LORD, TEACH US TO PRAY

A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

July 29, 2007

 

Scripture:  Psalm 85 and Luke 11:1-13

 

Sometimes there are happenstances in our lives that leave us shaking our heads in wonderment.  The other day I was at Betty Dorsey’s coffee shop and one of her other customers mentioned that he was going to the Thousand Islands for the first time this week.  That’s where I’m headed so I played the game of “Oh, whereabouts?”  “A place called Thousand Island Park on Wellesley Island.”  My jaw dropped.  “Who are going to visit?”  “Some people we met in Florida last winter.”  Then he gave their names and I said, “Well, you’ll be about 300 yards from our cottage—we’ll have to keep an eye out for each other.” 

 

Today’s lesson from Luke has that same fortuitous quality to it as far as I’m concerned.  As most of you know, a month ago I was part of a group of pilgrims making our way around Israel and the West Bank.  We visited Jesus’ birthplace in Bethlehem, stayed in a guesthouse on a hillside in Nazareth, the village where Jesus grew up, waded into the River Jordan, broke bread and dipped it in a chalice around a table on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, meditated in the garden of Gethsemane, made our way along the Via Dolorosa where Jesus took his final steps, and then bowed before the mystery of his death and resurrection.

 

You can’t make such a journey without pondering long and hard what there was and is about Jesus of Nazareth that so transfixes us, that grabs hold of us and won’t let go.  And this brings me to the coincidence of today’s lesson and my own musings about a two week sojourn in the rough and tumble of today’s Holy Land.

 

The Gospel reading from the lectionary for today seems heaven sent.  The disciples of Jesus had that same wonderment about who Jesus really was and why that felt compelled to follow him along the dusty roads of Palestine.  Like today, it was a land under occupation.  Roman soldiers were everywhere.  Life was unsettled.  And there Jesus was, praying by himself while his followers waited and watched.

 

“Lord,” one of his followers pleaded, “teach us to pray, as John [the Baptist] taught his disciples.”  We should not assume that the disciples had no idea how to pray, and had never been in prayer with Jesus.  What they are asking for is a model prayer that would contain their credo, their spiritual manifesto as followers of Jesus.  In just a few words, they want to pray as Jesus prayed, and in so doing find themselves in the same communion with God and other human beings that marked Jesus’ ministry among them.

 

The text of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke’s Gospel is felt by most scholars to be as close to the original as we can get:

Father, hallowed by your name.

   Your kingdom come.

   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.

 

I’m sure you’re thinking that this version seems a bit spare, compared to the prayer we will recite in a while—with debts and debtors, and the kingdom and the power and the glory intoned at the end, along with a hearty Amen. 

 

The reason for saying this rendering is probably close to Jesus’ original words stems from a basic rule of biblical scholarship—that the simplest texts are generally more original. 

Scribes who made copies of the Gospels would have been loathe to subtract any words of Jesus.  They were more likely to embellish, to fill things out from other passages of Scripture. 

 

That explains why later texts include “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.”  This was a standard closing benediction for all prayers in Jesus’ day, taken from a prayer of King David found in 1 Chronicles 29:11-13.  It made sense to add it on, but the likelihood is that Jesus’ original prayer was leaner, less embellished.

 

So here we have in just 38 words our recipe if you will for relating to God and living in God’s world.  One scholar says that this is “the richest summary of Jesus’ proclamation which we possess.” [Joachim Jeremias] This could be the subject for a dozen sermons, and I only have ten minutes left this morning.  I will focus on two things that most captivate me on the far side of a trip to the Holy Land:  “Father, hallowed be your name,” and “Give us each day our daily bread.”

 

First, let’s look at how Jesus addressed God:  Father in English, Pater in Greek, and Abba in Jesus’ native tongue of Aramaic.  What needs to be emphasized here is that Jesus was not someone who merely had a strong belief in God.  Rather, Jesus addressed God the same way a child speaks to his father or his mother—simply, intimately, securely.  His relationship with God was marked by an intimacy for which we long.  Jesus invites us to move beyond what William James called the “filmy screen of consciousness” into this very same communion with the living God.

 

“Yes,” you are saying, but “How, how is this to happen?”  John Dear is a Jesuit priest who, in his book, Living Peace, points us in the right direction.  Listen to his prescription for how we are to pray the words, “Father, hallowed be your name.”

 

Each of us can practice intimate prayer at any time. 

All we have to do is quiet ourselves down…..

