seventh sunday after pentecost
the gospel of luke 11:1-13
for St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square, July 28, 2019
—–
My night prayer growing up was a list of my entire family and close community, as far as I knew them, memorized, and I prayed for them to be well and wake up safe in the morning. There was a specific order that helped me remember everyone, and the list would shift as relationships changed. This was both a soothing nighttime ritual that helped me fall asleep, and a source of anxiety, because if I messed up the list at any point, I had to start over, or something bad might happen to someone I cared about. Sometimes I would have to go through the list three or four times to be sure I didn’t make a mistake. In retrospect, the anxiety I felt around prayer, and the consequences if I prayed “wrong” was both a possible sign of clinical anxiety, and a reflection of my early images of God.
I had picked up that if you were a good person, prayed correctly, asked God for help and protection, than that would be a shield from the world, which is often harsh, and often doesn’t make sense. We want to understand the world through the systems we were raised in, so I had a very capitalist view of God – treating prayer like currency, exchanged for goods and services. I don’t remember when I stopped praying before bed, but my guess is that it was after one of my family members died, or got sick, and it felt like my prayer was failing them. It isn’t as easy as the parable in our text makes it out to be – if we are shameless, and earnest, and persistent, then the doors we want to be opened will be. Our needs will be met. Our loved ones will be safe.
We know that’s not true. It’s a challenging reality that prayer doesn’t always work the way we expect, isn’t answered how we hoped for. How hard or “well” we pray isn’t a one-to-one exchange with what we will receive. There are forces in the world outside of God, forces that separate us from God and neighbor, and God is also more mysterious than it’s regularly comfortable to grapple with. It took time for me to develop a more resilient faith, where prayer moves beyond currency, and there are still times when I witness suffering, oppression, injustice, and I wonder where God is. I get angry with God, since so much in our world is so far from the abundant life God wants for us. I lament, and seek God, and cling to the knowledge that God is present, and mourning with us, even as I want God to actively alert me to their presence, and it seems like God is no where to be found.
And so how do we pray in the midst of a fallen but sacred world, dreaming towards the Kin-dom? I imagine the disciples coming to Jesus with similar undercurrents and questions. Their request for Jesus to teach them to pray as John prayed and taught could be a cover for another, deeper question – “Jesus, we’ve been praying, and there’s still suffering. There’s still pain. Teach us to pray, to ask for good things and receive them, because that’s how it’s supposed to work, right?”
Jesus doesn’t really address these concerns. He teaches the disciples a prayer, an early version of the Lord’s Prayer, and that is an instruction of how and what to pray for, but it’s also a prayer that tells us about who God is, what our relationship to God can be, and images of God to seek out.
“Father, uphold the holiness of your name.”
Jesus calls us into an intimate relationship with God – a familial relationship. Invoking God as parent, in the ideal archetype, invokes closeness, bonding, investment. God sculpted creation, and breathed over it, over all of us. We don’t need to hold God away from us, we can hold them as close as a baby clinging to a caretaker. It isn’t just Jesus who God has a familial relationship with, it is all who call on God as Abba, Father, Mother, Parent, Holy One. And God’s holiness is expansive, and all encompassing, and mysterious, and good.
“Bring in your kingdom.”
Bring in the renewed world you are dreaming towards. Bring forth abundance, and fruitful harvest, and equity, and righteousness. Bring right relationships, and community, and interconnected webs of creatures and plants and earthlings. Let us set our goals in line with yours, in harmony with Creation, and push back from oppressive systems. Divest from them, as much as we are able. Focusing on God’s Kin-dom can be a liberatory practice that breaks away from the ask-and-you-shall-receive imagining of prayer that often falls short of reality. It allows space for us to trust God’s Spirit to move and bring the refiner’s fire and passion into our lives. We have experienced glimpses, moments, of the Kin-dom – in laughing so long you forget what the joke was, in a plant that was dead in winter sprouting again in the spring, in sending someone forward on their journey, when they will be missed – and we can open ourselves to this prayer of possibility that God’s Kin-dom is near.
