Tenth Sunday after Pentecost: "Lord, Teach us to Pray"

Genesis 18:20-32

Psalm138

Colossians 2:6-19

Luke 11:1-13

“Lord, teach us to pray.”  It is one of the few times that any one of Jesus' disciples ask him something really sensible.  “Lord, teach us to pray.”  Many of us as children were taught that prayer is fundamentally petitionary – asking things of God.  And it is easy to give Jesus’ teaching a surface reading and see it purely about petitionary prayer; many Christians do.  If you pray hard enough, if you pester God enough, then you will get what you want.  You can manipulate circumstances, you can manipulate God.  Still, the problem with this sort of thinking is that it does not allow for what happens when prayers are not answered as we ask.  In these cases people are left with really only two options: a sense personal failure – “If I had only prayed hard enough God would have fulfilled my desire”, or with simply, a loss of faith altogether.  Rather, as we mature in the faith and in the life of prayer, we come to realize that petitionary prayer is only one aspect of prayer, and not nearly the most important.  Because, at its heart prayer is not about getting God to do or not do this or that.  It is not about our getting God to change but, as C.S. Lewis observes, about allowing God to change us.  And while Jesus responds to his disciples in the language of petition and asking, there is much more than that in his teaching about prayer, if we will only listen.  In answer to the disciple’s request Jesus makes three distinct responses.  He describes three important aspects of prayer – common prayer (maybe he as an Episcopalian after all), persistence in prayer and trust in God.

“When you pray say…”  In the first instance Jesus offers his disciples a common prayer. It is a prayer which has, of course, become the bedrock of Christian prayer.  But carefully considered what he offers is something not unlike what is offered in our own Book of Common Prayer – traditional prayers to say together  In the first instance, the Lord’s Prayer is deeply grounded in the tradition – the Jewish tradition that is, Jesus and his disciples were Jews after all.  Many of my Jewish friends actually say they would have no problem using it.  It is fundamentally a Jewish prayer.  So, Jesus offers a prayer grounded in the tradition, but also one to memorize and for common use.  One of the questions often asked of Christians in the liturgical churches – Episcopalians included – is why we read our prayers, why we have prescribed prayers.  The implication being that in using prescribed, written prayers our devotional life lacks genuineness, lacks sincerity.  What hogwash!  Now, detailing the very good reasons for using written, prescribed prayers could take up a whole sermon, indeed a whole book.  But let’s briefly consider some chief ones.  Firstly, using set prayer is perhaps the most ancient way of praying, Christian or otherwise.  It is the way our ancestors in the faith prayed.  It is the way the saints of the Church have prayed through the ages; and only a fool would dare to call into question their sincerity or spirituality.  Secondly, prescribed prayers give us words to praise God or pray to God when in our joy or anguish our own words fail us.  This shouldn’t be under-rated.  Set prayers lend to us the language of the ages to use as we approach the Lord.  Finally, common prayers are just that, common.  Their use – even when used privately – take us out of the strictly private sphere.  They bind us together with others; not only in our church building, but across the miles and the ages.  Someone in our study course observed last week how marvelous is the knowledge that in every community throughout the Episcopal Church we are all joined in common prayer and worship Sunday by Sunday – the collect is the same, the readings are the same, the forms we use are the same.  The practice of using set, common prayers gives the lie to divisions of time and space.

In response to his disciple’s request Jesus tells a little parable about persistence in prayer.  On the surface, as I mentioned earlier, the moral of story seems to be that if you pester God enough you will get what you want.  Yet, I am not really sure how helpful this reading of the parable is.  When I was a child I prayed for all sorts of things.  I prayed often and with the trusting innocence of youth, and my requests still did not come to pass.  Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean the parable has no meaning for us.  It seems more helpful to think of this parable as speaking to the disciplined nature of prayer, the regular persistence that the life of prayer requires; and ironically it challenges us with the question, “Do I only pray when I need something, do I only pray when I feel like it, or instead do I practice a regular, disciplined prayer life?”  Being persistent in prayer means sometimes praying when we really don’t want to – that’s where common prayer is so helpful, by the way.  It means that we “show up”, as it were, and we realize that it has little do with how we feel.  We come as we are, make ourselves available to God’s presence, and let God do the rest.  Regular, persistent prayer frees us from the need to feel “spiritual” or particularly together, because the commitment is to presence, not necessarily to feeling a particular way.  Moreover, it frees us from the pressure that prayer has to leave with a certain feeling, that it should uplift or “feed” us – whatever, that means.  I usually leave Morning or Evening Prayer not feeling particularly different, but how I feel is in some sense immaterial.  The effect of prayer is not instant or immediate,  it is rather cumulative and over time, as the words we pray and the silences into which we enter slowly work within us to transform us and draw us to God.  I suppose prayer is less like ibuprofen and more like penicillin.  You have a headache, you take a some ibuprofen and it’s gone in a bit.  Penicillin works more slowly, you have to take it at regular, prescribed times and you have to take the whole dose, even if the symptoms seem to get better.

Finally, Jesus highlights the fundamental necessity of trust in the life of prayer; trust that God is present and near to us; trust that God hears us and responds to us; trust that he loves and cares for us even better than we care for ourselves and for those entrusted to our care.  Part of trusting God means letting go of that feeling so many of us carry around that the only one we can really trust, the only one we can really depend on is ourselves.  In short, trusting God means letting go of control.  And interestingly enough, while Jesus still makes his point in the language of petition – “And I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Luke 11:9), the truth is that trust in God almost dispenses with petition.  Trusting God means that no matter what may happen, we understand God as the ever-real and ever-present reality of our lives, and of the entire world.  Trusting God means we know he already desires for us – as one of our collects says – “more than we can ask or imagine.”  Certainly, things may not turn out in a particular instance as we would have liked, or had hoped, or even expected, but why should we think that makes God untrustworthy?  It hardly signifies a betrayal of trust on God’s part.  Our friends and partners may not always do what we ask of them, but we’d never thinking of ceasing to trust them, and it is that trust which grounds and strengthens the relationship.  So, it is not that dissimilar with God.  The life of prayer is not about getting things out of God, but about deepening in a trusting relationship with the God who loves and cares for us even better than the best of parents.

We’ve tried this morning to look at our prayer as something beyond simply petition, and we can see that when Jesus’ disciple ask him to teach them to pray, he certainly points them beyond a prayer of asking.  Nevertheless, as he ends this discourse there he does focus on one particulary petition: “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.” (Luke 11:13)  Here he points us to the perfect prayer of petition, and promises the answer God will always give.  God will always give his Holy Spirit to those who ask.  In the midst of all our asking, of all our petitions, what more could we want more but the Spirit who binds us together in prayer, worship and a common life; the Spirit who encourages us and keeps us faithful, persistent in the life to which he have been called; the Spirit who comforts us and allows us to keep trusting?  The life of prayer is really the life of the Spirit in us, voicing our own deepest desires for union with God and with one another, and working within us to make that union really fruitful.  “Lord, teach us to pray.”  Three suggestions: pray in union with each other – whether together or apart, pray regularly and persistently, trust God more than you trust your own devices and desires; and do it all knowing that God the Spirit is already at work within you to bring all your prayer to fruition according to the will of a gracious a loving God.