Luke 11:1-13

He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” ² He said to them, “When you pray, say:

⁵ And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread;⁶ for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’⁷ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ ⁸ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

⁹ “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. ¹⁰ For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. ¹¹ Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for^[e] a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? ¹² Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? ¹³ 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^[f] to those who ask him!”

For most of us, prayer is something of a challenge. We recognise that it is a crucial part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus but, in both theory and practice, we have difficulty with it. Sometimes it is spoken of in churches as though it were something we all just knew about. We are often urged to pray, and to put more time into prayer, but we have often been given little or no guidance as to how. It can feel a bit like being urged to communicate more with your Vietnamese neighbours when you speak no Vietnamese and they speak no English. Nice idea, but how do you even start?

In this morning’s gospel reading, Jesus’ disciples see him praying and ask him to teach them to pray.  It is probably worth noting that Jesus apparently hasn’t hassled them about praying before this. He simply models the practice of prayer and waits until they are eager to know and ask for help. God is certainly keen for us to engage and relate, but God takes the initiative, coming to us and relating to us generously. God hopes for us to respond, but nothing is demanded. The gift is given freely, with no strings attached.

And when the disciples do ask Jesus to teach them to pray, how does he reply? He doesn’t give them a lesson in the theory and theology of prayer. He doesn’t discuss the complex relationship between prayer and God’s action in the world. He does give a couple of brief illustrations to assure people that God is eager to hear and respond to their prayers. He reminds them that even people who don’t care can be persuaded to act if you persevere in asking, and that even mediocre parents know how to give good gifts to their children. How much more surely then, he says, will God respond to your prayers and give you what you need. And that’s the end of the theoretical answer. Then, what he offers them, by way of teaching them to pray, is the text of a sample prayer. “Here, pray this,” he says.

The prayer he gives them is the one that has thus come to be known as “the Lord’s Prayer”. And even before we look at the content, I want us to note the practical significance of the way Jesus answered their request. “Here, pray this.” The implication for us is that we learn to pray by praying. It might be a desirable goal that we all learn to pray rich deep prayers that come from the heart in our own words, but Jesus doesn’t expect us to be able to start there. “Here, pray this,” he says. Get started by using my words, and keep praying them until they become your words, until they sink deep roots into your heart and mind and begin bearing fruit. We heard the version in Luke’s gospel tonight, and the fact that it is slightly different to the version in Matthew’s account should alert us to the fact that the important thing is not the precise wording of the prayer. Whether we pray forgiveness for our sins or trespasses doesn’t really matter, when we consider that the original prayer had already taken on different wordings in the communities the two gospel writers were a part of, but it is still identifiably the same prayer. “Here, pray like this.”

There is something else that is important about beginning with the words of Jesus. It is not just a kind of training wheels for prayer. It is also fundamental to the nature of prayer for followers of Jesus. Prayer is not something we make happen. We don’t generate it by our own efforts. We believe that Jesus is our great high priest. He is the one who is at the right hand of the Father, praying for us and for the whole world day and night. Our prayers are not separate from that. Our prayers are offered “in Christ” – which is why at the end of almost every prayer, we say “in Jesus’ name, Amen”. We participate in the prayer that Jesus is offering. We are not praying a solo; we are simply joining in the chorus. As the Apostle Paul said in today’s Colossians reading, “having received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him.” Whatever prayers we offer are offered “in Christ” and are offered as participation in the praying he is already offering. So to begin our praying by beginning with his sample prayer makes absolute sense. How else would we learn to participate in his praying? If you wanted to join in playing music with a jazz band, you would have to begin by learning the original song. They might permit you to contribute a solo after a while, but not before you had learned to blend into the music they were already offering.

When we begin to unpack the content of the prayer Jesus gave us, we also discover that it is quite revolutionary. It is something of a manifesto for what Jesus is on about, for his mission in the world, both then and still. This is another insight into why it is so important. Praying this prayer gathers us into the life and ministry of Jesus. As we let it speak to us and through us, it begins to write the values and agendas of Jesus into our hearts and minds. Praying this prayer does not only teach us how to pray; it teaches us how to be. If we allow it to do its work in us, it will continually reshape us into the image of Jesus.

You can see how this reshaping in the image of Jesus begins right from the first word of the prayer: “Father”. Regardless of the gender implications here, I think the point is that we are invited to address God the same way that Jesus addresses God, and that is with a name that is unique to the relationship Jesus has with the Father. When someone introduces you to someone else saying, “This is my dad,” you don’t begin addressing the person as “Dad.” That might be your friend’s relationship with them, but it is not yours. So there is no automatic reason to assume that just because Jesus can address God as “Father”, we might too. But Jesus invites us to do so. The Apostle said “when you were buried with Christ in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith”, and so we begin to see that being “in him” through baptism, we have now been generously adopted into the same kind of intimate familial relationship that he has with the Father.

