Teach us to pray

 

Luke 11: 1-13
New Ark United Church of Christ, Newark, DE
July 24, 2022

Photo closeup of a person holding a round loaf of bread with the bottom of the loaf wrapped in a white tea towel.  The loaf of bread has been scored from right to left and up/down like a hot cross bun.

When did you learn to pray and who taught you? Perhaps you’ve had many teachers, spanning over years. If that is a memory you have, a comforting, encouraging memory, take a moment now to think of that person, those people, and how they made you feel in their presence. Give thanks for them and the love they shared with you.



A few weeks ago, someone shared with me that they were trying to pray properly, which sounds very much like Jesus’ disciples wanting to know how to pray. From the time we were young most of us were taught that if we want to be heard, we must communicate a certain way, use the right words, have a proper attitude. This also became true for prayer, that in order for God to hear our prayer we had communicate a certain way. How many of us learned to pray using the acronym ACTS? Adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication. There’s also the five fingers of prayer: Praise (index finger), confession (middle finger), intercession (ring finger), petition (pinky), and thankfulness (thumb). Both of these methods have the basic elements of the Lord’s Prayer as we know it from the gospel of Matthew.



However, Luke’s version is more sparse. It begins simply with “Father” which was revolutionary for its time, to use such an intimate word for the creator of the universe. However, in Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke, the word used instead of “father” or “abba” is “abwoon”, a combination of “abba” and “woon”, the Aramaic word for “womb”. And so God is Parent but God is also Source, Origin, Oneness, the One who births us, who brings us into Being, the Ground of All Being. Prayer reveals how we think about God and our relationship to the divine, our connection to what is good, holy, and true.

Poem entitled "What We Want" by Linda Pastan
What we want/is never simple./We move among the things/we thought we wanted:/a face, a room, an open book/and these things bear our names--/now they want us./But what we want appears/in dreams, wearing disguises./We fall past,/holding our arms/in the morning/our arms ache./We don't remember the dream,/but the dream remembers us./It is there all day/as an animal is there/under the table,/as the stars are there/even in full sun.

“Hallowed be your name” or blessed or holy is your name, and for Jesus who was Jewish that name is YHWH, the Hebrew consonants Yod, Heh, Wod, Heh, known as the Tetragrammaton. It is the name that is sacred, ineffable, unspeakable, the One in whom we live and move and have our being. God revealed God’s name to Moses in the book of Exodus. Moses asked, “Who shall I say sent me?” and God replied, “Say ‘I Am Who I Am’ sent you.” Or “I Will Be What I Will Be”. When spoken as Yahweh, it is a breath in and a breath out. Yah. Weh. Hallowed be, blessed be that which is, that which will be, the breath in and the breath out, the way we move forward.



In Luke’s version there is no mention of God in heaven, or God’s will be done on earth, save for “your kingdom come”. Pastor Carlos Rodriguez of Puerto Rico reminds us that when we pray “your kingdom come”, we are likewise praying “let my kingdom go”. And it was Ada Maria Isasi-Diaz in her mujerista liberation theology who coined the word “kindom”. It is through our connections, our families, our friends, our neighborhoods, our communities that we are able to carry on and come alive, that we experience liberation and justice. So when we pray “your kingdom, your kindom come”, we are letting go of our comfort zone, our need to control, our desire for certainty. We let go of what we think is normative, what is dominant, what is harmful to the most vulnerable in God’s kindom. We open ourselves to the path that is revealed by journeying on it, a path with no guarantees except that we will learn to love well.

"When we pray, 'Let your kingdom come,' we are likewise praying, 'Let my kingdom go.'"
Carlos A. Rodriguez #DroptheStones

“Give us each day our daily bread” would remind Jesus’ disciples of the manna God gave to the Israelites each day in the desert, instructing them not to save it but to accept what was given each day and to trust that tomorrow would bring what was needed. Throughout his ministry, Jesus spoke about not hoarding up treasures here on earth and not worrying about what we eat or what we wear. In the parable he tells, in which we become the midnight friend in need of bread for a guest, we realize that our daily bread comes from the willingness of others to disrupt their lives for us. Our daily bread is connected to the daily bread of others and that we are all guests of God on this earth.



“Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” Forgiveness is one of the toughest, if not the most difficult of spiritual practices to engage in. By no means is it about condoning harmful behavior or evil actions nor is it about allowing those who have hurt us to have access to us. By the same token, forgiveness does not allow us access to those we have harmed. Rather, forgiveness can be an unburdening of shame or a release of a grudge or the need to get even. Forgiveness can be the repayment or erasure of a debt, an act of repair or atonement. In the words of poet Hana Malik, “Forgiveness is taking the knife out your own back and not using it to hurt anyone else no matter how they hurt you.”

Photo of a poem from the book RAW, entitled "How to Forgive":
Forgiveness is
taking the knife out your own back
and not using it
to hurt anyone else
no matter how
they hurt you

“Do not bring us to the time of trial”. And yet we’ve all lived through times of trial and we’re living through times like that now. We’ve all been tested in one way or another and for some of us it has been one thing after another. For too many the system is rigged against them, and prayer begins to feel like a means of swallowing the status quo. We’ve asked and it wasn’t always given. We’ve knocked and the door didn’t open. We’ve searched and haven’t found it yet. There are times we have despaired and wondered what prayer is for.



For Jesus, prayer is about persistence. It’s not about knocking once but over and over again. It’s not about asking politely but with all the emotion and desire we have. Prayer is not always quiet and meditative. In the words of poet Ellen Bass, “Make your eating and drinking a supplication. Make your slicing of carrots a holy act, each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.” Brushing our hair, washing our face, making love, crying, laughing, our hunger and our tiredness, all of it a prayer. The apostle Paul instructed us to pray without ceasing, and if breathing is a prayer, we are praying every moment we have life.

Quote by Mother Teresa: "I used to pray that God would feed the hungry, or do this or that, but now I pray that he will guide me to do whatever I'm supposed to do, what I can do.  I used to pray for answers, but now I'm praying for strength.  I used to believe that prayer changes things, but now I know that prayer changes us and we change things."

Prayer is hope and resistance. Prayer is a resounding “no” to evil and an emphatic “yes” to wholeness. Prayer isn’t the least we can do. Prayer isn’t an end in itself but the beginning of ethical and moral action, our prayers embodied in our hearts and minds, our hands and feet, our giving and sharing, in our relationships. Prayer is a call, an invitation to not only our survival but to healing, restorative justice, and systemic change. Prayer is longing and grieving. Prayer is the ache and the antidote. Prayer is wrestling and yielding. Prayer is profound thanks, deep anguish, indescribable joy. Prayer can be profane, and it can be poetry. Prayer can be mundane, and it can be ecstatic.



Most of all, I think prayer is about healthy humility. Prayer is an acknowledgment of our limitations, that our wisdom can take us only so far, that we cannot do this alone, that we need help. Prayer helps us articulate our needs and focus our energy, our attention, and where it needs to go. Prayer puts us in solidarity with people who are suffering and connects us in our suffering to those who love us. Prayer is a way for us to willingly disrupt our lives for another. Prayer places us in a relationship with our Source, the Mystery that brought us into being, in a way that shapes who we are as human beings. Who will I be today? Who will you be today? Who will we be as Church? Perhaps today we will be an answer to someone’s prayer. Amen.

Benediction – from the Open Door Community, Atlanta, GA



Our Beloved Friend

     who is outside the System

May your Holy Name be honored

     by the way we live our lives.

Your Beloved Community come.

Your way be done inside the System

     as it is outside the System.

Give us this day everything we need.

Forgive us our wrongs

    as we forgive those who have wronged us.

Do not bring us to hard testing,

    but keep us safe from the Evil One.

For Thine is:

the Beloved Community,
the power and the glory,
forever and ever. Amen.