This Sunday was our outdoor worship service at Christ the King, and after a lot of rain the night before, the weather was humid, but not too bad. We set up outside on the church lawn, with the music led from inside the sanctuary–the setup actually worked pretty well!
This week’s lectionary texts include Colossians 2:6-19 and Luke 11:1-13, where Jesus teaches his disciples the Lord’s Prayer. My sermon this week is very similar to three years ago, and I once again found helpful Brian Peterson’s Working Preacher commentary on this text.
Here’s the livestream of the whole service, and the audio of just the sermon:
Grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen
In this Gospel reading, the disciples notice Jesus has been praying, and when he finishes, they think it looks like a pretty great thing, so they ask him to teach them how to pray.
Jesus teaches them these familiar words we call the Lord’s Prayer.
“When you pray, say: 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.”
The words we use are a little different, because we also draw on the wording from Matthew’s gospel, as well as on church tradition and other sources, but basically, we pray the same prayer today. Christians all over the world, for two thousand years, have prayed this prayer, and there’s a lot we could dig into in the Lord’s Prayer.
But this example prayer is only half of Jesus’ answer to the disciples’ request to teach them how to pray. After he gives them some words to use, he tells them a story.
Suppose for some reason you needed to go wake up your neighbor late at night.
Well, as I read this story, I have some sympathy for the person in Jesus’ story who gets woken up late at night!
This is a true story: Right around the last time this story came up in the lectionary three years ago, I woke up at 1 am and I thought I heard something. Christin was pregnant with Micah at the time, and when your wife is pregnant, I think there are supposed to be some sort of protective instincts that kick in.
Apparently it was working, because I went very suddenly from sound asleep to completely awake. I looked out the window, and couldn’t see anything, and you know how it is when something wakes you up at night and you’re lying there straining to hear something.
And then there was another noise, and this time Zacchaeus our dog heard it too and started barking, and there was someone was knocking at the door. So I got up, and went half-dressed to sort of yell “Hello?” through the open window in the living room.
It turned out to be a neighbor I’d never met before, and the problem was she’d locked herself out of her house with her phone inside, and needed to make a phone call to someone who could get her back in. Once I figured it out, I was happy to help, but at 1 am, the only reason I answered her door was because of her persistence.
And in this story, that’s what Jesus says prayer is like. At least, that’s what our translation tells us. Another, maybe better translation for that word persistence is “shamelessness.”
I really like how the NIV puts it. It uses the phrase, “shameless audacity.”
Jesus is not saying we’re supposed to stand outside God’s door and yell until God hears us and gives in. God is not asleep in another room. We don’t need to wear down God with our prayers. Prayer is not about getting God to do what we want; prayer is about getting us to do what God wants.
Notice that the good gift God gives to those who ask is the Holy Spirit. (Luke 11:13) God doesn’t promise you’ll get whatever you want. I can pray to win the lottery for years; that doesn’t mean it’ll happen. Even better prayers like praying for healing aren’t always the way we want.
What God promises is the Holy Spirit, God’s own presence with us, encouraging us to persist through struggles and trials, giving us the strength to keep going through pandemics and downturns and all the junk happening in the world. The Holy Spirit keeps aligning us with God’s own purpose, helping us to pray for God’s will to be done, and leading us to get involved in building God’s kingdom.
Prayer is having the shameless audacity to approach God and admit we don’t have it all figured out, we can’t do it on our own, which of course, God already knows. Praying means humbling ourselves to ask for help. [Black Slide]
Have you ever been in a position where you had to ask someone for help, even though you didn’t want to? For me, it’s when I’m shopping for something. Maybe it’s similar to the guy stereotype of not wanting to ask for directions, but I really dislike asking for help finding stuff in a store.
It’s some kind of foolish vanity, especially because I used to work retail and I didn’t mind helping someone! But I think I don’t like asking because I have this idea I should just know where whatever I’m looking for is. I think I’m afraid of looking foolish by not knowing.
And sometimes that happens. One time I was in a Theisen’s—sort of the Iowa version of Fleet Farm—and I was looking for wooden dowels for a VBS project for church, and I thought I knew where they were, but they weren’t where I remembered.
So then I walked all around the store, back and forth for probably about 10 minutes looking up and down just about every aisle. Finally, I gave in and asked someone to help me find the wooden dowels.
The guy gave me an odd look, and he said, “Those dowels?” pointing to the shelf literally about 4 feet behind me. I felt pretty foolish, but I got what I needed.
I think one of the reasons we so often have trouble praying is because we don’t want to look foolish. We don’t want to do it wrong. It’s hard enough admitting to God that we need help—we want to at least be admitting the “right” way, to at least be in control of that!
Jesus tells us, though, that God does not hear our prayers because we pray the right way. There’s not some secret code or right language we need to learn and memorize so God will listen to us; God hears our prayers because God wants to hear our prayers.
It’s in God’s nature, God’s character to want to hear from us. God wants to be in a relationship with us—that’s why God created us in the first place!
None of you, Jesus says, are so mean as to give your child a snake when they ask for a fish, or a scorpion when they ask for an egg. And God is much more generous, much more loving than any of us are!
God invites us to come and pray because of who God is, and because of who God has made us to be. Look at the Colossians reading for a minute.
This is a dense reading, and I think it’s easy to miss some of what’s in here, but it’s a really important passage. Paul basically lays out the good news of the Christian faith in about 4 verses.
He tells the people of Colossae (and us) to remember who we are. As we talked about last week with Mary and Martha, remember your identity is found in Christ, as a beloved child of God. Remember, Paul says, what God has done for us.
In the waters of baptism, we have been buried with Christ, and we have been raised with Christ. Just as God raised Jesus from the dead, God has raised us from the dead into eternal life.
This isn’t eternal life that begins after death, this is eternal life that has already started. Your eternal life has begun.
Paul says, “When you were dead…God made you alive together with him, when he forgave us all our trespasses.” The sin that separates us from God is gone. You are forgiven. God has given you new life. God has joined you to the Body of Christ.
Remember who you are. You are a child of God. And because God has claimed you as God’s child, you are free to approach God.
God invites you to approach as a child approaches a loving parent, to bring your thanksgivings and your wants, to bring the concerns on your heart to your Heavenly Father.
Come shamelessly, persistently, as God has invited you. And may the peace of God, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
Amen