An Ongoing Conversation

Luke 11:1-13

When I was young, I believed prayer could cure cancer and guarantee we’d find a parking spot at the mall. I knew ways to pray that would bring Jesus into your heart or cast demons out of it.  I even believed that I had a magic super power prayer. I thought, if anyone tried to kidnap me, I would only need to shout with confidence, “I rebuke you in the name of the Lord!” and they would flee in fear.  I almost hoped someone would try it.  Thank God nobody did.

I prayed all the time, for everything, I didn’t hesitate, I asked brazenly for what I wanted, expecting it to be given unto me.  

I am not sure what I thought about God, who God was or what God was about, except that I had the bead on God. I knew how to get God to do what wanted. I would say the right words, the right way with the right attitude, and whatever I asked for would happen. “Your will be done, Lord!” I had the code cracked.  I knew God loved me and had a wonderful plan for my life. Seek and you will find! Ask and you will receive! I got this.

Here’s what’s tricky about this. It would be easy now to say I got it all wrong. That’s not how prayer works at all. And it’s true; it’s not. But there was one thing in this that I got right.  

In the parable Jesus tells his disciples, about the neighbor who knocks on the door at night asking for bread for an unexpected guest, the word for persistence, is actually, in the Greek, “shameless, audacious, bold.”  He tells his disciples to boldly, brazenly ask for what they want. I had some boldness about me in those days.  That part of prayer I got right.

Yesterday I googled “How to pray” and got 795,000,000 results. We want to do it right. We are trying to live a good life, and we don’t want to mess it up.  We would love to have a magic ace up our sleeve, but at the very least, we don’t want to piss off the almighty.  Or maybe we don’t even know if there is an almighty, but we think it wouldn’t hurt to hedge our bets.  We have things we want done, things we wish we’d never done, people we want to save and we wouldn’t mind making sure we ourselves are saved too.  The world is scary. Bad things happen. We do bad things. Prayer must be there to fix all of this, right?

Teach us to pray! Jesus’ disciples ask him. John’s taught his disciples! They got the bonus lesson, we want that too!  Jesus seems to got it going on in the prayer department. Give us a little of your mojo, Lord.  

So Jesus does gives them some words. And I love him for this. They wanted something concrete to hold onto, and he gave them that. We want something concrete to hold onto, and God gives us that.  

We’ve made his words into The Lord’s Prayer, a procedure almost, something we can rattle off.  And indeed, we do rattle them off - I have been asked to slow down in leading them so they can be felt and savored, and I keep forgetting about this until I’m in the car on the way home, and then I swear I’ll do the Lord’s Prayer slower next week.

This sample prayer Jesus gives to his disciples begins with addressing God as Abba, Daddy, Mommy – extremely intimate, parental language. Already, he’s way outside the box as far as rabbis teaching their students to address the divine. This is the tradition, remember, that replaced the name for God all throughout the bible with THE LORD, so as not to speak the holy name aloud.  And Jesus is brazenly, audaciously, assuming a very familiar, familial connection to God, like a trusting toddler.  Maisy used crawl up my lap and face me, and pat her chubby hands on my cheeks and look into my eyes and say, “Hi Mamamama!” 

Pray like that, Jesus says.

And then the prayer has two movements. Immediately it invites God to draw us into God’s concerns. You are holy other, Your kingdom come, your will be done, here on earth as it is in heaven. Reframe our perspective, God, give us your way of seeing and relating.

Then the prayer shifts to inviting God into our concerns – give us our daily bread, forgive us, as we forgive others, lead us not into temptation.  Help us with what we need for our survival, what we need for our being to be held in others, and in you.

Pray like this above everything, all-powerful and mighty God is actually your mommy, who cares about the intimate details of your life, and wants to be involved in them. Pray like you are invited also into the intimate details of God’s own life, like God wants you to be involved in them.

Two weeks ago I shared I was going on a silent retreat.  Well, I did, and it was wonderful, the walks and the naps and the writing and reading and the chanting with the monks. 

I recalled something I had read last year when I was there, about sabbath. God rests, so we rest because we’re made in God’s image. We all know that. But this person wrote something like, “God rests because keeping this world going is not the only thing to God. God has other interests and hobbies; it’s not all about us.”  And it struck me as so funny, so delightful, unexpected and surprising. Of course. We rest because keeping the world going is not the only thing that makes us us. There is more to us than the work we do to keep everything afloat. Why not God? 

So I tried something then.  I let myself wonder who God was apart from what God does to keep the world going. I let myself contemplate what it might be like to hang out with God in the rest of God, and not just the work, (the being of God, and not just the doing!) not just what I wanted God to do for me or for the world, but to be curious about who God is and what God was into, apart from keeping everything going. And on a trail deep in the woods, I cleared my throat and said, aloud, “Hi.”  

And as I walked along, feeling like I was walking along with God, in God, it became like a kind of centering prayer.  Every so often, I’d bring my attention back with my sacred word, which, in this case, was, “Hi.” And each time I got a little thrill. God was here. I was here. We were hanging out. “Hi God.” “Hi God, it’s me.” “Hi God, what are you into when you’re not keeping everything afloat? Hi God, Will you show me who you are?”

Last week, I got to go back and forth, between praying the Psalms, and being rooted in the liturgies of addressing God as the Great I AM, the mystery we must bow to approach, to trudging along the same path in the woods, stick in my hand, leaves crunching beneath my feet, praying, “Hi, God.” 

What Jesus is trying to show the disciples about prayer has far more to do with who God is, than how to pray. He gives them the how, because that’s what they’re asking for, he gives them some words and perspectives and even attitudes – pray audaciously! 

But he is showing them who God is by how we’re told to pray - Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened. God is a God who gives, who hears, who answers, who opens the door to us. 

