The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost, July 25, 2010

The Rev. Dr. Katharine C. Black, preaching

Hosea 1:2-10
Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6-15, [16-19]
Luke 11:1-13

This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

"Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples." Luke not only had Jesus not teach the Lord's Prayer in Matthew's words, he also didn't say it in Elizabethan English. Luke's version of Jesus' Prayer is shorter than Matthew's, but comes with two illustrative parables to clarify, both to whom Jesus prayed and his trust in God, whom he called "Father."

This week I combed several sources to read something fresh about this familiar Prayer. (I also spent much of the week sorting, sieving, and selecting out my books.) Somehow the church history went first, being well catalogued and available in libraries, and I don't often read it, and the psychology and leadership were as easy to move on, as much of it is opaquely written and under-documented. I found two very thin overlooked books (already a virtue): one on favorite garden borders, sent right off to someone with a serious passion for gardens and design, and the other called The Lord's Prayer, by Charles Gore.

[A brief digression about why it's astonishing sometimes to be a parish priest. I was working in a suburban parish, and the administrator told me that Ms Y had asked to see me. She was a faded middle-aged woman, with a look of defeat. Her hair was chopped off and just there; she looked tired, possibly like an abused woman. I said, "Of course," and she came the following week. She was diffident and hesitant. She didn't look up as we made conversational small talk. Finally after an interval of some minutes, I asked whether there was anything I could do for her, did she want anything specific. "Where can I find the works of Charles Gore?" That's why you're here? Why me?" "Because I thought you'd answer the question." "Well, some on my own shelves, but easily in Cambridge at EDS- really, was that why you're here?" By then she'd become lively and animated, "There's some other book by a v-name about early England..." "The Venerable Bede and that's easier; I have a spare Penguin of it. Why do you want those?" "To read them; I like Gore's writing."] Not an expected conversation, and I was as surprised that I owned this little book, that I think I'd never seen before. Odd-now it seems thick and hard to read carefully.

In struggling to read its 80 pages divided into four essays, I found Gore's first point occupied me thoroughly. He explains that people, in an anthropological long view, more than individuals in person, go through three basic steps. People had to find a way to sustain themselves, to reach a subsistence living. Then they could learn to form relationships, live in communities, and work together. Only then could they reach beyond themselves toward the Other, toward God. It read like evolutionary anthropology, nearly 50 years after the Origin of Species but 25 years before the Scopes Trial. I wondered whether Gore meant the three stages in that context or in the individual growing up process we all undergo.

In some ways it doesn't much matter. Anyone has to be stable enough in eating, living, learning, growing to reach toward other people to learn and love, grow and wonder, and imagine beyond that meal and those people right there, and reach beyond both the needs and that one pattern of life. That's the point when the disciples, many people, and we, here, ask, "Teach us to pray." People must trust the "to whom" they pray, so in Luke, Jesus offers two stories to show the  "Father's" trustworthiness. (Luke's word for Father is abba, or papa, or the name a young child calls a beloved male parent. We understand that "Father" is problematic for some among us, but Luke/Jesus was calling the Lord, Father within the hopes and practices of his time, although the word was not one traditionally used in addressing the Lord in formal prayer.)

Here the first illustrative parable is about friendship and trust, saying if a friend, knocks late, wouldn't you get up and help your friend, and then, second, if your child asks for a fish, would you give a snake, or if your child asks for an egg, would you give a scorpion? Jesus points out if you, or all of us know the right answers, and more to the point, the right actions, then surely the Lord, our Father, would know and do, as well. There is some chatter in the literature about whether scorpion is the word intended, because it seems so peculiar in context. The parables make their point: if God is any sort of worthy prayable-to God, then God would be as kind as the "you" person in the vignettes.

Jacques Prévert's poem called "Our Father," begins this way:

 "Our Father who art in heaven

                  Stay there

  And we'll stay here on earth

 Which is so pretty sometimes

 With her New York mysteries

  And also her Paris mysteries

Easily worth those of the Trinity

  With her little canal at Ourq

   Her Great Wall of China

       Her River of Morlax......

   With the terrible disasters of this world

                Which are legion.....

                 With the seasons.....

                    The years

         The pretty girls and the old fools

With the straw of misery rotting in the steel of cannons."

