Texts: Luke 11: 1-4; Colossians 3: 16; Romans 8: 26
“Different Ways to Pray”
One of the strange things about the task of preaching (and there are many strange things about it) is how to begin again after falling out of a regular rhythm. It feels a little like being in the merge lane of a highway, accelerating to get into the flow of traffic, all the while hoping not to crash. There are questions to be asked: what would be helpful to hear from the pulpit, how much does anyone want to hear about what we’ve been doing the past few weeks, what’s the pulse of the community right now, what’s going on in the world that demands a response? I don’t have definitive answers to any of those questions, but I thought I’d begin simply by saying that while it’s lovely to have some time away, it’s also good to return to this community, which grounds me in a personal way, but also helps to press me along in the journey of faith. I don’t know if you realize it, but those of us who lead are every bit as much in process as anyone else, and this community continues to shape and challenge me in profound ways. That’s simply a way of saying thank you, for letting us get away for a while, but more importantly, for letting us return to your company.
We spent time with family in Maryland and Tennessee, and we had a long stretch in New Orleans, followed by visits to the Mississippi Delta, and ultimately to Kentucky, which I’ll tell you more about in a bit. But along the way, we visited what I’ve come to think of as vortexes of sound, memory, and the transmission of identity, musical sites where for decades, and sometimes much longer, people have gathered to perform songs specific to the region they’re in. I’ve come to believe that those vortexes of performance and sound are places where historical traumas can be addressed, and sometimes healed. They’re places where memory is handed from one generation to another, and where culture is not only preserved, but renewed and updated. They are, in a very real way, places of ritual expression, and in a very real way, places of prayer. There was a country market and dance hall in the mountains of Virginia. A juke joint in the Mississippi Delta. Preservation Hall in New Orleans. There was a shop in rural Louisiana where people gather on Saturday mornings to perform Cajun music. And a church of Old Regular Baptists in the hills of Kentucky, where they sing and pray in a manner I had never experienced before. It’s that encounter that I’d like to share with you today. I do so because it prompted in me a series of questions about what it means to pray, and what it means to be attuned to the life of the Spirit. There are, I suppose, important things in the world that need to be addressed, things that ought to be said from the pulpit. But today, I want to linger in a hollow of Kentucky, to see what we can learn from a community of Old Regular Baptists.
Before doing that, however, let me pause briefly on the subject of prayer. It’s a difficult topic. Even in churches, where you might expect to find some consensus on the matter, it can be contentious, and confusing. Some do it with great ease and familiarity, while others find it baffling and strange. It’s prone to misuse and abuse, frequently used as a tool of manipulation and will to power. It’s often turned into a spectacle, or used to indulge in magical thinking, where external events can be altered through focused thought. Sometimes it involves words, and sometimes it does not. Sometimes it takes the form of an address, and sometimes it feels closer to losing your conscious self in an immersive experience. Sometimes it provokes ecstatic bodily responses like euphoria, and sometimes no discernable feeling is present. Sometimes it’s easy to pray, and sometimes it’s the hardest thing in the world to do.
If it’s ever felt like that to you, if you’ve ever felt like a fraud when you’ve attempted to pray, you’re not alone. If a panicky voice somewhere deep inside you has ever erupted when you’ve bowed your head in prayer, saying, “What are you doing? Do you actually believe this – you’re not alone. If you’ve ever struggled to discern what it is you’re doing when you attempt to pray, ifyou attempt to pray, well, you’re not alone. I share that struggle at times, and I’m betting those sitting around you today have felt the same. And if you simply don’t do it, because you can’t or don’t wish to, well, you’re not alone there either.
That’s why we can all be grateful for that passage from Luke’s Gospel, where the disciples approach Jesus with a request: “Lord, teach us to pray.” You see, they don’t know how to do it either. It’s encouraging to realize that the earliest followers of Jesus found prayer to be a difficult and confusing activity. But it’s also ironic, given that Jesus was, at the moment, actually with them. In such a presence, one might think that prayer would be a rather simple matter. And yet, they’re as baffled by the question of prayer, of communication with the divine, as anyone else.
Nor, it seems, has it been among Jesus’s top pedagogical priorities in the early days of his ministry. He’s busy healing the sick, restoring sight to the blind, helping the lame to walk, and feeding the multitudes. It’s only when he’s badgered about it that he gives them a formula by which to pray, words that we know as the Lord’s Prayer. He has to be prompted before he does it, suggesting a certain reluctance, perhaps, to be so prescriptive. John the Baptist has given his disciples some techniques, and indeed, Jesus’s disciples disclose that they simply want what John’s followers were getting.
