Sermon at The Church of
the Holy Apostles, New York City
July 29, 2007
The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost
The
Reverend Elizabeth G. Maxwell
Genesis 18:20-33
Psalm 138
Colossians 2:6-15
Luke 11:1-13
May the words of my
mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be always acceptable
in your sight, oh God, our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
“Lord, teach us to pray.” That request is ours too,
isn’t it? Sometimes, I dare say, out of a sense of guilt, or
obligation. I remember a few years back, being at a clergy
conference at which one of the topics was prayer. The speaker
had us all in hilarious laughter of self-recognition as she
talked about the sense that we all go around with: “I really
should pray. I should be praying. I should be praying more.”
We have a sense, and one of the secrets is that clergy
are in no way exempt from this sense, that others know something
about prayer that we don’t know – or that they’re doing
something that we’re not doing. Sometimes that’s true, to a
certain extent, and yet there’s also a way in which all of us,
in the matter of prayer, are always beginners.
The disciples had seen Jesus praying. Luke tells us
often of Jesus going away to pray, early in the morning or late
at night, taking time away from the demands of his ministry to
seek the presence of God. And, obviously these disciples were
touched by it; they wanted to know how it was for him, and how
they might share somehow in his experience with God. Their
question is born out of that hunger, that longing. And it is
also born, as it is for us, out of the movement of the Spirit,
who is always inviting us to pray. The asking itself is a kind
of prayer, isn’t it? It’s a sign that we are stirred and drawn
towards God.
Prayer is a gift, and most of all it is a
relationship. It is a lifelong journey, and it is always new.
Jesus answers their request. Luke’s version of what
we call the Lord’s Prayer is simpler and starker than the
familiar one in Matthew, but the essentials are all there.
Jesus gives them words to say – a kind of a shape – for their
way of speaking with God. These are words that most of us
probably know by heart, and sometimes when we say them it feels
rote, hard to get at the meaning. But they are also words that
are sometimes there when we don’t have any other words of our
own.
I can’t tell you how many times in hospitals or nursing
homes, when I have done a short communion service with someone
or led them in prayer before surgery, they join with me in
saying the Lord’s Prayer. It’s as if deep in the bones, those
words resonate when there are no words that you can come up with
for yourself. There’s something about these words, as with so
many of the other prayers that we may know by heart, that allows
for a life moving underneath the words, as if we don’t have to
worry about what we’re going to say. The prayer is praying in
us.
This prayer talks about the aspects of the relationship
with God into which we are invited. It’s Jesus’ own
relationship with God, and it is also communal. The Lord’s
Prayer is, after all, a communal prayer; it talks about “our”
rather than “my.” It is not a private prayer, although it is a
deeply personal one.
So what does this prayer, so familiar, so beloved, say?
Father…
That title for God, of course, has caused many of us
difficulties especially in recent years. But for all of the
patriarchal resonance of it, all of the issues with calling God
“Father,” it is still a startlingly intimate address. It speaks
of belonging to God in a unique and personal way, of being
claimed by God forever as God’s own.
Hallowed be your name…
…the prayer goes on: hallowed, holy, honored. May
your being, your essence, be honored in that way, for a name in
biblical terms is more than just a title or an arbitrary way of
speaking of someone. The name carries the essence of the
person, and so with God. This petition raises for me the
question of how we experience the holy, who we are able to see
the holy in, what it is to be God’s holy people, and to live in
a way that hallows God’s name.
May your reign come…
Matthew’s version goes on to say, “your will be done.”
What is it, then, that God wants? Peace, justice,
reconciliation, hospitality, the flourishing of all life –
humans and trees and animals and waters- wholeness and
fullness? All of that we pray for when we say “your kingdom
come.”
Give us each day our daily bread…
Not tomorrow’s bread, mind you, only the bread for this
day. In this petition we are invited to stay present, to act
with integrity and compassion, and to know how complete is our
reliance on God, to live, as it were, one day at a time,
trusting God for all that we need. Linking this petition to the
one before it, the commentator Michaela Bruzzese writes: “How
does God’s kingdom come? Hour by hour, in small and large acts
of mercy and solidarity. With this daily bread, we, too, become
food for the world.”
Forgive us our sins, for we forgive everyone indebted
to us.
Now this takes reliance on God to a whole new level.
One commentator noted that this is the most scary of all
petitions to pray, for after all, do we really want God to
forgive us, just as we forgive others? Furthermore, because of
Luke’s language, it seems that we are challenged to look at
monetary as well as spiritual debt. We are invited to look at
how we treat the poor. The tradition of “Jubilee” is at work
here, of the forgiveness of debt, the return of land, the wiping
away of social distinction. Throughout the bible, there is a
profound connection between the ability to forgive, or at least,
the willingness to forgive - for often, all we have at first is
the willingness, or the willingness to have willingness! There
is a connection between that and being forgiven. It’s as if
that process has to do with whether we’re able to take in the
free flow of grace from God to us to others and back again.