“Give us the bread we need for today.”
The central petition is the most striking for me in the prayer of the disciples. Because it is so, so ordinary. We are embodied beings – we need food, and water, and shelter, and warmth. These realities of life are not separate from God – they are so central to God’s relationship to humanity that Jesus walked and sweated and wept and ate. God providing for our physical needs, usually through bread, or manna in Scripture, is a theme that is continued today as we receive communion and break bread with our neighbors.
This part of the prayer also models that it’s okay, and correct, to ask for what we need. There are a lot of forces in the world that want us to make ourselves smaller, to make our needs and wants smaller, and those forces are not of God. God wants us to take the space we need, to ask for food, for shelter, for care, and to provide those things for each other. We can be in-tune with our body and lived experience, and name what we need to thrive, and let other people know. It doesn’t make us a burden, or too much, but instead opens the possibility of authentic relationship, where we know that other people can’t read our minds and know what our needs are. We name some of them here: God, we need nourishment for the day. We need to be reminded of your holiness. We need equity, and rest, and support. This prayer fosters an ongoing relationship with God, not asking for too much, but asking for enough to live well. To trust in God as the sparrows trust.
God, as you give us bread, send us your Spirit, nourishing all of the aspects of our bodies and daily life, and “forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who has wronged us.”
We come to God with humility, knowing that we are imperfect, and make mistakes, and hurt others, as we are hurt. Forgiveness is complicated. It doesn’t always mean staying in relationship with the person that hurt us. We can set boundaries to keep safe and healthy. There are times where all we can do is turn our pain over to God, trusting that they can renew all things. Forgiveness can be moving on with our life, noticing how we carry hurt with us, not letting the cycles of violence continue. It can be reparations, and reparative justice circles, and community care. It can be breathing in deeply, and breathing out hurt. It can be changing the way we interact with each other, and with ourselves. Forgiveness is gradual, and incomplete, and doesn’t erase the wrong, but allows us to continue dreaming towards the Kin-dom.
“And don’t lead us into temptation.’”
Taken in the holistic context of the prayer, I think about this line less in regards to material temptation, but instead to spiritual temptation. There are forces in the world aimed to separate us from God. To separate us from each other. To shift our focus away from God. It connects to the previous line, and to our litany of confession and forgiveness – “we are worried and distracted by many things”. Being in relationship with God requires resiliency, letting go of easy answers and instant gratification. And temptations are loud, they are neon lights, they are endless scrolling, they are competition and scarcity. God is present, if we slow down and allow God to interrupt our daily lives, to enfold us in God’s care and expand our images of the Divine.
When I reflect on the prayer Jesus taught, in it’s ordinary-ness, in the centering of our bodies, in holding onto the sacred, I am so aware of how interdependent we are on each other, on God, and on Creation. And as we pray, through our very existence, eating, sleeping, moving, breathing, we are praying with Creation. I think of how being in nature is prayer. Mary Oliver, an American LGBTQIA+ poet, writes a poem called “Praying”:
“It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.”
We are beings of prayer. And like the disciples, a question that keeps coming up is how best to pray, when prayer isn’t currency, and isn’t a guarantee, and the world is in pain. We can pray with and for each other, and not just when we’re in church. We can pray with the summer flowers that are in bloom, with the upcoming harvest, with our neighbors. We can seek out God. We can sit with the prayer Jesus taught, and use it in our lives. It can be a moment to name our needs to God, to ask God for protection and guidance, to be open to noticing God in unexpected places. It can build community, as we share vulnerability, desires, and hurt.
Prayer is ordinary, and holy. You don’t need to have the perfect words, or structure – because God is in intimate, holy relationship with us, and forgives us, and feeds us, and guides us. Sometimes prayer is crafted in worship, sometimes it is spoken hesitantly, sometimes it’s just the call of a bird, or a sigh too deep for words. Nothing is too small or too mundane or too scary to bring to God, and Jesus wants us to know that. To believe that, and to pray like we believe it.
Reed Fowler 