7-28-19
Grace and peace to you from God our creator and from our
Lord and savior Jesus the Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, Amen.
When I was a kid, I remember reading a very special book
of prayers. I turned to this book over and over again, because they were
prayers written on a wide variety of topics, in a wise and profound, but also
brief way. This book was not written by Martin Luther or Mother Teresa or Mr.
Rogers…. It was written by kids. Some of these prayers are funny and very
honest:
“Dear
God, are you really invisible, or is that just a trick?”
“Dear
God, Thank you for the baby brother, but what I wanted was a puppy.”
“Dear
God, I think the stapler is one of your greatest inventions.”
Some of these kids also have some very serious things to
say to God. One little girl wrote:
“Dear
God, I bet it is very hard for you to love everybody in the whole world. There
are only 4 people in my family and I can never do it.”
I wish I could tell this girl that this is hard for
everybody, in our own families and in the whole world too, as we have seen all
too often the tragic consequences of not loving one another in the news lately.
And lastly, this is my personal favorite prayer from this
book:
“Dear
God, I think about you sometimes even when I’m not praying.”
Our theme for today, if you haven’t noticed, is prayer.
And hopefully you also recognized parts of the prayer that Jesus teaches his
disciples. It is, of course, a version of what we know of as “The Lord’s
Prayer.” This is actually the only time in our three-year cycle of readings
that any part of Lord’s Prayer is comes up.
A more complete version of the Lord’s Prayer can be found
in the Gospel of Matthew, and yet, we are hearing Luke’s version today. I like
to think it’s because that in Luke, every time the disciples turn around, it
seems, Jesus is praying. Like, all the time.
At the beginning of Luke, at Jesus’ baptism, Jesus was praying when the heavens opened, and
the spirit descended on him, and God’s voice rang out, saying, ‘you are my Son,
the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.’ Later on, right
before Jesus asks his disciples that big question, “Who do YOU say that I am?”
Jesus was praying. Along with Peter,
James, and John, Jesus went up a mountain to pray and be transfigured. And even on the night of his betrayal,
Jesus spend most of the
night in prayer, and encourages his
disciples to do the same, though of course they fail miserably.
Here, though, on their way to Jerusalem and on their way
to the cross, the disciples are being observant, for once. They’ve seen Jesus praying before, they’ve noticed he does it often. And so, as
Jesus’s students, they ask for a lesson in prayer. But what they got was
perhaps not exactly what they were expecting.
There is so much packed into this little prayer we call
the Lord’s Prayer. And even in this, an abbreviated version in Luke, there is a
lot of big requests happening. Each of these petitions by themselves could
easily take up an entire sermon. But all put together we paint a picture of the
kind of God we pray to. The kind of God whose kingdom does not play by the
rules of power that holds this world in sway. The kind of God who cares about
our daily needs. The kind of God whose forgiveness abounds. The kind of God that
does not send trials to us to see if our faith is “good enough” or “strong
enough. A God that Jesus encourages us to call our father as our loving parent.
There are lots of prayers that are recorded in the Bible.
And yet, THIS is the one that we as Christians have clung to as the most
important. After all, this is the
prayer that Jesus taught his followers to say.
For just one second we are going to get into our time
machines of choice – the TARDIS, Delorian, time-turner, you get to pick – we
are going to hop in and travel back to what you might have gone over in
confirmation class. In the Small Catechism, in Martin Luther’s explanation of
the beginning, or “first petition” of the Lord’s Prayer, he writes this: “With
these words God wants to attract us, so that we come to believe he is truly our
father and we are truly his children, in order that we may ask him boldly and
with complete confidence, just as loving children ask their loving father.”
When Jesus prays in the Gospels, he calls God his Father.
And here, when the disciples ask Jesus how to pray to God, Jesus wants us to
follow his lead. He says, “when YOU pray…” we get to call God “father” too. Because
it’s true. God is like a parent who loves us unconditionally and eternally, who
provides and forgives and promises to be present with us in all circumstances.
All because we are God’s beloved children.
Jesus doesn’t say that God will hear us only if we say
the write words or the right kind of prayer, or if our faith is “strong”
enough. God will not refuse to hear the
cries of God’s children in need if we don’t
send that email to ten of our friends or if that child with cancer on Facebook DOESN’T get ten thousand “likes.” God will not ignore us if we don’t have our
lives put together, or don’t go to church “enough,” or if we let our minds
wander during the prayers or hymns or sermon when we ARE at church. God will
not discount our requests, even if God disagrees with them. God promises to
hear you because God loves you.
As Paul wrote in his letter to the Colossians, the love of
God is revealed to us by God making us alive together with Christ, setting
aside the record of our sins by nailing them to the cross. And every time we
pray, we are speaking to a God who loves us even more than a parent could
possibly love their own child. A God who communicate back to us, who reveals
Godself to us and is vulnerable enough to create two-way dialogue. Because
sometimes even God needs to be reminded of who God is – a God of Justice AND a
God of Grace.
Abraham did just that, and in this way is an excellent
model for prayer – while Abraham knew of the great sins of Sodom and Gomorrah –
sins of greed, lack of mercy, inhospitality, mistreatment of the vulnerable –
and yet he also knew that there were might be some good people among them
still. Ultimately, Abraham’s petitions of mercy failed, because there were not
even 10 righteous people remained in those cities…but that was not Abraham’s
fault. He still tried.
Now, not every moment of prayer for us will be a dramatic
bargaining with the divine for the sake of a whole city. Our daily prayers will
be more mundane, like those of the kids who asked for a puppy and got a brother
or thanking God for the invention of the stapler. But maybe those prayers are
just as profound.
I think that I love that little girl’s prayer from that
book the most, the one that went, “Dear
God, I think about you sometimes even when I’m not praying.” And sometimes,
we even pray when we don’t know we are praying. Like when the disciples ask
Jesus to teach them how to pray, their
question is a prayer. Our questions, our
wonderings, our thoughts, complaints and laments can all be prayers, and can become as unconscious as breathing.
We can pray with our hands – not just in folding them, but
also in using them to construct a Lego tower of prayer, or in service to our
neighbor, or coloring a picture with crayons to give to someone else…. We can
use our voices, in singing our praise to God, and with giving an encouraging
word … we can use our feet, when we march for justice or walk toward those who
are in need. I dare say that we can even use our time, our money, our
possessions, and even our social media to pray as well.
But whether or not we are aware of it, whether or not we
are consciously praying, whether we have a set time to pray or pray whenever we
have a need whether or not we are thinking about God, God is always thinking of us. And sometimes… when we pray to God… God actually listens. As
long as we keep at it. Thanks be to God, amen.