Let me interrupt John Dear on this very point.  “All we have to do is quiet ourselves down….”  For many, this has become an almost insurmountable obstacle to prayer.  I have been in situations where cell phones were not even turned off at the graveside.  I have seen people who were alerted by the vibrations of their cell phones back away from a circle of family and friends paying last respects to a loved in order to take a call.  This can only be described as human bondage, as giving in to the idolatry of noisiness.  Quieting ourselves down in a world like this requires a surge of will power and a heavy dose of grace.  Having said this, let’s turn back to John Dear:

 

All we have to do is quiet ourselves down, open our hearts

to God, offer ourselves to God, accept God’s unconditional

love for us, love God with all our hearts, and rest in this

intimacy.  We can imagine resting our heads on [Christ’s]

shoulder, or lying prostrate at the feet of the risen Christ,

or breathing in the Holy Spirit.  The point is to adore God,

to be lost in love for God.[1]

 

John Dear tells of his compatriot Henri Nouwen once seeking out Mother Teresa for spiritual advice.  Her counsel was as disarmingly simply as the words Jesus taught his disciples:

When you spend one hour a day adoring your Lord and never

do anything that you know is wrong, you will be fine.”[2]

 

“Father/Mother/Holy One, hallowed by your name.”  We must be willing to enter into a spirit of adoration and the deepest intimacy we can imagine if we are to pray like Jesus, if we are to pray with Jesus.  This means the cell phones are off, the TV is off.  You may be resisting all this a bit, mumbling to yourself, “Mother Teresa was a saint living the life of a nun—she could set aside an hour each day.  I can’t!”

 

O yes you can, if you count a morning walk, and a quiet time of meditation before you fall asleep.  Martin Luther, is his treatise on Discipline for the Life of Ministers, suggested that we should take a short phrase of Scripture to bed with us—that is memorize it—and then ruminate on it as we are falling asleep.  “This passage,” he says, “must not be too copious, but rather brief, yet well meditated and understood.  And as you awake in the

morning you must find it back, like an inheritance from the past evening.”[3]

 

I’d like to suggest that you do this tonight with the second of Jesus’ teachings I’m emphasizing this morning:  “Give us each day our daily bread.”  When Jesus taught his disciples these words in Aramic, the literal meaning would have been:  “Our bread for tomorrow, give us today.”  He was saying that we should put aside all our anxieties about worldly goods and live one day at a time.  As you pray yourself to sleep tonight, begin with the words, “Father, hallowed be your name,” and then repeat over and over as you drift off to sleep, “Give me each day my daily bread.”

While in the Holy Land Nina and I stayed in the home of parishioners from our sister congregation, St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, in the West Bank town of Jifna, just north of Ramallah.  These folks are living through trying times, as I’ve pointed out previously.  As was true in the early church, they are living under occupation, with travel severely restricted and jobs hard to come by.  Most families are just scraping by.

 

On Saturday night, Rand, the wife and mother who managed her household with such love and tenderness, told Nina and me we would be having breakfast at 8, and then would share in a family dinner after church.  At that point she began doing what would have been done in Jesus’ day.  She set about cooking for the next day—including baking wonderful flat loaves of chewy, scrumptious bread.  Jesus’ mother Mary would have done the same—baking enough bread to carry the family through one day at a time.  Daily bread is just that—bread for tomorrow baked the night before. 

 

Nina and I were deeply moved by the spirit of gratitude around Rand’s table, as she and her husband and three children relished the food and companionship they see as God’s continuing gift to them.  “Give us each day our daily bread.”

 

As we ruminate on this petition while we drift off to sleep tonight, we do well to push aside some of the demons in our lives that make these words so foreign to us.  The stock market goes into a tailspin, and it is so tempting to stay glued to our computers, agonizing over every twist and turn of the Dow Jones or that S&P 500.  “Give us each day our daily bread.”  What better words could there be to settle our anxious hearts and allow us to end our day grateful for what we have.

 

This brings me to the concluding words of today’s lesson from Luke.  “Ask and it will be given to you,” declares Jesus.  Over the past several months a dear friend of ours at Thousand Island Park has been battling cancer, and she and her family and friends have hoped and prayed mightily for a cure.  About a week ago it became clear that this was not to be.  What we asked for was not going to happen.

 

Last Monday we gathered at her bedside in their cottage and sang hymns and prayed.  A favorite of everyone at the St. Lawrence is “Shall We Gather at the River,” which we will sing in a minute.  There at Janet’s bedside we sang our hearts out:  “Shall we gather at the river, where bright angel feet have trod, with its crystal tide forever flowing by the throne of God.”  Janet was not going to be healed physically. She knew that.  We knew that.  But what Jesus had promised came true—the heavenly Father gave us the Holy Spirit, and love filled our hearts and the entire room where we had gathered.

 

Janet died Tuesday.  Her memorial service will be this coming Thursday.  We will grieve with her husband Dick and their sons Andy and Jeremy and their families.  But finally, when all is said and done, we will thank God for sending the Holy Spirit into our midst that Monday afternoon.  It is this gift that enables us to know that in life and in death we belong to God.  This is the gift Jesus gives us when we dare to ask him to teach us to pray.

 

 

MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

Lord, Teach Us to Pray