Genesis 18:20-32
Luke 11:1-13
Today’s Gospel is one that evokes great humility for a preacher. Well, that’s true of almost any Gospel. But what could I possibly say this morning that would add anything to the Lord’s Prayer, which has preached itself through the prayers of billions of people over thousands of years? You all know this prayer; you’ve prayed it in times of hallowing and temptation. I remember one of my sons telling me that, as a young child, he prayed it over and over when he was scared of the dark. There’s worse things than that to do when we’re frightened of the dark.
All of us have some kind of relationship with it, and by all of us I mean all of us all over the world. The Lord’s Prayer unites Christians when so much else threatens to divide: we can pray it in ecumenical gatherings and be pretty much on the same page save for a stray trespass, sin or debt; we can pray it in multilingual gatherings and the cadence is deeply familiar even when the words are Spanish or Tagolog or Korean. I have found myself at home in very foreign places when I hear “padre nuestro, que estas en el cielo…”
Do you remember when you learned the Lord’s Prayer? I do, because prayer was not something practiced in my family of origin. So when Miss Gray at Tacaloma Tots—the (obviously private) preschool I attended in Los Angeles—patiently taught me the prayer line-by-line, it was like entering into a strange and mysterious world. And truth to tell, the Lord’s Prayer was—and still is—an invitation into strange and mysterious world.
It’s a world wherein everything begins and ends with praise of God, which is about a countercultural a stance as someone can hold in a culture that celebrates self-promotion. To state the obvious, “hallowed be thy name” is a very different sort of refrain from “we are the champions.” I don’t claim to fully understand what it means to hallow—which means to honor the holiness of—God’s name, but I do know that to be given even a glimpse of God’s identity is the deepest and oldest longing of human beings. In our ancient scriptural stories, we encounter characters like Jacob asking the God with whom he wrestled for his name. Which I should mention that he did not get: he just got a blessing and a broken hip. In similar manner we encounter Moses likewise pleading for a name so that he could tell under whose authority he was leading people out of Egypt. And what he heard from the burning bush was I am who I am. I will be who I will be. That is the profound otherness and the sovereign freedom of God. That is the name we hallow.
It’s also a world in which conventional notions of authority are upended. To pray for God’s kingdom to come on earth makes an ethical claim on our character and our resources. We who pray these words long for—and lean into—a compassionate earth where justice and peace are the common property of all. Praying the Lord’s Prayer compels us to do things like give generously and care for the vulnerable and fill backpacks for children in underserved urban schools. And while the same would have been true in Jesus’ time, there was also a deliberately provocative quality to praying for God’s kingdom in the midst of Caesar’s. Under an authoritarian system of human rule, praying the Lord’s Prayer was and is fighting words.
In the countercultural world of the Lord’s Prayer, we ask God for bread and restored human relationship and protection because we know that we all need them and because we know that other common ways of getting them—through coercion and consumption and objectification—are not how we’re called to act as disciples of Jesus. We don’t blame others for our hunger, our broken relationships, or our fears, but we do ask God to feed us and heal us and protect us. There’s an interesting tone to these petitions; the language is insistent but not whiny or demanding. Give us, forgive us, deliver us… one commentary called this a prayer that serves to remind God to do God’s job.
And so Jesus taught his disciples to pray for is a restored world which begins with praise, proclaims God’s sovereign power, and then reminds us and God of our respective roles: ours to be honest about our needs, God to equip us and provide for us. And then we return to praise again. You may have noticed that Luke version of the Lord’s prayer lacks the concluding “for thine is the Kingdom and the power and glory, forever and ever” that we are accustomed to praying in worship. That was likely added in the second century for worshipping contexts much like our own. People praying together in a liturgical context may have left some room for private petitions, but wanted to close in common words of, well, hallowing God.
The Lord’s prayer is the model Jesus gave us, but it’s not the only way to pray. Abraham’s protracted negotiation over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah was a kind of prayer, and goodness knows we’ve all prayed some variation on the theme. Lord, please just get through this exam, this project, this day… Lord, if you’d just keep my children safe… Lord, stop the spread of the fires and do not let one more refugee die crossing the Mediterranean. What Abraham learned through his repeated petitions was that God was more merciful than he imagined at the outset, which is generally what any of us learn when we start praying in earnest.
The Bible also teaches us of prayers of lament, of prayer of gratitude, and prayers too deep for words. When we borrow the prayers of our forebears in faith—the Lord’s Prayer, Biblical prayers, prayers from our own Book of Common Prayer— they shape our prayerful imagination. It’s as if we were picking up the tools of a master carpenter to learn an ancient craft. But sometimes the job is even simpler than that. Sometimes we’re not so much building holy interior houses of prayer as we are looking for shelter in a storm. And that’s when we might do well to remember the words of 13th century mystic Meister Eckhard, who said that “help” and “thank you” were sufficient prayers.
Sufficient because they are truthful. Whether we are prayer warriors or prayer beginners or people who’ve wandered far from our native language of prayer, its never a bad thing to begin anew by telling God the truth. I’m hungry, I’m hurting, I’m scared. We can dress those truths up with Jesus’ words and say “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.” Or we can just cry it from the depths of our souls and know that Jesus said it before us, and hears us when we say it even now. So let us persist in prayer. Asking, searching, and knocking. For the things we need, yes, but also for the prayerful relationship with living God that is strong enough to sustain us through hunger, pain and fear.
Today’s Gospel contains what may be the most important prayer any of us will ever pray. And it’s not even the Lord’s Prayer: it’s the simple, honest and visceral petition of people longing for intimacy with God just as we do. Remember that Jesus was praying in a certain place? And after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him what any of us can say to Jesus anytime: “Lord, teach us to pray.”