What do you make of the fact that, prior to that moment, Jesus hadn’t bothered to offer such instruction? Is it because he was disgusted at the abuses of prayer, the pomp of prayer, the pomp and manipulation of it all, the way political leaders cloak themselves in the rhetoric of prayer to lend themselves the aura of divine authority? Jesus has some hard things to say about such practices. Maybe it’s because he knows that specific prescriptions about how to pray will limit as many people as it helps, cutting off other important avenues to God. Maybe it’s because he had been teaching them all along, every time somebody got healed, or fed, or just loved. In any event, with some prodding, he does give his disciples some words to use. They’re good words, words worth repeating, as we do Sunday by Sunday. Someday soon we’ll pause to ask about the meaning of those words. Even so, I’ve often had the sense that the words to the Lord’s Prayer are given somewhat reluctantly, as a kind of crutch, the way a teacher of struggling literature students might allow Cliff Notes into a class on Shakespeare. And I’ve wondered if the disciples’ very desire for prayer is as revealing as the prayer itself.
Here’s where my journey into the Kentucky hills becomes important, along with Paul’s beautiful words about prayer in the book of Romans: we don’t know how to pray, but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. Because here’s the thing: I think I heard those sighs in the mountains of Kentucky.
Two weeks ago today, my dad and I got up early and drove several hours from my parents’ home in Tennessee, soon crossing into Kentucky. We were headed into coal mining country, to a town called Blackey, where part of Coal Miner’s Daughterwas filmed. It was music, sound, we were searching for, a kind of singing found in Old Regular Baptist churches of that region.[1] But it was a sense of the sacred itself that drew us into those hills, far from the highways and box stores and rest stops that litter the American landscape. More important still, it was a way of praying, a way of being connected to the sacred, a way of sighing and singing in the Spirit that we were chasing. Our car descended small mountain roads, past churches and gas stations, bingo halls and baseball diamonds. To the side of the narrow road we followed there was a bridge, and on the other side we found the Mt. Olivet Old Regular Baptist Church. We went inside, where we were greeted warmly by several people at the door. We shook hands, which we soon found out was central to the Old Regulars sense of identity – extending the right hand of fellowship to one another. Throughout the course of the morning, we probably shook hands fifty more times, as people greeted us, and as we returned the greeting.
The sanctuary was devoid of any ornamentation, save for the famous image of Jesus painted by Warner Sallman, hanging on the front wall. There were no hymn books, no bulletins, no pew Bibles, and contrary to everything I knew about Baptists in the South, no one, save a preacher, carried a Bible with them. And then, a few minutes after 9:30, a voice began singing from the front of the church, a simple melodic line. At the end of the line other voices joined in, loudly, enthusiastically, repeating the line though not duplicating it, in a slow, almost dirge-like form of singing. Back and forth they went, the singer setting out a line, while the congregation joined in at some point during the line, a swelling of sound within the sanctuary that reminded me of being immersed in a powerful river – slow, thick, and unfathomably deep.
Just so you know what I’m talking about, here’s a recording of Old Regular Baptist singing. (O How Happy Are They, from Songs of the Old Regular Baptists, Smithsonian Folkways Records)
You’ll have known by now that I’m passionate about forms of music occasioned by the African diaspora – blues and jazz, gospel, soul and hip hop, all of which contain sacred, or ritual dimensions within them. What you may not have known is that I’m equally fond of old time country and mountain music, the high lonesome sounds of Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, and a good many others. The Old Regular Baptists, with their particular form of singing, are at the foundation of it all. It’s called lined-out hymnody, and it’s one of the oldest musical forms in North America, with roots stretching back to England in the early 1600’s. It’s an oral tradition, born from a time when most churchgoers weren’t literate. As musical literacy was introduced throughout the 18thand 19thcenturies, the Old Regular Baptists preserved their oral tradition, which explained the absence of printed materials from the worship space. Singing, the very sound of the human voice, is what allowed them to be tuned up in the Spirit, as they put it. There was no hellfire in the service. No threats of damnation. What I heard was something more akin to wonder, wonder at the beauty of the world and at the beauty of life, wonder at the mystery of it all. What I heard, in the songs, in the prayers, in each of the three (!) sermons that were delivered, was a form of sound that alternated between melodies, and sighs and groans that are too deep for words. Down in the old hollers of Kentucky, you can still hear it – you can still be baptized in a river of sound that is ancient and beautiful and mysterious and deeply alluring, if you only get off the more traveled routes for a little while.
