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Peter JB Carman
July 25, 2010
Reading: Luke 11:1-13
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples." Jesus said to them, "When you pray, say this: 'Father: May your holy name be honored; may your Kingdom come. Give us day by day the food we need. Forgive us our sins, for we forgive everyone who does us wrong. And do not bring us to hard testing.' "
And Jesus said to his disciples, "Suppose one of you should go to a friend's house at midnight and say, 'Friend, let me borrow three loaves of bread. A friend of mine who is on a trip has just come to my house, and I don't have any food for him!' And suppose your friend should answer from inside, 'Don't bother me! The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can't get up and give you anything.' Well, what then? I tell you that even if he will not get up and give you the bread because you are his friend, yet he will get up and give you everything you need because you are not ashamed to keep on asking. And so I say to you: Ask, and you will receive; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For those who ask will receive, and those who seek will find, and the door will be opened to anyone who knocks.
Would any of you who are fathers give your son a snake when he asks for fish? Or would you give him a scorpion when he asks for an egg? As bad as you are, you know how to give good things to your children. How much more, then, will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!"
I remember him from long enough ago that it seems like a dream now. A refugee from Uganda during the early 1980’s, he had ended up in Waterbury Connecticut, in the Baptist Church where I was a student minister. He was part of a small group on prayer that met every Wednesday through June. One day at the end of the prayer class, the minister asked him to do a closing prayer. He flipped his chair around like a kneeler and got down on his knees. “Lord, I don’t know how to pray. Teach me how to pray.”
The prayer Protestants usually call the Lord’s Prayer and Catholics grow up calling the “Our Father” that’s in our reading from Luke’s Gospel is only about half as long as the one we pray every Sunday morning. Yet it offers a powerful pattern for prayer itself. “Teach us to pray” (not what words to say) is the plea of the disciples to Jesus. So many of us can confess—“I don’t know how to pray.” We fear prayer. This prayer offers instruction for what prayer is all about rather than an exact recipe for what we ought to say, word for word over and over.
Following the general format of a typical Jewish prayer of the time, it starts with a simple and typically Jewish address to God. Calling on God intimately as our parent, we first bless the name of God, then pray that God’s reign may come fully. We pray for that before asking for anything. Then we ask simply that we may receive sufficient nurture and nourishment to live day by day. We ask forgiveness, and remind ourselves that we need to forgive everyone who owes us. Finally we ask to be delivered from the “hard test.” Every one over the age of two knows what it means to face a “hard test.”
Let’s try that prayer pattern again in a different age with somewhat different words! Bless you, Mama. May the whole earth come to live as you desire. Grant us breath and water and food sufficient for this day. Forgive us our wrongs—we already forgive those who are in debt to us. Save us from the hardships that test our character. Amen. Prefer other words? Try it for yourself!
Edged down to its bare essentials that’s it. Simple enough? It is that simplicity, I believe that is at the heart of what we are taught to do in praying. And what if this prayer becomes not only the pattern for our praying but for our living? What if this simplicity becomes the way we spend our days at work, our nights in solitude, our life in community? What if we asked God not for wealth but for just enough to live on? What if we worked and prayed unceasingly for a new world waking—for justice and peace to break out, for intentional community to form in which each person was beloved, for an inner kingdom of love and light to be realized in every human breast. Simple? Yes, but rich, a whole different kind of rich.
Simplicity in prayer and action: living within our means. Praying for the good of the whole world before we pray for ourselves—and then not being afraid to ask, but only for what we truly need. Working for the kind of world God desires for God’s beloved children. Forgiving others in the realization we need forgiveness ourselves from God—and have already tasted it. Asking for faith to live day by day, and supporting each other in this simplicity of life, choosing a different way than the prevailing paradigm of wealth and success. Praying for help in the face of adversity that we may not lose heart.
These days the term “sustainability” is being thrown around a lot. I love the term in principle, because it suggests that we live in a way that our local environment, and the earth as a whole, can handle, continue, flourish with. There is a slight problem with sustainability as a WORD. It is being used so much to market so much that I fear it will lose its meaning. A simple sentence seems to me to sum up what it actually means pretty well—and it isn’t far from what I think a follower of Jesus might also mean by the older term simplicity. Mohandas Gandhi is reputed to have said: “Earth provides enough to satisfy every [one]'s need, but not every [one]'s greed”. How did Jesus put it? “Give us day by day the food we need.”
Simplicity is the alignment of our personal and communal lives with the ideals for which we strive. For many of us it means embracing personal nonviolence. For those of us trying to live faith simply, the notion that the ends might justify means that are drastically nasty just is a little too complex to embrace. Kill for peace? Grab power for Justice? Make massive personal profits for the good of humanity? We have trouble computing.
There is a lot to this simplicity thing! Once we start down the path, it’s hard to turn back.
This last Tuesday, I came back from a peace conference in upstate New York to a demonstration in front of the North Carolina State Capitol, in lovely if blazing hot Raleigh. As I stood there, I listened to articulate high school students speak to why it is important to have diversity in education and to guarantee access to schools that are a true rich mix of humanity. I listened to David Forbes call out for justice, recalling a day when the very street we were standing in had been divided by the de jure structures of segregation. And as I stood there, it occurred to me—that as a follower of Jesus, this was a good place to be.
If our actions are going to be aligned with our prayers, then the simple way is also the way of hope and justice. My two children grew up in a school system where they were in a minority—but were fully embraced in a city-wide system. However New York State schools contain a contradiction: the surrounding suburbs in states like New York have always managed to avoid busing across city lines—this is what some are trying to foist on North Carolina. But the education my sons got in the city was vastly richer culturally if not academically superior to the kids they knew from those suburban communities. They don’t seem to have been hurt too badly going into college. And they have an extraordinarily rich group of friends they stay in touch with. Experience says that this vision of an educated populace that is not separated by race or class is doable—and will be good for the future of us all. It is real—been going on for generations now.
The principles of such a coming together may be enshrined for some in law. For me they are about a simple 2,000 year old dream. They are about the words “Thy Kingdom come”, or in more contemporary terms: “May the world become as you long for, God.”
Simplicity in prayer and action means that you and I get to live as though this reality were already coming into being. To put it bluntly: we get to be servers at the banquet. We get to act as though every child of God indeed does have dignity. We get to love our enemies and work for reconciliation. We get to get out in the streets and demand justice, when some are excluded and some are given extra privileges…. Some of us may even get to get arrested now and again, because we have some convictions worth having a conviction.
Jesus teaches us some simple words to teach us how to pray. But it turns out this kind of prayer is prayer on the move, prayer in action, prayer both for the soul and for the hands and feet and minds of us all. It is about alignment of intentions with how we live. It is about deeds that match the vision they are committed in the name of. It is about hopes that are worth while trying to put in practice, even at the risk of ridicule, or failure, or controversy.
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At the essence of the prayer Jesus taught us are the words “Your kingdom come.” What is this “Kingdom”? Our twenty-first century sensibilities tend to draw back from the monarchical and patriarchal language of yesteryear! Your Kingdom come? Is that some kind of talk about the judgment day? But actually the “Kingdom” that Jesus was pointing to was an empire turned upside down, with the first last and the last first. This is a REAL “new world order”, in which we humans are no longer divided up into little boxes of gender class and race. In the Jesus version of the Kingdom, there is a grand feast where the people who were previously left out in the cold are welcomed with open arms. It’s a feast where the prodigal is welcomed home. It is a feast where the dirty get to party with the pure, where caste means nothing any more. But what does it mean to pray for such a world to come into being? What does it mean to live and act simply into that kind of dream? It starts in our hearts. It is rooted too in how we live together in community.