 | The Geelong City Parish, UCA |
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| Jesus was
praying in a certain place and after he had finished one of
his disciples said to him: Lord, teach us to pray….? In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen |
In all of the gospels there is only one occasion when Jesus disciples specifically ask that he give them instruction, that he teach them. A bit surprising isn’t it, but on all the occasions we encounter Jesus instructing his disciples it is Jesus himself or some situation that gives rise to his teaching ministry. So this episode we hear in Luke’s gospel is a significant one. It is obviously a real need, a matter of pressing concern to his disciples that compels them to take the initiative this time. It won’t come as any surprise to those of us who still remain a bit bewildered on the subject that the one pressing thing that Jesus disciples ask to have illuminated is the subject of prayer. ‘Lord, after a lifetime of being good and faithful observers of our traditional faith, after following the well established patterns and rituals, after listening to one alleged expert after and another, after a bit of experimentation with this and that, after long periods of steady persistence intermixed with perhaps longer periods of confusion and frustration, we have to admit we still haven’t got much of a clue. Lord teach us to pray!’
The first thing we can take from our reading this morning is that prayer in not as straight forward, doesn’t come as naturally to us as some might have lead us to think! It’s rather comforting for those of who struggle with our prayer life in the twenty first century to know that even those who formed Jesus’ closest inner circle of followers in the first century experienced the same sorts of the difficulties and questions that we do. We need guidance, we need to be taught how to pray – it doesn’t come ‘naturally’.
And is not simply a matter, as popular theology would have us believe, of forming a list of needs and wants and shooting it off into the ether in hope of an eventual response! Prayer is not just about forming into thought and words the things we hope for or even need, even desperately need – of expressing ourselves to God in the hope of being heard. That is part of it – but prayer is a much more, a much more comprehensive act than that.
In prayer, in how we pray, we can and do express our need, but we are also expressing who it is we understand God to be, what it is we can hope for and expect of this God, and who we are in relation to this God.
If I pray, as I have in moments of fiscal desperation been known to do, for God to come to my aid in the form of the delivering the winning tattslotto numbers for the Saturday night draw, then that is saying as much about my understanding of who and what God is as it is about me and my financial position: God is the one who stands above me, with the power, or otherwise to manipulate the cosmos for my benefit if God so chooses to do so. My prayer is my attempt to convince the good Lord that that might be a good thing to do! Good for me, anyway. Even if my prayer is a little less self interested, my prayer for world peace, I am still expressing an understanding of God as the one who hears my needs, dreams and aspirations, however noble, and who will hopefully respond favourably, will tweak the necessary cosmic forces to get me the result I’m after.
We have all, I’m sure, had moments when we have fallen into this kind of prayer – hopefully for far more noble and far more pressing concerns that the winning tatslotto numbers. If there is a ‘natural’ or instinctive way to pray – then its probably this one – God ‘up there’, ‘out there’, ‘give us a hand down here’! It is the kind of prayer that can leave us pretty chuffed if we get the outcome we’re after, it can leave us a bit aggrieved, at best, even down right devastated, if don’t.
As a minister you become something of a magnet for people’s stories of unanswered prayer as the reason they can no longer come to church, no longer believe in God. The more heartfelt and selfless the prayer, the deeper the wounds run. It is not usually the opportune time to suggest that perhaps the problem lies not with God, but rather with their understanding of prayer - an understanding that leads them into a very false and very disturbing image of God.
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‘Lord, teach us to pray’! It is this one crucially important thing that Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them – because in it we express our whole understanding of who God is for us, who we are in relation to this God, and what we can truly hope for and expect for ourselves and our world from this God.
And Jesus said to them, ‘When you pray, say’:
Our Father, hallowed
be your name.
Your kingdom come.
The most important words are the first two – they tell us to whom we are praying – and sadly the NRSV translation leaves one of them off.
