Lord, let us be so bold as to pray as you have taught us ☩ in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
If there has ever been a set of words spoken more often than the Lord’s Prayer, I’d be surprised. For 2,000 years, Christians have been praying these words, often multiple times a day. And there’s a deep beauty to this – these words are prayed at weddings, gravesides, battlefields, hospital rooms, chapels, and living rooms. I have prayed these words with people as they died, I have prayed with people who know these words even when, because of dementia, they do not know who they are, I have prayed these words with children as they are just learning about the wonderful and amazing grace of God. This is the richness of such a familiar prayer. The other side of familiarity though is that, because we know this prayer so well, we can say these words while on auto-pilot. So it is always good when we have a chance to reflect on and rejoice in these words that our Savior Christ has taught us.
Immediately,
we notice that what we heard in Luke isn’t what we are used to praying. We are
used to the longer version that is found in Matthew – but we don’t need to get into
text-critical analysis to receive the fruits of this prayer. The version we
heard from Luke has the same basic structure: Our Father, your kingdom, daily
bread, forgive us, and save us. And while I’m speaking of the intricacies of
the Biblical text, I do want to acknowledge how challenging that first reading
from Hosea is. People have struggled with the images presented in Hosea for millennia,
so it’s okay to be troubled by it.
Instead
of focusing on what phrases like “hallowed or “daily bread” mean, I’m going to focus
more on the bigger picture of the Lord’s Prayer this morning. Back in May 2020,
I launched the Behold & Become podcast, which I started to function
something like Sunday School during the pandemic and I plan to continue it
because demand for that sort of content seems to be higher than a return to
Sunday morning classes. About a year ago on the podcast, I did a five episode
series on the Lord’s Prayer in which I explored this prayer in greater detail
than I can in a sermon, so I’d recommend episodes 67 through 71 if you’re
interested in going further.
There’s
a story that comes out of Latvia when the country was under Communist control.
Public prayer was not allowed and a young girl was raised in an atheist
household. However, at funerals, it was permitted that the Lord’s Prayer be
said. She remembers wondering what this prayer was all about – who is this father,
where is the kingdom that is mentioned, what are the debts that we owe? She
told one interviewer that even without knowing what these words meant, they
gave her a spark of light in the shadow of oppression that she had been living
under. So when the regime changed and religion was allowed, she wanted to learn
more about this prayer. She recounts that by the time she learned what the
prayer was referring to, she had become a Christian.
That
is the power of the Lord’s Prayer – it gives us faith and strengthens us in it.
This is why we encourage all those who are seeking to follow Jesus to pray
these words at least twice a day. We do not pray because we have faith, rather
we have faith because we pray. Faith is a gift given to us graciously by God
and prayer is one way of receiving and being assured of the peace, mercy, and
love of God towards us. When we put ourselves in the habit of praying to our
loving Father, reminding ourselves that is God’s Kingdom, not our own, that we
are after, confessing that we are hungry and need our daily bread, and that we
have sins to be forgiven, we are being molded and shaped into a people who rely
on and trust in the grace of God in all things. The Lord’s Prayer takes us
deeper into faith.
Of
course, there are many ways to start into this prayer, but I really appreciate the
way our Prayer Book tradition molds us into praying the Lord’s Prayer with boldness.
The Eucharistic liturgy invites us to say these words with the bidding – “And
now, as our Savior Christ has taught us, we are bold to say.” “Bold” comes from
Old English and means “brave, confident, strong, or stout-hearted.” In modern English,
boldness connotes being audacious, presumptuous, or fearless. In the short
parables that Jesus tells after giving the words of the prayer, we see this
sort of boldness being described as persistent and stubborn faith that takes
for granted that God loves us and will provide for us. Imagine a world in which
Christians were full so bold as to expect God’s action and provision at all
times.
The
particular moment at which we pray this prayer gives us this boldness. We pray
this prayer right after the Eucharistic Prayer which makes us present to the
mercy, love, and salvation of Jesus’ Incarnation and Passion. Therefore, we can
be bold in our faith because we have been assured that we are forgiven for things
done and left undone, because we are confident in knowing that “Christ has died,
Christ has risen, and that Christ will come again,” because we are assured that
God will nourish us with the bread of heaven and the cup of salvation.
Our Eucharistic
liturgy gives us the boldness to pray as Jesus did – to call God our Father, to
demand our daily bread, to ask for our forgiveness. The Lord’s Prayer, as it is
recorded in Scripture, really is a bold prayer. The language is not “Please,
sir, if you wouldn’t mind, might we a bit of daily bread?” No, not at all. The
verbs are all in the imperative; they are commands. The Father that Jesus
teaches us to pray to is not like the Wizard of Oz who we need to cower before,
but rather Jesus teaches us to be blunt, direct, demanding, and honest. The
Lord’s Prayer invites us to be so bold as to enter into an authentic
relationship with God.
