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SERMON – Proper 12C (Ninth Sunday after Pentecost)
July 25, 2010
Preacher: Bill Knutson
Texts:
Hosea 1:2-10
Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6-15 (16-19)
Luke 11:1-13
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“Lord, teach us to pray.”
This request, coming from an unnamed disciple in today’s gospel, was certainly a reasonable one. Anyone who travelled with the growing band surrounding Jesus knew that prayer was at the root of his powerful ministry. Luke recounts that as Jesus was baptized at the beginning of his public ministry, he prayed. And as he was praying, heaven was opened and the Holy Spirit washed over him like a dove descending.
And time and time again, Jesus withdrew from his frenetic rounds of teaching and healing to refresh himself with prayer in deserted places far from the crowds clamoring for his presence. Even the most casual follower of this remarkable rabbi could see the link between his prayer and his power. The bolder among them sought to learn what words, what rituals, what hidden invocations he deployed to call down the divine.
“Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”
After all, was this not the duty of a teacher, to provide his followers with the correct form of prayer, the names by which God might be called, the words that would connect them to the source of all being? Each teacher of the day had his form of prayer that he taught his disciples. In that largely non-literate, oral culture, vast liturgies were committed to heart and passed from disciple to disciple with great precision and reverence. Surely the prayers of this exceptional teacher must be of a particularly elevated and elaborate form! Surely if, after hours of laborious memorization and recitation, it could but be mastered, heaven would open and the Holy Spirit like a dove would descend!
Oh, yes, Lord, teach us to pray, teach us to pray!
So Jesus responded, “When you pray, say:
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.”
This is neither the form of what we call the Lord’s Prayer we know from today’s Gospel reading in the New Revised Standard Version nor its longer form that is found in our liturgy. It is a contemporary paraphrase of Luke by the pastor and Biblical scholar Eugene Peterson, whose dynamic translation of scripture called The Message seeks to be true to the colloquial expressions of the original languages of the text.
Different, isn’t it? Homely, simple, perhaps a little plain, neither elevated nor elaborate, it is the language of intimates, of parents and children, of family. Imagine the shock of the followers seeking to be initiated into deep mysteries of what they assumed would be Jesus’ very esoteric prayer discipline.
“Lord, teach us to pray”.... but like that?
Surely there must be more than that – is simply an acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty, purpose, providence, forgiveness, and protection in our lives and the life of our community all that is needed? Could it be that direct and frankly childlike? Was there not something more refined, more literary, more tasteful, more... perhaps, Episcopalian... required? Not at all, Jesus tells us.
Because the traditional words of the Lord’s Prayer echo in nearly every Christian worship place in the world each Sunday and in the smaller gatherings and private devotions of the faithful each hour of every other day, its received language is as familiar to many of us as the names of those we love. And, indeed, the words themselves are such a touchstone, a way to reconnect ourselves to our heritage of faith and our personal experiences of grace, that their very familiarity can sometimes blind us to the deeper reality of what Jesus was teaching us about prayer.
I must confess that, raised as I was on the majestic cadences of the King James Bible, other translations frequently sound “off” to me, as if something is not quite right about them. I want my pleasantly archaic “thees” and “thous”. I think “For now we see through a glass, darkly” rings more poetically than the NRSV’s more accurate “For now we see in a mirror, dimly” and “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death” trumps the NRSV’s “Even though I walk through the darkest valley” hands down, as far as I’m concerned.
But for the sake of my spiritual growth, I frequently need to be jarred out of my comfortable repetitions and hear the Living Word lurking behind the language I cherish, which, if I am not mindful, can become an idol unto itself.
Such was the experience of our Anglican sisters and brothers in New Zealand and Polynesia, who, when revising their prayer book, had to come to grips with the reality that they were a church descended from both the English colonizers and the aboriginal colonized, two cultures inextricably bound together yet separated by language and experience.
“Lord, teach us to pray” -- in way that discerns the image of Christ within our respective cultures and bridges the divisions was their longing.
So after a lengthy time of hearing each other’s stories and honoring each other’s words, these children of colonizers and children of the colonized crafted a common expression of prayer that blended the English and Maori languages and, indeed, those very different ways of looking at the world. They included several versions of the Lord’s Prayer. Listen to this one:
Eternal Spirit, Earth-maker, Pain-bearer, Life-giver,
Source of all that is and that shall be,
Father and Mother of us all,
Loving God, in whom is heaven:
The hallowing of your name echo through the universe!
The way of your justice be followed by the peoples of the world!
Your heavenly will be done by all created beings!
Your commonwealth of peace and freedom sustain our hope and come on earth.
With the bread we need for today, feed us.
