Teacher, teach us how to pray

A Sermon for Bloomsbury Central Baptist Church

Sunday 26 May 2024

Luke 11:1-13  

Genesis 18:20-32

One day, some disciples asked their teacher,

            ‘Teacher, teach us how to pray.’

 

And their teacher told them:

            ‘It’s easy, you just pray your deepest desires before God,

            because that which you most desire

                        will most surely give shape to the world you are bringing into being’.

 

The disciples replied,

            ‘Teacher, could you be a bit more specific?’

 

And their teacher told them:

            ‘You should pray today

            that the world above becomes the world below,

            that the world beyond you becomes the world beneath you.’

 

The disciples asked a third time, saying,

            ‘Teacher, could you say that again?’

 

And the teacher told them as clearly as he could:

            ‘You should pray the coming kingdom until kingdom come.’

 

Then the disciples decided to try another tack,

            and they asked their teacher,

            ‘Teacher, teach us why we should pray’

 

And the teacher answered with a riddle,

            saying to them:

            ‘You should pray because Mummy now walks the dog every morning’.

 

And the disciples started to think they were never going to get anywhere,

            but one last time, they said to their teacher, most earnestly,

                        ‘What?’

 

And he told them a story,

            which went something like this:

 

‘Christmas was over for another year,

            the turkey had been eaten, the drink has been drunk,

            and the presents had been well received by the children.

Except for little Megan, who was still unhappy.

            It wasn’t that she didn’t like her Hello Kitty three wheeled scooter,

            and it wasn’t that she didn’t like her Peppa Pig makeup set

But they weren’t the little puppy she had set her heart on.

 

For months she had looked longingly

            at every puppy they had passed in the park.

She had put posters of puppies on her bedroom wall,

            and talked about how people with puppies apparently lived longer

                        and had happier lives

 

She had carefully written to Father Christmas,

            asking for nothing except a puppy of her own,

            which she would walk every day, and feed, and love for its whole life.

She had even promised that it would be the last thing she would ever ask for

            if she could only have a puppy for Christmas.

 

And they had so nearly bought her one,

            but then they knew that it would be hard work,

                        and daddy had a new job and was working long hours,

            and mummy wanted to go back to work now the children were at school,

                        and who would look after it during the day,

            and who would take it for morning walks

                        when Megan was struggling to get ready for school in time as it was.

 

And so they hadn’t bought her one,

            thinking that by next year, she would have set her heart on something else.

 

But Megan didn’t waver,

            she started getting up earlier sometimes, to prove she could do it.

She started saving some of her pocket money to put towards the costs of a puppy.

            She seemed to grow up, to become more responsible.

 

And next year she got a puppy for Christmas,

            and it was hard work, and it was expensive, but it was also lovely,

                        and Megan was very happy.

But she still struggled to get up early,

            and so Mummy now walks the dog every morning’.

 

And the disciples looked at each other,

            and they looked at their teacher,

and they waited, patiently, for an explanation.

 

And the teacher said,

            ‘If even Megan’s parents, who didn’t really want a dog,

                        gave her one because she kept asking,

            how much more does your father in heaven

                        long to give you desires of your hearts.’

 

‘It’s like I told you already:

 

            ‘When you pray, you just pray your deepest desires before God,

                        because that which you most desire

                        will most surely give shape to the world you are bringing into being’.

 

            ‘You should pray today

                        that the world above becomes the world below,

                        and that the world beyond you becomes the world beneath you.’

 

            ‘You should pray the coming kingdom until kingdom come.’

 

And the disciples pondered long and hard on the teacher’s words,

            because they still found the whole idea of praying

            something that they really struggled to understand.

 

And I don’t think we’re any different, are we?

 

Which of us truly understands prayer?

            Which of us truly knows why we should pray?

            Which of us truly knows how we should pray?

 

These are difficult questions,

            and there are no straightforward answers.

 

But there may be helpful perspectives,

            and one perspective that has stayed with me,

            as I’ve been pondering the subject of prayer,

has been the idea that

            prayer ought to tell us more about the nature of God

            than it tells us about ourselves.

 

I think what I’m getting at here,

            is that when we pray,

                        our focus should primarily be on God,

                        rather than on us.

 

Often when we come before God in prayer,

            particularly prayers of intercession or petition,

            we quite rightly bring our concerns before God.

However, the danger here can be

            that we also come with our own solutions in mind,

            and so then we seek to pray those solutions into being.

 

And danger of this,

            is that any attempt on our part

                        to persuade God to do what we want him to do

            is actually an attempt by us to create God in our own image.

