“Lord, Teach Us to Pray”

Luke 11:1-13; Colossians 2:6-19; Psalm 85

Psalm 85

Lord, you were favorable to your land; you restored the fortunes of Jacob.

You forgave the iniquity of your people; you pardoned all their sin. Selah

You withdrew all your wrath; you turned from your hot anger.

Restore us again, O God of our salvation, and put away your indignation toward us.

Will you be angry with us forever? Will you prolong your anger to all generations?

Will you not revive us again, so that your people may rejoice in you?

Show us your steadfast love, O Lord, and grant us your salvation.

Let me hear what God the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to his people, to his faithful, to those who turn to him in their hearts.

Surely his salvation is at hand for those who fear him, that his glory may dwell in our land.

Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other.

Faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and righteousness will look down from the sky.

The Lord will give what is good, and our land will yield its increase.

Righteousness will go before him, and will make a path for his steps.

Luke 11:1-13

{11:1} [Jesus] was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” ² He said to them, “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. ³ Give us each day our daily bread. ⁴ And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

⁵ And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; ⁶ for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ ⁷ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ ⁸ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

⁹ “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. ¹⁰ For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. ¹¹ Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? ¹² Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? ¹³ 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!”

Colossians 2:6-19

⁶ As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, ⁷ rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. ⁸ See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ. ⁹ For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, ¹⁰ and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority. ¹¹ In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of the flesh in the circumcision of Christ; ¹² when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead…

¹⁶ Therefore do not let anyone condemn you in matters of food and drink or of observing festivals, new moons, or sabbaths. ¹⁷ These are only a shadow of what is to come, but the substance belongs to Christ. ¹⁸ Do not let anyone disqualify you, insisting on self-abasement and worship of angels, dwelling on visions, puffed up without cause by a human way of thinking, ¹⁹ and not holding fast to the head, from whom the whole body, nourished and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows with a growth that is from God.

The Sermon

How on earth do you talk to God?

We’d been traveling with Jesus for many weeks, watching him show us what it meant to be God’s son: healing, feeding, teaching, helping—at all times and in every way, loving us poor wretched creatures.

“Poor and wretched,” I realize, sounds almost kind of hyper-Presbyterian, doesn’t it. I’ve been in churches where there are true blue, Calvinist Presbyterians who don’t feel like they’ve been to church yet if they haven’t spent at least ten minutes feeling extremely guilty, and the other 50 trying to bore themselves to death as punishment.

But just as he had been showing us what it meant for him to be divine, we showed him over and over what it means to be human.

We lost things all the time, important things. We lost track of our friendships, our marriages; our children’s ages, and their dreams, and the things that make them nervous. It just happens; we just lost them.

“Where was it when you last saw it?” Well if I knew that, it wouldn’t be lost. We just lose things.

We lose things, and we fumble things a lot. It’s kind of funny in retrospect, how you fumbled your first date, or you foolishly wasted ten bucks on some stupid thing when you could have saved it for something better. I worked with a waiter, who lived alone, who bought a microwave for $115, because he had accidentally bought some frozen pizza that was supposed to be microwaved, and he didn’t want to waste the five dollars he’d paid for the pizza.

But it’s serious when you’re in school, and you’ve got one huge test to get ready for, and the night before, you can’t seem to focus, or you put too much stock in your ability to pull it out at the last minute, and you fumble.

And then we grow up and we learn how to mess up increasingly important things—money, addictions, relationships, jobs, life decisions. We showed him we were human all right.

And then sometimes we were just jerks. Have you ever had that thing that’s almost like an out-of-body experience? You’re having a painful conversation with somebody, or you’re giving them the silent treatment, or there’s some kind of awful manipulation going on; and gradually you start to become aware, as if you were kind of hovering slightly above the room, and you can see yourself there, and you’re thinking—you’re looking at yourself, and it’s like pounding against the window of a soundproof booth, shouting at yourself to stop being such a jerk.

But the You in that scenario can’t hear, or won’t listen, and you go on acting that way, pushing buttons you know should not be pushed, knowing you could stop the misery with just one word of kindness, or forgiveness. But that word is not forthcoming.

You want to know what it’s like to be fully human without being fully divine, Jesus? Take a look around.

And that’s really what he was doing. And he had called us disciples to come with him. And we saw. And we knew.

None of us is holier than anybody else here, only he.

When we saw hungry people, he made sure they could eat, and no lack of food or number of people was going to stand in his way. They were always fed.

When he saw someone who was sick, who was alone, who was crying for the life of his or her child, he brought love and life and hope—every time.

