The Power of Plain Old Prayer

Originally published at https://unitedchurch.love/blog/power-of-prayer

I’ve always found the second chapter of Acts to be a sticky wicket, so to speak. Tongues of fire on heads. Speaking in tongues. Depending on how you grew up, this can sound like The Key to Salvation or the Banana Pants Crazy Town.

I grew up in an old-school mainline protestant denomination. Prayers were printed in the bulletin or in the hymnal. Formalized prayers, while beautiful and full of meaning when one takes the time to stop and study them, had already turned into rote mumblings for me by the time I had learned to read. I knew the creeds and prayers and confessions and the 23rd Psalm by heart before I was old enough to be confirmed. I could say them for you now, if you wanted me to. As a newly ‘saved’ tween, I sawthe predictable congregational cadence and lack of spontaneityas proof that my home church was ‘dead.’ Where was the excitement I felt, the love, the zeal, the passion? Where was the proof of the Holy Spirit?

In my late teens and early twenties, I spent time in churches that preached that they were conduits of the Holy Spirt—not quite dancing or rolling in the isles—I was still a midwestern gal after all—and all that’s a bit much for my stalwart Scandinavian upbringing. But there was a pressure to speak in tongues, or, for the more low-key of us, a ‘prayer language.’ Surely, they said, if your salvation is real, you would have the Holy Spirit, and, by the transitive property of our reading of scripture, you should be able to speak in tongues. I prayed earnestly for that gift. I knew I was ‘saved,’ knew it to my core, so where was the gift of the Holy Spirit in my life?

I prayed and prayed and I got an answer. Of course, people will argue about prayer, and argue even more about a supposedanswer to prayer. Be that as it may, what I heard that day in thestill, small voice inside of me was: You don’t need that. You can just talk to me. Which was true. I’d been doing it my whole life. I knew God, felt God speak to me; I guessed I didn’t need a translation after all. When I learned that Billy Graham himself had never spoken in tongues, that sealed the deal for me. If plain old talking was good enough for Billy Graham, it was good enough for me. 

In Acts, Luke writes that when the Holy Spirit came down 50 days after Easter (hence the word Pentecost), tongues of fire came down upon the apostles and they spoke other languages. There were people from all over visiting Jerusalem, people who spoke all manner of different languages and dialects, and they were amazed to hear people from Galilee speaking words they could understand. 

I don’t know whether what is written in Acts 2 is literal, or metaphorical, or another literary device that would have made Luke’s message clear to the first-century followers of Jesus. But I do know, that after Jesus was baptized by John, and the Holy Spirit descended on him like a dove, he taught us to come to God as if He was close to us, like a Father. He didn’t speak in fancy syntax or in a foreign or new language. Jesus said, “Our Father.”

If coming to God as a father is good enough for Jesus, and good enough for Billy Graham, then surely it’s good enough for me.