ways, lacking the specificity needed to say a true communal prayer.

Before I go on, I should mention that I am as guilty of giving pseudo communal prayers as much, or more so, than the next person in line. That said, here is where I think we all need to improve, in specificity and honesty. We can not hope to be the community until we are honest about the community. Honest about our successes, our challenges, and perhaps most of all, our failures. Only by recognizing how we have acted, in good and bad ways, can we begin to move into the direction that God has for us. Once we do that we should begin to reach into the community at times of prayer, the pastor is no more an expert on prayer than anyone else, so they [we] must open up the prayer of the church to those who comprise the body of said church.

[to be continued somewhere down the road]