29  July 2007                                
Carolyn L Roberts
Luke 11.1-13

            People of faith—any faith—are expected to be people of prayer. Jesus’ disciples—from Peter and Mary to Paul and Dorcas—were no exception. And neither are we. We expect to pray when we come to church. It’s built into the order of worship—at the beginning as we gather, and again as we move from the word that Glen Pearcy focused on, toward our service to God in the greater community. Last week when we were talking about the teaching of the good Samaritan and Jesus’ visit with Martha and Mary, we couldn’t help but look at the context of sending out for mission and returning for instruction and reflection. Today’s reading completes this trilogy. By the way, this is another instance of the need to be careful of what we think we know. The Lord’s prayer is not found in Mark, the earliest gospel, nor is it found in Paul, the earliest Christian writings. The version we use in worship comes closest to what we find in the gospel according to Matthew. But even there, what we say in the practice of Sunday worship is not the same as what we find in the Bible. In fact, scholars believe that the prayer we have received—in whatever form—is made up of fragments of prayers that Jesus spoke in other settings. But the request that leads off this whole section come from the disciples: Lord, teach us to pray.

            In one of our recent conversations with son Jeffry, we were talking about life after graduate school. What does he envision next? This meandered into a short discussion about some of the specific skills he’s picked up in his research, including real time PCR. Real time PCR—so I’m told—is a comparative measurement using light to study a specific gene. It’s like something straight off CSI. Jeffry commented that most of the grad students with whom he works have no hands-on-experience with real time PCR. They’ve only done it in simulation. But nothing substitutes for the real thing.

            The same thing is true of prayer, and Jesus’ disciples know it. Like learning to ride a bike, we can’t learn to pray by watching our sisters and brothers. At some point we have to give it a go ourselves, and with or without training wheels, we need to keep doing it in order to make it our own. We assume that Jesus’ disciples know many of the rote prayers that are common in the liturgies of their day. Those prayers are good practice. But the disciples also yearn for the Spirit-connection that Jesus clearly experiences in his many times at prayer. Sometimes he slips away and prays through the night. Other times he finds a quiet place early in the day. The “when” isn’t so critical. But the fact that he does pray is foundational. Prayer is more than a battery boost for Jesus—it’s the source of his spiritual power. It’s the ground of his being.

            Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us that in our highly individualistic culture, where private property and personal whim reign supreme, prayer is more than individual; it is communal. Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us that prayer is relational, speak to us through images of God which remind us that if we are in relation to God, we cannot help but be in relation to one another. Lord, teach us to pray. Imbue us with the supreme confidence that the realm you call into being not only is as accessible as the ground under our feet, it also is intrinsically different from the realm of Caesar’s Rome or Hitler’s Berlin or contemporary Washington. Teach us that your realm is different even from the realm of the Temple. Your kingdom, your realm come. Even when Darfur and Iraq and Guantanamo and drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia make it seem light years away.[Strome,19] Your kingdom come.

            Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us that your will is that the hungry are satisfied, the sick are healed, the homeless are sheltered, that lives have purpose and hope. Because that vision is so out of synch with the world we experience, we become cynical and skeptical, even suspicious. We harbor the question: what difference does prayer make?

            Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us that bread for the day is not a utopian dream but a reality made possible when we share rather than hoard the resources you give us. Yet even here, children go to bed hungry.

            Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us that the freedom we say we cherish is most real, most available to us when we practice forgiveness. Because Lord, you know that forgiveness is the exception, not the rule.[Strome,19] And like Marley’s ghost, we weigh ourselves down with an accounting of the very real hurts and countless slights we suffer—then dole them out again tenfold. The best defense is a good offense? But that defense crumbles in the shadow of the cross. And forgive debts? In this day of credit card madness and mortgage default? Father, forgive them. Forgive us. Teach us forgiveness.

            Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us that temptation is more than the siren calls of the drug of choice: food, alcohol, Starbucks, Hummers, whatever numbs us from our own deepest self. Temptation is also the urge to cocoon, to shut ourselves off from our neighbor, even from you.

            Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us that prayer is more than the to-do list we create for you; more fundamentally it has to do with staying centered in our relationship with you so that we are compassionate and loving in our relationships with others. At least, that seems to be the model of prayer for Luke.
Luke places instruction for prayer smack up against the parable of the demanding neighbor. It’s clear, very clear that Jesus has the audacity to suggest that not the neighbor, but God, God will open the door when we knock. In fact, not to do so will bring shame on God, because after all, God is in the business of answering prayer. Knock and it will be opened. But it isn’t a quid pro quo, and round upon round of Seek and You Shall Find doesn’t cut it. Neither does the twisted rationale that if my uncle’s cancer wasn’t cured, or that the people stuck at the top of the World Trade center, or the students at Columbine  didn’t escape their death trap, somehow they weren’t praying hard enough or their faith wasn’t pure enough. “Elie Wiesel saw the wreaths of smoke ascend into heaven, like smoke from an offering, like prayers to a God who interacts with creation.  ‘Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky.’ What were the final prayers of those children? What were the final prayers of their mothers as they died with them in the gas? What were the prayers of their fathers and brothers when they guessed the significance of the chimneys and the smoke?”[Swanson,171] Were they not standing at the door, knocking?

Remember one of the earliest stories in the Bible, the story about Noah and the great flood? The theological affirmation of that story is that no matter how great the provocation to do so, God will not overwhelm even the vilest of the world’s evil by God’s own show of destructive power. Even when God’s own son stands at the door  in the garden of Gethsemane, and asks the most fundamental question of faith: will you not remove this cup from me?

We stake our lives on the belief that God responds to human need and suffering.[Strome] But God does so by using our hands, our feet, our lives when they are needed. On 17 April 2007, scores of students at Virginia Tech were knocking at that door. Part of God’s response came through a man of faith, a Holocaust survivor from Romania, Liviu Librescu, who blocked the doorway of his classroom with his body and told the students to escape. They opened windows and jumped.

            In Librescu’s sacrifice, in the sacrifices of firefighters and emergency crews at the World Trade Center, the collective human experience is shaped. The flat words, deliver us from evil, are transformed. They grow and imprint themselves on our minds and hearts. Children receive a fish instead of a snake, and metaphors for God’s loving action in our lives become reality.[Strome] Lord, teach us to pray.

Swanson, Richard W., Provoking the Gospel of Luke, Pilgrim Press, ©2006.
Strome, Joy Douglas, The Christian Century, “Prayer Power,” July 10, 2007, Vol 124, No 14.

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Biblical Background – Luke 11.1-13