A Fourth Church Sermon by Fred Holper

July 29, 2001 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

Why Pray . . . This Way?

Fred Holper
Professor of Preaching and Worship,
McCormick Theological Seminary

Genesis 18:20–32
Psalm 85
Luke 11:1–13

A few years ago, I seem to remember that there was a little dust-up reported in the Chicago Tribune when a widely used ecumenical English translation of the Lord’s Prayer showed up in the Sunday morning worship service here at Fourth Church. Both the reasons for the change and the negative reactions to it are now safely consigned to history, but I suspect that the very strangeness of the new translation played a role in both.

That incident came to my mind when I began to look at the lectionary readings scheduled for this Lord’s Day. At first, the Gospel reading, in particular, seemed to be filled with familiar teachings:

> a version of the Lord’s Prayer
> a parable apparently focused on persistence
> a set of exhortations and rhetorical questions whose purpose is to point to God’s providence

But the familiarity was not really a comfortable familiarity, but more the disturbing familiarity of a Pablo Picasso painting, where recognizable images are put together in weird ways:

> The Lord’s Prayer we find there is not the one we say together every Lord’s Day.
> The parable—unlike a later one involving a widow and an unjust judge (Luke 12:1-8)—is not about persistence but shamelessness.
> The providence of God toward which those exhortations and questions point takes a shape different from the one we expect.

What ties these segments together is prayer, but not just any sort of prayer. Rather it is prayer of a very particular sort—i.e., the prayer of those who choose to follow after Jesus. The familiar setting of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew’s Gospel comes in the middle of a long discourse on piety in the Sermon on the Mount and thus seems to be directed to the crowds.

Luke’s version, by contrast, arises from the disciples’ request that he teach them his way of praying. They seek a way of praying that will mark them as a distinctive community of Jesus’ disciples, in much the same way that the mode of prayer taught by John the Baptist marked them as his followers.

Like Jesus, the earliest disciples were Jews. The piety and prayer life of Judaism had already formed them over the course of a lifetime. They were not pagans; they already knew how to pray. What they wanted Jesus to teach them was a way of praying that would not only reflect but also shape their life and ministry together. Indeed their request to Jesus follows almost immediately upon their return from their first foray into public ministry.

Moreover, their request, I think, provides us with a kind of lens for seeing the Lord’s Prayer in a different way. What is it about this prayer that marks as a distinctive community of people those of us who use it?

The first thing about this prayer that makes it distinctively Christian is that Christians pray it together. The verbs referring to the community are all second person plural. Imagine Jesus as Southerner: “When y’all pray.” Moreover, all the pronouns in the prayer talk of “us” and “our.” The Lord’s Prayer is the community prayer of Jesus’ disciples. It is not an expression of individual piety apart from the life and worship of the whole community. One of the marks of the Reformed tradition of worship is our insistence that all prayer—including personal prayers offered by individuals—need to be seen as part of the corporate worship of the church.

The fact that the Lord’s Prayer is meant to be prayed together, that it is meant to shape and express the common life and ministry of the whole Christian people, is what lies behind the attempt to find a common ecumenical translation for all English-speaking Christians. On the other hand, our resistance to new translations offers a powerful witness to the ways in which our piety has been shaped by the translations used by the church during our formative years.

The Lucan version of the prayer itself reveals a very simple three-part structure:

> First, an address (“Father”)
> Second, two petitions blessing God (“hallowed be your name” and “your kingdom come”)
> Finally, three petitions for the well-being of the community (“give us each day our daily bread,” “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us,” and “do not bring us to the time of trial”)

We will return to the three petitions a little later, but for the moment notice that this pattern suggests three characteristics of prayer for those who follow Jesus.

First, those who follow after Jesus are invited to live their lives—including their prayer lives—in a relationship of intimacy with God. In making our prayer we are to remember that God is like a loving parent, and—like loving parents everywhere—God wants our lives to go well, perhaps even more than we do.

But this God is also the God who created heaven and earth, the God who is Lord of human history. So the second characteristic of Christian prayer as rehearsed in Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer is this: we need to begin by acknowledging that everything we have and everything we are comes to us as a gift from God’s hands. We make this acknowledgement when we hallow God’s name and long for the coming of God’s reign on earth.

Finally, Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer teaches us that Christians need to beseech God to care for us where we are most vulnerable:

> to provide us each day with what we need to live
> to forgive our failures and those of others
> to keep us from the kind of testing that might separate us from God

This pattern of praise and beseeching, thanksgiving and lament, acknowledgment and petition constitutes the living heart of all Christian prayer. All the prayers of Christian worship–from the prayer of invocation to the prayer of confession, from the prayers over the water at baptism to the great prayer of thanksgiving at the Eucharist, from the prayers of the people following the sermon to the prayer of thanksgiving at the time of the offering—are formed around this basic juxtaposition.

They really need to be together. Thanksgiving alone, or praise alone, or acknowledgment alone might be misunderstood as a celebration of the ways things are. On the other hand, lament alone, or beseeching alone, or petition alone, might be misconstrued as a refusal of hope.

