“Learning to Pray”

July 18, 2010

Luke 11:1-8

A child comes to you with shoes in his hands, holding them out for your help. With fascination he watches as you tie them—making a loop, wrapping the lace around it, a push, a pull—a bow! And while you’re still kneeling down at his level he looks into your eyes and blurts out—a request? A demand?—“Teach me!”

Watching other kids in the neighborhood race by on their bicycles grows tiresome. While out shopping with you she sees just what she wants—red paint, chrome handlebars, two wheels, not three, and says: “Teach me!”

Remember the excitement, the eagerness to learn, the voice that said to you: “Teach me!” Remember your own intense desire to learn when you said “Teach me”—to drive, to read, to play golf, to knit?

If someone wants to learn, just about anything can be taught.

Years ago, somewhere in Israel—the place apparently didn’t matter—a rabbi was at prayer. In the heat of the day, his followers watched as they had many times before. He had prayed by the Jordan River. He had prayed in the synagogues. He was known for his praying. Always his followers watched in silence.

Finally on this day, the desire to learn became so great that one of the disciples said to Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” The need to learn was great and urgent.

How do we pray?

Where do we begin?

What do we say?

 “When you pray, say, ‘Father’ . . .”

The hymn writer, Brian Wren, points out that “This is not at all the same as saying ‘When all future Christians pray, they may only speak to God in terms of male authority figures.’”

We need not be literalists here and claim that since Jesus said “Father” we, too, should use that title exclusive of all others. Father points to something beyond that word, to the caring relationship with God that we humans can have. Jesus is saying, “We’re all in this together, so address God with the same intimacy with which I do.”

Our Episcopalian friends begin the Lord’s Prayer after the invitation: “And now, as our Savior Christ has taught us, we are bold to say . . .” The point is, as one person put it, “only because Jesus Christ is our Savior do we have the audacity to assume this intimate relationship to God and to ask for forgiveness and sustenance.”[1]

Father. Mother. Parent. We are that close to God.

In fact we are closer than our often-formal word “Father” usually suggests.

The summer before my final year in seminary I worked at the child care center at Harvard Law School. I worked with toddlers—eight children between one and a half and two years old. It was an international group of kids: four Americans, boys from Japan and Germany, a girl from Norway, and Shushi, a boy from Israel. Like all of the kids, Shushi was just beginning to talk. And like all of the international children, he understood and spoke two languages.

I had what might be called a spiritual awakening one afternoon when Shushi’s father came to get him. Opening his arms and running toward him, the toddler cried out “Abba!”—the Hebrew equivalent of “Daddy!” or “Dada!”

And when Jesus said, “When you pray, say ‘Father’ . . .” he did not, of course, say the English “Father,” or the Greek “Pater.” He spoke his own language and said “Abba”—Daddy. When you pray, be this open, this trusting, this close to God, that like a child you can say “Mommy,” “Dada.” This is the intimacy with God that is granted to the followers of Jesus. As sisters and brothers of Christ, we know ourselves as children of God.

Lord teach us to pray.

As we begin to pray we are reminded that prayer is not an escape from the world, not a retreat from the rest of life. Jesus teaches us a way of prayer that is wrapped up in the world. “Our daily bread” is not some spiritual bread from heaven, but each day’s provision of real food for real people. In prayer we bring our concerns for survival, our concerns for life before God.

Martin Luther developed a rather extensive list to explain the meaning of “bread.” It included food, drink, clothes, shoes, houses, farms, fields, land, money, property, a good marriage, good children, honest public servants, a just government, favorable weather, health, honors, good friends and loyal neighbors. Since Luther others have agreed that we can think of “our daily bread” in the wide sense of the term. And certainly we could quite quickly expand this list to include other necessities for our contemporary lives. All of our needs can be the subjects of our prayers.

This is more than presenting God with a wish list of items that we would like. Instead, we become like the person who, out of bread, goes to a friend in the middle of the night. Beginning to pray, we become aware of our own emptiness. We know that there is little or nothing we can do. Of our own accord, we give our lives over, trusting in God’s goodness.

You see, in addition to a model of prayer, Jesus suggests an approach to prayer as an occasion of openness.

To ask is to be open.

If I ask you a question, then I am open to your answer, whatever it may be.

If I ask for your help, then I am open to your action, whether assistance or rejection.

