I’ve always liked the Jewish story that there is a small group of righteous men whose presence in the world preserves it from disaster. This story is based on a passage in the Talmud which says, “The world never has less than thirty-six righteous men who receive the Divine Presence every day.” The Jewish legend around these 36 Lamed Vavniks (which just means “36ers”) or Tzadikim Nistarim (“hidden righteous ones”) has it that these persons do not know each other and often do not even know that they themselves are one of the number. If one of them learns it about himself, he never tells or admits it to anyone.
That Jewish 36 seem to sustain the world simply through their righteousness, but the Talmud’s description that they “receive the Divine Presence every day” suggests to me that we might identify their primary work as prayer. They are people who are constantly in the presence of God, speaking with Him, and perhaps, like some biblical models, interceding for the rest of us. That’s born out by the legend’s connection with an actual biblical model in Abraham’s intercession for Sodom in Genesis 18, where the presence of just 10 righteous persons would have saved that city.
That Talmudic story came to my mind today as I thought about my brief sermon text for this coming Sunday, I Thessalonians 5:16-18, three very short verses which conclude with “for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.” I’m taking, of course, verse 17, “Pray without ceasing,” as the answer to the question implied in my sermon title. When to pray? Pray continually, without ceasing.
The implication of the connection of that direction to pray without ceasing and the Talmud story is that our prayers really do matter. The time Christians spend in prayer really does make a difference to the welfare of the world and the people around us. And perhaps without those prayers the world would be much worse off than it is now.
As Karl Barth wrote about prayer he was quite concerned and said more than once that we ought not to interpret the direction to “pray without ceasing” in such a way that we end up not praying much at all. That is, he was worried that as we recognize the literal impossibility of any person constantly voicing prayers without stopping, we would then take the command of verse 17 to imply some sort of constant “attitude” or “spirit” of prayer which didn’t involve any actual spoken prayer at all.
Barth’s answer is that the call to pray without ceasing is a call for the whole community of the Church to be regularly in actual spoken prayer, and that of course means that individuals need to be regularly and daily in prayer. I think that might mean that together we are praying without ceasing, with never a moment going by but that a believer somewhere is speaking with God on behalf of us all.
To the same sort of end, the ancient Christian answer to verse 17 was to pray the “hours,” especially in monastic communities for whom a primary occupation is prayer. So the ancient rhythm of praying at several fixed times of the day was developed out of the Jewish synagogue practice of gathering for praise and prayer at fixed times each day (see Acts 3:1 for instance). So contemporary religious orders and many liturgical churches continue to practice fixed times of daily gathered prayer to at least some degree.
The question remains how those of us who live and worship in the Protestant free church tradition might best live out the direction to “pray without ceasing,” without the structure of the “hours.” Surely, as Barth maintained, it will not be by failing to pray at all, but by encouraging each other and coming together in some regular way to fulfill that commandment to pray. When to pray? All the time. Often. Every day. Several times a day. Now how will we let that happen in our lives?