In his book Holy Things: A Liturgical Theology, Lutheran theologian Gordon Lathrop writes:

These pairs come to expression in the apposition of thanksgiving and hope. Thanksgiving alone might be misunderstood to be an acceptance of the status quo, as if the truly religious heart would rise above all actual material suffering to perceive some unearthly religious meaning and so to praise God for all conditions and realities, as if there were no need of God’s promise or God’s future. Lament alone could be a refusal of comfort and of hope, a choice to hold on to bitterness, as if there were no truth to God’s past giving grounds for hope. (p. 57)

But what makes Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer something more than merely a shorter version of the prayer in the Gospel of Matthew—indeed, what makes it so important for a Christian understanding of prayer in the twenty-first century—comes from the rhetorical questions that Jesus asks of the disciples after teaching them the prayer.

Immediately following the prayer, Jesus asks a question that leads into a parable about three men. Now, the parable is ostensibly about friendship and hospitality, but it is used here by Luke to make a fairly radical point about Christian prayer.

In order to keep the three unnamed men straight, let’s give them nicknames. The first man (we’ll call him the “hungry friend”) arrives at the home of another man (we’ll call him the “host friend”) in the middle of the night and asks the host friend for some bread. As a matter of sheer fact, the host friend doesn’t have any bread, but he does have another friend (we’ll call him the “sleeping friend”). So the host friend goes to the sleeping friend and asks for some bread so he can offer the basic provisions required by the hospitality practices of the community.

Now the sleeping friend has already turned in for the night, and while he might very well get up to provide bread for the host friend, whom he knows personally, he isn’t really too keen on getting up and disturbing his family simply for the friend of a friend. As far as the sleeping friend is concerned, there are limits to the rules of friendship and hospitality.

But, says Jesus, what will get the sleeping friend’s attention, what will make him get up, wake his family and cause him to unlock the door is if the host friend acts shamelessly. The New Revised Standard Version—perhaps seeing the parallels between this story and the story of the unjust judge—translates the Greek word here as “persistence.” What Jesus is pointing to here is not so much persistence as it is the willingness to act shamelessly in order to gain what another needs.

Friends ask one another for things all the time, but most of us wouldn’t see those kinds of requests as shameless. Friends, after all, return favors, so their requests are hardly shameless. Beggars, on the other hand, perpetually act shamelessly because they know they are begging with no plan or ability to return the favor.

The key to the resolution of the dilemma set forth in the parable is that the host friend must adopt the social role of being shameless in order to meet the traveling friend’s need.

The impact of this parable in the context of Jesus’ teaching of the Lord’s Prayer seems to be this: petitioning God for our own needs is both appropriate and necessary, but for those who follow after Jesus, it is also insufficient. Those who follow after Jesus are also called to petition shamelessly on behalf of the needs of others. And because what we believe and how we act are shaped and expressed by the way we pray, shameless petitioning on behalf of others’ needs must necessarily lead to shameless action in seeing that their needs are met.

During the Gulf War, I received dozens of phone calls from worried pastors. They were all in trouble with their congregations, it seems, in part because during the prayers of the people at Sunday worship, they had offered petitions seeking God’s protection for those on both sides of the conflict. They wanted to know if there was any book or article I could recommend that would help rehabilitate their standing in their congregations. I gave them a few suggestions, but not before asking them to tell me about the way the prayers of the people were led in the months and years leading up to the Gulf War.

Well, it turns out that the prayers of the people had focused almost entirely on the needs of the local congregation, their friends and family, upon the needs of this nation and its leaders, and upon the particular concerns of their own denominations. “You did a wonderful job of teaching your congregation that the focus of the church’s prayer should be upon them and their friends and family. And having taught them so well, you shouldn’t have been surprised when they heard you pray for the enemy during a time of war.”

The parable, in turn, opens into a set of commands: ask, search, knock. Ask and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. Each of these imperative verbs is in the present tense. “Keep on asking, keep on seeking, keep on knocking.” Or, “Continue to ask, seek, and knock.”

A few years ago, the elected head of the Southern Baptist Convention made headlines when he stated publicly that God doesn’t hear the prayers of Jews. God only hears the prayers of those who believe in Jesus, he said. But notice that in Jesus’ teaching here there is no mention of believing, only of asking, seeking, and knocking. It’s almost as though Jesus well understood that, for many of us, prayer is the way we come to believe, not the other way around.

At any rate, Jesus’ teaching about prayer concludes with another set of rhetorical questions that seem designed to cause us to consider what we might expect from prayer: “Is there any one among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?” The obvious answer to both questions is no. And just as obviously, says Jesus, God will give the Holy Spirit to those who keep on asking, seeking, knocking.

The last word this morning comes from the Jewish philosopher and mystic, Abraham Joshua Heschel:

Prayer is no panacea, no substitute for action. It is, rather, like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness. It is in this light that we who grope, stumble, and climb discover where we stand, what surrounds us, and the course, which we should take. Prayer makes visible the right and reveals what is hampering and false. In its radiance we behold the worth of our efforts, the range of our hopes, and the meaning of our deeds.

Amen.