‘Our Father’ The very first words of Jesus’ prayer tell us who it is we address in prayer: not some disinterested cosmic principle, not some authoritarian judge or ruler, but one we are to address with the same intimacy as beloved children, to speak with as an adoring parent – ‘Our Father’. For the sake of brevity I will set aside any gender controversies of the naming of God as Father except to say that this is the Father Jesus reveals to us: the one who brings forgiveness and healing, the one who brings new and abundant life, the one who unites himself to us in the flesh and blood of his only son. The Father who is with us, and for us. So whatever we ask, whatever we pray for, whatever we confess, we are to do so with the confidence of children who are loved, whose wellbeing and flourishing are of the utmost importance…
Equally important though is that other little, easily overlooked word: ‘Our Father’. This is a Father who exercises his love and concern and commitment to our flourishing and wellbeing by calling us into a community, to live as one family of brothers and sisters who pray, no alone and in isolation from one another, not to my Father, or your Father, but to our Father.
Probably one of the single biggest mistakes we can make in our personal prayer life is to forget that each of us pray, always, in the context of this identification of God as the loving Father who calls each one of us to new life by embracing us in and as a community. Even in the privacy of our homes, our own heads, when we pray we always do so in companionship of all those brothers and sisters that make up the family of faith – past present and future. We never pray alone. If the prayer that Jesus teaches us is the context for all our prayer, and it is!, then we don’t offer our personal prayers and petitions in splendid isolation but in the fellowship of the whole Christian community. Even when you are alone, your brothers and sisters pray with you. We each carry one another’s burdens, in prayer, and in life. We express that reality quite concretely when we pray for one another Sunday by Sunday, but we carry that reality with us in all of our prayer life.
And the reality of our shared prayer life can then overflow into the way in which we live our lives together. We don’t have to hide our need, our weaknesses from one another. The context of our whole lives is marked our by our prayer life - a life we share supporting and upholding one another in the presence of our loving Father who supports us and upholds us all.
So the ‘hallowing’ of God’s name, the honouring of the God Jesus invites us to call our Father, means the hallowing of the community life that he has called us to: To take our life together that seriously, to see it as the sacred response that it is to God’s call.
Then, Jesus tells us, we are to pray to this loving Father – ‘your will be done’. Not many of us would or should be too comfortable subjecting ourselves to another’s will – that is the antithesis of what our society says constitutes our freedom. It is an accusation often hurled at mindless religious obedience, quite rightly. But we are not praying, here, for the will of some arbitrary Lord or force or ruler, but for the will of this God we call ‘our Father’: the one who wills us to live peacefully, joyfully as brothers and sisters, and who wills that familial existence for all people, for all creation. That, according to Christian faith is freedom, not to assert my will, to have it all my way, but live in real freedom with and for others, in love.
So, we are called to pray for the emergence of this life that enables the peaceful, joyful flourishing of the whole: the reign of God’s love in all creation – to say to our Father: ‘your will be done.’
The life that God calls us to, the life we share together - in justice, in peace, in love - is what we really need, is the true ground and goal of our being – we don’t need much else…. Only ‘our daily bread’ just what our bodies need so that we can enjoy this life we have together. Sorry, no winning tatts tickets on this list.
And whatever dares to disrupt this life of peace, the negative forces of individual egos, the niggardly holding of grudges, the even more violent attempts to corrupt and destroy this common life, all of these of course need to be confronted, but we also need to move beyond: may we be prepared to ‘forgive, as we ourselves have been forgiven’, prepared to reconcile and to heal, so that we can get back to what it is that we are meant to be on about: enjoying this life we’ve been called to share together, and getting on with the mission of inviting and welcoming others into it.
In this life of mutual love that God calls us to, there are no guarantees that we will be spared the hurts and suffering that is part of being human. We will each face times of trial and testing. None of us want it for ourselves, none of us want it for our neighbours and so Jesus invites us to pray ‘do not bring us to the time of trial.’ ‘Save us from those times if it is at all possible’! We can dare to ask such things.
So long as we never, ever forget, that even in those times, if we do find ourselves facing them – that this God to whom we pray has given us everything we need to weather those times in our life: The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the love and companionship of all those brothers and sisters with whom, in faith, in hope and in love we stand and pray:
‘Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name….’
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