"Pray"

Luke 11:1-13 Click here to watch the Sermon "Pray"

Shortly after starting my first call as pastor to a church in Tennessee, I was asked to pay a home visit to a member of the church. She had been a Sunday school teacher in the not-too-distant past, but she and her family had stopped coming to church as regularly as they once had. There were suggestions around the church that maybe they had succumbed to the pervasive influence of youth athletics that carried families far from home—and church—most weekends for seasonal soccer and softball leagues. Others said they'd heard that this woman was facing unexpected health challenges. In small towns there's no shortage of speculation about other people's lives. 

She met me at the door and invited me in for a chat. She shared that she had indeed been struggling with her health. The doctors hadn't been of much help in diagnosing the source of her symptoms. This health crisis, as you might imagine, had turned into a kind of spiritual crisis. While she had been a faithful churchgoer and a Sunday school teacher on top of that, she confessed, "I don't know how to pray for myself." All of her believing life had been spent praying for others, and now that she was facing difficulties of her own, she was self-conscious and uncomfortable praying for herself. The problems she faced weren't small, but she didn't have to look far to find someone with needs that seemed to be so much greater than her own. It didn't feel right asking for God's help when that help was so clearly needed elsewhere. Wouldn't that be selfish? 

I wish I would have told her that none of us knows how to pray. Not really. Isn't that what Paul says in the eighth chapter of his letter to the church in Rome? "We do not know how to pray as we ought." That's pretty funny considering the fact that many of us pray often, over meals or at the end of the day before we go to sleep. Every Sunday that we come to worship we pray multiple times. We offer prayers of confession. We pray for the illumination of the Holy Spirit before we hear scripture read. We give thanks at the table when we come for communion. We pray for the world and the church, for people we know and those that we don't. We pray over the offering of our lives and gifts that they would be dedicated to God's purposes in the world. We pray a LOT! And still, Paul says, "we do not know how to pray as we ought." I have to tell you that I find that oddly comforting because when I first felt called to do this, the thing I felt the most unprepared to do was pray. 

Now I've never been accused of not having something to say about just about anything. It's not often that I'm at a loss for words—except when it comes to prayer. It's like the second I close my eyes and bow my head, all the words that usually come so easily suddenly fly out of my head. It feels like being in high school again and getting up the nerve to call your crush on the phone only to find yourself tongue-tied the second they pick up. Only when I pray it's God who is on the line and I don't have the first clue what to say. "Hey…" 

So, when I hear Jesus' disciples say to him, "Lord, teach us to pray," I am so relieved, because maybe they weren't all that sure about their prayer lives either. What's more likely is that these disciples were following the time-honored tradition where a rabbi's instructions were about more than the finer points of what was, or wasn't, in the law; they also touched on how the law informed a person's life and the ways in which they trusted God. The question itself is a recognition that there is always more to know when it comes to living, and praying, faithfully. Teach us. Notice they don't say, "Lord, teach us the right way to pray," as if prayer could be made so small and singular. And while Jesus' answer to this request doesn't come at the exclusion of all other prayers ever, it is likely the most widely-used and recognizable scripture in the world. You would think that our prayers would at least be informed and shaped by this prayer Jesus teaches. Instead, the prayers we tend to hear the most and are encouraged to pray ourselves sound far removed from the one Jesus gave us. 

First, Jesus invites us to begin with a term of endearment and intimacy: abba, dad, papa. We can't even bring ourselves to address God that way in our English translations of this prayer. Instead we use the more formal—and consequently more distant—form of address, Father. Our own prayers tend to take us even further from that intimacy, mistaking distance for reverence with words like Lord, and Almighty, and Most High. Or could it be by design? Maybe we'd rather keep God at arm's length, an authority figure to be formally petitioned rather than the One on whom we depend absolutely the way a small child depends upon a parent. Perhaps out of a misplaced sense of dignity, or perhaps out of our uniquely American desire to be self-made and independent, we forgo the bond that exists between a parent, or parental figure, and a child curled up in their arms. We don't know how to pray like that. 

Next, Jesus prays for God. Specifically, that the name of God would be kept holy and that the realm of God's power and presence would be made manifest among us. We're not used to the notion of praying for God, at least not right away. Our prayers often resemble an order at the drive-thru window. "Yeah, God—give me an order of good health, some success and a side order of happiness to go." As with many of our religious practices we have fallen into the bad habit of needing everything to be about us, including our prayers. These days most of the so-called Christian books that you find on the best-seller list fall into this category. What's in it for me and my best life? What do I get out of it? Which invariably leads to prayers peppered with the nauseating repetition of the phrase, "we just wanna…" For Jesus, God isn't the button we push to place our order, but rather the One around whom our lives are ordered. As such, Jesus suggests that we keep the distinctive quality of who God is and what God wants for the world foremost in our hearts as we pray. But we don't know how to pray like that either. 

Finally, Jesus does get to the part about us and the kind of things we might seek from God in prayer. Here again, it's bound to be a little disappointing to our capitalist consumer culture. They're certainly a far cry from the name-it-and-claim-it school of prayer. Not long ago, a friend described to me a rather unusual encounter he had with a group of people who were getting together regularly to pray for one another. "We keep track of how God answers these prayers," they told him. So far, God had given one couple a Hawaiian vacation, another man had landed a big commission at work, and another couple was getting ready to move into their dream house. It was all very nice, my friend told me, but he wasn't sure what any of it had to do with God. 

Jesus keeps the requests simple and relatively small, not because God isn't capable of more, but because we aren't. Driven by a culture of scarcity that frightens us into pursuing more than we need, we are quick to lose sight of what God has already provided and provides each and every day. To pray only for a day's worth of bread keeps us grounded in the essentials, what we depend upon God for today. We don't usually pray like that. 

Maybe the problem that most of us have, the problem my former parishioner had whose health crisis had become a faith crisis, isn't that we don't know how to pray, but that we don't know what to pray for. If all we are praying for is ourselves, if all we are doing is dropping our prayer coin in the cosmic gumball machine and waiting for God to dispense our request, then it is no wonder that we often feel like something is missing from our prayer life. What is missing is God. Ask, says Jesus, and it will be given to you. Search, says Jesus, and you will find. Knock, says Jesus, and the door will be opened for you. And what will be given, what you will find, the one who opens the door is God. God, who loves us deeply and intimately. God, whose name is distinct and unparalleled. God, whose goodness orders our lives. God who sustains us each and every day giving us all that we could ever need. God, whose Spirit of forgiveness and mercy is what finally allows us to do what we cannot do on our own: allows us to rest as a child in the arms of a loving parent, allows us to keep God's name holy, allows us to exhibit the kinship God has established with us and between us here on earth, allows us to enjoy what we have been given without always seeking more, allows us to forgive others and endure the trials life sends our way. When what we are praying for is God, then there is no such thing as an unanswered prayer, and the answer we are given is only the beginning.