A Fourth Church Sermon by Sarah A. Johnson

July 25, 2010 | 4:00 p.m.

Teach Us to Pray

Sarah A. Johnson
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Luke 11:1–13

“To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world,” wrote nineteenth-century Reformed theologian Karl Barth.

That is exactly what Jesus told his disciples when they asked him, “Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us how to live and what to ask for. Teach us how to be participants in God’s work. Lord, would you be willing to teach us to pray?” The question isn’t a random one; it hasn’t suddenly dawned on the disciples that this is a good time to benefit from a teaching moment. Rather, Jesus has just finished “praying in a certain place” and has repeatedly made prayer a central part of his ongoing ministry.

Throughout Luke’s Gospel, Jesus has withdrawn again and again to deserted places to pray (Luke 5:16). It is one of the defining characteristics of Jesus’ ministry in the Gospel of Luke. After Jesus is baptized and is beginning the work of his adult ministry, we find that he is praying. He will repeat this action of prayer at least once in each of the next three chapters, each time withdrawing to a different place to pray. Jesus will also pray before he chooses the twelve disciples, before the miracle of feeding of the 5,000, and even as he hangs dying on the cross.

Jesus’ disciples know that this act of prayer that Jesus repeatedly practices is somehow intimately connected to living out an active life of faith.

The words of prayer that Jesus shares with them are familiar words to most of us. They are, of course, the words that make up the prayer commonly referred to as the Lord’s Prayer. It is a prayer that has remained over the centuries and a prayer that even those of us who have lapsed in and out of the church typically know.

Luke presents a simple version of the prayer laid out in five unadorned imperatives. “When you pray,” Jesus tells them, “do it like this: ‘Father may your name be holy! May your kingdom come! Give us each day the bread we need! Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who owes us! Do not lead us into testing!’”

Notice what Jesus doesn’t instruct his disciples to pray for: Jesus doesn’t spend any time crafting fancy religious language. He doesn’t walk them through praying for a laundry list of their personal needs or wants or desires. Jesus instructs his disciples to pray for the presence of God’s kingdom, here and now. He instructs them to ask for bread so that they might be filled (but only for what they need daily, not for a surplus). He asks them to pray for forgiveness, asking God to be generous to them with the same measure of generosity that they offer to others. He instructs them to pray that God might lead them.

It is, at its most basic, a prayer that calls you and me to ask for the grace to risk being faithful bearers and disciples of God’s kingdom each day of our lives.

Martin Luther called the Lord’s Prayer, “a summary of the whole gospel.”

“Jesus has a definite peculiar notion of what constitutes prayer,” writes Methodist bishop and former Duke University chaplain Will Willimon.

Prayer is not when I spill my guts to God. Prayer is when I obey Jesus and pray for the things he teaches me to pray for and when I pray the way he prays. Prayer is bending my feelings, my desires, my thoughts and yearnings toward Jesus and what he wants me to feel desire and think. . . . Jesus is most notable for teaching that we are to pray not for recent gall bladder surgery but for our enemies!

There are, of course, many forms of prayer in which we seek after and are found by God: prayers of praise and thanksgiving to God who is the giver of all good gifts; prayers of intercession for healing and wholeness of others; prayers of supplication to the God who knows our every need.

But this is not the primary task to which Jesus calls his disciples in prayer. The prayer Jesus teaches his disciples offers systematic practice for the vision of God. Pray in this manner, Jesus promises the disciples, and you will realize in your experience the kingdom, which I have been representing.

As you and I know, God’s vision, God’s kingdom, is no small task for which to pray, for God’s kingdom requires turning the principles of the world on their head. Even with our best will and noblest impulses, we could never get it right on our own, for the kingdom of God asks us to love not just our neighbors and our friends but our enemies. It asks us to pray for those who persecute us, to worry about the least of these when we have worries of our own; to find power in the way of peace; not just serve those who are hungry but to ask why the hungry do not have food to eat; to know that strange gospel truth that we become more fully ourselves by giving ourselves away for the sake of others.

The liturgy in the Anglican church introducing the Lord’s Prayer begins, “As our Savior Christ taught us, we are bold to pray . . .” It does indeed take great courage to pray the prayer Jesus taught if we pray it with all the consequences that it intends.

As Will Willimon points out, “To pray the Lord’s Prayer is one of the most defiant, most politically charged things that we can do.” To actively pray for God’s kingdom here and now and not in some distant future is to challenge the world order with the alternative reality of Christ—the kingdom of God, that is. Not man’s kingdom. Not any political party’s kingdom. Not any of the kingdoms that still have nuclear missiles aimed at each other’s heads. Not any that worry, like us, about counting calories while so many starve to death. But God’s kingdom.

Theologian Frederick Beuchner writes, “It is only the word Father which makes this prayer bearable.”

Jesus’ prayer makes the riskiest, most countercultural moment in all of Christian worship the moment when someone stands amid the congregation and says, “Let us pray . . .”

The hope is, of course, that as we pray the Lord’s Prayer with our lips, we also receive the grace to pray it with our lives.

This week I read about a program started by the Reverend Tim Keller, Pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in New York City, a program known as the Entrepreneurship Initiative. The program brings together investors and entrepreneurs who are a part of “a movement of innovative, gospel-centered, culture renewing, institutions and ventures.” The idea is to gift and inspire people to use their talents and their resources not to stock up more money, power, or status for themselves, but to start and sustain businesses, nonprofits, and art ventures that look to change the world, to create in God’s image—that is, for the sake of others.

“Those who create like God do so for the sake of others,” Keller said. “The triune God has an orientation directed toward others, first among the divine Persons, and then among the others whom God created. God wants these created others to enjoy and love him as the divine Persons, Father, Son, and Spirit, eternally do. God creates so that others will have space to share his goods. Human creators should do so as well.”

Thanks to the funding of Keller’s initiative at Redeemer, four young twenty-something women who share a love for photography and appreciating the world from another’s point of view created the nonprofit 100cameras. The company gives cameras to children in underserved areas to take pictures of the world around them. The children’s photographs are then sold as a way to raise money and awareness for their communities. It’s a business in which photography becomes a vehicle for appreciating another’s point of view, restoring self-image, giving exposure to the unjust lives of brothers and sisters around the world, calling others to be a part of empowering sustainable growth in those places.

It is a different way of think about business, a different way to think about our lives and what we might do with them, how we might use our lives to pray and live the Lord’s Prayer.

I know a group of older women who love to spend their free time knitting. But instead of just knitting blankets and scarves for themselves and their families, they decided to present them as gifts to members of their church community who were in the hospital.

This week a group from our church will leave to build a Habitat house for a family in Honduras. A family will get a home, relationships will be built across cultures and economic boundaries, and hopefully members of the work team will return with renewed hope and a new set of questions about the poverty and injustice in our world.

There is always room for you and me to discover how our business, our money, a little bit of our time and energy, can pray and live the Lord’s Prayer; to risk proclaiming the radical and inclusive love of Christ that changes the way the world operates. We will, of course, by no means bring about the kingdom of God on our own. It is God alone who brings about God’s kingdom. But we can take part, courageously praying and living as Jesus instructs his disciples—hands folded, an up-raising against the disorder of the world:

Father may your name be holy! May your kingdom come! Give us each day the bread we need! Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves also forgive everyone who owes us! Do not lead us into testing!

May it be so. Come, Lord Jesus.

All thanks be to God. Amen.