In the hurts we absorb from one another, forgive us.
In times of temptation and test, strengthen us.
From trials too great to endure, spare us.
From the grip of all that is evil, free us.
For you reign in the glory of the power that is love, now and forever.
Amen.
Perhaps having now heard now some other words, we, too, can turn to “our” Lord’s Prayer and hear it again with fresh ears and re-imagine what it might mean in our lives. In a few moments, when we are preparing to gather to receive the gift of Christ’s own self from this holy table, we will pray this prayer.
I invite you to listen to what the Spirit is saying to God’s people, as if for the first time. Hear all the words and imagine others echoing back from the beautiful multiplicity of cultures and languages of all who confess Jesus is Lord!
“Lord, teach us to pray.”
Along with words of prayer, Jesus taught us the means and effects of prayer in two illustrations – one of the persistent neighbor who, having received an unexpected guest, bangs on the door at midnight until the sleepy and disgruntled householder gives him the bread he needs to show hospitality and the other of the nurturing parent who would never give something harmful or hurtful in response to a child’s request.
Much has been made of the two little examples by those who are seeking the secret to “successful” prayer – which is frequently defined as prayers in which the petitioner’s requests are fulfilled on the petitioner’s terms. Sometimes these requests are noble and selfless – healing for sick friend, new life in dying church, relief for victims of natural disasters. At other times, the requests sound a bit like Janis Joplin singing “Oh, Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz.”
Preachers of the prosperity gospel, which holds that God will shower material blessings on those he favors in response to persistent prayer done perfectly twist these passages to assume that slavish desires driven by consumer culture represent the fulfillment of God’s purpose in our lives. When Paul warns us to “see no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition,” I imagine this is what he might have had in mind.
These examples further assume a relatively positive human experience of good parenting and neighborly relations. For many of us, they resonate with our own life experience and we have can understand a God who responds above and beyond our human kindness.
But for others, these examples just don’t work – the door has not been opened to their persistent knocking and they have been handed a snake when the asked for a fish. They have known neither neighborliness nor nurturing parenting. The y are like the children of Gomer, only knowing their names to be those of pitiless dispossession, but not yet seeing the possibility of restoration and hope.
And I can further assure you there are more than a few in these pews who have prayed fervently and faithfully for that which has not been received. At the very least, there is one in this pulpit who has been in that circumstance.
Are our prayers rejected? Is an indifferent God deaf to our persistent knocking or, worse yet, does a capricious God take delight in handing us scorpions when we ask for eggs?
These are deep and troubling questions; rocks on which the faith of many have foundered.
The easy answers tend to follow into two categories: the first, that our prayers were insufficient in either their intent or form and therefore not honored and if we could but perfect our efforts we’d achieve different results ; the second, that what we prayed for was not “God’s will” and our only alternative is stoic resignation.
Neither answer is particularly satisfying nor, more importantly, do they illuminate the role of prayer in the Christian life.
“Lord, teach us to pray.”
Perhaps the words of the Lord’s Prayer might provide us with deeper insight; in particular two words: “our” and “us”. As in “our Father,” “give us our daily bread,” and “forgive us our sins”. The language of the Lord’s Prayer is the language of community; it is the prayer of the Kingdom of God made manifest in our collective lives and hearts.
How often, though, do we actually pray to “my” Father for “my” daily bread asking forgiveness for “my” sins in a culture that encourages absolute independence and unbridled autonomy to the detriment of the commonwealth of God’s reign? How often do we privilege “my personal relationship with Jesus Christ” over the notion that our salvation is inextricably bound up in each other’s and that Christ calls us to be his Body of many members and, indeed, all of creation is groaning in hope of redemption?
“Lord, teach us to pray!”
The answer to our asking, seeking, and knocking and the big questions that accompany them come in the context of a community that is willing to wager – no, willing to stake its very life upon – the belief that prayers are answered and God does respond to human need and suffering in and through his Body here on earth, empowered by those prayers. The good gifts of a loving God are here among us.
To live into the “thy Kingdom come” means realizing the fact of God’s reign in your own life and that of your community. To expect “our daily bread” is to know there is enough and more than enough in God’s economy, where nothing is wasted and nothing is without purpose. To stake your life on this claim means letting God in heaven have access to your hands and feet in this world so that when a child asks for a fish, she does not receive a snake.
In the words of the poet and mystic Teresa of Avila:
Christ has no body now but yours
No hands, no feet on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
As we pray, we deepen our relationship with God. As we deepen our relationship with God, we deepen our relationship with each other. As we deepen our relationship with each other, we grow strong in the knowledge that prayer changes things, because prayer changes us.
“Lord, teach us to pray.”
Amen.
