A PRAYERFUL LIFE
SCRIPTURE
READING: Luke 11:1-13
Let us pray. Holy Jesus, your first disciples saw a
prayerful life lived in you. What they witnessed in you brought awe, wonder,
and humility. They were so touched by
your Spirit, that it moved one of the disciples to want to have as rich a
spiritual life as you did, Lord Jesus. “Teach us to pray,” he said, and you
offered a model for prayer. Teach us to
pray, Lord Jesus, that in the midst of our lives, in the midst of our hurting
world, your Spirit may have life and breath in each one of us and move us to
bring grace, mercy, peace and justice to others. In your most Holy name we ask it. Amen.
I don’t
know how many of you remember the Peanuts cartoons, but when I was growing up,
those characters had about as much to offer about the wisdom and meaning of
life as anyone in My Circle, (and NO, I don’t mean My Alltel Circle.) The whole gang – Charlie Brown, Lucy, Linus,
Sally, and Snoopy, the little redhead girl, Pigpen and Woodstock – could make
you laugh, sigh and even have an ah-ha moment in reading the captions into
their daily life. Charlie Brown,
especially, brought his own note of humor and hope to life as the boy whose
spirit was indomitable in the face of constant disappointment, hurt and challenge. One of my favorite strips had to do with
prayer. A classic Peanuts cartoon
features Charlie Brown kneeling beside his bed for prayer before heading off to
dreamland, (something many children of my generation made a nightly
practice). “Dear God,” he says. Then
suddenly Charlie Brown stops, opens his eyes, and says to Lucy, “I think I’ve
made a new theological discovery, a real break-through. If you hold your hands upside down, you get
the opposite of what you prayed for.”
We laugh – maybe
because we think it’s cute, maybe because we believe it absurd, but maybe what
we haven’t considered is that we ourselves question what we believe, what we understand
about prayer – what prayer is and how it works, why we pray and how we
pray. There are many questions about
prayer, for sure. And, in spite of being
your pastor, I’m not sure that I can or would want to answer the many questions
posed about prayer, despite years of training and practice. I’m not even sure that our scripture for
today can answer the myriad of questions about prayer. But, today’s biblical story does offer some
insight into the mystery of prayer and a model for a prayerful life.
The story
begins with “Jesus praying in a certain place.”
Throughout the gospels we notice that often Jesus goes off by himself to
a certain place to pray. Prayer is a
regular part of his life. The disciples
see this. They see the importance of
prayer in his life, the role and power it plays in Jesus’ life. Thus they are
moved to ask, “Lord, teach us to pray.” “Harry Emerson Fosdick pointed this out
in his book The Secret of Victorious
Living. Here, before their very
eyes, they saw a personality in whom prayer was vital and influential! The more they lived with him, the more they
saw that they could never understand him unless they understood his praying. They wanted him to tell them how to pray.”[1]
For Jesus,
prayer was an integral part of his daily life.
He turned to God regularly – to give thanks and praise, to seek
guidance, to confess he failed to live as called, and to ask for
forgiveness. Jesus regularly asks God
to provide for his needs and the needs of others. But mostly, through prayer, Jesus seeks to
usher in a new understanding of God’s love and grace for all of humankind and
to make God’s desires for humanity known in the world. Jesus intentionally turns to God in prayer at
every turn on his journey.
For many of
us, we turn to God in prayer, either in crisis or out of habit, as is often the
case when we say grace at mealtimes. As
a colleague of mine once put it, “Many people pray as if God were a big aspirin
pill; they come only when they are hurt.
Often we look at prayer as an antidote to whatever is wrong with us or
we turn God into a vending machine and expect that if we put in the right
combination of prayers, we should get what we want.”
God does
care about what we need in life. And
yes, God does care about our hurts.
Jesus encourages us in this story to ask, seek and knock, and promises
to those that ask, that they will receive, that those who seek will find, and
those who knock will have the door opened to them. We can expect God to listen, care and respond
to our deepest hurts and needs, as any loving parent would do for their
children. How much more does God love
and care for us than we, as human parents, imperfectly love and care for our
children? The parable Jesus tells makes
this point quite clearly.
But so
often we are disappointed when our prayers are not answered as we had
hoped. Often we mistakenly take Jesus’
words to mean, “God will give us whatever we ask for, or that somehow prayer
compels God to respond just as we hope.
