Praying in the Wrong Direction ~ July 26, 2026

A Sermon for Emmanuel Church, Dublin, NH | The Very Rev. Gideon L. K. Pollach | P12A‍

Most of us are praying in the wrong direction.

Not with the wrong words. Not with the wrong posture, or at the wrong hour, or with insufficient sincerity. The wrong direction.

We have put ourselves somewhere in the middle distance and God somewhere out past the tree line, and then we spend our lives calling across that distance, hoping the wind will carry our prayers in the right direction.

And that's backward. All of it. And this morning Paul and Jesus, working together, would like to turn us around.

Well, not around, but inward. Not behind us, but within us.

But first, before we tackle that, a little rectory update, with welcome news: there are house finches nesting on the side porch of the rectory, feeding their young and singing a wordless song of their spirits.

We did not invite them. There was no vetting process, no managing committee vote, no permitting for their ADU, the nest. They arrived, they assessed the situation, they moved in. Now they have baby finches, and we can see the edges of their yellow mouths over the top of the nest. It's adorable.

Now, they chose to build their nest over the one door we never use. Sheltered from us, but in full view of the living room window. How they worked that out, we will never know. But we have spent these weeks on one side of the screen, and they have spent it on the other side, and together, we have been watching the World Cup. And I'm fairly confident they were pulling for Spain, because they are the correct color.

Now, here is something you may not know about house finches. House finches are not from here. Every house finch in the eastern half of this great country descends from a small group of birds released from Mineola on Long Island about eighty years ago. They were being sold illegally under a much prettier name, Hollywood finches, and they were released in a hurry when the sellers heard that the heat was on. So before the shop was caught in the illegal bird trade, they freed them — a handful of exiles, onto the mean mid-island streets of Nassau County, with no map and no permission to be there.

And they spread.

They were first seen in Connecticut. Then up the Connecticut River valley, tracing the watershed upstream, until they arrived in New Hampshire in the 1980s.

They did not get back to their side of the continent. They made a home where they landed, and adapted. And now they're on the porch of the rectory.

So, there we are, all Long Islanders spending an unplanned summer together.

And here's the thing about house finches, which is also the thing about the mustard seed. The finches did not build the porch. The birds in the parable of the mustard seed did not plant the mustard seed, but they both made a home — one on the porch and one in the branches — nonetheless.

Jesus says the kingdom of heaven is like the smallest of seeds, which grows into the greatest of shrubs, and then — and this, I believe, is the whole point of the parable, the reason it exists at all — the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches. The birds contribute nothing to the growth of the plant.

The bird did not plant it, did not water it, did not worry it into being. The bird's entire vocation was to notice that the branch was there, and move in.

We do not have to build the shrub. We do not have to build the porch. We only have to move in.

So this, I think, is where our ideas about praying go wrong. Stick with me a little more.

Most of us assume that prayer is a transmission — that we are the sender, that God is the distant receiver, and that everything depends on the strength of our signal and the clarity and persistence of the message.

So we work on the signal. We polish the words. We hunt for the formula that will finally carry our prayers across that great distance. And when it doesn't feel like it carries, we conclude the failure is within us. We're not devout enough. We're not disciplined enough. We're not something enough.

But Richard Rohr puts the whole challenge in one sentence. His sentence is singular; mine is plural, for this congregation. Here is basically what he said: "We have never been separate from God, nor can we be, except in our own minds."

Except in our own minds. That is the precise location of the distance between God and us. Not in the world. Not in God. In our mind, and nowhere else.

Because we are the only creatures — not the finches on our porch, or my dog Berkeley in his crate, or the chipmunks living in our circle — we are the only creatures who can step outside our own experience and examine it.

As far as we know, the finch cannot watch herself nesting and wonder whether she is nesting adequately. She cannot compare her nest to the nest of more accomplished finches. She has never once asked whether she is doing it right — and that is not because she is holier than we are. It is because she cannot ask.

We alone enjoy the gift of self-consciousness that Adam and Eve won for us. The same self-consciousness that allowed them, for the first time, to know of their nakedness before God and creation, and, out of shame and sudden self-awareness, to hide themselves from God and separate themselves from creation.

Only we can examine our reality from within. That is the gift. And this gift of self-consciousness creates a gap.

The same awareness that lets us turn deliberately toward God is the same awareness that lets us stand back, watch ourselves turning, and grade our performance. We are the one part of creation capable of walking out of a room filled with light, and love, and God, and then complaining that the room feels empty.

Now, look, I am not asking you to become a bird. We can't, and it wouldn't be holiness if we could. The finch is in communion with God unself-consciously, because she cannot and does not refuse it. The maple and the eagle and the minnow, none of them can refuse their connection to the Creator and to the creation.

We alone can do that. And we do.

Now, human beings are offered something harder and better. We can say yes, or no, to God on purpose.

