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So how do you pray?
By This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it (please email questions or replies)
July 25, 2010
Colossians 2: 6-19; Luke 11: 1-13

May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable to you, O God, who sent your word to live among us.

As you’ve heard the words of the Lord’s Prayer come at you this morning in several different forms – the hymn at the beginning, the kids praying just now, the words in Luke’s Gospel – you may have felt that something was out of kilter with the way Jesus said the prayer in Luke’s Gospel.

They are not the words we are used to. But I suppose Jesus can use any words he wants. It’s his prayer, after all.

It’s that very sense of disquiet that can open up the meaning of this prayer for us today. It is more than the prayer of Jesus. It is the prayer of the Christian community, across time, across borders, across theological divisions, yet it is a prayer marked by variations –- just as we as humans are marked by so many variations.

Still, at its core, this prayer defines much of what it means to be a follower of Jesus – not just an individual follower, but followers gathered together as a community like we have here at Memorial.

Let’s start with the story in Luke.

“Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

In Luke’s Gospel, more than any of the others, Jesus frequently takes time out to pray. 

He prays before his baptism, he prays before he starts calling people to be his followers, he prays on a mountain just before his closest followers see a vision of him with Moses and Elijah.

And then on that night before he was to be killed, Jesus went to a garden to pray. It was a prayer of desperation – “I don’t want to die, don’t let this happen.”

The model Jesus seems to be setting is one of taking time apart from the pressures of life to connect his spirit with God. His prayers are not quarters dropped in a slot machine with hopes for big winnings. They don’t always come out the way he hoped. But they do help him remember that God’s presence is there with him in good times and in bad.

His followers notice. You can imagine they saw a change in him when he came back from this particular time of prayer.

It helps to also understand that the idea of prayer was still a developing concept in the religions of this era.

For the most part, people in the ancient worlds related to the divine force in the universe with great trepidation. The predominant way of worship was animal sacrifice, a highly ritualized act acknowledging the power of the divine and hoping to keep that power in check.

There were prayers as well, but they were mostly individual, on the margins. Some rabbis taught their followers ways to pray. John the Baptist apparently was doing that with his followers.

One of his disciples said to him: “Lord, teach us to pray.” They wanted a way to connect with God the way he seemed to be doing, a prayer that would help them define who they were among all the religious groups of that time.

This is a very different setting than the story in the Gospel of Matthew. In Matthew’s account, Jesus is on a hill near the Sea of Galilee, offering a summary of his teachings to a crowd that has gathered. We know that as the Sermon on the Mount.

About half way through, he talks about prayer as something to be done without a lot of show, without the babbling of excess words. And then he tells them to pray the words that we now most commonly use as the Lord’s Prayer.

In Luke’s Gospel, it is just Jesus with his closest followers. He teaches them these words in response to their request. And the words are a little different, more minimalist.

There is yet a third version in an early Christian document called the Didache, which adds another set of variations.

What really matters is how important this prayer was for those first Christians … and for us. What the variations tell us is that it was the ideas that mattered, not the precise words. 

Like the writer of the letter to the Colossians that we heard today said, “Don’t put up with anyone pressuring you in details of worship services … All those things are mere shadows cast before what was to come; the substance is Christ.”

That letter to the Colossians tells us that it’s not all sorts of philosophical constructions or magical formulas that bring us to God. It’s coming to know Jesus, to let the words of Jesus nourish us – words like the ones in this prayer.

I’d like to offer a few thoughts on the ideas in this prayer, what they might mean to us today, how they might affect the way we pray.

There’s trouble right away with the first two words. “Our.” “Father.”

You wouldn’t think there’d be a lot of trouble with a simple word like “our.” But there is. Jesus offered this prayer as a community prayer.

That does not mean we can’t say it alone. But we are not praying in isolation. This is not just about God and me. We are all in this together.

When I sit at someone’s bedside as they are struggling with life and we say this prayer together, it is a very intimate moment. But it also a moment that connects them not only with God but with the community here at Memorial and with what we sometimes call the communion of saints across time and space.

And “our” is not a limiting term. God is not just there for Christians. We understand God through the life and teachings of Jesus. But God is not just God for us in this room or us as Christians. God is not just “our” Father.

Which gets us to “Father,” the second troublesome word of these first two. In this era, as we understand that God is beyond human characteristics like gender. As we are more open about the fractured relationships within families and as we move away from the old ideas of a society where men hold all the power, this word “father” rankles some people so much that it throws the prayer off course before they even get started.