Which of you, if your child asks for an egg will give a scorpion, or as Matthew 7 more helpfully suggests, when they ask for bread will give them a stone? If we, who are evil, can give good gifts to our children, how much more this God of ours?  

            

Our chapter this week in our book that we are reading together, Being Disciples, talks a lot about forgiveness.  “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Forgiveness – both giving it and receiving it- returns us to the core of our humanity as a gift that is bestowed upon us, by God, and upheld by each other, rather than something we each possess and defend. Forgiveness breaks down the armor and shell of us, so the tender and defenseless human part inside is exposed – I need to admit my need, I need to let go my power, I need to see and be seen, I need to be ministered to.

We belong to each other and we belong to God – so the vulnerability of this connection means I am bound to uphold others’ humanity and I need others to uphold mine. We nurture each other’s dignity. 

Living is risky. Being human is an unsafe activity. We can get hurt. We can hurt others. But also, we can bestow dignity and uphold humanity. We can forgive; we can receive forgiveness. We can restore and be restored.

 “I cannot live without the word of mercy; I cannot complete this task of being myself,” Rowan Williams says, “without the healing of what I have wounded.” 

We need each other for this – the ones we wound and those who’ve wounded us. We are set free to live fully in our humanity when we release the hold we have on others with our unforgiveness.  And we are set free to liv fully in our humanity when we receive forgiveness from someone we have wounded.

Forgiveness pulls us into God’s life. And it pulls us back into our humanity.  

This is how to pray--as one connected already to God and to others, as one longing for that connection to be restored, shameless in asking for it to be.

We pray as a who, addressing a who, a personal being who is free to act or not, who has interests we know nothing about, who loves and adores us, and invites us to refer to the Great and all powerful Mystery as our closest, most trusted source and caregiver, We pray in an ongoing conversation that will never end.

Jesus prayed this way. Secure in his connection to God and all others, certain in where this is all going to end up –living from the complete here in the partial.  There is a kind of submission that happens, then. When I am in my most honest and vulnerable and human self, I return to the strength of the bond that will never let us go. 

During my life, my view of prayer radically shifted. 

I prayed, really hard in all the right ways, for a friend to be healed, and she died. 

I got a little more aware of the world’s suffering and a little humbled and scared to pray for my own puny old needs with so much worse tragedy unfolding on the planet. 

I got tangled up with people who used “prayer” as permission to do and say whatever you feel like in the name of “God,” with religious impunity.  

I got educated on histories, heresies, theologies and doctrines, and mixed up about which way was right and why it matters. 

I got suspicious of my motives, and curious about God’s priorities. 

So I got afraid about asking, and hesitant about seeking, and sheepish about knocking. I didn’t want to do it wrong. Perhaps it was better not to pray than to pray the wrong way.

We once said here that the only way to do it wrong, the only way not to pray, is not to show up as your real and authentic self, or not to acknowledge that God has shown up.  That if you do those two things- if you show up, and if you trust God is showing up, you’re praying.  

You’re praying with words, or silence, or walking, or breathing, or begging and pleading, or using formal written liturgy, or singing in your car, or dancing in a field, or crying with someone else in your arms. If you are present, and you attune to the presence of God, you are praying.

This sounds easy. This is not easy. 

We hardly ever show up in our real lives as we are. And we rarely expect God will. 

But the moment you say, “Hi God,” why, here you both are! 

God is already here, waiting, waiting for us to ask, to seek, to knock, ready to open the door. Not to open it with judgment or criticism, "Where have you been?” or ready to tell you how you’ve been doing it wrong, keeping track of how incorrectly you’ve been asking, or sporadically you’ve been seeking or how long it’s been since you knocked.

No, God is always, already here, with love. Ready to receive whatever we bring. God is inviting us to address the Divine with the audacious boldness of a toddler patting her mama’s cheeks, ready to soak in the gaze of love that is always turned to her. 

God is inviting us to be like an annoying neighbor pounding on a door demanding what we need to care for the unexpected guest.  If we can give good gifts to our children, How much more will the Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?

In other words, how much more than all the generosity and excitement I might have to show my own daughter that I love her, and she belongs to me no matter what, is God ready to draw me toward God’s own self through the power of the bond that connects the Father to the Son and breathes life into the world?

We don’t know why God does some things and not others. Sometimes prayers get “answered” how we hope they will, meaning, what we ask for happens. Sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes God cures cancer, and even gives us parking spots when we ask.   Sometimes God doesn’t.  God is free to act and free not to.  And we are free to ask. God wants us to ask because God wants to be with us, to share our place, to invite us to share in God’s. God does love us and have a wonderful plan for our lives.  God came into this human life, taking on all suffering and death, with us and for us.  God will minister to us. God will forgive us.  God love us.  That’s who God is. 

God is always ready to return us to the core of our humanity as a gift that is bestowed upon us, by God and through each other.  And we can receive this gift when we’re ready to let go of our humanity as something we each possess and defend. 

Teach us how to pray, Jesus, like you do. Teach us how to be human again. Teach us to trust, to forgive, to receive, to boldly live in our belonging to God and each other. 

So find some methods you like. Try out different strategies. Find a good structure to help you. But however you pray, show up with your real self.  

Trust that God has shown up in God’s real self. 

Ask. Seek. Knock.

And don’t hold back. Be shameless about it. Be all in.

The good news is you can’t fail at prayer.  The other good news is you can’t succeed at it either.  It’s not a game to win.  There’s no code to crack. There are no rules to memorize. There’s no magic formula to master. 

Be you. With God. That’s it.

Amen.



We are in a series with Rowan William's book, Being Disciples. The first chapter's sermon, "Being Disciples," is found here. The sermon corresponding to the second chapter, "Faith, hope and love" is here. This is connected to chapter 3, "Forgiveness."