Because here Paul admits to something I dare say many of us feel, but which we somehow expect would never have been the case with a giant of the faith of the stature of Paul the Apostle. Listen to what for me is a shocking admission: he writes, “… we do not know how to pray as we ought.”

Here he is, Paul the Apostle: by birth, a Jew; by education, a rabbi; through his zeal for adherence to the law, a Pharisee; by the grace of God, one who had an experience of the risen Christ, who called him to a mission to the Gentiles, leading him to starting churches throughout Asia Minor and Greece. But he does not know how to pray as he ought.

Maybe I shouldn’t be shocked. After all, we remember how it came to be that Jesus taught us what we now call the Lord’s Prayer. His disciples, those who followed him day in and day out, who sat at his feet for this teaching, who witnessed first-hand his healing miracles, who were even sent out by Jesus with power to teach and heal in their own right, these, his closest followers, came to Jesus one day and said to him, “Teach us to pray.” They did not know how to pray as they ought.

Maybe I shouldn’t be shocked. In an article titled “The Right Way to Pray?”, printed in today’s New York Times Magazine, the spiritual leader of the Brooklyn Tabernacle, which has become a destination for evangelicals from around the world to study prayer, is quoted as saying this about prayer: “The fact is, most pastors never learn how to really pray…. They get to the seminary, and people just assume they know how to pray. But that is not true. Prayer is a lot more than reciting words. It requires mastering both theory and technique.” Even today’s pastors, this spiritual leader embarrassingly points out, do not know how to pray as they ought.

Maybe you do not feel as if you know how to pray as you ought. If that is the case, then take heart in knowing that you are not only in company with Paul and the disciples and all those pastors, but also with me. It may be that I am the first pastor that has ever admitted from this pulpit that they did not know how to pray as they ought, but there it is. But maybe, if you have ever had difficulty in prayer, you share with me the sort of despair about prayer which comes when one hears a self-professed “expert” on prayer tell us that prayer requires “mastering both theory and technique.”

If not, then I suggest finding the Times article and reading it through. The author recounts how he visits many religious traditions inquiring about prayer and how to pray. At a synagogue, they have a young rabbi who teaches prayer through yoga; among her techniques is to encourage mourners to say their prayers while standing on their heads, thereby acknowledging in their bodies how death can turn the world upside down. He explores Catholic lay retreats on prayer, which, it is explained to him, “are like marathons; you have to train for them. Beginners usually start with a weekend. Eight-day retreats are the next step, and for those with sufficient spiritual stamina, there is a full month of exercises.” At the Brooklyn Tabernacle, workshops on prayer technique include instructions on praying standing up, to fight torpor, and prayer directly facing others, eye-to-eye, in a loud, clear voice.

But is prayer all about mastering theory and technique? Is prayer something that in effect requires of each of us attendance at workshops, is prayer something that is hard work, is prayer something on which we must struggle with the effort a high schooler puts into pre-calc? If even giants of the faith like Paul and the disciples of Jesus and yes, even our pastors, do not know how to pray as they ought, is there any hope for us?

Once again Paul knocks our socks off. This is how he prefaces his admission that we do not know how to pray as we ought; he writes, “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought.” The Spirit, God, helps us “In our weakness”. Not in our strength, not in our power, not in our vast wisdom, not in our accumulated learnings from workshops and seminars, not in our degrees from seminary, not in our prideful self-sufficiency, not when we think we have all the answers, not when we have all the energy, not when we have all the right words.

In our weakness. In our insufficiency. In our failings. In our distraction. In our aimlessness. In our feelings of abandonment and isolation. In our inability to find the right words. In our weakness and in our despair. When we sit at the bedside of a six year old being biopsied for possible cancer. When then the I-just-got-kicked-in-the-gut feeling which comes when you found out your spouse cheated on you won’t go away. When the jury comes back with the verdict you have dreaded. When the boss tells you she is sorry, but the company can no longer keep you on. When you sit at home alone and wonder if your heart will ever be whole again. It is exactly here, Paul tells us, where the Spirit helps us – in our weakness. It is not when we exult that we have “found God”, as some would put it, that we know the hope that can comfort and sustain and empower us – it is when we, in our weakness, groan, with the whole creation, “Come, Lord Jesus.”

Here is a hope that we have not when we focus on what a colleague refers to as “the idolatry of technique”, and not when we succumb to the blandishments of the self-proclaimed prayer experts; here is a hope rooted in what the great reformer Martin Luther called a “theology of the cross.” A hope that boasts not of its power and technique, but a hope that is formed amid the experience of sighing for that which is not yet, but for which we hope. For this is what we have: a hope that is not based on our mastery of prayer technique, but a hope that is based on the intercession for us of the Spirit itself. Here is the complete verse of what Paul tells the Romans: “Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.”

It may be hard for us to get our minds around this image of God and prayer, but if we can, I believe it might open up for us a new way to pray, and a new attitude about what prayer is. Traditional Christian teaching has held that prayer is concerned with raising the mind and heart to God, and there is much to recommend this approach. But there is also a long tradition within the faith that God is not just like a person “up there” somewhere, a person that through prayer we might strive to contact. In this expanded vision, we realize that God is not just “up there”, but everywhere – as the prelude reminded us, “Everything is Holy Now.” The universe is steeped in the presence of God, a presence that not only created all that is long ago, but which creates still, a sustaining Presence “in whom we live and move and have our being.”

The Hebrew, Greek and Latin words for “Spirit” can also be translated as “breath.” Just as God breathed into dust and thus breathed life into Adam, so too does God’s breath continue to animate us and all that we know. Breath is life, it is the most basic of the life processes we know. And just as our breathing usually escapes our conscious attention, so too God’s animating Spirit often escapes our daily attention as well, and so too we neglect or refuse to respond. We do not know how to pray as we ought.

And yet, Paul tells us, “that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words.” It is not, my friends, all up to you, to your finding the right words, to your being in the proper frame of mind, to your getting it right just at the moments when nothing is going right and it seems like nothing will ever go right again. God, ever present not only around you but also in you, intercedes for you with sighs too deep for words. God’s breath, inside you, making prayer for you out of your wordless sighs, your deepest moans.

A popular song by Anna Nalick is titled “Breathe”, and its refrain goes like this:

‘Cause you can’t jump the track, we’re like cars on a cable, And life’s like an hourglass, glued to the table. No one can find the rewind button, boys, So cradle you heads in your hands, And breathe . . . . just breathe, Oh breathe, just breathe.

This, for me, is the prayer beyond all prayers, beyond all technique, beyond all the guilt-inducing “oughts” which underlie so much of what passes for spiritual instruction. God is not out there somewhere, waiting for you to perfect some spiritual discipline before coming into your life and your situation, whatever it is. God is all around you, inside you, as close to you as your next breath.

So breathe, just breathe.

Amen.