Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 29,2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Did any of you notice some time back that I changed the line I usually use to invite you to offer your prayer concerns during our prayers of the people? It’s a subtle change, but I think it’s an important one. I used to say “For what shall we pray this morning?” A year or so ago—I can never remember when things happened any more—I began to say instead “How shall we pray this morning?” I didn’t have this morning’s passage from Luke specifically in mind when I made that change, but that passage and the important question that it raises reminded me of it and of why I made it. The passage is one of the key Gospel passages on the nature of prayer, and it is certainly worth spending some time with it this morning to see what it can teach us about that essential spiritual discipline.

The passage begins with an unnamed disciple saying to Jesus: “Lord, teach us to pray….” Luke 11:1 NRSV The first thing to notice is that there is an implied assumption behind that statement. The disciple does not say “Lord, should we pray,” or “must we pray?” He assumes that they’re going to pray. That’s because, it seems to me, prayer is the central religious spiritual practice. Religious people pray. We can’t not pray. St. Paul instructs us to “pray without ceasing.” 1 Thessalonians 5:17 NRSV Prayer is so central to the spiritual life that the most serious and faithful people in many faith traditions do in fact devout substantial amounts of time every day to prayer. Mother Teresa, for example, spent at least a couple of house a day praying. When someone asked her how she found the time for all that prayer in the midst of her intense and vital work she replied that it was precisely because she was so busy that she had to pray so much. Prayer is indeed the indispensable spiritual tool.

So Jesus’ disciple in Luke’s story doesn’t ask whether they should pray, he asks how they should pray. Now it seems to me that it isn’t possible to answer that question without knowing first what the purpose of prayer is. And I think that Luke’s brilliantly constructed story reflects his awareness that the question of how we should pray is first of all the question of why we pray. Luke’s little story of Jesus talking about prayer leads us straight to the answer to that question. Let’s take a closer look and consider how Luke answers the question of the purpose of prayer and how he leads us to that answer.

After he gives us a very abbreviated form of the Lord’s Prayer (that he doesn’t seem very interested in) Luke has Jesus go on about the necessity for perseverance in prayer. He gives an example of how you can pester your neighbor into giving you something you need—in this case bread—simply by being so irritatingly persistent in your request that you neighbor will finally give you what you want just to make you go away and stop bothering him. Not a real good example of the power of prayer for me, but there it is.

Next come some very famous lines. I’ll quote them in the King James Version, which is probably how many of us first learned them: “And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you, seek, and ye shall find, knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” Luke 11:9 KJV Luke’s Jesus goes on to say that everyone who asks receives. Everyone you seeks finds. For everyone who knocks the door will be opened. All of that sounds to me like a promise that God will give us whatever we want if we pray for it loud enough and long enough. That the purpose of prayer is to get God to give us whatever we want. Ask for it, whatever it is, and you’ll get it, Jesus seems to be saying. Up to this point our story is setting up the idea that God is there to give us whatever we want if we just pray for it long enough and hard enough.

And that’s how an awful lot of people understand prayer, isn’t it? That understanding can be trivial. I’ve heard of people who claim that when they need to find a parking place all they have to do is pray for one and they find one every time. Or that understanding can be tragic. To this day there are pastors who tell people when a loved one had died that they just hadn’t prayed hard enough to save the person they lost. They blame the bereaved, saying in effect it’s your fault the person died because you could have saved them if you had just prayed harder. The assumption behind both examples is the same: Pray hard enough and long enough for whatever you want, and God will give it to you. If what you prayed for didn’t happen the reason isn’t that that’s the wrong assumption, it’s that you didn’t pray hard enough or long enough.

As we read Luke’s account of Jesus’ discourse on prayer, it looks like that’s the direction he’s taking us in: Ask, and it will be given to you, with no limitations stated on what “it” is. But Luke, the master story teller of the New Testament, next throws a twist into the story that completely changes the thrust of what Jesus is saying about prayer. We know, he says, how to give good gifts not harmful ones to our children. Then the punch line: “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” Luke 4:13 And we’re brought up short, aren’t we? The Holy Spirit? Where did that come from? No one has said anything about the Holy Spirit up to this point. Why does Luke’s Jesus end his discourse on prayer by suddenly bringing up the Holy Spirit?

Let me suggest that we think about it this way and suggest that to get to the answer we need to back up a step or two and ask:. What is the purpose of religion? Is it not to connect us with God and God with us? Is our faith tradition not where we find and live our primary relationship with God? I used to think we come to Christianity for the truth, for the true facts about life, about God, and about our eternal fate. It is of course correct that we come to religion for truth, but I now understand that the truth for which we come isn’t some set of facts. The truth for which we come is precisely that relationship with God. The truth is in the relationship. Establishing and nourishing that relationship is what we come to religion for. It is the purpose of religion.

Prayer, as we have already noted, is a vital part of the religious life. It is the primary religious discipline. The purpose of prayer as a key religious practice then is the purpose of religion generally, namely, establishing, tending, and nourishing our relationship with God. The purpose of prayer is not getting things. It is not somehow cajoling God into doing things God wouldn’t otherwise do. God isn’t Santa Claus. God isn’t there for us to manipulate into finding us a parking place or even sparing our loved ones from inevitable death. Rather, in prayer we become conscious of our relationship with God. We enter into God’s presence intentionally, thoughtfully, purposefully. Prayer as the primary religious practice is nothing less than the primary instrument of our connection with God and God’s connection with us.

And that, I think, is why in Luke’s story Jesus ends his discourse on prayer by saying not that God will in fact give us whatever we want but that God will send us the Holy Spirit when we pray. For what is the coming of the Holy Spirit? Is it not God establishing a firm connection with God’s people? When we pray, God the Holy Spirit comes to us, and we enter into God’s presence. We restore our connection with God and God’s connection with us. We live in the Spirit, and God brings us the fruits of the Spirit—peace, joy, comfort, courage, patience, whatever spiritual gifts we need to come to us in prayer.

So let us pray. Let us pray often and long. Let us come to God in prayer, but let us not do it because we want to manipulate God into doing our will. Let us do it so that we may establish and maintain a healthy relationship with God and so that, so far from God doing our will, we become instruments of God’s will in the world. This morning our choir sang a beautiful setting of St. Frances’ famous prayer: Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. When in prayer we receive the Holy Spirit we do indeed become God’s instruments in the world. We become God’s instruments because our connection with God is nourished. It thrives in prayer. Our spirits thrive in prayer in our spirits because in prayer God sends us God’s Holy Spirit.

So, how shall we pray this morning? Not for what shall we pray this morning. I can’t say often enough: God isn’t Santa Claus. God’s not going to deposit that new boat I would so dearly love to have in my driveway if I pray for it hard enough. Instead, let us pray for our friends and loved ones, because in our caring for them God’s love increases in the world. Let us pray for those who grieve, for in our concern for them God’s peace increases in the world. And let us pray as Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane on that fateful night: God, not our will but thine be done. Send us your Holy Spirit, God, that we may live in you and you in us. How shall we pray this morning? That our relationship with God may be strong and healthy. That we may live in God the Holy Spirit, enjoying not the material blessings of the world but the spiritual blessings of life in God. Amen.