February 01, 2026
• Rev. Mindie Moore
Pursuing God’s Will Together Week 4: The Prayer for Indifference
Luke 22:39-42
FEBRUARY ANNOUNCEMENTS! (SLIDE)
Pray
This past week has been one of e-learning palooza. And at first, it was kind of cute to see my kids set up their desks in their rooms with their Teams and Zoom meetings pulled up. Rhys called it “meeting school” and did a scavenger hunt around the house for gym. Hazel had a breakout room with her friends for lunch.
But by day three, the cuteness had started to wear off. And there were competing prayers happening inside my home. You might not be surprised to learn that the desires of these prayers fell neatly on either side of generational lines.
In fact, I was initially tricked. Because my dear son came up to me, with these sweet, earnest eyes, and he said, “Mom, Hazel and I were praying together.” And I thought, “yeah, you were. Best parent ever!!”
You all know that did not last long for me. Because he quickly told me, “We have been praying to God that school will be canceled all week long.”
I let him know that I was going to pray REALLY hard in the other direction, and that their father would be joining me in that spiritual endeavor, and we would see how that all shook out. (They did go back to school on Thursday, in case you were wondering.)
We’re continuing our conversation on discernment today and we’re ARE talking about prayer, but the prayer we’re going to be talking about is pretty different than the type of prayer practiced by my family over multiple snow days. The prayer we’re focusing on comes from an ancient Ignatian concept, called (SLIDE) The Prayer for Indifference.
Ruth Haley Barton, the author of Pursuing God’s Will Together, introduces this prayer as a foundation to the practices she talks about in her book. The prayer for indifference is critical to our work of discernment, because it’s this prayer that readies our spirits to begin to try and hear from God. And while it might sound pretty simple...this prayer is anything but easy to pray. In fact, I would say that it is one of the most difficult prayers for most of us TO pray.
Now I want to address the word “indifference” really quickly. Because it sounds a bit like apathy or not caring, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. Anytime we’re trying to practice spiritual discernment, we’re in a place where we are pretty invested in the outcome. We care a LOT about what might happen or what we should do, and there’s nothing apathetic about it at all. But sometimes the degree to which we care about the outcome can actually make it really hard to be open to what God has to say to us. Our desires can become so loud that they drown out the voice of god’s spirit.
And so that’s where this prayer comes in. It’s not that we would stop HAVING our desires, but it’s that we could let ourselves desire God’s will more.
Ruth Haley Barton says about this prayer, (SLIDE) “This is a state of wide openness to God in which I am free from undue attachment to any particular outcome, and I am capable of relinquishing whatever might keep me from choosing for love. I have gotten to a place where I want God and His will more than anything—more than ego gratification, more than looking good in the eyes of others, more than personal ownership, comfort, or advantage. I want God’s will, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.” (SRp119)
Maybe you can think of a time in your life where you have prayed this prayer. Or maybe this seems almost impossible. Today we’re going to look at what is probably the clearest example we have in Scripture of someone praying this prayer. We see it in Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he was crucified. He's there with his disciples and he instructs them to be in prayer, but then he goes a bit away from them to pray by himself. And as he prays, he says, (SLIDE) “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me, yet not my will but yours be done.”
What I think is so powerful about this particular example, is that right away we see the tension of holding our desires and wanting to follow God’s will. Because Jesus clearly has a desire here—he names it. He knows what’s coming for him, he knows that crucifixion is on the horizon and he doesn’t want to go through it. It’s going to be terrible and he wants this to go any other way it could. AND. Even as he names that desire, he prays this prayer. He says—not my will, but yours, God.
The conflict Jesus faces here is important for us as we try to pray this prayer, because it reminds us that (SLIDE) Indifference involves struggle. I would say it goes against a lot of what makes us human to pray like this. When we care about something, when we are invested in the outcome, it’s not easy...I would say, it shouldn’t be easy...to choose indifference over the desired outcome. The more we care about an outcome, the greater the struggle to release that desire in order to be open to whatever God wants.
And even as I talk about this with you, I FEEL the theological tension. ESPECIALLY if we’re going to couch this conversation in THIS particular story. Because this story, this idea that God’s will involves the cross...that is deeply uncomfortable, and frankly, it can open the door to some really harmful theology about who God is and how God works. Several weeks ago, we talked about foundational beliefs for discernment and one of them was that God is good. The way we hold on to that belief can help us navigate through not only this specific theological conundrum, but so many that we face in our everyday lives.
A couple of years ago, we did a whole series about The Will of God, and it might be something you want to go back on our Midtown page and listen to these sermons. I think it’s a good companion to the topic of discernment, especially to what we’re talking about today. But as we did that series, we looked at how there are actually three aspects of God’s will. This is all based on work by Leslie Weatherhead, a British theologian who wrote a book called “The Will of God.”
He breaks it down into: (SLIDE)
God’s Intentional Will
God’s Circumstantial Will
and God’s Ultimate Will.
So to explain these a bit, let’s see how those things show up in the Jesus narrative:
God’s intentional will was not that Jesus should die. It was that people would follow him. God’s intentional will is never for anything evil to happen. I have had to remind myself of that over and over again as I’ve prayed about the events unfolding in our country. As I’ve prayed for little children in ICE detention centers. As I’ve prayed about people killed in the streets. As I’ve prayed for an end to the racism and greed that are creating systems that harm so many people. When I pray, “God let your will be done” my soul reminds me that nothing like that is God’s will. Because none of this reflects the character of who God is. And God’s intentional will is always rooted in God’s goodness and love.
