Praying together

The Rev. Alissa Newton

The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

text: Luke 11:1-13

I did my Clinical Pastoral Education at Harborview Medical Center. Clinical Pastoral Education, or CPE, is basically a chaplaincy internship that is required for people who are preparing for priesthood. Harborview is our region’s level one trauma center. It’s also the county hospital, where everyone who doesn’t have insurance can be seen without question. And, Harborview is a top notch emergency psychiatric hospital – the only place in King County where people can be held involuntarily if they are a harm to themselves or others. It was a wonderful, interesting, challenging place to serve as a chaplain, and very much the deep end of the pool, so to speak. While I was there I learned a few tricks about pastoral care of people in crisis, or people in the process of dying, or at the moment of death. For example, I learned that even those who are not religious at all often want someone to hold their hand and pray with them. I learned that it is not always a good idea to give someone in the middle of a psychotic break a bible that has the book of Revelation in it. And, I learned that if all else fails and I don’t know what else to do there is always the Lord’s Prayer. Time and time again during my time at Harborview, and since then, I have said this prayer with people in distress, and it calms them down. Time and time again I have sat with older people who are mostly gone from us through dementia of some sort, and when I begin to say Our Father, who art in Heaven, they come back, or wake up, and pray those words with me.

Our gospel begins this morning with a question, “Lord, teach us to pray.” The disciples, seeing Jesus pray, are longing for something themselves, for a connection to God in that way. In response Jesus gives them five simple lines of prayer, each one a petition of some sort, and we have been praying them together ever since. The first petition is Father – the Greek is Abba – an intimate word for parent that implies love, care, and intense attachment. We pray to God who loves us as a parent loves a beloved child. The second petition is for God’s kingdom to come. So we address the God whose love is greater than the most loving parent and we ask to live in the world of love that is God’s kingdom, God’s vision for us. This is a world that began with Jesus Christ – the incarnation of God’s love and God’s kingdom. Father, we say, let your kingdom come. Then, in Luke’s version of the prayer, we ask for the things that we already know our loving God wants for us, the things we need to survive and thrive in this world. We ask for food, we ask for forgiveness or release, and we ask to be spared trial or temptation. It is not a complicated prayer, and yet it contains everything we need to connect to God and to each other.

To each other! This is another thing that is important to notice about this way of praying. This is not a story of one disciple coming to Jesus and asking for personal advice. And it is not a story of Jesus giving out some general principles for making up good prayers for individual people, although there are some great general principles in this prayer and it is good for individuals to pray. No, our gospel lesson is about a community of people asking Jesus how to pray together, and being given specific words to pray, together. The togetherness of this prayer is even more evident in Matthew’s version, the one we are more familiar with that begins "Our Father in Heaven." But it’s here in Luke as well. Teach us how to pray, the disciples ask. And Jesus responds with a prayer that we pray in the plural, give us our daily bread, even if we pray it all alone. Jesus gives his disciples and friends a prayer with specific words, words that they will learn to say together, and teach to their children, and their children for thousands of years. He gave them words that would connect them to a great community of Christians through time, even to right now, and to us.

And then, in this gospel, Jesus gives the disciples, and us, a parable that shows us how to use this communal, togetherness prayer. The parable is of someone who goes to a friend’s home at night, in need, and keeps knocking until the friend gets up and helps. The word we hear in our reading is persistence “at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him what he needs.” A better translation of what Jesus is getting at here might be “shamelessness.” In the culture of Jesus’ time it would be embarrassing not to get up and show hospitality to someone. The persistence of the knocker shames the person in the house into giving what is needed. So we are to pray, we are to pray together, and we are to do it shamelessly until we have what we need.

I wonder if you can remember who taught you The Lord's Prayer? My gran taught me to pray it, which is a little ironic because she is not a very religious person. One night a week when my parents were out she would put me to bed and pray the Lord’s Prayer with me. She started by having me listen, then repeat back one line at a time. She is in her nineties now, still very sharp, and still not very religious. Yet I feel certain that the words of this prayer are etched on her heart. Every time I pray it, I am connected to her. I teach it to my kids now, and many nights before bed we pray it together. I want them to have this way to connect to God, to me, to my gran, and to all who pray in this way. I want my children to have a prayer that will bring them back when they are far away, and comfort them when they are afraid.

Lord, teach us to pray. We are invited to long for this teaching, today. And we are invited to pray, persistently and without shame, by a God who meets us in prayer just as Jesus meets us in our lives, and met with all the world in his incarnation. This is the kingdom that we pray will come – a kingdom where all needs are met, all debts forgiven, all trials survived. This is a kingdom where God’s love connects us to each other and to the God who made us and loves us best. We pray this kingdom into our lives every time we gather at this table, every time we pray together, love each other, and move into God’s world as disciples discovering and share the promise of this kingdom of love. It’s not always easy, in a world full of fear, doubt, and violence. But no matter how scared or lost we get, we can pray. And God will bring us back.