Proper 12, Year C – Luke 11:1-13
The Rev. Charles Everson
St. Luke’s Episcopal Church
June 24, 2016
Audio recording is here.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
It has been six weeks since I first stepped foot in the door at
St. Luke’s! I’ve been trying to get to
know all of you little by little over the past six weeks, and I feel like I’ve
just begun to scratch the surface. But it only took a few days to learn
something very important about this community:
you pray for one another.
One of the first things Mother Mary suggested I do was to
sign up to receive the prayer list: Pulse of the Parish. Thanks to Maxine’s
loving work on her computer, we have prayed for Penny Hughes as she’s undergone
surgery. We’ve prayed for Marlin Howard
during the last moments of his life. For
Brenda Carl’s sister and brother in law and their serious health issues. For John Hoffman when he recently had a heart
attack. And we’ve even prayed for a
woman outside of the parish who is pregnant and was bit by a spider, causing
serious concerns for the health of the baby and the mother.
We all turn to prayer naturally during life’s most serious
moments when someone is in need.
But what about during life’s ordinary moments? Is prayer as easy then as it is when someone
we love is struggling? How many of you
have struggled knowing how or what to pray when everything seems to be going
well?
I went to college at a small Southern Baptist school in
Arkadelphia, Arkansas, called Ouachita Baptist University. OBU was in a dry county, but of course, we
didn’t drink anyway because we were good Baptists! The nearest movie theater was 45 minutes away
and the most exciting thing that happened to the town while I was in school was
when we got a Super Walmart!
I was a Baptist at the time, but all Christians believe that
it’s important to spend time with God in prayer and Bible study regularly. The Southern Baptists called this “having a
quiet time.” I remember waking up in the
wee hours of the morning to try to spend time with God in prayer, and often wondered,
“What in the world should I be praying?
No one in my life is sick. I’ve
prayed for everyone in my family. What’s
next? Lord, teach me to pray.”
Today’s gospel begins by one of Jesus’s disciples saying to
him, “Lord, teach us to pray.”
His response was to give us that prayer that has come to be
known as the Our Father, or the Lord’s Prayer.
We all know it by heart and pray it together every time we celebrate the
Eucharist, and often personally in our own prayer lives.
But Jesus wasn’t just
intending to give us a beautiful prayer to pray together over and over. More importantly, he was giving us a way or a model for prayer. In the
Lord’s Prayer, we learn first to address God as Father, then we praise God and
ask him to bring his Kingdom to the here and now, and only then, we petition
God.
We often think of God as a great King in the sky who is far
away, impersonal, and full of condemnation much like He is portrayed in Monty
Python and the Search for the Holy Grail.
But Jesus starts out by calling us to approach God as “Father.” The
relationship between parent and child is an inherently intimate relationship
that we can all relate to. God isn’t
just some distant monarch who rules from afar.
He is close to us, and cares for us just as a parent cares for his or
her child. God loves us. God loves us. I don’t think we can hear this too
often. Because God loves us, he wants us
to be close to him. Jesus teaches us to enter into prayer by intimately
addressing a very personal God who cares for us and loves us more than we can
ever imagine.
He continues, “Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.” The word hallowed is another way of saying
holy, or sanctified. Jesus isn’t asking
us to declare that God’s name is holy, but rather Jesus is teaching us to ask God
to make his own name holy in the world. In
other words, we are asking God to bring about his kingdom in our lives and in
the world around us. To bring justice
and freedom and peace into our very souls, into our homes, into our jobs, into
our politics, and into our broken society.
To quote Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, we are called
to pray, “May what You want shine through in this world and shape the kind of
world it is going to be.”
It is only then that we should start asking for what we need. Asking God to provide the daily bread we need
to sustain us. Asking for forgiveness of
our sins as we forgive those who sin against us. Asking for the strength to
remain faithful to God in the midst of temptation.
And yes, for healing and strength for those who are sick,
poor and needy. For Penny Hughes as she recovers from surgery, for the repose
of the soul of Marlin Howard and for Nona and their family, for Brenda’s sister
and brother-in-law Barbie and Todd, for John Hoffman as he recovers from his
heart attack, and for the pregnant woman who was bit by the spider.
Jesus continues with a parable. In this parable, a friend goes to another
friend at midnight to ask for three loaves of bread. His friend can’t be bothered to get up and
give him the bread just because he’s his friend, but because of his persistence,
the friend will give him whatever he needs.
The word persistence is better translated from the Greek as “shameless.”
The person in need shamelessly knocks at
the door of his friend at midnight, exposing the shameful behavior of his
friend who stays in bed rather than answering his urgent need. Jesus is telling us in this parable to be shameless
in our prayer life. Keep asking, and it
will be given to you. Keep searching, and
you will find! Keep knocking, and the
door will be opened.
Praying in this way that Jesus taught us is not for the faint
of heart. It’s so tempting to jump to
the end and pray for our own needs and the needs of others. That’s tangible. We can read from our prayer list. It’s also easy to give up on prayer out of
boredom, or because we feel like our prayers are not being heard. It’s much
more difficult to approach prayer, in silence, and seek to be in an intimate relationship
with the creator of the universe. That’s
hard work.
Many of you already have a prayer routine, though some of you
may not. But I imagine that even more of
you are like me: you have a prayer routine and you have a hard time sticking to
it! During the next week, I challenge
you to spend just a few minutes in prayer each day. Choose a convenient time with no distractions,
no cell phones, no TV, and just sit for a few minutes. Resist the urge to jump to the end and start
praying for your own needs and those of others.
Start by approaching God in intimacy and love, and for a few moments,
sit and revel in the fact that God loves you more than you can even imagine. Then, praise him for who he is and ask him to
use you to bring forth his kingdom here upon earth. And then,
ask God for forgiveness and pray for your own needs and the needs of others. Shamelessly, again and again and again.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