But sometimes evil circumstances prevent God’s intention. And when that happens, that when God’s circumstantial will takes over. In Jesus’ case, this involved the cross. The cross became God’s way of working through human circumstances to achieve God’s ultimate will, which was that people would be reconciled to their God.
So as Jesus prays to accept God’s will, I don’t think he was praying with a belief that the cross was God’s intention, but he was praying to trust in God to work through his circumstances and take an unwanted, evil thing and use it to accomplish God’s ultimate will. Was it easy to accept God’s will as he understood it in that circumstance? Absolutely not. The different Gospel accounts of this prayer describe him being in anguish, that he prayed so hard his sweat became like drops of blood. I mean, this is a gritty, all-in, difficult prayer to pray.
Have your prayers ever felt that way? I know mine have. I'm not a person who very easily can set down what I want and just trust that God is going to work. I wish I was, but that’s not my wiring. And so if you’re like me in that way, I want you to know that just because this is a difficult prayer to pray...doesn’t mean we’re doing it wrong.
And because it's so difficult to pray this way, (SLIDE) Indifference often Requires Praying Over and Over. Receiving indifference is not something that happens easily or quickly. I would tell you that it’s probably a continual process every time we try to discern. Notice it says about Jesus that, “In his anguish he prayed more earnestly…” (v.44) Even though this is wrapped up for us in just a few verses of Scripture, it was not one prayer. He prayed over and over, “not my will, but yours be done.” And as we pray that over and over again, we open ourselves up to God creating indifference within us. Because it takes that work of God’s spirit. We don’t get to indifference quickly or on our own.
Some of you may know Kent Millard, who was the senior pastor at St. Luke’s before Pastor Rob. After he retired as senior pastor here, he served several interim appointments in churches around the country. One was in Minneapolis, a large downtown United Methodist Church, where he was sent to help prepare this church to receive a new senior pastor. And he walked into an incredibly tense moment of discernment. This church was locked in conflict about worship times and it was Kent’s job to get them to a better place before a new pastor came.
Now, if you’ve been around a church before, or any group of people at all, you know that this conflict wasn’t JUST about worship times. It was also about parking and kid’s ministry, and a bunch of other programmatic elements. And under all those logistics, there were relational division, hostility between people who went to the different services. It was honestly starting to tear the church apart.
When Kent met with the church board he asked them to consider “What does God want?” So they spent time together praying about that, and ultimately ended up feeling the direction to send out a congregational survey...a survey that ended up almost evenly split on the six different options for a way forward. So, they came back again, and Kent once again invited them to pray, “God, what do you want for our church?”
As they continued that practice of prayer, a new sort of openness started to settle in on the board. One man had been ready to read a list of 50 names of people who would leave the church if they didn’t get what they wanted! But he said that as he kept praying this prayer of what would God want—not what would he and these 50 people want—he felt this strong nudge. That this way of going about things wouldn’t be right. That there should be more compromise and that the different services should work together so that everyone felt honored.
And as he shared that, it created this openness to compromise and following God’s leading for the board as a whole. They were able to name that their individual desires weren’t the most important thing. That maybe God was inviting them all to lay something down to get to where the Spirit was leading. So they took their process and their prayers to the whole church, this congregation that had been so embroiled in conflict, and it was almost like releasing a pressure cooker valve. There was gratitude, there was celebration, there was a new type of unity and energy in the church because they took the time to pray, over and over that God would lead them and that God’s will would be done.
As we seek for God to create this in us, this is what we find too. We find (SLIDE) freedom and courage to fully follow God. Even if it’s hard and uncomfortable and isn’t what we initially had imagined for ourselves. Ruth Haley Barton says that the Prayer for Indifference produces what she calls “interior freedom.” And it’s my very favorite way to look at this kind of prayer. Because we can use all sorts of words to describe it—surrender, submission, stuff like that. But freedom? What a powerful image for what God does in us through this prayer. What an invitation to be free from our own expectations or hang ups or egos to just let God lead us somewhere. That’s not the image of a God who forces us to follow God’s will, but it’s an image of God who invites us to be free to do just that.
Jesus experienced that interior freedom, and it allowed him to do something so hard and so brave. And while our life circumstances likely look so different than this specific example...this kind of freedom lets us do hard and brave things too. And, friends, we live in time, where I do think many of us are being called or will be called to do hard and brave things to love our neighbors well. And that’s going to take trust. It’s going to take this type of indifference to anything but God’s will. It’s going to take praying things like, “not my will, but God, your will be done.”
And here’s what I want you to know I am holding with you. We are in a moment in time, where I know we are holding both our everyday discernments and our collective discernment on who we are going to be, as a country, as people who use that word Christian. And whether it’s something really specific and individual, or something that’s bigger than us...I do think this prayer has a place in all of it. And that God accompanies us on all of it. It might feel strange to let some things matter in the face of a lot of heavy and unjust things, but what I believe about our God is that we have a God who can hold it all. And part of living our faith is LETTING God hold it all and bringing those things to the one who loves us so much.
We have a Prayer in our Methodist tradition that is like the Prayer for Indifference. It is called the Wesley Covenant Prayer. And as we get ready to go to the Communion Table, I want to invite us to pray this together out loud. We prayed this prayer to begin our series, the first week of January, and it feels like the perfect way to wrap us up.
(PRAYER ON SCREEN)