Ninth Sunday after Pentecost – 29 July 2007

St Paul Lutheran Church, ABQ NM – the Rev. P. L. Holman

Genesis 19: 20-32’ Psalm 138, Colossians 2:6-19, Luke 11:1-13

“Just ask”

Of all the things we do in our daily lives, one of the least visible and often least considered is pray. I know for myself that conscious ‘sit down and think in complete sentences about those I carry on my heart’ sort of prayer is not at the top of my to-do list each day. And yet prayer is among the most powerful tools we have as Christians. It may be scheduled time with formal words, and it may be simply time taken apart from clock time praying like we breathe, without words or specific request, holding in our hearts “like broken birds in cupped hands” [Ellis Peters] all the people and concerns of our hearts. What matters is that we turn our hearts to God in prayer.

As he finishes his own time of prayer, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray – “just as John taught his disciples.” What did John teach them? I don’t know -- perhaps a formula prayer, perhaps a psalm. Certainly not the same prayer Jesus did – John didn’t have the same relationship with God the Creator, the one Jesus called father. It wasn’t the intimate “daddy/abba” relationship Jesus knew. After all, John served the God of the first covenant whose name was not mentioned lest it be profaned; John served the God of his ancestors even as he pointed to the one coming after whose sandals he wasn’t worthy to service.

 We do know what Jesus taught them: he taught them to “pray like this” then recited what we call “The Lord’s Prayer,” the Jesus Prayer. In worship we use two “official” versions, and here in Luke’s gospel for today (NRSV) we have yet another version. Each offers nuances that help us better to understand and relate to the prayer Jesus taught.  In his translation of the Bible, Eugene Peterson (THE MESSAGE) offers yet another version:

Father, reveal who you are. Set the world right. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the Devil.

In response to “teach us to pray” Jesus offers a model – pray like this: offer petitions of praise and supplication, remembering God and remembering one another. When we see this prayer through that lens it gives us grace to learn it in whatever form, trusting what matters to God is not the “right” words but the righteous heart – not what we pray but that we pray.

Lord, you’ve given us the model. Now teach us to pray.

The model of prayer Jesus offers shows us that prayer is faithful when it moves us beyond our own prejudices and frustrations and opens our hearts to seeking the mind, heart and spirit of God.  It is amazing the ways the mind and heart and spirit of God can be experienced. Many of those ways can be hard to recognize in our material-flooded corner of the world. When I was serving in Denver people would often ask, “Pastor is it okay if I pray for the Broncos to win today?” Even though that misses the mark of my focus for prayer I don’t want to discourage the practice of prayer, so I developed a positive answer: “Sure, as long as you end your prayers something like Jesus did in the garden of Gethsemane: “Nevertheless not my will but yours be done, O God.” Is it okay to pray that the tumor disappear, that the conflict in Iraq end, that the planned layoffs at Intel and Sandia Labs not happen? Sure – the act of prayer itself re-centers our trust in God, which can give us the strength we need to faithfully respond to whatever will come. Having been to Madagascar I know the power of that strength when we ask for “three square meals”….

Lord, teach us to pray….for the vision to see your ways.

Whatever version of this prayer we use, they all contain plural pronouns. Jesus reminds his followers, and us, that we are part of a greater whole. The most effective prayer arises from our participation in a faith community. We aren’t islands unto ourselves – we are part of a global community and we need each other. We strengthen and draw strength from one another. Marva Dawn, theologian and woman of worship and faith, has commented that as Christians we are responsible for loving the whole world, and we practice “by loving the people in the church.” Indeed. Our daughters were with us for the past week, and being lovers of projects they dove right into sorting through their boxes stored in the garage. They made piles for Goodwill and piles for recycling. They even saved a few treasures “to share with our children someday”– which prompted a “from your lips to God’s ears” prayer from this grandmother-in-waiting. Since they’ve been double PKs for most of their lives, the conversations invariably turned to remembering the “weirdoes” in the churches their father and I have served over the past 20+ years. [I can say that here because the girls don’t know any of you well enough to label you one way or the other.] We laughed and cried, wondering where those folks are now, and in the process realized how much we’ve learned about ourselves by being involved together in the church all these years. How true it is that the wellbeing of our own bodies, and that of this body of Christ called church, are dependent on our willingness together to seek the spirit of God in all our dealings with one another.

Lord, teach us to pray together…for the wellbeing of this faith community, and your body around the world.

Theologian Barbara Brown Taylor reflected recently on an experience of prayer she had at Mount Calvary Monastery in Santa Barbara CA. She spoke of how each day some of the very monks who did the dishes in the kitchen would don albs and serve Eucharist in the chapel, a beautiful space whose windows opened to the ocean. During the prayers of the people the names of those who died that day in the conflict in Iraq were read aloud. “Every day, soaked in the silence of that golden room,” Brown Taylor said, “I felt their names enter my heart like bullets.” This was not a political statement but a way of affirming the “our-ness” of the way Jesus taught us to pray. Not everyone who died that day was named, even though those whose struggle with cancer and the like were certainly noteworthy. But these were named because, as the message from the pro-conflict folks puts it, they died for our freedom. That being the reason, the least we can do, Brown Taylor suggests, is to “stop breathing while we listen to their names.” And while we are at it, she adds, we do well to remember the names of all the casualties (literally all those injured as well as those killed in the course of armed conflict) – those thousands of Iraq and Afghanistan peoples whose names are not publicly reported (if even recorded anywhere), and the names of all US soldiers who’ve been injured as well as those killed. Each has a name, each beloved of the God Jesus called Father. “To say these names out loud, in the presence of God and God’s people, is not a matter of being for or against the war,” Brown Taylor said. ”It is a matter of remembering that our lives are bound up with all other lives in Christ, as we keep count of those who are worth more than many sparrows” [THE CHRISTIAN CENTURY, 7/24/ 2007, p. 35]

Lord, teach us to pray…that your will be done in our world through us.

Remember that translation of the Jesus prayer I quoted earlier, the one by Petersen that condenses all the “kingdom” talk into “set the world right”? He also translates verse 11 in a very concrete way: “Don’t bargain with God. Be direct. Ask for what you need. This is not a cat-and-mouse, hide-and-seek game we’re in.” Indeed – it’s about life and death, and pursuing life the way God desires.”

Ask for what you need – open your hands to God who can use your hands to make what is needed real. Open your heart to God who can give you the eyes to see what matters, so you can receive the answer God longs for you to share with others. Be direct.

Okay, Jesus, we’re ready now. Teach us to pray. Amen.