The same self-consciousness that is uniquely ours is also a fence that separates us from God and one another, and from the creation of which we are a part.

Which is why St. Paul says something today that ought to end our anxiety about prayer forever.

We do not know how to pray as we ought.

Hear it again, because it is not a rebuke. It is a release. Paul doesn't say some of you don't know how to pray. He doesn't say that he knows how to pray, and we don't. He does not say the beginners don't know how to pray. He says we. The apostle is including himself. No one in human history, except Jesus, has known how to pray as they ought — and that has never once been a problem.

Because here is what comes next: the Holy Spirit intercedes for us, with sighs too deep for words. The Holy Spirit closes the gap that we have created.

Now, the Greek here — which I'm not going to read to you — for that kind of prayer is groaning. Groaning is communication beyond words. Groaning cannot be spoken aloud. It is not eloquence. It's not liturgy. It's groaning.

And we know that sound. It's the sound a person makes when lifting something that's too heavy. It's the sound of exasperation from the chair beside the hospital bed at three in the morning. It's the sound we make when the news comes and language has not caught up with the emotions we feel. The sound we make when fear overcomes sleep, when grief captures our hearts, when our bodies fail us unexpectedly, or when our vocation outruns our direction.

And we treat it as the place where prayer breaks down.

But St. Paul says that that sound, that noise, is the Holy Spirit speaking from within us.

The groan is a sound we do not construct. It comes from underneath the part of us that watches. There is no way to groan self-consciously — the moment you try, it stops being a groan. And this is exactly why Paul trusts it, and does not trust our better sentences.

Groaning is not the failure of prayer. It is prayer, before we get our minds on it. Before we put words around it. Unself-conscious, deep, and wordless.

And notice where it comes from. It doesn't come from across the lawn. It doesn't come from past the tree line. It comes from deep inside us, where the Spirit is praying in the cellar of our own being, in a language older than vocabulary, before the mind upstairs can worry about whether we're doing it right.

The Spirit does not wait for us to become worthy of habitation. She does not arrive once our spiritual house is clean. She is already there. And she has been groaning the whole time.

Which brings me to hospitality.

Friends, God has already made a spacious home within us. The room of our spirits is framed. The door is hung. Hospitality is not construction. It is opening what has already been built and getting out of the way.

So get out of God's way. And — this is harder — get out of your own.

Jesus tells us about treasure hidden in a field, and someone who finds it and sells everything they have, for joy, to buy that field.

We have always heard this parable — or at least I have always heard this parable — one way: where I am the buyer, and God is the treasure, and my task is to want that treasure badly enough to purchase what we do not yet possess.

But what if we turn it around?

Friends, you are the field.

The treasure is already in you, buried in the ordinary soil of a life that has never looked like much, sown there long before you were consulted. You are the pearl of immeasurable price. And God is the one who found you, who sold everything — everything — for the joy of holding that ground. This is not a metaphor about our spiritual ambition. This is a description of the crucifixion.

The treasure was never hidden from us. It was hidden in us.

And this is why St. Paul ends where he ends today, in that great cascade — neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all of creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord. Jesus is not promising that God is stubborn and at a distance. Jesus is telling us there is no distance left to shout across, because nothing — nothing can separate us from a love that is already inside the house.

So this week, my invitation is: stop shouting across the lawn. Turn in, not out, and greet the one who is already there. Not with fancy words — there are no right words — but with attention.

Sit somewhere still. Let your groan be prayer. Let your sighs be enough. They are not yours anyway. They are the Spirit's, and they have been going on under your breath, and under your consciousness, for years.

Be the mustard seed, which does nothing but grow. Be the field, which does nothing but hold what was buried in it. Be the bird, who did not build one branch of the shrub but who lives there anyway, singing, completely at home in something she did not make.

The finches are not going anywhere. And neither, for at least three more days, am I.

And here's the truth of it: I do not know how to say goodbye to you as I ought. I have no words equal to what these summers have been. But Paul settled it this morning. The not-knowing is not the failure; the not-knowing is exactly the place where the Spirit takes over, and prays the thing I cannot say. So let my groaning stand in for the speech I do not have — because it's truer anyway.

My dear friends, what an incredible summer it has been. It's only 48 weeks until we get to be together again. But until then, we are connected. We are connected to God and to one another in bonds not of our own making, but God's — and not just to each other, but to all of creation. We are held together: the living to the dead, the past to the future, the beloved of God, all of creation — held by the same watershed, and connected by the same Spirit, who prays in us and intercedes for us.

So each morning, I look out at the porch and hear, in the eaves, those beautiful birds making their small, unremarkable noise, and I think: eighty years from a store in Mineola, and not one of them has ever wondered whether they belong here, or whether they are living right. They are. And so are we. And it's easier than you think — because the Holy Spirit is leading you from within.

So turn in, not out. God is at home in you already.

Just welcome it. Amen.