Sermons

I’ll bet you’ve heard someone complain that God doesn’t do anything in this broken world. He’s not fixing the wars, not relieving poverty, not freeing the prisoners, not redeeming the oppressed. Of course, you and I know that God’s been busy, but it does seem like those stories are seldom told. But who’s in a position to tell those stories?

“Teach me to pray.” It’s an issue many of us have. We want our prayers to “sound good,” not only to others, but to ourselves and of course to God. And we want our prayers to be effective – when we pray to God above, we want to make sure he hears us and responds with a positive answer. An issue I found interesting, because when the disciples asked Jesus about how to pray, he gave them a quick formulaic prayer, but then spent the the rest of the training time on that last question – how do we get God to listen?

“Life, so they say, is but a game and they’d let it slip away,” or so said Seals and Crofts. I don’t know about the game thing, but it IS true that we have a tendency to let life slip away right through our fingers. Too often, the real important stuff of life ends up taking a back seat to all the busy-ness of our lives. There is much to learn from the story of Martha and Mary.