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Jesus,
Teach Us to Pray |
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Jesus,
Teach Us to Pray |
We arrived back from LA
at 11 Monday night and were greeted by an entourage of spider webs.
They were at the front door, the back door and all over the garage door.
A children’s book Be Nice to
Spiders came to mind so we let them be for the night.
Besides, as Reg says, we’re building an ark at our house. At least two
are needed.
Speaking of arks, if you
get to LA, a visit to the
But what I found as
wonderful as the animals is the mission of the place.
The Jewish community is working to fulfill its calling to do Tikkun Olam
– Hebrew words for “making the world a better place.” On
your way out of the
Tikkun Olam is part of
our calling too and we seek to make the world a better place by being centered
in letting God lead, being a loving community and passing on the faith.
A conviction to let God lead means we will listen
to God and act in faith. One thing
we know about Jesus is that he was a person of risky action.
He cured the sick on days he shouldn’t have.
He fed people who didn’t deserve it.
He loved those called enemies. We
also know his actions grew out of listening.
Jesus let God lead him through prayer.
In Luke’s Gospel there
are 63 verses referring to prayer. Many
times Luke tells of Jesus praying before something happens.
Jesus prays at his baptism before the heavens open (3:21); Jesus
spends the night praying before selecting the disciples (6:12); Jesus
prays before he asks the disciples, "Who do the crowds/you say that
I am?" (9:18); Jesus prays on the mountain before the
transfiguration. (9:28, 29). And,
Jesus is praying right before the disciples ask him to teach them to
pray. (11:1)
They probably would not
have asked Jesus to teach them to pray had they not seen him praying every time
they turned around. When his
disciples asked him to teach them to pray he didn’t say, “Oh, you don’t
need to pray. Just go do good works.
Leave praying to me.” Instead, he taught them to pray.
He knew prayer and good works go hand in hand.
Michael Foss, in his
book, Power Surge lists "daily prayer" as "The first mark
of a disciple." Foss begins his
section on prayer with these two thoughts. He
writes:
I
was stunned when I was approached by someone saying, "I agree with the
encouragement to pray. And I really want to pray. The problem is I don't know
how.” Then when a workshop was
offered for clergy on prayer, I was excited by the numbers who attended, but was
stunned again when one of the pastors responded, "You are assuming we
pastors know how to pray." [p. 90]
Like the first disciples,
we all need to ask, "Teach us to pray."
One of the most helpful things I’ve read on prayer is a book by Anthony
Bloom called Beginning to Pray.
He names us all beginners – even those like himself who have been at it
for years. Prayer is a relationship
so it is always changing. It can be
left dormant as relationships sometimes are, but the good news is that it’s
like those relationships where you may not have seen each other for years, but
you pick up right where you left off.
Frederick Buechner says
of prayer that “everybody prays whether we think of it as prayer or not. The
stammer of pain at someone else’s pain; or of joy at someone else’s joy.
Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing over your own life.
These are spoken not just to yourself but to something even more
familiar.” Listening to Your Life, (212)
The first prayer I
learned was “Now I lay me down to sleep.”
How about you? Do you
remember your first prayer? For some
it’s the Lord’s Prayer. I made
up a prayer for our boys when they were young. “Dear God, thanks for all your
love today, in our work and in our play, thanks for friends and things to share,
thanks for people everywhere.”
Sometimes prayer is
silent. This last week at Centering
Prayer the only noise in the room was the sweat rolling off our faces.
The room hadn’t cooled down enough yet.
But don’t be afraid – the air-conditioning is going on earlier this
Tuesday. We meet every Tuesday at
4:00 and newcomers are always welcome. If
we get enough people we may even move to the Parish Hall which has a great
air-conditioner – or start a second group.
Walking the labyrinth is
a more active way of praying. Instead
of sitting, we walk. Our canvas
labyrinth has arrived, awaiting our painting between the lines of its
penciled-in pattern. If you want to
help paint, call the office.