But he wouldn’t be around forever. One day, it would be our turn. One day, we would have to find a way to feed those people.

And I started to be afraid that he was going to give us a pop quiz, as he liked to do from time to time, and I was petrified that I would be the first one that he would ask. I was afraid he was going to stop us all one day as we sat in the shade at noontime, resting from our endless walking journey, and ask: how do you pray?

Because we could see that there was work to be done that we could do—start up a food pantry or make sure every child had proper health care—but there were a lot of things that we couldn’t do by ourselves.

And, it’s true, we are responsible for our own behavior, and we are all responsible for changing ourselves.

But we need some help. We can’t do it alone.

And if Jesus had asked me, “How do you ask God for help,” I might have had to say, “I don’t know how to do this.”

Sometimes we pray petitions. At their best, they deliberately cast aside the learned theologies and the arrogant instructions to God for how such-and-such situation ought to be worked out, and they just say, God, if it takes a miracle, I’m asking for a miracle.

A teacher once asked me and my class, let’s say you’ve been called into the emergency room, and the doctors have told you it’s an absolute certainty, the child’s not going to make it. And the parents come in and grab you and they say, “Pray with us right now for God to make her better.” Do you pray for healing?

And of course we were all geniuses, on our way to big things in church life, and we felt pretty much unanimously that it would be cruel to be so misleading to the family to act like you could pray that child back to health; and then what if they never trusted God again, when you knew it was an absolute medical certainty, it was a foregone conclusion….

And our teacher said, that wise woman: if that’s the case, then when I come into the emergency room with my daughter, I want you to get out.

If you brilliant theologians can’t get on your pathetic knees and cry like a baby and beg God, beg God, to make that little girl get up and walk again, then exactly what do you think you’re there to do? Write an article?

Sometimes we pray petitions: please God, make the sickness go away. Please God, don’t let me get stuck in the snow. Please God, make her come back to me. Please God, don’t let me do that again.

But sometimes, our petitions turn to requests, and where we once trudged our cross up to the top of the hill to lie at God’s feet in our shame and humility, now we’re not really willing to trudge quite so far.

Now we kind of want God just to sort it all out, so that we don’t have to dirty our own hands in the process; and we’ll enjoy the fruits of God’s labor, and maybe we’ll even go around for a while saying, “Glory be; look what God has done for me.”

And then, some nights, you look up at the sky in its infinite vastness, each tiny fleck of light an unimaginably enormous power generator that ground out its fabulous light a billion years ago so that at this tiny moment in the span of eternity you would see it, standing right where you are on the soil of a rock orbiting another power generator much closer.

Some nights you look into the vastness and say, “Where are you?”

And sometimes you say, “Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.”

And sometimes you just stand there, your open jaw itself a kind of silent prayer.

So I asked him: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

And he taught us a prayer.

He taught us to praise God’s holiness. He taught us to look forward to the day God’s kingdom would come. He taught us to ask just enough for each day. He taught us to ask God’s forgiveness and to share in that miracle by forgiving those who owed us something. And he taught us to ask in all humility that we be spared the time of trial.

What does the Lord require of you, said Micah, but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?

But try as we might, we found that it wasn’t always so easy.

And now Jesus taught us how to pray for the ability to do all of those things.

My favorite of the children’s letters to God from the book of the same name is the last one: “Dear God, I didn’t think orange went very good with purple till I saw the sunset you made on Tue. That was cool. Eugene” (Marshall & Hample, eds. Glasgow: Wm Collins & Sons, 1975).

I wish I could still pray with the simplicity, the directness of a child. But we grow up, and life gets complicated, and you get separated from what centers you.

Thomas Troeger wrote a hymn of six stanzas for all those who pray the Lord’s Prayer (New Songs of Praise, Book 2. Oxford University Press, 1985).

Let all who pray the prayer Christ taught first clear the cluttered heart.

Make room to breathe the living thought those well-worn words impart.

Dismiss the fear that this world drifts with no one in command.

Your pulse and breath are signs and gifts from God's attentive hand.

Refine and test each passing aim against this final one:

Has your life hallowed heaven’s name, and has God's will been done?

Discard each vengeful hope that’s fed the dreams of wars you’ll win,

Then freely ask for daily bread and pardon from your sin.

Examine how temptation breeds inside the mind’s dark maze,

acknowledging that your life needs deliverance from its ways.

By faithful discipline prepare an inward holy space

That when you offer Jesus’ prayer your heart may fill with grace.

Keith Grogg

Carolina Beach Presbyterian Church

Carolina Beach, NC

July 29, 2007