Grace Presbyterian Church
July 24, 2016, Pentecost 10C
Luke 11:1-13
What
to Pray, or How to Pray?
It is one of the
most familiar things we do in the church. Whether as the body gathered in
worship or each of as individuals in our own quiet time, Christians pray.
It is also, quite
possibly, one of the most – if not the
most – misused and abused practices of the Christian faith. It can be used
before a Friday night football game as a kind of sanctified middle finger at
anybody in the crowd who does not claim Christianity. It can be appropriated by
political parties as a insinuation that God endorses our candidate and hates
the other one (I promise I wrote that line before the RNC last week). It can be used, as Jesus shows in a parable about a Pharisee in
Luke 18, as a means of proclaiming one’s righteousness to the derision of
other, presumably less righteous folk around the one praying. Prayer can be
abused quite prolifically, and it sometimes seems the more public the prayer,
the more abuse of prayer is involved.
That is a danger,
but there are others. Maybe for the church itself the danger is something
different; the danger is, perhaps, that we pray without remembering how, or
why.
It’s possible
something like that was in play as the disciples approached Jesus in today’s
account from the gospel of Luke, in which they ask Jesus to teach them to pray
“as John taught his disciples” (v.
1). Now we can’t be exactly sure of what this means, whether there was a manner
or a style or even a fixed text that John’s disciples had inherited from the
one called “the Baptizer.” Whatever it was, Jesus’s disciples wanted Jesus to
give them that same thing, but it’s not necessarily a given that what they
asked for was what they got.
You’ll no doubt
have noticed that the text recorded by Luke is not quite the same as the
version we’ll be saying later in the service as we typically do, when the
pastor doesn’t forget. Luke’s version doesn’t include a few of the familiar
phrases that are in that popular version, which is patterned after the text
recorded in Matthew 6. Luke records the address of the prayer as simply “Father,” instead of “Our Father in heaven” as in Matthew; “your kingdom come” is not followed in
Luke with “your will be done, on earth as
it is in heaven”; and the end doesn’t include the plea about not leading us into temptation. But perhaps the most jolting difference is in what happens
when, after we have prayed for our daily bread, we turn to the petition for
forgiveness.
We say, “and
forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Other denominations borrow
from different text translations and say “and forgive us our trespasses, as we
forgive those who trespass against us” – that seems particularly popular among
Methodists. This of course leads to some amusing situations when “debts” and
“trespasses” groups are together in the same service, and the running
seminary-type joke about Presbyterians being obsessed with money while
Methodists are fixated on property.
The really
interesting part, though, is in the little words. Matthew records Jesus telling
the disciples to say “forgive us our
debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.” Luke’s version is a
bit different; “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted
to us.”
Whoa. The prayer
Jesus gives the disciples assumes
that we are forgiving those who do us wrong. We state this, if we pray the
prayer this way. I don’t know about you, but thinking about the prayer this way
would give me pause before launching into the prayer. Umm…am I really living up to that?
Even with all this
just within the model prayer that Jesus gives, Luke records more, and we miss
out on what Jesus wants his disciples to understand about prayer if our reading
ends before we get to this part. It’s possible, though, that across the
centuries our minds haven’t always been attuned to this instruction very well
for one important reason; what Jesus has to say here is not about us, we who
(with the disciples) are seeking some kind of nailed-down instructions for
getting exactly what we want when we pray. Jesus isn’t giving us a formula for
Praying the Perfect Prayer; Jesus wants us to understand the God to whom we
pray, the God Jesus calls “Father”.
Jesus gives us
this instruction in a mini-parable and a handful of seemingly silly
hypothetical examples. The mini-parable is one that has confused readers more
than once. A man unexpectedly receives a guest at midnight (remember, we’re in
an age before 24-hour quickie-marts or Wal-Marts), and goes to his neighbor to
plead for bread. The neighbor is already tucked into bed, the house all locked
up (in a modern retelling we’d say the alarm system was already set), and it
would frankly be a big hassle to get up and fish out a loaf of bread. However, the
petitioner is persistent, and Jesus notes that even if the neighbor’s friendship
or “neighborship” isn’t enough to get the man out bed, he’ll eventually get up
and give him bread just to get him to go away.