The prayer reminds us, though, that we cannot presume on that relationship. We are invited to address God using the same name that Jesus uses, but we are also to pray that God’s name will be hallowed, honoured, used with the utmost respect. This prayer has powerful political consequences, both then and now. The opposite of hallowing someone’s name is to drag it through the mud, and God’s name is dragged through the mud whenever people wrongly invoke God’s name to justify their actions. It happens all the time. God’s name is dragged through the mud when those who are identified as God’s ambassadors manipulate and exploit and abuse people. God’s name is dragged through the mud when the leaders of nations claim to be acting on God’s behalf when they order the invasion of other countries and the bombing of towns full of innocent men, women and children. We are called to pray that God’s name will be hallowed, that the sound of God’s name might instead cause people to stop and reflect on the truthfulness of their words and actions and that the very sound of the name might be a powerful force for the ending of all evil. The more we pray this prayer, the more passionate we become about the honour of God and the bringing of God’s kingdom. Which leads us to…

“Your kingdom come”. Matthew’s version, which we know better, adds, “your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” This is not a separate idea. In essence it is simply an expansion of “your kingdom come”. A whole series of sermons could be preached on this line, so let me just say a couple of things. Note that we pray for God’s kingdom to come, not for us to make it to God’s kingdom. Many religions see this world as something from which we eventually escape to go elsewhere to be with God, but Jesus does not teach that. Jesus teaches us to pray for the kingdom to come here. He teaches us to pray for the marriage of earth and heaven, not our transfer from one to the other.

Describing the vision as a “kingdom” has huge implications for our life in the here and now. Not only are we now to regard God as our Father, rather than as some distant foreign power, but we are to pray for the establishment of God’s kingdom, here and now. We are to live that, to give our allegiance to God’s kingdom, to God’s will, now, and that means that no other kingdom or nation can ever again rely on our unquestioning allegiance. This is the sort of prayer that had Herod dispatching the death squads and Pilate signing an execution order. When we pray this prayer, we affirm that our allegiance is with God and God’s kingdom.

“Give us today our daily bread.” When we are not learning to pray from Jesus, many of our prayers begin and end here; a shopping list of personal wants and needs. Now, Jesus does not discourage us from praying for our needs, but his prayer places our needs in the context of the prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom. Jesus celebrated the kingdom around food all the time. He was constantly at dinner parties with those who were seen as socially unpleasant, and he made every party a sign of the arrival of the kingdom. And so the prayer for our daily bread is a prayer that we might continue to do likewise; a prayer that the party might go on and that we might continue to celebrate the kingdom with those whose needs for daily bread have so often been ignored.

“Forgive us our sins, and we ourselves are forgiving everyone who is indebted to us.” This continues the same idea further, because it was often in the context of those disreputable dinner parties that Jesus spoke the words of forgiveness; words that caused so much scandal to the powers-that-be. “Who does he think he is, forgiving sins? Only God can forgive sins, and God does that in response to the required sacrifices being offered in our temple. Who does this guy think he is?” Well the answer was that Jesus thinks he is the one in whom the kingdom has come, on earth as it is in heaven. Now the forgiveness of sins is proclaimed to all. Now, as the Apostle put it, he is “erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands”. And as those forgiven in Christ, we do the same, forgiving those who are in debt to us. Here the prayer is absolutely explicit: we are to live the prayer, not just mouth the prayer.

“And do not bring us to the time of trial.” Or in other words, “save us when things get out of control.” This is the same prayer that Jesus prayed in the garden of Gethsemane. “Father, this is too much for me. Take this cup away from me.” And he urged his sleepy disciples to pray the same: “Get up and pray that you may not come to the time of trial.” But we must pray this remembering that when Jesus prayed it, the answer was no. Ultimately he had to subordinate this prayer to the earlier prayer, “your will be done,” and so it was. Our Saviour was taken into the ultimate time of trial, so that we might be freed from it.

This is an awesome prayer, and one not to simply be recited without thinking and feeling. It is a manifesto of all that Jesus is on about. In praying it, eagerly, consciously and actively, we are participating with Jesus in his mission of saving the world by establishing the kingdom of God on earth. And it could be said that in praying this prayer, and allowing it to rewrite our values and agendas, we are offering ourselves for the life of the world. We are allowing ourselves to become part of the coming of the kingdom, of the establishment of God’s will on earth as it is in heaven. So much is this so that it could even be said that the basic defining characteristic of a follower of Jesus is the praying of this prayer. Would you follow Jesus? Then pray like this. Allow this prayer to become your breath, to become the nature of your living. Allow this prayer to bring you forward and offer yourself for the kingdom. Allow this prayer to carry you into the life of Christ and his intimate relationship with his Father, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen – may it be so.