Happy Sunday, FCC Family! We had some technological difficulties with the livestream of this morning’s service, so the manuscript of the sermon can be found below… some fun, light beach reading (about prayer) for you.
Luke 11:1-13
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.” So he said to them, “When you pray, say: ‘Father, may your name be revered as holy. May your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.’
And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything out of friendship, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.
“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asked for a fish, would give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asked for an egg, would give a scorpion? If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
The disciples ask Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” The disciples ask Jesus this. The disciples. These are religious people, are devout, pious people, are people who, between them, have prayed uncountably many prayers. If anyone should know that you start with a “dear God” and end with an “amen,” it’s them. If anyone should know how to pray, it’s them. That they don’t know how to pray, or, at least, that they think they don’t know how to pray – I take this to mean that prayer and having questions about prayer go hand in hand. To wonder or to worry whether praying means anything or does anything is simply a part of what praying is. Feeling that prayer isn’t “working” for you may not be a sign you’re doing it wrong, but, rather that you’re doing it right. And this is because prayer is great mystery. When we go to God in prayer, we are not summoning a genie. There are no magic words that if only we say will guarantee we get what we want from God. There is no spiritual technique that we can master to ensure that blessings and nothing but blessings come our way. This would mean that we can manipulate and control God, that we have power over God – which, of course, we can’t and we don’t. No. To pray is to step into a swirling flux of energy and possibility and love and hope and pain, a whirling, open dance of cause and effect and providence and purpose and chance. The Apostle Paul can only exclaim: “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been His counselor? But from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever.” To pray is to step into those vast and holy depths. To pray is to dip a toe into that. To pray is to enter into the mystery and let the mystery enter into you. And so: in a very important sense: To pray is to not know how to pray. To pray is to not understand what happens when you pray.
The disciples ask Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And Jesus responds to their question about prayer witha prayer. Praying leads to questioning, and questioning leads to… praying, to more praying. Praying and questioning, questioning and praying: this is the upward spiral, the path, the way home to God. The prayer Jesus prays couldn’t be a simpler, shorter, sweeter prayer. You probably recognized it as the Lord’s Prayer, or as part of the Lord’s Prayer, anyway. Jesus prays this prayer and teaches his disciples to pray this prayer in two of the four gospels. You can find the longer, more familiar form of it in the Gospel of Matthew. Here, in the Gospel of Luke, the prayer is whittled down further; an already concise and straightforward prayer is made more concise and more straightforward still. Here is prayer at its most elemental. Here is prayer refined to its barest essence. It begins, “Father.” God is not just God. God is Father. When we pray, we are not howling into the void or into the cold vastness of the Universe. We are not weeping our prayers to some Ultimate Vagueness. Now, I don’t believe that God is an old man with a white beard. I don’t believe God is an old man or a man at all, for that matter. But I do believe that God is Father. God is Spirit, which is to say, God is an Energy, but is an Energy that makes itself felt to us as a personal, parental, paternal and maternal, Energy, an Energy we experience in our lives as a kind of provision and nurture and guidance and tenderness and correction and care. Prayer – and much more than prayer; everything about us, really – rests upon this truth: Whatever is “out there,” beyond us, never to be seen, never to be fully known – it is not frightening, it is not indifferent to us; it is a Father to us. There is a whole prayer in this single word, “Father.”
“Father,” Jesus prays, “may your name be revered as holy. May your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.” This modern translation is more literal and wooden and less poetic than the one most of us know by heart. So I’m going to borrow from the old one. There’s a quick succession of petitions: Give. Forgive. Deliver. Give. Forgive. Deliver. Just like “Father,” we could pray any of these three words, could pray each of these three words, on their own and be praying a deep, true prayer. There is a kind of prayer – maybe you have heard of it – called centering prayer. All you do is pray a single word, pray it over and over, turn it over and over in your heart, and let it communicate all there is to communicate – from you to God and from God to you. If your mind starts to wander, you just gently call yourself back to that single word. Center on that word. Center all your thoughts on that word. It’s amazing what one small word can become when it’s carried into the presence of God. Again, prayer is a great mystery. And praying this way allows you to give the mystery some space. Maybe you can relate: I very often don’t know what to pray for. I’m a minister, I’m a sort of a semi-pro pray-er, but very often there are not words. One of my oldest friends shared with me last week that he’s filing for divorce. I told him I would pray for him. But what do I pray? There is determination and bravery to be celebrated. There is heartbreak to touch tenderly. There is strength needed. There is rage to be acknowledged. There is fear and excitement and hope and fear and hope and fear. I find myself simply praying his name, “David,” over and over again. I feel myself really praying. Give. Forgive. Deliver. Give – Even though I have a happy, comfortable life, I stand always as a beggar before my God, praying, “give.” Forgive – Even though I think I’m a good person, I have a hazy, fuzzy but profound sense that I need to be forgiven for more than I fully understand. It is almost an ache. So I pray, “forgive.” Deliver – I know my happiness and comfortable life can turn to dust, that so much blessedness can all vanish in an instant, so I pray, “deliver.”
The disciples ask Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And Jesus responds with a simple, short, sweet model prayer – which doesn’t end with an “amen,” by the way. Did you notice that? The prayer just fades into what comes next, which is, what else, but a teaching, a wrestling match of a teaching, a grappling with, a consideration of the thorny, unanswerable question of why, when we pray, so often, nothing seems to be happening. Again, praying leads to questioning. Praying, even praying the Lord’s Prayer, just becomes questioning. Jesus spends significantly more time with this hard question about praying than he does actually praying. (That should tell us something.) Jesus tells the disciples a story about a man banging on the door of a friend’s house in the middle of the night, making noise, tripping the alarm, doing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb” with the doorbell, doing everything he can do to get his snoring, unresponsive buddy to get up, to rouse himself, heed the man’s pleading, and give him bread. The assumption here, the implication here is that God is like the sleeping friend, snug as a bug in a rug, shut up in God’s house in heaven, deaf to our prayers. There are all kinds of problems with this story, but for now, let it be enough just to note that Jesus tells it. This, Jesus tells his disciples and tells us, this is – it just is – what prayer sometimes feels like: like being unheard, ignored, forgotten, forsaken, like desperation, like helplessness, like despair, like rage. The disciples ask Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And what he teaches them (besides a prayer for the ages) is that a good deal of the time, it will feel like your prayers are going unanswered. They should expect this. We should expect this. Pray expecting this, appreciating this, understanding this, knowing this. The feeling that God is silent. The feeling that God is absent. The feeling that God doesn’t care. All this is what prayer can and will feel like… But pray anyway. Pray all the more boldly still. “Ask,” Jesus says, Jesus promises, “and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.” May it be so. Amen.