Let us pray – May the words of my mouth and the thoughts of all
our hearts be pleasing in your sight, O God, our rock and our
redeemer. Amen.
I don’t know about you, but I get a warm fuzzy feeling when I
first take a look at our Gospel text for today. It begins
when
the disciples ask Jesus how to pray, which is a great
question.
And he gives them a simple answer: Pray like this.
And I
look at the prayer he outlines and I think… I can do that.
In fact, I already have it memorized – I’m ahead. And
then the passage continues and we have one of the most wonderful, the
most extravagant, promises of scripture:
“Everyone who asks receives, everyone who searches finds, and for
everyone who knocks the door will be opened.”
What a promise.
Jesus tells us exactly how to pray. And then he promises to
answer all our prayers. Fantastic. It sounds so
easy.
But I have to admit, for me at least, the reality of prayer can be very
different.
I have this mental picture of how prayer should be…me, getting
up the first time the alarm clock goes off, drinking one and only one
cup of coffee, and sitting quietly with God for an hour before the day
starts.
But sometimes (or often), it doesn’t turn out that way.
For one thing, there are distractions. For parents, for
people
who are sharing a room in a crowded house to save money, for those of
us with busy schedules – in fact, for pretty much all of us...a
quiet place and a block of absolutely uninterrupted time are VERY
rare. The phone rings, the baby wakes up, someone’s at the
door, it’s time for work or for dinner, the neighbors play loud
French pop music…we can be interrupted before we even get to
“your kingdom come”…
And then there are the inner distractions. As much as we’d
like to leave the world behind, if we come to prayer sleepy, nervous,
or sad, those emotions don’t go away the moment we say,
“Our Father…” I don’t know if
you’ve had the experience of entering into prayer and then
realizing later that for the last five minutes you’ve been
thinking about the argument you had with a friend or what you forgot at
the grocery store. It can take a while to even realize how
far
our minds have drifted…
Sometimes praying isn’t easy.
Our passage today is kind of one of Jesus’ master classes on
prayer and sometimes when I finish reading it, I want to raise my hand
and ask some questions. Maybe you have some too - for example:
-Jesus, you promise that if I seek, I will find; you promise that you
answer prayer. But when I pray, it feels like I’m talking
to myself.
Or how about
-You promise that you give us good gifts when we ask, but some people
that I know and love are suffering. It kind of feels like
they
asked for fish to eat and you gave them a snake. Where are
you?
Or even
-What’s the point of praying when you already have a plan for us anyway?
I think the real heart of these questions, what’s behind a lot of
our struggles with prayer, what makes prayer so hard sometimes, is that
deep in us, we have this sense that our spiritual life is somehow off
track.
We believe that the Holy Spirit – who is really and fully God,
dwells within us. We believe that the God of the universe is
closer to us than we are to ourselves. But often, when we
pray,
we don’t feel particularly connected to God. Prayer somehow
doesn’t feel real. In scripture we see these Christians
doing amazing things – sacrificing everything for the Gospel,
healing the sick, living revolutionary lives, praying to God as if they
were talking face to face.
And we think, my life just isn’t like that. My relationship
with God just isn’t like that. And prayer ends up feeling
like a disappointment, kind of like going through the
motions.
Like we are still standing at the door, knocking and hoping to get in.
And so, we find ourselves right there with the disciples looking at
Jesus, saying, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Lord, there
has to be more than this – Please let there be more than this.
And the great gift of today’s text, the Good News from Luke today – is
that Jesus is saying that there is.
The text begins: “Jesus was praying in a certain
place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him,
Lord, teach us to pray…”
I love that Jesus answers their question. And he answers
specifically. He doesn’t just say go light some incense and
sit for a while and something will come to you. He gives
specific
instructions: When you pray, say…Our Father:
He treats prayer as something that can be learned.
Whereas I think we sometimes assume that once we accept Christ, we
automatically know how to pray, that learning to pray is like learning
how to walk. By the time it occurs to a baby to try to walk,
she’s pretty close to being able to do it. She falls down a
few times and then she has it. We think prayer is the same
way…it’s a little shaky at the beginning and then
we’ve got it down.
But I think the reality is very different. Prayer is
something we
learn. Jesus is always there of course, reaching out to us,
but
we have to learn how to reach back. A man in my old church
used
to always say that praying is like bricklaying. You’re not
born knowing it; it doesn’t come naturally. Instead
it’s a craft that you learn over time. You don’t walk
up to a construction site and expect to know how to build a
wall.
You learn how to lay bricks. How? Mainly, you ask
for
help. You read about it. You watch people who
already know
how to do it. You listen to them. You ask how to
improve.
And this whole time you’re not just taking notes, you’re
actually laying bricks. Because when push comes to shove you
become a brickmason by practicing, you become a bricklayer by laying
bricks.
And I think that prayer is the same way. It’s a discipline,
it’s a craft. We have to learn it. When we pray, we
come up directly against our most sinful tendencies – our
selfishness, our need to constantly be entertained, our tendency to put
God low on our list of priorities, our fear that God won’t
provide for us. It’s no wonder that our prayer
lives
disappoint us, that we don’t live the radical, loving Christian
lives we yearn for. We don’t automatically overcome our
sinful tendencies the moment we begin to pray.
