Lord, Teach us to Pray

Proper12C July 24, 2022, St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Moses Lake, WA by Sr. Annette Fricke, OPA If you’re looking for a source to learn about prayer, Luke and its sequel Acts are the perfect primers. There are more references to prayer than either Matthew, Mark, or John. By the way, coming in dead last, there are only 29 references to prayer in John. Luke has 63. In that 63, Luke has 12 unique verses and 3 unique stories. Out of those 3 unique stories, the compilers of the lectionary chose for this Sunday, The Friend at Midnight. The Lord's prayer is found in just 2 of the 4 gospels. The form we use is taken from Matthew. Matthew begins the prayer with Our Father in heaven in English translation, in Greek, Our Father in the heavens. That’s right, it is plural as in more than one heaven. The change from plural heavens to just one heaven is found in a body of early Christian teachings called the Didache. In Luke, it simply begins, “Our Father.” Remember that the time in which these words were uttered by Jesus in Aramaic, then translated into Greek was a patriarchal society. Also remember the image of God as a “hen gathering her chicks” points to God being like a mother as well. We only have the comparison of what we experience ourselves and the images and traits ascribed to God by the experience of those disciples who have gone before us. God is like a hen gathering her chickens. God gives guidance on how to live our lives. God, through the Holy Spirit calls, gathers and enlightens the church, the baptized and probably others as well of which we are unaware. We are the recipients of God's grace, a grace made available to all. We are children of the living God. Note the structure of the 10 commandments. The first commandments are regarding our relationship with God. The rest is about how we treat each other. The 10 commandments are summarized by Jesus “You shall love the Lord, your God with all your heart, with all your mind, and with all your strength and your neighbor as yourself. “. That is how the Our Father or the Lord's Prayer is also structured. Praying that prayer is saying to God, we want to be part of God’s kingdom! We also want to be baptized and participate in the Eucharist to be a part of God’s kingdom. And yet, the kingdom is not such a good analogy either. It suggests a world of kings and conquering which is quite the opposite of the image of a loving Father who listens to his children, helping them along each moment of life troubles and pleasures. But this is how it has been handed on to us, so much unchanged that nearly every funeral of a Christian burial, or memorial will have all reciting the Lord’s Prayer and Psalm 23 word for word. Listen and you will observe that these are both ingrained in the hearts and souls of those who learned them from childhood. We ought to be thanking Luke for taking the time to further explain who God is and what it means to be in prayer with God. “On one hand, we don’t have to be” concerned about approaching God “properly” by saying our prayers “with the right words or at the right time.” We can be bold and shameless in our requests to God at any time.” Because “the man’s request isn’t just for himself, but for his late-night-visiting friends, that he might properly care for their needs.” This “story [then] suggests that there is a similar friendship between God and us – we can approach God as a friend.” If we are interested in doing God’s will, we can approach God on the intimate level of a friend who will go out of the way to meet the needs of another friend. God does not need our prayers but invites us to enter that relationship whenever and with whatever we choose, and God will hear us. God also invites us to be persistent in our prayers. We should not give up on each other. We should not give up on God. After all, God does not give up on us.