We’re always telling
our homebound members that prayer is their special ministry. We
need their prayers as much as we want to hold them in prayer.
We have Faith Lutheran Pray-ers who pray each week for the alphabetical
list of our membership that you find on the bottom of the Prayer Request Insert.
Take a look at whose one there this week.
You will be called by our Faith Lutheran Pray-ers to ask what you might
like them to pray about. When they
asked Allison what she wanted prayer for she said, pray for another male
vocalist for our Contemporary Service. And,
Art has appeared.
We have asked you to pray
this summer – every day – the prayers on the back of our Summer Songs
bookmarks in your bulletins. In our
Installation service you committed yourselves to pray for Reg and me as your
pastors – even as we committed ourselves to pray for you. If
you want to help this ministry – pray for it daily. Susan,
our Youth Director, is asking us all to pray for one minute every Wednesday at
4:00 p.m. for our ministry with children and youth.
If all of us would do that, imagine what it might mean.
Our world needs prayer:
prayers for peace; for an end to war and poverty, for freedom from “isms”
that subdue us, for our earth, sky and seas, for wisdom and courage to take
actions that matter. An email came
recently from Pastor Barbara Lundblad asking for prayer for the ELCA Churchwide
Assembly early August. The request
is for prayer that we would be a fully inclusive church empowering everyone to
fulfill their callings.
As Kevin Secrist taught
us last Lent, email prayers are a going thing.
ELCA.org has daily prayer suggestions.
Gratefulness.org allows you to light a virtual candle for someone.
I’ve done it – and it’s quite moving.
If every one of us prayed even the Lord’s Prayer everyday imagine the
impact on our hearts. Of the
Lord’s Prayer, Buechner writes in Listening
to Your Life:
We
do well not to pray this prayer lightly. It
takes guts to pray it at all. We are
asking God to set free the power that is now mostly under restraint.
“Thy kingdom come…on earth” is what we are saying.
And if that were suddenly to happen, then what?
It is only the words, “Our Father:” that make the prayer bearable.
If God is something like a parent, then as something like children maybe
we can risk it. (78)
I’ve also been helped
by something Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote on prayer.
The
disciples want to pray, but they do not know how.
Children learn to pray because the parent speaks to them.
They learn the speech of the family.
So we learn to speak to God because God has spoken and speaks to us.
God’s speech in Jesus meets us in Holy Scripture.
If we wish to pray with confidence and gladness, then the words of
Scripture will have to be the solid base of our prayer.
Jesus Christ, the word of God, teaches us to pray.
The words which come from God become, then, the steps on which we find
our way to God.
(Psalms:
the Prayer Book of the Bible, 11)
Learning a biblical way
of praying has transformed my own prayer life.
That is why I enjoy lectio divina
– the practice of praying scripture. It’s
not studying the word, but allowing the word to study us – the word that says
God is merciful and good and we are beloved.
From that starting point, what word or phrase stands out?
What might it be saying to my life?
Last Tuesday we did lectio
divina at Centering Prayer. One
present said what stood out to her in the scripture read was the image of locked
doors. It brought to mind the locked
doors in her heart. A prayer out of
that could be: “Jesus, unlock the door of my shut-down heart.”
What I know from experience is that fidelity to prayer opens doors more
than anything else I know – starting with the locked doors in our hearts.
One of my hopes is that
Faith Lutheran we will become known as a Center
for Praying the Living Word that we might be Freed for Action in Jesus’ Name.
That’s the ministry my heart
yearns for. What are you longing
for? Put it into prayer – but
watch out, because while sometimes the answer is “no,” and we’ll talk
about that next week, sometimes we actually get what we pray for.
But most importantly, prayer is a relationship.
To grow in relationship with God is worth every effort we make.
Amen.
+Pastor Peg Schultz-Akerson,
to the glory of God
Faith