When readers stop
here we get a strange picture of God, as some cranky old sleepyhead who has to
be pestered into answering our prayers. Needless to say that’s not Luke’s
point, which we understand when we finish the whole teaching episode. So, let’s
finish the teaching episode.
We get one of Jesus’s
more eloquent sayings in Luke’s gospel; “Ask
… search (or “seek” if your memorized scripture mental file is all in the
King James Version) … knock” is one
of those eloquent passages that stays with us pretty effectively. But again, we
can get crosswise if we stop here.
Verses 11 and 12
can be a little troubling for us. In the age in which we live, it is sadly easy
to imagine parents who would give their children a snake when they ask for a
fish, or a scorpion instead of an egg. We know that fathers (or mothers) aren’t
always kind or giving to their children. We know too well that fathers (or
mothers) can be abusive, destructive, or even deadly to their children. We
really need to listen to the cries of those for whom the word “Father” does not
bring forth an image of a loving and caring parent, but instead summons
nightmares and trauma. We do not need to be so attached to our particular words
and phrases that we cannot hear the pain of those for whom the words are not
words of comfort and reassurance.
But finally, we
get to the key point that Jesus is trying to get us to hear. It’s worth hearing
again:
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!
While we might not
be keen on being called “evil,” hear what Jesus is saying: we (Jesus’s
listeners) know what it means to give our children good things. We know how to
do the right thing for our children. If you have ever been a parent, you
probably learned along the way that being a good parent is quite a different
thing than giving your children everything they ask for. I’m just gonna guess
that you never gave your six-year-old a chain saw as a toy. I am sure she was a clever child, but probably she’s not quite ready for that kind of
thing at this point, and (I’m just guessing) you knew that. We give
our children what they need, not necessarily what they want.
If we have enough
basic sense and enough basic goodness to do this (or most of us, anyway) for
our children, how much more will God do likewise? How much more will God give
us what we need when we ask? God knows us well
enough not to drop ten million dollars in our laps just because we ask. God
knows us well enough to know what kind of jerk we’d become if we suddenly had
that dropped in our laps – possibly much more destructive than the six-year-old with a
chainsaw.
I am pretty sure that the Rolling Stones were not seeking to express
a theology of prayer in their song, but it’s actually not a bad summation; “you can’t always get what you want, but if
you try sometimes, you just might find … you get what you need.”
This is a hard
truth. We don’t always get what we want when we pray. If we always got what we
want, Lynette Ramer would be here with us this morning if she weren’t off on
vacation, instead of at her home under hospice care. But if we continue to pray
for Lynette, we just might find that she gets the peace and the rest she needs.
We don’t always
get what we want when we pray. We pray for peace, not just in Baton Rouge or
Orlando or Nice, but also in Munich or Baghdad or Kabul, and yet the assaults
and the attacks and violence keep happening. But if we continue to pray for
peace, we just might find that we become the bringers and makers of the peace
that we need.
How much more will
God give us the Holy Spirit when we ask?
How to pray: we
give God the glory, we ask for what we need, we forgive, we pray persistently,
we trust God to give us what we need – we trust God to give us the Holy Spirit.
Maybe that’s not as easy to memorize, but maybe that is what we need to hear.
For a lesson on
how to pray, Thanks be to God. Amen.
Hymns (from Glory to
God: The Presbyterian Hymnal)
#728 Somebody’s
Knocking at Your Door
#465 What
a Friend We Have in Jesus
#464 Our
Father, Which Art in Heaven
#39 Great
Is Thy Faithfulness
Credit: agnusday.org. Of course, in our church we say "debts"... ;-)
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