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." He said to them, "When you pray, say:
Father, hallowed be 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."
(Luke 11:1-4)
If you're coming to St. Michael's during the summer, you know that for the months of July and August, we have been using the Enriching our Worship liturgy. There are, of course, many differences in language from the familiar words of the Book of Common Prayer liturgy. One difference is the words of the Lord’s Prayer. Many assume that the words of the Lord’s Prayer found in the Enriching Our Worship liturgy is a new fangled way of bringing contemporary language into our services. However, EOW uses the Lucan Lord’s Prayer rather than the familiar Matthean Lord’s Prayer. It’s true, we actually have two versions of the Lord’s Prayer from scripture. I guess Enriching our Worship is, on second glance, not as new fangled as we imagine.
Some of us, myself included, aren’t always fond of changes in liturgy, temporary or otherwise, and that’s unfortunate, because many times that change can be a new way of understanding our faith and our relationship with God. When I was at St. David’s in Austin, Texas, I would regularly go from presiding at an 8am Rite I said service, to a 9am sung Rite II Service to an 11am Enriching Our Worship service. At first, I found it really disorienting. Where was my comfortable Rite II Lord’s Prayer that I could say without looking at the words in the bulletin? That I could recite by rote while I thought about what I was going to have for lunch later that day? But then I started to allow myself to listen for God’s voice in the variety of ways that I was praying and worshipping. I was reminded that the purpose of prayer is to open us up more to God, so that God can work through us and change us and make the world better because God is making us better.
But while I can partly explain prayer's power in these practical ways—prayer changes us, prayer connects us to each other—I also cling to the belief that something else happens in prayer, something that goes beyond what we can observe and explain, something that invites God's power and love to break into our daily lives.
Prayer can help us discern God’s will for us and help us live into our Christian mission of helping God’s Kingdom break into a world that seems to have little use for the values and way of life that Jesus calls us to live. It goes back to connecting what we do here in this church, with the way we live our lives out there in the world.
The very words of the Lord’s Prayer that Jesus teaches expresses the force and necessity that the prayer imparts and makes that connection between church and world for us. This prayer calls us to always glorify God’s name; to make way for the coming of God’s kingdom, to ensure that we all get our daily bread; to act in ways that reconcile God’s love for us even as we act in ways that drive us apart from God and one another; and, finally, we must appeal to God for our preservation in such a world of trials. The “time of trial” here is not “temptation”, as an enticement to do evil – that’s a bit too simplistic; instead Jesus is asking for protection from circumstances that test or imperil our faith, including temptation to sin, but also anything that moves our focus away from proclaiming the Good News and living God’s mission in this world.
It’s amazing how our church culture and pious convention has changed this prayer into a quiet and reverent appeal that we lose all sense of how gut wrenching this prayer really is. There is no “Please”, or “Dear Father”, or “Heavenly Creator” to open this prayer. This is a prayer that invites us to get on our knees and plead with God because the appeals it makes bears witness to the human suffering that fills our world still. This prayer remains aspirational, some would say unanswered, all these years after Jesus because we can’t seem to get it right. But still we pray and we can ask what can we do now to glorify God, instead of glorifying things like money, success, ego, and social status, to name a few? How do we care for those who can’t afford healthcare and who regularly have to make a choice between paying for food or their medication? How do we help asylum seekers at our borders so that they don’t end up dead on our watch? How do we help parents make a fair wage so that their children don’t have to rely on Give-a-Kid-a-Meal donations?
Some people say that the church isn’t supposed to get involved in partisan politics and that partisan politics should never be preached from the pulpit. I agree with them wholeheartedly. As Christians, however, we are supposed to engage the world in order to feed the hungry, to tend to the sick, to shelter the homeless, to welcome the foreigner and to love our neighbors as we love ourselves. Anything that we allow to keep us from doing these things should make us question our faith and our commitment to God. And if engaging with the world or hearing about it in church makes you feel uncomfortable or offended because you think it’s too “political” or because Christian social action doesn’t otherwise conform to your political views, then you may need to pray on that and figure out how you are called to live in that tension, because you can’t have it both ways according to Jesus. You can’t claim to bear the Good News of Christ and then withhold that Good News by turning a blind eye to the suffering before us because of your political views, no matter what they are.
Living a Christ-centered life is not about politics, or partisanship or pulling yourself up by your bootstraps – these are simply the “human ways of thinking” as Paul says in his letter to the Colossians today. Instead, a Christ-centered life is about speaking truth to the brokenness in our world and finding a Gospel response, a Christian way of bringing wholeness to everyone in the name of God.
This is where the importance of the second part of our Gospel reading comes into play. After all the praying we do here on Sunday, after sending our hopes and prayers to those suffering from tragedies we hear about in the news, after reflecting on who we are as disciples of Christ, Jesus invites us to act. Ask. Search. Knock. Do something, do anything, to try to bring about God’s love into our world and it will be so. But we have to be persistent in our call for love, and justice and peace in the name of Christ. We have to be persistent in grounding ourselves in our faith and our baptismal vows. Even when it seems our prayers fall on deaf ears and the answer we seek is not forthcoming, we must still have faith and hope. And we will not be disappointed because in God is our hope, and we shall never hope in vain. Indeed, God promises that everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Amen.
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