Lord, teach us to pray…

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Luke 11:1-13

“Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” We can imagine that the disciples have watched as Jesus would slip away to a quiet place to pray, returning to them centred and focused, regardless of how much pressure from the crowds or the Pharisees or whoever that he’d faced that day. They saw that, and they wanted to have a share in it, just as they knew that John the Baptist’s disciples had learned prayer from him.

Jesus’ answer, of course, is what we now call “The Lord’s Prayer,” though here in Luke it is a different form from what we find in Matthew, and a whole different context. The familiar form for the prayer—the one we use each Sunday in our worship and in daily Evening Prayer online—is Matthew’s version, and in that Gospel it is taught to the crowds in the context of the Sermon on the Mount. Here this somewhat shorter version is taught privately to the disciples:

Father, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

And forgive us our sins,

for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

And do not bring us to the time of trial.

There’s no question that the two forms are related, even if this version from Luke is considerably shorter. So how to resolve that? One way is to say that Jesus taught the prayer twice—once to the crowds, and then considerably later and in a simpler form to the disciples. That’s quite an acceptable way to think about the prayer, of course, but it may be that we’re also witnessing here how things can get sifted around in an oral tradition before being written down in what we call the gospels.

Luke, you see, was not a disciple, but rather someone who joined the Jesus movement considerably later; perhaps in the 50s in the context of his connection to St Paul. Meanwhile the teaching of Jesus he’s reflecting on dated to the early 30s, while his project of organizing both the Gospel according to Luke and the book of Acts doesn’t happen until sometime around the year 70. He’s inherited all of these stories—some already written down, others circulating in the oral tradition—and he's taken on the enormous task of pulling it all together. It is pretty clear that both Luke and Matthew had a copy of the earlier Gospel according to Mark in hand, so they had a solid outline to work with, but both also had all of this other material come into their hands. The oral tradition was both incredibly reliable in that largely oral culture, but there was also a fluidity to it such that two versions of the same prayer might well have been preserved. What would matter to Luke and to Matthew—and frankly what is important to the work of the Holy Spirit—was that the heart of what Jesus taught—and who he was and is—was shared.

So Luke offers us the basic outlines of Jesus’ prayer, but then has it fleshed out by what follows: a marvellously odd parable of God and prayer. “Suppose,” Jesus says, “one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’” Now this is a picture that would have made a good deal of sense to someone from that part of the world, as there existed—and still exists—very strong standards around hospitality. If a friend comes to your home and is in need of a welcome and a meal, you need to offer that even if it is in the middle of the night. And if you don’t have food to offer because you neglected to get your grocery shopping done that day? Well, you better go into high gear!

So the man—let’s call him Arthur—so Arthur goes to his friend’s home in the dark, knocks on the door and asks for some supplies. “Not a chance, Arthur, my whole family has bedded down for the night, and I’m got about to get up and give you anything.” But Jesus has Arthur persevere, and “at least because of his persistence” the haggard friend gets up, staggers around the kitchen putting together everything Arthur might need to make some sandwiches, and all is resolved.

“At least because of his persistence he will get up and give him—Arthur—whatever he needs.” And this is a little parable of prayer, which is odd because the man who is in bed is clearly the stand-in for God… but then again, Jesus isn’t shy about using odd characters in his parables to make his point. In this case his point seems to be to just keep praying, or as N.T. Wright, puts it, “[Jesus] is encouraging a kind of holy boldness, a sharp knocking on the door, an insistent asking, a search that refuses to give up,” adding “That’s what our prayer should be like.”

Now of course the parable is summed up with a bit of teaching, that is best summarized in the closing lines from our reading: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”

But then again, we all know people who have prayed and perhaps prayed relentlessly for the life of a dying child or for relief from some rough physical condition or for a friend who is drinking too much or whatever, and God never seems to quite get out of bed to answer that prayer. Do you know that roaring silence? Over the centuries many have tried to make sense of why some prayers seem to go unanswered, and here I’d offer the insight of Jan van Ruysbroeck from the 14th century, who wrote, “[The Lord’s Prayer invites] a turning of all things of the self into the freedom of the Will of God.”

There’s something in van Ruysbroeck’s insight here; that praying—and especially praying the Lord’s Prayer—can reorient us from the needs of the self toward the freedom of the Will of God, and on my best days I can certainly wrap my life around that truth.

Yet there is another way to think about this, articulated brilliantly by Robert Farrar Capon in his book, The Parables of Grace. He writes,

“Everyone who ask, receives,” Jesus says, “and he who seeks, finds, and to him who knocks, it will be opened.” Taken literally as a program for conning God into catering to the needs of our lives, that is pure bunk: too many sincere, persistent prayers have simply gone unfulfilled. But taken as a command constantly to bring our deaths to his death and to find our resurrection in his, it is solid gold.

That, in the last analysis, is why we pray. Not to get some reasonable small-bore job done, but to celebrate the job beyond all liking and happening that has already been done for us and in us by Jesus. We have a friend in our death; in the end, he meets us nowhere else. Prayer is the flogging of the only Dead Horse actually able to rise.

Now you might be tempted to respond, “But Father Capon, what does that mean?” To which Capon might have replied, “Listen, this is what we know: Jesus lived, was executed on a cross, and was resurrected. And he said to Martha on the day he went to her brother Lazarus’s grave, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live,” which is another way of saying that even with all the messes and losses and hurts of this life, in the end we will be met by Jesus in our very deaths. On the way there, there will be praying to be done; plenty of it!

For van Ruysbroeck our prayers are understood as a “turning of all things of the self into the freedom of the Will of God,” which Capon calls “the flogging of the only Dead Horse actually able to rise.” They’re actually on the same track, you see… just using rather different imagery!

And here’s the other thing. In God’s oftentimes incomprehensible way, there will always be these moments when our uttered prayers will find very clear, vivid, and even miraculous responses. I know that to be the case, and I know that personally. Why sometimes and not others? That I’ll never know this side of my own death. What I do know is that whether or not I experience my own prayers to have been answered in the way I’d like, I’m confident that they are always heard. And I’m equally confident that in the fullness of time I will be able to rest in that, fully at home with my risen Lord.