Intercessory Prayer
A Lenten reflection on prayer and intercession, exploring how praying for others unites us to Christ, strengthens spiritual brotherhood, and draws us deeper into the heart of God through the Gospel story of the healing of the paralytic.
MC: Adam Hohn
Presenter: Joseph Gruber
Deacon: Rick Freedberg
Brought to you By: The Knights of Columbus
Jackson Michigan & Surrounding Area Catholic Parishes
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St Joseph Oratory: https://saintjohnjackson.org/new-here/st-joseph-the-worker-oratory/
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Morning, gentlemen. How's everybody doing today? Oh good. I didn't actually hear what most of you said, so I just assumed.
All right, anyone mind if we pray again? In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Direct, O Lord, our actions by Thy holy inspiration, and carry them on by Thy gracious assistance, that every word and work of ours may begin in Thee, and by Thee be happily ended. Amen.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Welcome. I wanted to talk to you today about prayer.
There are three practices we associate with Lent. Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. And if you want to know what the first three weeks of CORE are going to be about, it's going to be prayer, fasting, and then almsgiving.
So today is the day to jump into the topic of prayer. And as an angle to talk about it, we're going to talk about intercessory prayer, especially. Praying on behalf of someone else.
Is there weird feedback with this? Is it annoying anyone? Okay, good. Intercessory prayer. A real quick check.
No worries if you don't know who this is. Does anyone know who my daughter Gisela is? You've seen her around. She's 10 years old chronologically.
Skeletally, she's four and a half years old. And developmentally, she's like an 11 or 12 month old. She's in a wheelchair.
She's mostly deaf. She's nonverbal. And she's a sweet little terror.
And some things to know about her. She has a rare chromosomal abnormality. She has an extra chunk of her seventh chromosome.
So Down syndrome, people with Down syndrome have an extra 21st chromosome. She has an extra chunk of her seventh chromosome. And when she was one year old, for her first birthday, I decided the present that I wanted to give her was to get as many people praying on her behalf as possible.
So I sent out an email to all of my donors. I was a Catholic missionary back then. And I had a number of donors.
And I sent it out to all the people in my missionary organization. And I let them know, if you want to sign up, I'm going to send out a Novena prayer for nine days for my daughter. And expecting, you know, a few people to click on it and have, like, maybe a dozen or 20 or 50.
I think we had something like 700 people praying a Novena for my daughter for her first birthday. And I still have people coming up to me telling me that they prayed that Novena for her. And they keep praying for her every day.
There are people who I haven't seen or talked to in years who pray for my daughter every day. Let that sink in. Do you know what that makes me feel? Do you know how I look at them knowing that they pray for my daughter? Knowing that they care enough to pray for her by name.
Some of my siblings, they tell me every night they pray with their kids for my daughter. She's always listed, always listed in their list of intentions. Like, my brothers do that for me.
My brothers pray for my daughter. That's an amazing thing. It's a wondrous thing.
It is. It really does bring tears to my eyes. What does it mean that they pray for them, for my daughter? It means they desire her good.
They want to see her to become the best that she possibly can be. They want God's blessings to pour out on her. They also want my good because I'm her father and I actually do a lot of the care for my daughter.
So in praying for her, they're also praying for me. They also are desiring the exact same thing that I desire for her. I desire goodness for my daughter.
I don't know. I doubt. In a, you know, a healthy sort of, I-still-have-the-virtue-of-hope sort of way.
But I doubt that she will ever be very verbal. I don't know if she's ever going to walk. I just don't know.
But wouldn't it be glorious if she did? Wouldn't it be glorious to have a conversation with my daughter? It is a little slice of heaven already to sit next to her and hold her hand. But wouldn't it be so good to be able to do more with her? And that's what they want too. The people who are praying for my daughter, they want what I want.
Not only are they saying that they are on my daughter's team, they're saying that they're on my team. When somebody says that they're praying for my daughter, what I hear is, I am standing with you. I want to, I want what you want.
It means that I'm closer to them, even if I haven't talked to them in years. Even if I've never talked to them. I had people signing up for this novena who worked for my, the missionary organization that I was part of, who I've never talked to ever.
They just received nine emails from me with cute pictures of a one-year-old Gisella, and they still pray for her. And yet they are closer to me because they pray for her than I am to many other people. They're on my team.
So gentlemen, with intercessory prayer, who is it you are praying for? And who prays for you? I think these are really important questions. Who do you pray for? And who prays for you? Because when you're praying for someone, you're praying not just for them as an individual in a vacuum. You're praying for one of God's children.
Every time you've ever named someone in prayer, every time you've ever offered up a sacrifice on behalf of someone that you love or care for or hate, every time you've ever prayed for someone, you've been praying for one of God's children. That not only puts you on their team, that not only says that you want their good, it puts you on God's team. I think a lot of the time when we think about Lent, we think about things that we can give up, which is good.
We're going to talk about fasting next week. But I think a huge piece of Lent should be, how do I firmly establish myself on God's team? There's this anecdote about somebody asking President Lincoln whether or not he thought God was on their side. And Lincoln was like, well, I'm much more concerned that I be on his side.
An intercessory prayer is a very firm way of saying, Lord, I am on your side. I am on your team. I want what you want for this other person, for these other people.