                        Or, to give it it’s theological title, it is to engage in the sin of idolatry.

 

Prayer is not about us getting God to do what we want him to do,

            because prayer like that is focussed on us, and not on God.

 

Neither do we pray to make things happen in the way that we want them to happen,

            because that is an attempt to use spiritual means

                        to manipulate the universe according to our will.

            Or, to give it it’s theological title, it is to engage in the practice of magic.

 

Prayer is not about us bargaining God

            into submission to our will.

Rather it is an exploration of the nature of God

            in order that through our prayers

                        we might align the fallen world that we inhabit

                        with the revealed nature of God.

 

Let’s think for a moment about our Old Testament reading,

            where Abraham has his infamous engagement with God

            about the number of righteous people necessary to save the city.

 

Abraham’s conversation with God about the fate of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah

            isn’t the story of a hostage negotiator,

                        talking down an unpredictable and violent terrorist.

Rather, it’s a story designed to explore the very nature of God,

            and which specifically pushes the boundary

                        of God’s capacity for mercy in the face of human sinfulness.

 

The picture that emerges from this ancient story

            is of a God who is, as Walter Brueggemann puts it,

                        ‘more attentive to and more moved by

                                    those who obey than those who do not.’ [1]

The God of Abraham, it seems, is not an indiscriminately wrathful deity

            in the style of other ancient near eastern gods.

Rather, he is a God of justice;

            and also a God of righteousness and mercy.

 

The act of prayer on the part of Abraham

            is not Abraham seeking to control or limit God’s actions

but is rather an exploration by Abraham of the nature of God

            when God is confronted with the hellish depths of human sinfulness.

 

I’m certainly not proposing to get into a long discussion this morning

            on the nature of the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah,

but it is worth noting in passing that they are not primarily sins of sexuality,

            but rather are sins of injustice, irresponsibility,

                        inhospitality, and indifference.

 

What Abraham discovers, possibly to his surprise,

            is that it is within the nature of God

            for righteousness to override evil.

And having discovered this,

            he has no need to push his questioning to the final step,

                        and ask of God, ‘If only one righteous person be found…?’

            because he has already received his answer.

One righteous person can indeed save the city of sinners.

            It doesn’t take a Lot, if you’ll pardon the pun,

                        to save Sodom.

 

And this insight that one righteous person

            can be the salvation of many

is something that Paul returns to in his letter to the Romans,

            where he compares the sin of Adam with the righteousness of another.

 

He says:

So then, it goes like this: just as the result of one man’s transgression issued a verdict of ‘guilty’ on all human beings, so one man’s righteousness issued in a verdict of ‘not guilty’ and of life. To put it another way: just as that single man’s disobedience resulted in many peoples being made sinners, so, because of that other man’s obedience, those many people are made ‘not guilty’, or ‘righteous’.[2]

 

The one righteous man, for Paul, was of course Jesus Christ,

            in whom the righteousness of God was made fully known.

 

What Abraham discovered through his prayer

            was the same thing Paul discovered through his encounter with Jesus Christ,

which is that God’s nature tends towards mercy.

            God’s desire is for the release of the human world

                        from the destructive forces of evil.

            The one righteous man, Jesus Christ,

                        is sufficient to spare the whole world from God’s judgment against sin.

 

So those of us who pray to God through Christ Jesus,

            are entering into God’s great work for the salvation of the world,

because in prayer we align ourselves

            with his in-breaking kingdom of righteousness and peace

and in prayer, the desire of God that the world be transformed

            becomes our own desire that the world be different,

            not on our terms, but on the terms of the coming Kingdom of Heaven itself.

 

And so the kingdom breaks in upon this world of sin,

                        and justice and righteousness are found once more upon the earth;

            as the humble are lifted high,

                        as sinners are forgiven,

                                    as the poor are fed,

                                                and as debts are cancelled.

 

And so we find ourselves back at the Lord’s prayer

            joining our hearts and minds and voices

                        with the longing of God;

            and when we pray together,

                        we long together for a world transformed;

            and when we long together for a new world,

                        we share in its inauguration,

                        as it comes into being in our midst.

 

When Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them how to pray,

            he told them to start with God:

                        ’Father,’ he said, ‘hallowed be your name.’

 

If the starting point for prayer is us, our needs, and our desires,

            then our prayers can become idolatrous, or sorcerous.

But if we start with God,

            then we begin to pray with our eyes fixed on the true centre of the universe,

            and our prayers find balance

                        because they are offered to the one in whom all things hold together.

 

All other principalities and powers,

            whether external to us or within the confines of our innermost being,

            are relativized when we declare the holiness of God.

