17 LECTIONARY                                            GLORIA DEI, ANCHORAGE

JULY 29, 2007                                                              PASTOR SCOTT FULLER

GEN 18:20-32;  PSALM 138;  COL 2:6-19;  LUKE 11:1-13

Pray, Persist, Praise

Prepare our hearts, Lord, to receive your Word.  Silence in us any voice but your own that in hearing we may believe and in believing we may obey your will revealed to us in Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Dear friends in Christ: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.  Amen.

Teach us to pray…

Perhaps you have paused periodically to ponder the puzzle of prayer.  In this particular pericope, the Prince of Peace is pursued by Peter and his pals to provide them with a procedure for prayer.  Correspondingly, the Apostle Paul, in place after place, pushes us to pray perpetually over all problems – private and public – and to praise God for all purposes and in all places . 

So it’s no surprise when these servants say to the Son, Teach us to pray…

But I wonder if this request by the disciples, at this point in Luke’s Gospel, strikes you as a little strange?  I mean, a lot has happened in the previous ten chapters.  Jesus’ followers have seen the Lord: heal the sick; teach about the kingdom; cast out demons; fight with the Pharisees and feed the 5,000.  To top it all off, he’s even sent them out, into the world, on their own to proclaim the Kingdom of God and to heal people (Lk. 9:2).

So, tell me, Does their request here, to learn how to pray, strike you as strange?  Here’s why I think so: it seems kind of late in the game for them to ask Jesus about something so basic…

So I read through the first eleven chapters of Luke’s Gospel to see what kind of references I could find to prayer.  Guess how many I found?  Six!

I was surprised…I thought there’d be more than that.  Martin Luther once said that when he knew he was facing a hard day, he’d get up early to spend an extra hour in prayer!  That’s a lot of God-time, isn’t it?

But for whatever reason, we don’t hear much about prayer in this first half of Luke’s Gospel.  And though a lot has happened, the disciples still feel the need to ask Jesus for some guidance.  Maybe, they say, you could teach us to pray…in the same way that John the Baptist taught his followers. 

And so the Lord honors their request.  Look at what Jesus says: 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 (Lk. 11:2-4).

We recognize those words,  they are familiar as the core of what is called The Lord’s Prayer.  But they raise a second question for me: does anything seem strange about this response from Jesus?  It’s so short!  Five little petitions and the lesson is over.  Plus, the words themselves – seem fairly simple…it just leaves me wondering if the disciples were maybe hoping for a little more. 

And yet…there is an absolute gold mine in those few words.  All you have to do is google The Lord’s Prayer, and you will have reading material for ever and ever, amen, on all is packed into those five petitions.

According to theologian Frederick Beuchner, these words require a certain sense of bravery on the part of those who dare to pray them.  In short, Jesus teaches the disciples and us to ask God to be GOD in every aspect of our lives and throughout the word.  Says Buechner, We are asking God to do not what we want, but what God wants…To speak these words is to invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power look like a warm breeze (Listening To Your Life, pp.78-79).

I find it fascinating that Jesus spends much more time talking about how vital it is that we learn to persist in prayer than it is to learn the content of prayer.  Any ideas on why he would do that?  Someone once said that the best prayers are those driven by need.  And when the need is great, we will persist.

Pastor Carol Mumford tells how she learned this lesson from a telephone repairman.  Three staff members at church were discussing prayer – how to do it, what makes it most effective, etc. – all while a technician was across the room working on the phones.  After a lengthy conversation, the man felt the need to join in.  He stopped them and said, I found that the most powerful prayer I ever made was while I was dangling upside down…from a power pole, suspended 40 feet off the ground (Mumford, “A Loss for Words,” www.prescottumc.com).  As I said, our best prayers are those driven by need. 

And though some needs are more pressing than others, a need is still a need.  The problem is, if you’re like me, we want our needs answered RIGHT NOW and according to OUR WILL.  Those two problematic preconditions tend to limit the Spirit’s ability to answer our prayers in ways that we can appreciate and appropriate.

Country singer, Garth Brooks, wrote a song called “Unanswered Prayer.”  In it, he tells the story of a man who, on a trip back to his home town, meets a woman with whom he was once desperately in love.  He contrasts what he sees in her with the woman to whom he is married.  It makes him breathe a prayer of thanks that God did not answer his prayers of years ago in a time and manner that made perfect sense to a passionate youth. 

So we are to pray, and we are to persist in our prayers, and we are to praise God constantly, continually, collectively as a congregation and alone in our closet – simply for being God.  Jesus does it in the Lord’s Prayer.  Virtually every Psalm has a verse of praise to God.  And the Apostle Paul can’t seem to talk about prayer without praising God and giving thanks. 

So here’s your final question for the day: Why is praise such an important part of prayer?  For one thing, God deserves it.  What would we have, who would we be, how could we live – except by the grace and love of God?  For another, praise helps us put ourselves in the right frame of heart, mind, and spirit, especially when we praise God for: all good things; our families; their love; co-workers, neighbors and the gifts they share.  It’s one small way to make a big difference in life. 

And finally, when we focus our attention on finding reasons to praise God, we shut the door on sin’s insidious suggestions: that God doesn’t care about us, that our families don’t love us, that others are out to get us.  In a world that seems so complacent about suffering and sin, Jesus promises to bless us with God’s gift of answered prayer.  Pray, persist and praise.  Thanks be to God.  Amen.