It's actually, I don't know if this is depressing or not, what we want for the person that we're praying for or the people that we're praying for, strictly speaking, isn't what God wants. God actually wants more for them than what we want. God actually wants better things for them than we can even imagine.
He wants more glory for them. He wants more sanctity for them. He wants a greater conversion in them.
He wants greater healing for them than we could possibly understand. So we're approaching his desire. We are approaching what he wants when we pray for people.
And that's a beautiful thing, to spend our Lent approaching the heart of God, to practice desiring on behalf of other people that which God desires perfectly for them. Some people, you can tell a lot about someone, whether or not they pray for other people, and how they pray for other people. If they say, Lord, if it's not too much trouble, maybe just maybe could you see it in your great compassion to maybe do something for this person.
It's like, what kind of a God do you worship? Who do you think he is? This is the God who is mercy himself, who is love himself, who is compassion. When we pray to say, Lord, you want more for this person than I could possibly imagine. Not, not, if it's not too much trouble, Lord.
It's not too much trouble for God. There is no such thing as too much trouble for God. Literally, we can't want more for someone than what God wants for them.
The options are we can want less than or the same as, but there is no more that we can want for them than what God wants for them. More than that, when we intercede, we join the prayer of Christ, who according to Hebrews chapter 7, always lives to intercede for them. There's a question that Frank Sheed in his book, it was either theology for beginners or theology insanity, one of those two.
If you've never read either one, I recommend them both. But he asks the question, what is Jesus doing in heaven? What is Jesus doing in heaven? And according to Hebrews, he lives to make intercession for us. He is constantly pouring forth a prayer on our behalf at the throne of heaven.
We join him in that heavenly intercession. We join him too in this moment in Gethsemane, in this agony in the garden, when his heart is overwhelmed with us, concern for us, intercession for us. We join him in that moment.
Every time we intercede for someone, we are joining with Peter, James, and John, and what we are doing sleepily, our Lord is doing fully awake, fully alive. Praying for others brings us into the heart of Christ. That's what it does.
I don't know how much time you spend on intercessory prayer. I don't know what you think it does or what power it has. I will tell you, yesterday I was over at Lumen Christi High School, and I was giving a talk to Eric's class.
Eric, where are you? There you are. And I got there a few minutes early, so I stopped by the chapel. And do you know what I saw in the chapel? It was one of the most beautiful sights that you could possibly see.
Another one of the teachers was in the back corner, rosary in hand, and every single deed he was offering up for somebody. Nobody else was there. I don't know if anybody knows that this is what he does.
I don't know if this is what he does every day or every Friday. If I'm guessing right, I would guess that he's doing this every day. It's that he's pouring forth his desire for these people.
And in so doing, his desire is meeting the desire of Christ. One of the most beautiful things. Do we have hearts that are open enough, that are large enough, to comprehend another? Because that is what the heart of Christ does.
It comprehends us. It takes us in. And we are invited to participate in the love of Christ in intercession.
These are just some thoughts about intercession. What we're going to do now, we're going to spend a few minutes in silence with this passage from scripture. I want to give a couple of real quick notes, and then we're going to have time for discussion after that.
So we're going to be looking at the story of the healing of the paralytic. I just want to say this part out loud. I remember in college, we were asked the question, who are going to be your groomsmen? Who are going to be the men who stand beside you on your wedding day? Who will bear witness to the bond you make? Who will support you in the life you will create? Who are going to be your groomsmen? That was a good question.
And last night, I actually re-watched our wedding video with the kids. Mostly our four-year-old daughter was interested. The boys were men.
But I looked at the groomsmen, and I was like, these are some really awesome groomsmen. That was an awesome day. But for most of us, that question is behind us.
And the question that might be looming before us is, who is going to be our pallbearers? Which is a good question, too. As Adam observed. Yeah, who are going to be the men that are going to let you down one last time? Who are going to be the men that are going to let you down one last time? But then also this question, who are going to be the men who will lift us up in prayer, who are willing to overcome any kind of obstacle to bring us before our Lord? Who are going to be those men now? It's a good question.
Mostly, I just wanted Adam to tell that joke. Alright, so I'm going to read it aloud. We're going to open in prayer.
I'm going to read it aloud. We're going to have a few minutes of silence to just sit with the passage and to pray about this act of intercession. What was it they wanted for the man? What was it Jesus wanted for the man? What is it we want from our Lord? What is it we want on behalf of the men that we care about? Also the men that we don't like.
We should pray for our enemies. I'm just going to sneak that in there. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
Come Holy Spirit, teach us to pray. When he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door.
And he was speaking the word to them. Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him.
And after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, son, your sins are forgiven. Now some of the scribes were sitting there questioning in their hearts.
Why does this fellow speak in this way? It is blasphemy. Who can forgive sins but God alone? At once, Jesus perceived in his spirit that they were discussing these questions among themselves. And he said to them, why do you raise such questions in your hearts, which is easier to say to the paralytic, your sins are forgiven, or to say, stand up and take your mat and walk.
But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins. He said to the paralytic, I say to you, stand up, take your mat and go to your home. And he stood up and immediately took the mat and went out before all of them, so that they were all amazed and glorified God, saying, we have never seen anything like this.
Take seven-ish minutes of silence to just sit with the passage, read over it several times, talk to our Lord about it, and enjoy being in his presence. He's a pretty wonderful guy.
(Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Go Unlimited to remove this message.)