When we pray, we come before God with empty hands and open hearts. Empty hands and open hearts are ready to receive.

Which may be why prayer is so difficult for many, especially in American churches.

You see, our hands are full. It is not that we possess too much. It is not that we are materialistic. I’ll leave that for you to decide—it’s not the point here.

It’s just that we have been told over and over how good it is to give—and it is. We have heard again and again how much we have to give—and we do. The danger is that many have come to see the Christian life and the mission of the church only in terms of giving from what we have.

How strange then, to be invited to pray as those who ask. How difficult to find that we come to prayer with empty hands. Because our hands are empty, because our hearts are open, we can receive what is given to us when we pray.

It’s an odd business, the kind of prayer in which we ask and are given. The poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote: “God answers sharp and sudden on some prayers,/And thrusts the thing we have prayed for in our face,/A gauntlet with a gift in’t.”

Other times we wait and wait.

We wait—and pray—with the promise of Christ that God hears and is affected by what we pray. It is a dangerous gift that we are given—to come into the presence of the living God who listens.

We come, Jesus suggests, not to give, but to receive. We come empty. Prayer is an occasion of openness.

Such trust is not always easy. People often feel let down or rejected or abandoned by God. At such times trusting in God’s goodness seems extremely difficult, perhaps even foolish.

The opening word of this prayer—“Abba”—calls us back, invites us into a relationship of trust. We come slowly to the sense that, as friends will not let us down, even responding to requests for bread in the night, even more so can God be depended on in our daily existence.

In prayer we take the risk of not having it all. We take the risk of not having it all together. Because God can be trusted, we dare to come before God in need.

Lord teach us to pray.

In prayer we do not escape from the world. We place the world before God. And in bringing the world before God, we are also making a commitment as to how we will live. Jesus understood the connection between how we live and how we pray. Each enables the other.

Trusting in their ability to act with love toward their neighbors, Jesus instructed the disciples to pray: “Forgive our sins because we too forgive all who have done us wrong.”

There are those people who are willing to forgive others just about anything, yet who carry around a load of guilt about their own lives. They can’t see the forgiveness offered. To such people this comes as good news. You have forgiven. You are forgiven.

On the other hand, this serves as a warning to all who would remain cold and unforgiving. Can we blithely rely on God’s forgiveness if we are unwilling to offer our own? What we do does matters. Our actions have consequences.

Our acts of forgiveness are presented to God in prayer that we might be forgiven. At other times, as after confession, we are reminded of God’s forgiveness that we might live in this way. Prayer and action are closely linked.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Our lives, our actions, our relationships are brought before God. As this instructional prayer ends, we follow God out of prayer and into the rest of life. “Lead us.” Go before.

Like the pillar of smoke before the Israelites on the exodus from Egypt.

Like the shepherd before the sheep.

Like the risen Christ who goes before the disciples to Galilee,

God will lead us.

Lead us not into temptation. As you lead, O God, continue to keep us safe, keep us on the path of life and light.

Lord teach us to pray.

In prayer we begin to understand the words of Jesus that we must be like children. We call God our parent: Mommy, Daddy. Like children we enter into a relationship of love and trust with God.

That which children want to learn, they remember. The important things—reading, riding a bike—are not learned to be forgotten or outgrown. They are learned so that they can be done over and over.

A girl learns to tie her shoe and proudly asks, “Want to see me do it again?”

“Every day,” she is told.

So prayer is meant to be a continuous relating of ourselves to God. If it were not, why would the disciples, why would we, be so ready to learn.

Jesus not only prays for us. He teaches us to pray, to let our whole life be involved with God’s goodness.

And because prayer is meant to be an ongoing process, we are given encouragement as we learn. Jesus follows his model prayer by saying: “Ask and it will be given to you. Seek and you will find. Knock and it will be opened to you.” Next Sunday I want to spend some time unwrapping the gift of those words.

Many, if not most, people here today have carried the Lord's Prayer with them from childhood. We learned it at home or in Sunday School, we would say it from memory along with the rest of the congregation during worship. We know these words "by heart," indeed they are written deeply upon our souls.

Yes, there are some for whom this is not the case. You learned this prayer later in life. Perhaps it continues to startle and challenge.

Either way, we have been taught well. May God give us the grace and the strength to daily use what we have learned.