Do not bring us to the time of trial…
…the prayer concludes, and yet we remember that Jesus
himself was brought to the time of trial. Perhaps here we are
praying, “Not my will but yours, God. May it be no more than I
can bear.”
It’s a simple prayer, isn’t it? And yet, chock full.
It’s all petition for ourselves in community. Certainly there
are other prayers that are important. Meister Eckhart notably
said that the only prayer we ever need to say is “Thank you,”
and that’s certainly something for us to meditate on, especially
in our consumption-mad society with its inflated sense of always
needing more and more and more.
But, at the deepest level, in the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus
is teaching his disciples and teaching us to bring ourselves,
our needs, our longings, all that we are to God, without shame
and without fear.
There are so many ways to pray: praying with scripture,
praying in silence, dancing, journaling, wandering in nature,
doing art, doing service…all of them, though, are meant to be a
way that we nourish this relationship with God. That we open,
that we take time with God with intention to let God in, to
listen, or just to be together.
The core of Jesus’ teaching on prayer, I believe, is
found in the rest of the passage that we heard today, in the
parable that he tells the disciples about the friend who comes
at midnight, seeking bread for yet another friend who has
arrived late. He bangs on the door of his friend, and his
friend is not initially interested in opening the door despite
the deep tradition of hospitality that would have been honored
widely in Jesus’ day. We are told that, in our lectionary
reading, the second friend opens because of the persistence of
the one who comes knocking. But actually this word is not
“persistent,” it is “shameless.” He opens because of the
shamelessness of this petitioner, or, some scholars think, he
is shamed into responding.
Whatever it is, the word carries a quality of being
willing to go outside the normal bounds, to push and push – as
Jesus says, to ask and keep asking, to search and keep
searching, and to knock and keep knocking, to keep speaking the
need and to keep telling the truth, presenting yourself in the
presence of the one who can respond.
I don’t see this so much as asking incessantly for
every little thing that I want. Rather, I see it as a
willingness to keep showing up in relation to God, to keep
paying attention, and to keep opening my heart, in and out of
season.
The lectionary makers give us a brilliant example of
shamelessness in the lesson from Genesis today. Abraham
bargains with God – Abraham, that patriarch who was called God’s
friend. He talks God down regarding God’s intention of
destroying the wicked city. “Will you spare the wicked for the
innocent few?” he says, and the number required moves from fifty
to forty-five, to forty, to thirty, to twenty, to ten. Abraham
calls the Almighty to remember his own divine nature: “Far be it
from you to slay the righteous with the wicked! Far be it from
you! Shall not the judge of all the earth do what is just?”
What’s going on in this passage? Is Abraham’s sense of
morality and justice more developed than God’s? Does God
change? Does Abraham change? Does Abraham’s understanding of
God change in this exchange? These questions are not answered
in the passage. The story, in one way, simply evokes our
wonderment - who is this God to whom we pray, and what happens
when we pray? How are our images of God formed? What
experiences do we bring to our prayer, and what experiences do
we have in prayer?
I’m reminded of the great Rabbi Heschel, who said we
are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we
think we have answers. These questions about who God is are
worth our whole life, really. Our notions of God are formed by
scripture, by tradition, by community; they are formed, as well,
from the culture, perhaps less benignly.
We call God “Father” in the tradition as we do in the
Lord’s Prayer, and for some of us that is a profound challenge,
as we work through patriarchal notions of authority, or
experience of a father who was abusive. “Mother” may or may not
be an easier word to call God. It may be just as problematic,
although I do know many women and men, including myself, for
whom beginning to pray to God as Mother was a radical and
opening experience. We may learn to call God “Friend,” to call
God “Beloved.” We may move into more impersonal images like
light or wind, or nonverbal ways of understanding and addressing
God, speaking to the mystery, the darkness, the silence.
In all of that, God is both deep within and beyond us,
among us. We are in relationship, in partnership, drawn into
widening circles, as Abraham was, of love and compassion for
others, for our dear ones, for our enemies, and for ourselves.
And this process, in which we work and are worked on and work
with God, is personal and particular, and part of God’s own
Great Work – that mystery in which we participate, reconciling
the world to God.
“Teach us to pray,” the disciples asked Jesus. Teach
us to pray: it is our prayer as well. And for us, as for those
disciples, the response is, “Pray shamelessly, and keep on
praying.”
Amen.