If we want to truly know God in prayer, we have to focus on learning
how to pray in the same way we would be intentional about learning how
to be bricklayers. We have to read about it, talk together
about
it, observe people who excel, and most of all practice.
And we don’t learn our craft in isolation. We teach each
other how to pray. This is one of the reasons why God calls
us to
live together in community. My high school bible study leader
is
here visiting today, and I can’t tell you how much I learned
about how to pray from watching her. In fact, I learned about
what it means to be a woman of faith from watching her. The
gift
of prayer isn’t automatic. We learn because of the love and
sacrifice of people like Ashley Clark and her family who share their
practical knowledge with those around them.
We have to learn how to pray. And we have to learn knowing
that
just as with anything else we try to learn, there will be good days and
bad days. That what works at one time in our lives might not
be
helpful at another. That we have to find a way of praying
that
fits our own lives, our own personalities.
I have a friend who absolutely can’t stand sitting still.
So she starts every day by taking a short walk to pray. I
have
another friend who works next door to a hospital and he prays every
time he hears a siren. An excellent brickmason becomes an
artist…you can recognize his work because it’s
distinctively his, it fits his project and his style
perfectly.
Our prayer lives should be the same way, uniquely ours, suited to us
and our situation.
And finally, just as in any craft, we won’t learn if we
don’t practice. Jesus had just three years of active
ministry before the crucifixion. I think that we can trust
that
he was more pressed for time than we are. And yet he made
time
for prayer. When push comes to shove, there’s just not
anything more important than getting closer to God. It’s
what allows us to have the strength and energy for everything else in
our lives. And the fact of the matter is that we absolutely
have
to make time for it. If we are too busy to pray something in
our
lives has to change.
But we also worship a creative God. So we need to be creative
in figuring this out.
I have a friend who used to begin every day with an hour of silent
meditation. And then he and his wife had a baby.
And he
would sit there, in silent communion with God, while his wife rushed
around trying to get breakfast ready, feed the baby, and get ready for
work at the same time. And one morning, she had had
it. She
put the baby in his lap and said: this is your prayer
now.
And she was right. He had to learn a new way of praying for
this
new time in his life. And so now feeding the baby is his job,
and
it’s a time that he sets aside for prayer.
The disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray. And Jesus
does. This means that we also can learn how to pray, we can
have
the lives of closeness, intimacy, and wonder that we all
crave.
The thing is, it’s not instant. It’s not
automatic. And that means that we have to experience the
frustration and sense of distance that I feel when I suddenly realize,
in the middle of a prayer, that I’ve been thinking for a long
time about cheese or whether or not I need a haircut. Or the
sadness and anger that we feel when we pray faithfully and earnestly
for something and God says no.
And that’s hard. But on the other hand, what a great
life. Most people spend their days searching for some kind of
meaning, some sort of purpose. But as Christians we can know
that
the work of our life is a process of growing closer and closer to God
and learning more and more to serve others with compassion.
We
have a lifetime to learn, to ask, to seek and knock. We get
to
learn how to listen when we pray and not just talk. We can
try
praying through art, we can try meditation. We get to figure
out
how to pray in an engaged and unselfish way, in a way that pulls us
into our hurting and unjust world. We have sometimes these
very
set ideas about what prayer looks like – on our knees, at night
or only in church or always very serious. But actually we
have a
lifetime to experiment, to learn, to play, to enjoy this process of
getting closer to God who loves us desperately.
And we are praying too to a God who actually hears us. I
probably
shouldn’t admit this, but I struggle to believe that
sometimes. But I think it’s true. Theologians have
been debating the question of prayer for thousands of years – if
God has a plan for each one of us, why bother praying? Do we
really think that we can change God’s mind? Would we even
want to worship a God who could be pushed and pulled by our requests?
The argument continues. And I don’t have an elegant
theological solution to offer. But just this: the
witness
of scripture and the experience of Christians before us suggests that
God really hears and responds to prayer. And that maybe the
world
even changes in response to prayer. I honestly don’t know
how or why. Moses and Abraham seem to argue with God
sometimes,
and God actually changes course in response to their
conversations. Paul prays to God and seems to get specific
responses on specific issues. That’s the scandal of
the incarnation, isn’t it…that God chose and still chooses
to interact with us as a person. That God meets us in prayer
as
the Almighty and Holy God, but also as Jesus the person. When
we
pray, God meets us in conversation. God is really there.
Every part of us that lives in the west in the 21st century resists
that, resists the idea that prayer can change us but also that prayer
can change the world, the course of history. But it’s
true.
Praying can be hard. It raises questions that are hard to
answer. It can leave us feeling disappointed and
frustrated. Sometimes God feels far away and we’re left
wondering: Is this all there is?
The message of the Gospel today is this: Everyone who asks
receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks
the door will be opened. God is really there and over time we
can
learn to live a praying life where we experience God’s
presence. We won’t feel it at every second, but we can and
do grow into a fuller and fuller sense of really and truly meeting God,
into a sense of life as an unbroken conversation with the Almighty,
into a praying life.
The key is to persist, to keep praying, to keep banging on the
door. We have to be like the man in today’s text
who’s not afraid to wake a friend up in the middle of the night
and keep on harassing him until he what he needs. We have to
be
like a bricklayer, who studies and observes and practices in order to
perfect his craft. We have to trust that when we pray, we
might
really be changing the world.