Here’s something that a minister in the Old Regular Baptist wrote: “The thing about being an Old Regular Baptist is the unspeakable joy of everyday life. We Old Regular Baptists are a peculiar people. We sing differently. Some say our worship has a sad and mournful sound. But I’ve never heard a more beautiful melody, and the sound of the worship causes my heart to feel complete.”[2] What a wonderful thing to say.
So why am I telling you all this? What does an old and mostly forgotten form of singing and praying have to do with us here in Old Lyme? What do the Old Regular Baptists have to teach us about the practice of prayer? First this: I experience a sense of wonder that such places exist, and that such forms of musical expression, and of prayer, can still be found. One of the gifts that our church has given me is a reverence and wonder at the many ways that human beings access the divine – on the plains in South Dakota, bowing toward Mecca with our friends at the mosque, invoking the vodou spirits in Haiti, or, as in Kentucky, getting tuned up in the Spirit through a peculiar form of song. There’s wonder in that for me, and I hope there is for you too. Second, I admired the Old Regulars’ proud awareness of their peculiarity, their ownership of the fact that practicing the ways of Jesus is going to make us all look pretty weird sometimes, albeit in a variety of ways. We too need to remember that we’re called to be a peculiar people. Third, for all the ways I prize critical reflection, the Old Regular Baptists reminded me of how helpful it can be to lose all that self consciousness for a while, to risk making a fool of oneself, to risk the nakedness of feeling, the sheer exposure of singing, and of prayer. They simply threw themselves into the singing, into the prayer, the way a diver leaps, riding the air, before entering the deep. What courage that takes. We could all use a measure of that boldness, to risk looking and sounding that foolish. Because here’s the thing: the naked risk itself was beautiful.
Next: there is a link between prayer and our bodily senses. For the Old Regulars, that link comes in the form of sound. But our Muslim friends kneel and touch their foreheads to the ground, our Lakota friends sweat as a ceremonial offering, practitioners of vodou dance to complex rhythms, and the Orthodox burn incense. On the face of it, it seems that we in the Mainline Protestant traditions diminish the senses when we pray, closing our eyes, remaining still, for the ways our senses might distract us. But maybe we pray best when our bodies, when our senses, are actively engaged. And finally this: their singing suggests a deep truth, which is that a Spirit courses through the world, somehow animating our lives. It suggests that when we relax enough to trust it, that Spirit meets us, and flows through us, interceding for us with sighs too deep for words. I don’t know about you, but something about that draws and compels me. Something about that reassures me that for all the fumbling awkwardness, for all the reluctance that human beings so often feel, for all the misgivings and misuses of prayer, there exists a Spirit that intercedes for us, within us, with sighs too deep for words. The Old Regulars helped me to sense the presence of such a Spirit.
But you do too. Because for all of our differences, for all the ways other practices can feel instructive, we do know a little something about prayer here in Old Lyme. We shouldn’t neglect the beauty of our own music, our own words, our own expressions of prayer. There’s much that we have to be thankful for. But there’s more to it than that. Around here we believe that Jesus, God, the sacred itself, is discovered when we take care of what the Bible calls the least of these. And if that’s true, then we pray every time we make ourselves vulnerable, every time we lend a hand to those who need it, every time we accompany the undocumented, or offer sanctuary, or provide food, or any other number of ways we put ourselves out there. That’s a powerful form of prayer, a beautiful way to be tuned up in the Spirit. Some say we’re a little different. Some say we’re a little peculiar. But our worship, our ways, help my heart to feel complete. I hope the same is true for you. I give thanks for what I experienced among the Old Regular Baptists, but I give thanks for what I experience among you on a regular basis.
There’s more to say. But thankfully, there are more Sundays to say it. For now, maybe it’s best to take a cue from the Old Regular Baptists. Maybe it’s time to forget ourselves for a little while, to open ourselves in whatever way makes sense for us, and to trust that a loving and gracious Spirit will find us, helping us to pray.
[1]I learned much about the Old Regular Baptists from an article in the Oxford American, “Tuned Up in the Spirit,” by David Ramsey, Winter 2017. It was Ramsey’s article that prompted our visit to Blackey.
[2]Elwood Cornett, in the liner notes to the Smithsonian Folkways recording, Songs of the Old Regular Baptists.