In many ways, the opening line of the Lord’s prayer

            is one of the most politically potent phrases in all of human language,

            because it poses a direct challenge to all other claims on human allegiance.

 

And this is the where Jesus taught his disciples to begin.

 

Loving God, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

 

The prayer for the coming kingdom is crucial:

            It has been said that the phrase ‘your kingdom come’

                        is at the heart of intercessory prayer,

                        with everything else just commentary.

And in so many ways I think this is true.

 

We can pray for many things,

            we can bring all our concerns, big and small, significant or petty,

            we can bring our hopes, our dreams, our fears, our failings,

and in each case, we pray, fervently, ‘your kingdom come’.

 

There are times where we don’t know what to pray for.

            What do you pray,

                        for the person in the latter stages of a long and debilitating illness?

            What do you pray,

                        when confronted with the horrors of war,

                        the starvation of millions

                        or the tragedy of loss?

 

Sometimes, there is nothing else to say,

            except to give voice to a longing that the kingdom of God break in upon the earth,

            a kingdom where tears are dried,

                        where hope is rekindled,

                                    and where lives find their true value before God.

 

The prayer for the coming kingdom aligns our desires with those of God,

            as we relinquish our own sense of the way the world should be,

            and together we grasp for, and long for, and live for,

                        the world which God is bringing into being.

 

Jesus rejected the temptation to take possession of all the kingdoms of the earth,

            and so we are called to join all our desires with his longing for a new earth.

 

Loving God, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

 

The prayer for the meeting of human need

            is a legitimate request.

It is not right that people are hungry,

            it is not right that people cannot feed themselves or their children.

It is a crime against humanity,

            and a sin against God.

 

None of what we own or eat is ours by right.

            and a prayer for enough food to eat today

            is a prayer that asks us in turn

                        to play our part in ensuring that others have the same.

 

The gift of bread is a gift from God:

            whether it be manna in the wilderness,

            or bread broken for you for the forgiveness of sins,

            or bread shared with the starving,

            or bread on the table of the messianic banquet to which all are invited,

the sharing of bread is the giving of the gift of life.

 

In the Lord’s prayer, the context for the request for enough food,

            is the proclamation that God is at the centre of the universe,

            and a commitment to seeing the kingdom break in upon the earth.

 

And it is only when self is removed from the centre of our world

            that the other becomes humanised.

 

And it is only with the humanisation of the other

            that the will emerges to act to see the prayer come into reality.

 

Prayer, you see, has the capacity to restructure the world,

            because in prayer we speak into being an alternative narrative,

            to the selfish, idolatrous, sorcerous narratives

                        that can otherwise so dominate our lives.

  

Loving God, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

 

The fusion here of the language of sin and debt is interesting and profound,

            and it gives us a perspective on sin that can easily be lost.

 

According to Luke’s version of the Lord’s prayer,

            sins are to be thought of as debts against God,

            and the forgiveness of sin is to be equated to the forgiveness of a debt.

 

The root cause of all sin is, I think, idolatry.

            It is when we displace God from the centre of our lives

                        that we act in ways that place ourselves out of kilter with God

            and it is when we place our own selfish desires at the centre of our lives

                        that we incur debts to the one who created us to be free.

 

And so we ask for forgiveness,

            that we might be free again,

no longer living under the obligation to repay,

            no longer living with the uncertainty of the penalty of defaulting on the debt.

 

But from our own forgiveness must spring acts of forgiveness to others.

            Where we are owed, we must forgive,

            just as we have been forgiven.

 

Loving God, hallowed be your name.

Your kingdom come.

Give us each day our daily bread.

Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

And do not bring us to the time of trial.

 

As Jesus says in Mark’s gospel, at his own time of trial,

            ‘The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.’ (Mk 14.38)

None of us know how we will react if we face our own time of trial,

            none of us knows what pressures might unlock our weaknesses,

                        and expose our frailty.

 

And so we pray to be spared,

            and in our prayer we express our hope

                        that if we are called to face the time of trial,

            we will find strength in Christ

                        who was himself tested in every way as we are. (Heb 4.15)

 

So then, how should we pray?

            It is as the teacher said to his disciples:

 

‘When you pray, you just pray your deepest desires before God,

            because that which you most desire

            will most surely give shape to the world you are bringing into being’.

 

‘You should pray today

            that the world above becomes the world below,

            and that the world beyond you becomes the world beneath you.’

 

‘You should pray the coming kingdom until kingdom come.’

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis, Interpretation, a Bible commentary for teaching and preaching (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 172.

[2] Romans 5.12-21 – translated by Nicholas King.