Let me suggest that Jesus had a marvelous way of undermining some of the conventions of his era. In those times, a father was a distant, powerful, often arbitrary figure.  In this prayer, Jesus casts God as a caring father, not a distant, imposing monarch.
In this prayer, Jesus creates an intimate relationship between the one praying and the divine being. 
It’s God as the creative force of the universe who is also the ideal parent. We are people who are closely related to God, not puppets in a divine play, not individuals cast out on our own.

The words “hallowed be your name” may sound archaic to us. And why would we be asking God to make God’s name holy, anyway? Not because God does needs to be reminded of the power of the holy, but because we do. This is a counterpoint to the intimacy of our relationship with God. Yes, God cares deeply about us and we can address God in family terms, but God is still an awesome being.

“Your kingdom come” also sounds out of date in the era of democratic nations, but at the time of Jesus, kingdoms were how life was organized. When Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, he was talking about God’s vision for how the world ought to be. So we pray that this might happen and that we might be part of that process.

Then we get to the parts that affect our lives.

“Give us each day our daily bread.” That’s not a hard concept to grasp. It’s harder to live out.
It hearkens back to God giving the Hebrews manna in the desert as they fled from slavery to freedom.
It draws on the image of Jesus using a few loaves of bread to feed a crowd on a hillside.
It foreshadows Jesus using bread as an image of how his life would feed the world.
It prays for abundance is a world where bread is not always distributed well.

It asks God to help us as we try to make that happen, for ourselves and for others.

Now for the really challenging one: “And forgive us our sins as we forgive everyone indebted to us.”

There was a time in the early centuries of Christianity that people left this phrase out of the Lord’s Prayer. Augustine, the great fourth century bishop and theologian, pushed hard to make sure this was included once again in the great prayer of Christianity. But these were contested words.

That was not unusual. Jesus’ words of forgiveness from the cross were left out of some of the early copies of Luke’s gospel.  This is the only one of the four gospels where those words appear. People just couldn’t believe that Jesus could forgive those who made him suffer so much, who nailed him to that cross. So they snipped the words out of the story.

What do you think made people more uncomfortable – the notion that they should forgive others -- or that they themselves needed forgiveness?

What makes you more uncomfortable?
Neither one is very easy, after all.

Asking forgiveness is tough. It means before we offer forgiveness to someone else, we need to acknowledge our own imperfection. There’s nothing in Christianity that lets us be smug about our own goodness.

Then try forgiving someone who has really hurt you. That is very hard work. It sometimes seems like impossible work. But there it is, an integral part of this prayer that Jesus gave us to form who we are as his followers. As one author said, it gives us a chance to throw a monkey wrench into the eternal wheel of retribution and vengeance in our world.

And then there is the final phrase in the prayer, which seems rather odd: “And do not bring us to the time of trial.” The phrase we are familiar with is “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.”  There are variations among translations, but scholars argue that “time of trial” catches the essence of what Jesus meant.

This is not a plea to save us from lusting after that hot guy at the company picnic or from having one more beer at the ball game … although both of those things could lead to trouble. 

The time of trial is a much bigger thing – the kind of evil that rages in the world, that really tests what we believe.

For early Christians, those tests could mean death.

For us, it could mean how we deal with an economy that exploits people, with how we let understandings of race and ethnicity and gender define how we treat each other, with a consumer culture that takes control of our lives.

Do not bring us to the time of trial. Save us from the evils of the world.

The doxology – for yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory, etc. – really comes out of that version in the Didache – the early Christian document, although it also shows up in some versions of Matthew’s Gospel. It is not without impact. It is a reminder that God is greater than any of the powers on earth – greater than Caesar, greater the kings, presidents, dictators, any earthly powers. And to that, we say “amen.”

If you think back to the Gospel of Luke we heard today, you may recall there were some other stories Jesus told about prayer, confusing sorts of stories about people knocking on doors at midnight and parents who would never give their children snakes and scorpions instead of eggs and fish.

Those of us who take time to pray in our lives know this is not always an easy process. Oh, if we need something, it’s not hard to say, “God, help me out with this.”

But if we are going to pray like Jesus did and take time to nurture our connection with God, we know that does not always go smoothly, that it’s easy to get distracted and discouraged and wonder why we even bother.

It seems to me the point of these stories is to remind us not to give up. It’s not that our persistence can convince a reluctant God to give us what we want. It’s that we need persistence if we are going to stay in relationship to God.

So when we come together here on Sunday mornings, we are shaped as a community by the prayers we say or the prayers we sing. 

When we are persistent in prayer on our own, when we let our spirits connect with God and then bring in all those people around the community and around the world who need our care, then we are acting in the spirit of that prayer Jesus taught his followers.

As we gather our prayers today, let us do it that spirit of connecting our joys and concerns with those of others here and then open ourselves to how God might be working in and through our lives.