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The Rev. Frank
Logue
Prayer and the Workaholic My name is Frank…and I’m a workaholic. I came by my addiction honestly enough. I was raised by workaholics and grew up to fall in love with a workaholic, to whom I have been happily married for just shy of 20 years. You see I was raised to, as much as possible, handle things myself. I will not call someone for help if I am able get a task done on my own. Yes, I am a workaholic, because I will take on too much and not ask for help if I can get away with it. The reason I connect doing what I can on my own to being a workaholic, is that this very positive self-reliant tendency makes it more difficult to be a team player. I see something that needs doing and I do it. I’m working on something and could use a hand, I try to push my way through on my own rather than asking for assistance. I want to show you what taking too much on yourself looks like. This is the Mother’s day version of what being a workaholic is like. [Show short clip from the Simpson’s of Marge Simpson taking care of a house full of family sick with the flu. She is delirious from keeping it all straight and getting everything done.] Mother’s Day may well be a day for workaholics. After all, the culture expects so much of Mommies. A stay at home Mom has high expectations and so much to do that she can’t possibly get to it all. In addition, many Mothers now have to work a full day outside the home and then come home to do all of the traditional women’s work, with all that much less time to get everything done. It makes you tired just thinking about it, and taking the whole world on your shoulders is the path to sin. Yes, being a workaholic is a sin and this is a confession. You see in Ancient Israel, the laws of the Sabbath were quite strict. Breaking the Sabbath with work came with the death penalty attached to it. And in a culture with such a strict penalty for being a workaholic, I guess it was only natural to not expect you could do things all by yourself. Jesus should have been the most self-reliant person on the planet. As God made flesh, the rules of nature needed not apply to Jesus. He could, after all, feed thousands on a hillside without sweating over a hot oven. But Jesus depended on others, especially his Father in heaven, and he taught his followers to do the same. We see other times when Jesus delegated his authority. Jesus assigned Judas Iscariot the task of keeping up with their common purse and he sent two disciples ahead to prepare for The Last Supper. Jesus did not even count on his own abilities at preaching and healing. The Gospels tell us that he entrusted this core part of his ministry to 70 others who he sent out ahead of him to preach the Good News and to heal the sick. Jesus was all about giving himself and his ministry away and this meant trusting others. Mostly, Jesus entrusted his ministry and his very life to his Father. This is the part of the story that gets a bit confusing. For we know Jesus to be a part of the Trinity and yet Jesus prays and he prays often and fervently. Jesus seems to do nothing without prayer. Why would he of all people need to pray? First, Jesus was God made man and so he had emptied himself to become human and some things were no longer possible for Jesus. For example, if he was in Galilee, he was not also in Jerusalem. Jesus was bound by time and space. Jesus had also always been connected to the Father and The Holy Spirit in ways that are mysterious to us. They are one and yet three. If that is difficult to get your mind around, that is fine. After all, a God you can fully comprehend isn’t much of a deity. Our powers of understanding, and we trust the Truth contained within the mystery of the Trinity even if we don’t fully have a handle on it. So Jesus prayed as a part of this ongoing relationship within the Trinity which we don’t fully understand. Jesus also prayed to be an example to his followers. We see this most fully on the night before he died. All of the Gospels tell of Jesus praying fervently on the night before he died. In Matthew, Mark and Luke, we hear only that Jesus’ prayed for the cup to pass from him. He did not want to die. Yet we also hear that he submitted himself to God’s will. In John, we get a deeper glimpse into Jesus’ prayer that evening. In chapter 17 of John’s Gospel, which we read part of this morning, Jesus prays on the night before he died. Our reading today started, “Jesus looked up to heaven and said.” I find those words to be the most significant words of the chapter. For they tell us that what follows is a prayer. The prayer is not written to us. Jesus is talking with his father. John who overheard, gives us not just the character of the prayer, but the character of Jesus in writing down this prayer for us. Jesus says, “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you.” In John’s Gospel, the word glory points to the cross. It is in his faithfulness to death that Jesus glorified God. In Jesus’ words in this prayer, we learn that Jesus values those who believe in him as a cherished gift from God. And in the final lines of our reading this morning Jesus prayed, And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one. He wanted us to be protected, kept safe. And most of all he wanted us to be one as he and the Father are one. This could be reduced to a prayer for Christian unity, but that is not all that is going on here. Yes, Jesus would pray for those who follow him to be one in a way that makes some sort of unity among Christian denominations an important goal. But here, Jesus is praying for our protection and for that to happen he calls us to be drawn into the relationship of love that is the very Trinity. Jesus and the Father are one in a way that goes beyond simple agreement, like or love. Jesus and the Father are one at their essence through relationship. Jesus prays for that sort of deeper relationship for us. This is Jesus’ own prayer before dying. His dying wish is for those who know him to be drawn into an abiding connection to him and his father through the power of The Holy Spirit. And Jesus has already shown us what an abiding connection to God looks like. Throughout his life, Jesus had taken regular times for prayer both public and private. Both liturgical prayers of synagogue and Temple worship and spontaneous prayers offered on various occasions. Jesus maintained his connection to God in good times and bad, in times of triumph and in the agony of the cross. He could have been the real DIY [Do It Yourself] person, the ultimate do-it-yourself man. With only a few years in which to change the world forever, Jesus should have been a workaholic. Yet, he was only accused of breaking the Sabbath to heal and for his disciples to eat. Jesus trusted his followers with his ministry and mostly he trusted his very life to his Father in heaven. Instead of being a workaholic, Jesus enabled others to minister as well. Jesus only addiction was to trusting God. So the thing I find most important about our Gospel reading this week, the thing I take away for my own week ahead, is not what Jesus prayed as much as that Jesus prayed. His life is soon to end. Jesus is in the last hours with his disciples. But instead of having an all night cram session of getting that last bit of theological information into his disciples’ heads, Jesus pauses and prays. If there is a message for Mothers in this Mothers’ Day sermon, it is that the job of being a Mom is first and foremost a task of prayer. You will never be able to fully take care of your husband and your children. There will never be enough time for all your concerns for them, so you will need to spend some of that time in prayer trusting your family to God. Praying for your family is part of the work of being a Mom and it is not in addition to your busy schedule, but might could replace some of it. That goes for the rest of us as well. I know that worry has been proven to work, because none of that stuff I waste my time worrying about ever happens. If we could just give our worry time to God and really trust him with the concerns we have, that alone could take much of the burdens off our shoulders. No matter how self-reliant you would like to be, you can’t shoulder it all on your own. You need others. We have to be able to rely on one another for help. Most of all, you need God. This was Jesus’ will for you. Jesus wanted you to find and nurture that deep, abiding connection to God. Jesus wanted it so much that he prayed for you to get that sort of relationship and then he trusted his Father in heaven to enable it to happen. Amen.
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