In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. (Mark 1:36)

For the last couple of years I’ve been going to the gym on a fairly regular basis. Sometimes I’ll do some cardio type exercise that works my legs. Other times I’ll do some weight training that works my upper body. Pretty much always, though, I wind up in the spa pool. Yeah, I know. That’s really working out, right? But when you work your muscles hard you need to let them relax. It’s like when you’ve spent hours digging in the garden and your back’s aching, the idea of just soaking in a warm bath is appealing, because your muscles need down time. And what’s true of our muscles - of our body - is true for us as a whole.

Which is why I love this bit in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus goes off by himself somewhere quiet to pray. Mark’s Gospel is usually so action-packed and dynamic. People don’t just go places and do stuff in Mark’s Gospel - they usually go “immediately” or “straight away”, to an extent that everything in it can seem like a headlong dash. Even here, Jesus has spent hours the night before healing folk who’d come to Peter’s house and, when his followers find him, he’s off again to neighbouring towns to spread the good news. But here, in these few moments, there is quiet. There is peace. There is down time - time for prayer and reflection.

And we all need that. The world we live in has become very busy. It’s said we have become a 24/7 society. At every moment of every day there are people in shops buying stuff, or they’re online. There are people who work so hard at their jobs that they don’t take lunch breaks: they eat at their desks. They leave for work before their kids are awake in the morning and they don’t get back until they’re in bed. We find faster and faster ways of getting from A to B and we don’t have time to enjoy the journey. As Christians, sometimes, we get so caught up with the work of God and with the life of the church that we don’t take the time we need to pray. I remember when I was starting out as a Reader, being told of software that would help me run up a service in record time with the by-line “For the Quicker Vicar”.

But we all need down time and, especially, we need to take time to pray. If this little jewel of peace and quiet in Mark’s otherwise fast-paced Gospel tells us anything it is this: even Jesus needed down time. Even Jesus needed to pray. Why? What’s prayer for? I’d like to take a few minutes this morning thinking about what prayer is and, perhaps more importantly, what it isn’t.

Prayer isn’t about feeling small and unimportant. Sure, when we come to pray we come before God and God is so much bigger and better than we are. If all you do is think about God then you’re going to feel tiny and insignificant. You and I, we are limited. We have these tiny bodies that fail and fade as we grow older. What we can know and understand is limited by our senses and by the capacity of our brains to understand. What are we next to a God who is transcendent - who occupies all of space and time: who sees everything, knows everything and understands everything?

Yet, in Christ, God knew all our limitations. He knew our temptations and our weaknesses. The God who calls us to prayer knows all our fallibilities and all our failings and yet loves us. However small and apparently insignificant you may think you are, when we come to God in prayer we encounter a God to whom each of us is special and unique; who knows us and reminds us of who and what we are - that we are his children; made in his image. 

So what is prayer? What is it not? “O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all have Porsches. I must make amends.” There are some who seem to think that prayer is about asking God for stuff. I’ve sometimes had atheists on discussion groups saying, “Doesn’t it say in John’s Gospel that when you pray in Jesus’s name God will give you whatever you ask for? Where’s that Mercedes Benz, then?” There are also Christian groups in some parts of the world that have bought into what’s called the Prosperity Gospel - that praying to God will make you wealthy and successful. Perhaps God could have made that clearer by coming into the world in the life of a successful business tycoon with a Lear jet and a fleet of fancy yachts.

The Jesus who prayed in that quiet moment before his followers found him was probably tired - exhausted perhaps. He’d been up half the night healing people and today he was going to preach the word of God in the nearby times and villages. I’m guessing that if he was asking anything for himself it was strength to get on and do what he had to do. This is what prayer is for. We come to God and open up our hearts to him. We can bring our needs to him, sure. We can bring the things that are troubling us, the things that are wearing us down, the things that are making life hard for us. And we can lean on him and let go of them. We can find quiet and peace in the madness.

We can bring, too, our concerns for others: for people who are close to us who are going through hard times, or for folk who are caught up in the terrible things that happen in the world - war, poverty, exploitation. When we bring these people to God in prayer, we’re not reminding him about them, as if he’s somehow forgotten. God is reminding us about the most precious part of ourselves - our ability to care for others; to feel for them in their need and to want to make a difference to them. To be part of God’s answer to our own prayers.

And that is what we are here for. Unless we believe that we are called to the contemplative life, then we get up from those quiet times to live in the world; to take the love that we have found in our encounter with the God who is father to everyone and let it inform the way we think, the things we say, the things we do. We get up from those quiet times to live in the world; to take the strength and confidence we find in leaving our worries and cares with a loving God and know that we make a difference in this world with things as simple as a smile or a word of kindness when they are really needed. We get up from those quiet times to live in the world; to nurture the light of compassion and love that we rekindle in the presence of the God who put them in our hearts and try, each day, to serve God by insisting that the poorest, weakest, most easily forgotten scrap of humanity on the planet is our neighbour.

We all need down time. We all need time for prayer. We all need time to recharge our spiritual batteries at the ultimate power source - the God who knows our weaknesses, knows our limitations, knows our temptations because he came into this world in a human being like us; yet still calls us to find strength in him to be his servants - his children - and do his work in the world.

Lord we gather in prayer. Strengthen us when we are weak. Guide us when we are lost. Refresh us when we are weary. Lead us in the ways of your Son who prayed in these words.

Preached at Gretna Old parish church