Be Watchful and Pray

20th Sunday of Pentecost October 6, 2024

The texts for this sermon are Mark 10:33-39a, Matthew 26:31-45, and Acts 1:2-5, 13-14; 2:1-4

We begin with a conversation that took place as Jesus and his disciples are headed for Jerusalem where Jesus will be betrayed, arrested and crucified. He’s already told his disciples what to expect but James and John ask Jesus to give them special places when he comes into his kingdom. They have not heard Jesus, they believe he is going to have victory over Rome and re-establish a sovereign kingdom like the one David ruled.

When Jesus asks if they can pay the price for what they’re asking they readily assure him they can. 

Then, on the night of the last supper when Jesus says he is going to be betrayed by one of them, Peter declares he would die before denying Jesus.

Now we’re in the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus has taken these three disciples to pray. He asks them to be watchful and pray and then he goes off by himself where he engages in a cosmic struggle for his soul.  He confides to them that he is under great duress and is deeply grieved.

Yet, when he returns, he finds them sleeping.

 “Watch and pray,” he says, “so that you will not fall into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.”  Or put another way:  You need the strength prayer brings. You mean well, I know, but the flesh is weak and can override a willing spirit. Prayer fortifies that spirit to meet the challenges, the tests, you will soon face.

Jesus is sorely tempted to renege; to step back from his mission. While he prays to be released from his obligation, his mission, his prayer actually enables him to overcome this temptation.

It is prayer that brings him to his surrender:  “Not my will, but thine.”

Note too that his disciples are found sleeping both times Jesus asks them to be watchful pray. 

So in these text we have fervent, spirit-over-coming-flesh, cosmic-changing prayer and we have sleep.

Now, let’s scroll ahead. We have another story following the Gethsemane story. In this story, we are told about Prayer that brought an explosion; a corporate, communal prayer. Individuals joining together with single purpose. Gathered in obedience to Jesus’ instructions.

They probably didn’t know what to do at first, huddled together in a room; some drinking coffee, some diet pop, all munching on cookies and grapes. I envision them sharing memories of Jesus; recounting bread multiplied, storms silenced, stories and sermons that upended old theology. Then someone reminds them about Jesus’s departing promise of the Holy Spirit. Someone else recalls that Jesus said they were to pray for the Holy Spirit.

Perhaps one brave soul opened with a halting prayer; they might have said something like

Lord, we don’t know what we’re supposed to say or ask, but we want to try. Help us know what to pray.

Someone else might have voiced an affirmation like “Yeh, Lord, we need your help here.” Others joined with “Yes, please.” Then someone else joined in with another sentence prayer and then another person and then another person until all were praying at once, urgently asking God to give them the Advocate, the Helper, the Comforter whom Jesus had promised. Their whispered prayers became full-voice prayers; their hesitancy was replaced with a fervent boldness.

They didn’t know what it all meant.
They didn’t know where it would lead.
They didn’t understand, yet they prayed anyway.

They didn’t go to sleep this time. That much they did understand. 

They knew they were weak.
They recognized now they couldn’t pay the price for the right- and left-hand seats.
They couldn’t hold up under pressure.
They were cowardly even, capable of betrayal.
They knew this about themselves because they’d failed to pray in Gethsemane
and so they fell away in the face of Golgotha.
They had failed the One they esteemed more than any other.
But now?

Now, they prayed.

And God honored their obedience and faith and God rushed in on them like wind.
God breathed on them like fire. 

And their fears vanished.
Their hesitancies evaporated.
Their doubts fled.

And they were invigorated with an energy and certainty that loosened their tongues and animated their bodies. They flew out of that secluded room; out into the streets with laughter and joy and an eagerness to tell how wonderful God is: how present and vibrant and warm and quick and loving and eager for fellowship. How merciful and victorious in quashing sin and death and gifting soul-cleansing redemption.

Then Peter stood up and Peter started to explain. And when Peter finished 3,000 people said they wanted to know more. The community of believers organized themselves into clusters and met in each other’s houses and they did three things:

They listened to the teaching of the disciples.
They shared meals together. 
And they prayed.

In other words, they spent their time and energy nourishing their souls and each other and appealing to God for agency. They became good witnesses of God’s gift and faithfulness to them. They became renewed disciples who nurtured and invested that Gift and multiplied it like Jesus multiplied the loaves and fish.

In Acts 2:43 it says: Everyone was filled with awe and many wonders and miraculous signs were done. 

This story tells us that prayer and a longing for God’s Spirit are the marks of a faithful, God-guided disciple, Will a wind and tongues of fire break out today? Not likely. But is not the Spirit of God who empowered those ordinary, shy, faltering folks and turned them into confident, bold, articulate, compelling scions the same Spirit available to us today?

We might ask, how do we become like them in our day? It isn’t given to us to break out into the street to a ready crowd. We’re not going to create a church of 3,000 from one sermon. So what? What from their story can we bring into our own lives? our own community of faith? 

There is a simple but demanding answer. We first decide we really want to be God-guided people, that we really do want to feel and yield to the palpable presence of God’s Spirit. Then we each make prayer---focused, attentive---prayer part of our daily lives. We pray as we usually do for God to help us with this or that and we pray for those we love. But in addition to those prayers, we admit to God that we don’t know how to pray for what God wants. We appeal to God to inhabit our prayer, to examine us, correct us, forgive us, 

invigorate us and inspire us with the words of a new prayer, a deeper prayer, a Holy Spirit led prayer. And then we decide to live into what God’s Spirit has inspired us to be and do.

We ask ourselves do I want to be a Gethsemane person?  Or Pentecost person?

A Communal Prayer

Come, Lord Jesus. Be as an intrusive and glad presence, 

excite our expectations, disrupt our assumptions, shake 

loose our routine, and rally us with the fire and power of 

Your Holy Spirit so that we can be the kind of church 

You want us to be.