This sort of boldness
is, I imagine, what led the disciples to ask Jesus how to pray. Luke records that
Jesus had been at prayer himself, and then one of the disciples asked Jesus to
teach them how to pray. The disciples had been following Jesus for quite a while
at this point and they were all Jewish, meaning they knew how to pray. Judaism has
always had a robust prayer life and so it is not as if they were asking “how
to.” Instead, the disciples noticed something in Jesus as he had finished praying.
What exactly it was, I can’t say for sure because I wasn’t there. But I imagine
it was a mix of peace, resoluteness, vitality, and holiness. And so they ask “How
do we get what you have?” And Jesus’ response was to tell them to say these
words.
Often, people will
ask me for suggestions and help in praying. Sometimes we overcomplicate things.
I’m not suggesting that the only prayer that we ever use is the Lord’s Prayer –
but it’s sort of like water, it should be a staple in our prayer diet. If you
want to know to start with prayer, start by saying “Our Father who art in
heaven.” This is how Jesus teaches those who seek to follow him to grow closer
to his Father, to live by the rhythms of grace by asking for daily bread, to participate
in the economy of forgiveness, to rely on God to save us from things that are bigger
than us. Yes, the Lord’s Prayer is a great model for us to follow, but it is
also an indescribable gift that allows us to partake of the difference that
Christ makes.
As wonderful as
this prayer is, we are still left wondering what prayer, in general, is all
about. Again, I’ll refer you to the Behold & Become podcast, as episodes 24
and 54 delve into the question of what prayer is and why we do it. We all heard
what Jesus said – “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find;
knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and
everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be
opened.”
And yet, we still
deal with corruption, greed, illness, accidents, things not going our way. Has
Jesus made a promise and then failed to deliver on it? What good is it to pray
the Lord’s Prayer with boldness when it seems like we don’t get what we’re
praying for? To state the obvious, but we all need the reminder: God is not a
vending machine. We don’t put in our words as the currency, punch in our prayer
request, and then get whatever it is that we’ve asked for. CS Lewis once said, “If
God had granted all the silly prayers I’ve made in my life, where should I be
now?” If prayers were more like wishes made to a genie, I wouldn’t be here this
morning. I’d be coming towards the close of a Hall of Fame career as a Major League
shortstop. More often than not, I should probably be thankful for all the times
God has saved me from what I prayed for.
That being said,
there are other less “silly” prayers that we have – for peace in Ukraine, for a
cure for cancer and Alzheimer’s, for reconciliation after estrangement. These
seem like good things that God should want to grant us immediately. There are a
lot of things that I gained from attending seminary, but being given the answer
key to religion wasn’t one of them. It’s a question we all struggle with. If we
pay close attention to the words of Jesus though, we get a hint about what the
point of prayer is. Today’s passage concludes with Jesus saying, “How much more
will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
The Holy Spirit is
God’s answer to prayer, and there is no bolder gift than the very presence of
God with us. The Holy Spirit with us is the means by which God responds to our
pleas, petitions, and prayers. Jesus is promising us that God will never withhold
God’s loving, comforting, healing, transforming, and empowering Holy Spirit
from us. As the angel Gabriel testified to Mary, “With God, all things are
possible” and this is true because of the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is the Holy
Spirit that allows us to hallow God’s name, to long for and anticipate the
Kingdom, to acknowledge our neediness for God to provide our daily needs of
bread, forgiveness, and salvation. With the gift of the Holy Spirit, we can face
any trial, overcome any hardship, and find Resurrection life even in the midst
of death.
Now, I realize
that this can feel like a bait-and-switch. We pray for patience, or a cure, or
a job and instead are told “Well, you’ve got the Holy Spirit, so enjoy that.”
The issue isn’t that the gift of God’s Spirit is insufficient, it’s that we’ve
created an idol for ourselves of God. We’re so accustomed to treating God like
a genie or a vending machine, we’ve so convinced ourselves that we know what is
best, what an answered prayer should look like, and if we’re honest, we
probably think that if we had all power and knowledge that we could do a better
job running a universe than God could.
If the gift of the Holy Spirit strikes us as a “consolation prize,” then that exposes that we want stuff from God more than we want God. In Jesus and in the Holy Spirit, God has given us the greatest gift – God’s very own self. The most generous thing that anyone can give is their life, their very being, and that is exactly what God gifts us. And this is why we can be so bold – we are loved and nourished by a God who holds nothing back from us. God sends prophets and messengers. God came to us in the flesh, in Jesus, who gave himself up to death on a cross to show us just how deeply, truly, and fully we are loved. But death could not defeat this love, and so early on the first day of the week, the stone at the tomb was rolled away and Jesus gave Resurrection life to all. And to encourage and nurture us in this world in which things as unimaginable as the Resurrection are now possible, we are given the very Holy Spirit of God to be with us a guide, comfort, and companion. And because that is all the truest thing in the world, in order to help us grow and rejoice in that truth, Jesus has taught us to be bold enough to pray, “Our Father.”