(I omitted some lines of mysteries and then some of disasters)

The poet highlights the distance from the Father, while Luke emphasizes the Father's trustworthiness and effective concern.

Then Luke in the Prayer asks for three things: daily bread, forgiveness, and not to be brought "to the time of trial. " The scale of the requests changes. The first is for the basics-just enough for sustenance. The second acknowledges our distance from God and our fallibility as humans. We cannot live up to God's expectations for us, and we are culpable to and with each other. When we accept forgiveness, then we can model that behavior of God to each other, while still understanding our own limitations. Finally Jesus urges us to ask to avoid being tempted. He knew what that was like, and wanted people to be able not to undergo such. Jesus tells us not to ask for tangibles beyond the necessities, and to ask for protection from the arrogance of not understanding our humanity with God and each other, and the risks life holds for us. That's all and enough that Jesus tells us as the way to pray.

What then is the value of this Prayer for us? It shows us perspective for our daily living. We need enough, and we need to hold on to our relationship with God and each other. When we say it as the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, we are reminding ourselves of that. In the liturgical context, by then, we've gathered, we've heard scripture and its meaning for us, we've prayed for our world's needs and been forgiven of our sins. Then we've heard the narrative of Jesus reconciling man to God and God to man, and we're joined in that living reconciliation individually, physically, spiritually, and communally. Both the Prayer itself and its location in the liturgy enact the personal and communal reality of what it asks for. The Prayer mirrors what the whole Eucharistic liturgy acts out, as Richard Valantasis pointed out.

We say the Prayer together. We reenact the whole human experience, asking and receiving food enough, asking and receiving forgiveness, asking and being incorporated through the bread and wine into the on-going life of Jesus, and into the eternal banquet to come. We say it in a somewhat pro forma way, even though we sing it. You know the tune evangelical and other churches sing. It's dramatic and even melodramatic, but it has a kind of heart or emotion that we rarely infuse our singing with. People hold their hands out to receive and welcome God's blessings, to be open to the answering of prayers. We rarely let ourselves go as we sing the Lord's Prayer. It's one of the few prayers we know by heart, so we say it together to end meetings and as our frequent communal liturgical prayer on other occasions. The weakness of that rote saying is that we rarely actually pray the Prayer, or put our attention to its petitions: its requests, its trust, its acknowledgement and acceptance of our shortcomings and God's forgiveness. Saying the Prayer regularly makes it available to us, in heart and soul and mind. It is the outline of our belief system.

Remember that it's praying that shapes believing, not believing that shapes praying. Starting then with the Prayer, we ask for enough to eat, for ourselves and for everyone included in "us." As we grow in alertness and consciousness of our family, community, and world, we realize that "give us today our daily bread," is both about our own needs for eating, as well as our responsibilities to all people to see that there is enough food to go around. The longer we say and become aware of what were asking for, the greater our sense of seeing that all get today's bread. When we ask to be forgiven as we forgive others, it requires us to take ourselves, and our relationships, to heart. We come to understand what our limitations are, and how hard it is to do better, or to let up on ourselves for our sins. We resent others' sins against us, and it's hard to let those go too, and yet all of those shortcomings, sins, and sourness are forgiven us. We grow to understand the distances between ourselves and Jesus, ourselves and the Creator, and yet we hear ourselves prepared for and welcomed to Paradise. We learn about ourselves and we can understand and appreciate who Jesus was and what he did. When we're kids, being perfect: fully man, fully God, doesn't seem like much, but as we grow, we gain a glimpse of who we are, who God is, and what God does for us.

The outline for our believing growth is the Lord's Prayer. It shapes our maturing into believers. It's not that we're struck in the head or heart and suddenly get belief and start to pray. We accept the outlines of our belief, saying it and moving toward greater understanding. Repeating it, we experience its connection to the incarnate enactment in the Eucharist. At meetings we are shaped together as a believing community. At evening prayer, we're given night strength, and trust in a watchful God to see us through the night, welcome us at daybreak and see us into paradise.

Perhaps I'll say more about praying anon, but Luke's Prayer, with Matthew's that we know and say regularly, have given us our backbone of belief, our backbone for life's action and decisions. The Prayer teaches and shapes us, and teaches us that God in Heaven, watches over us, and through his Son, Jesus Christ, leads us there forever: Good News.

© Katharine C. Black, 25 July 2010