Where Do You Go To My Lovely? – The Accent In Your Prayer
Acts 2:1-11
“Where do you go to my lovely, when you’re alone in your bed,
Tell me the thoughts that surround you, I want to look inside your head”
Are you old enough to remember Peter Sardsted singing those words and rocketing to the top of the charts with them? Words which reflect a desire to draw closer to someone you are trying to love.
Think of Jerusalem on that great day of Pentecost and how God must have looked down from heaven that morning and concluded that the people were ready for it. His final, great outpouring for a people he was trying to love.
The streets would have been crammed full of people from all over the known civilised world. Descending on the city to celebrate the great festival.
Imagine the excitement of families come all the way from Egypt, Libya and Rome. The colour of them all dressed up in their best clothes, pouring in from Mesopotamia and Capodocia and imagine the voices of them all, each person with their own unique accent echoing round that holy city, and wondering if God would visit his people. Wondering, in uncertain times, just what would be coming next.
Not so very different from us here this morning. For we are people from all over the place come to worship God in the one holy place. I wonder what it sounds like to God when our voices are raised in worship, prayer or coffee time hubbub. There are accents galore in this place every Sunday as rich and as varied as on that day in Jerusalem.
There’s faint west country lilt in the voices of several ladies and not so faint in one case when she starts telling her stories of Zummerzet.
The celebrant at the Eucharist still betraying her Leeds connection and the church wardens wife, different again although just down the road in Skipton. Tracey Jennings could only come from Poplar and Anne Currie remains Essex girl through and through. Be reminded about submissions to Platform magazine and spot the Sheffield origins. There’s beautiful welsh to listen to here, there’s Scottish and Irish rolled into one.
The prayer of this people rises up with richer voices still from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, the Ukraine, and Austria and German and Czech. Hear a touch of the Bahamas mixed in with the oriental. Refined Surrey takes its place alongside hop country Kentish, echoey dialects from the Midlands and news of our financial situation fresh from the fog on the Tyne.
Each voice raised here is shaped by its unique background. Each prayer uttered, comes out of our unique life experience.
It is this coming together of God’s people, loved and accepted as they are, that is the heart of Pentecost, for although so very different we are united by the one Spirit coursing through us. We may not see it as flame, we may not feel it as wind. We speak, not so much in strange tongues, but in the unique tongue with which the spirit gives us utterance and coming from the heart of who we are.
So where do you go to my lovely ..when you’re alone in your prayer…..
If you read through the Acts of the Apostles carefully, you will find there is this one thing that unites the people of this Pentecost age, the pioneers of the early church. It’s not that they jumped around waving their arms in the air, although they did that sometimes, it’s this, that everything they did was rooted in their prayer.
They appoint Stephen to his new role having devoted themselves to prayer first.
Stephen, later, prays as he dies.
Saul in his conversion experience is left hungry and thirsty and blind and he prays for the help which comes in the form of Ananias.
Peter prays in the home of Dorcas when a seeming fatal illness strikes.
The story of Cornelius and Peter is grafted out through prayer.
At each church the apostles come to in their great missionary journeys they carve out their prayers, they find prayerful people. Along the road, on board ship, by the riverside, in prison cell and law court, the unique accent of prayer is given voice.
Nowhere in the Acts of the Apostles are we given any instruction about what this prayer sounded like. The words they used or the actions. They just prayed in their own way, from their unique experience, with the accent that was given its richness by their own life’s journey.
I was badly misled about prayer. I thought you scrunched yourself up like a little hedgehog. Putting your hands together and closing your eyes and saying the prayers your Grandma told you to say, if you hoped for the gift of sixpence.
It was a bit scary, there would be thunder and lightning if I got it wrong.
Then when I joined the church choir everyone hid their heads down under the choir stalls whenever the Vicar said “Let us pray” and the naughty boy in the choir opened bars of Galaxy chocolate, purchased with the money he had been given for the church collection and passed it along the row of juniors.
You hid in your prayers, I thought, in case, heaven forbid, God caught you doing nothing but eating chocolate.
It was years before I began to see that my prayer needed to be the overflowing of my heart, with my words, in my language, from my life’s experience – not worrying if they were unworthy prayers – because if God loved me as I am , he’d be pleased with whatever I came up with, – and then when I couldn’t think of anything to say, He was even happier – because then, in silence, I could hear him as the hymn puts it ..”in accents clear and still”
“Where do you go to my lovely, when you’re alone in your prayer, tell me the thoughts that surround you so I can look inside your head”
Prayer in the spirit then is maybe not quite what we first thought. It is praying out of my unique experience of life in whatever place I find myself. I love the notion that St Matthew’s prayer life cannot be contained within the times of church services, but weaves its way through all our activities and events and characterises them and the way we offer ourselves through them, and then it gathers strengthen to radiate out into home, work and leisure. The common prayer of the Parish Communion is like a reservoir, but from here it flows into a hundred and fifty different streams, which is the unique pattern of your life and mine.
There is one more thing about this way of praying in the spirit and that is that through his life on earth, we believe Jesus Christ has touched our human condition for ever, so that when we acknowledge his Spirit to be alive and active in our day, he actually blends his voice with ours and makes himself at one with our prayer, a whisper of common holiness rising with each of our different voices and an understanding of the passion and the need behind our petitions.
So sings Peter Sardsted then ,in the final refrain of his song:
I know where you go to my lovely, when you’re alone in your prayer
I know the thoughts that surround you, for I have looked inside your head. RH 23.5.10