God is not calculating, answering some prayers while imposing suffering
on others. Jesus presents us with a
faithful God who will always open the door to us.” [2] When we pray, when we seek God out of our
deepest human need, we also then must trust God to know what is best and
what is possible in any given situation. Not always do we know what is best, nor do we
know what it possible or not possible in any given situation. It is never wise to outline for God how God should
respond to us.
Sometimes
God answers prayer in the most surprising and unexpected ways. I was reminded of this as I read the story of
a woman who relied on prayer to get her through daily life. Her story is portrayed in the book The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio. Her family is nearly always in crisis,
because the father spends his earnings on alcohol. She is a stay-at-home mother of nine
children. She discovers that she has a
talent for writing jingles for contests, and it seems that her prizes arrive
just in the nick of time to buy milk, or rescue the family from some
disaster. One day, when the second
mortgage has not been paid, and it seems the family will lose its home, the
mother hears her children off in another room, and goes to see what they are up
to. She finds her three youngest
children sitting in a closet praying.
When asked why they are praying, they tell her that they are praying for
her to win another contest so their home will be saved. But, it doesn’t look like that will come
about. And so the family begins packing
their possessions. As they are doing so,
the phone call comes – the mother has won just enough money to pay off the
second mortgage. Not always do we know
what is best or what is possible in any given situation. And it is never wise to outline for God how
God will respond to our prayers.
Thomas
Moore says this, “Prayer cleanses us of expectation and allows holy will,
providence, and life itself and entry.”
Better that we allow prayer to be a way of surrendering our lives to
God, so that we might live at one with the heart and mind of God. Prayer is process of transformation, so that
we might, as Paul said, “have the same mind that was in Christ Jesus.”
The
disciple asked Jesus how to pray, because he knew that only God’s Spirit can
invite and unite us in knowing and living in communion with God and living out
God’s will. Jesus knew we needed a model
for prayer, a model that would be all encompassing. Thus he offers us this prayer, one we have
come to know as The Lord’s Prayer. The
prayer differs here from the wording we use every Sunday in worship, because
the words we say come from Matthew’s account of The Lord’s Prayer. But each text draws on a common source and
common themes of praise and petition.
The prayer
begins with entering into and centering ourselves in God’s presence, by calling
upon God. Jesus invites us to address
God, not as some far off, removed being, but as parent who knows their
children. Father, abba in the Aramaic, was the term small children used for
their human fathers.
Father, hallowed be thy name.
It is a request that God be honored as holy – which means set apart as
special in the deepest possible sense.
Thy Kingdom come is a petition for God’s Rule and
realm to come, to be brought fully into the world, which would mean that God’s
Rule of peace, justice would reign. Thy
kingdom come, O God.
Give us this day, our daily bread.
Few of us know here in this part of the world what it means to live from
day to day, not knowing how or where our sustenance for life will be
provided. To ask God for bread is to
recognize one’s absolute dependence upon God for daily survival.
Forgive us our sins, as we forgive
those who sin against us. Matthew’s version uses debts, which is probably
closer to the original. “The multiple
layers of taxation imposed upon peasants during Roman occupation resulted in
the loss of ancestral lands, and forgiveness of debts owed within the villages
could have helped alleviate the problem.” [3] Forgive us our debts as we forgive those who
debt against us – putting no one in a position of being so indebted to one
another that they cannot make a living – keeping the poor, poor.
Lead us not into temptation.
Temptation here is hardly the garden variety temptation, leading one to
engage in some “sinful” behavior and asking to be spared from doing so. But rather, it is best understood as an
acknowledgement of human weakness and a request to be delivered from trials too
terrible to endure, especially in the end times.[4]
That’s it,
a simple, succinct prayer. But some of
the best prayers are simple. Anne
Lammott said that her favorite prayers were, “Help me, help me, help me,” and
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” and “Wow.”
In spite of the simplicity of the The Lord’s Prayer, it does not come
easily to us, as it is not easy to surrender our will to God’s will, our
desires to God’s desire. As Will
Willimon put it, “Prayer is when I obey Jesus and pray for the things that he
teaches me to pray for and when I pray the way he prays.” Prayer, as Jesus taught by his very life,
takes intention and practice. It is
setting time and place aside to be in communion with God and to let God’s
Spirit move in us and so transform us that we have in us the mind of Christ and
are able by God’s grace to help usher in God’s realm. Only the Spirit of God can invite and unite
us into this kind of prayer. Lord, teach
us to pray so that we may lead a prayerful life.
Sermon
preached by Reverend Jane B. Anderson at First Congregational United Church of
Christ, Appleton, Wisconsin on July 29, 2007.