by The Rev. Dr. Max Lynn
SCRIPTURE READINGS Matthew 5:5-13, Luke 11:1-13
Transcribed from the sermon preached on JULY 24, 2022
For many people prayer can be complicated. We are not sure how to do it. We are not sure if God cares about the small things we care about. We are not sure if God wants to be bossed around. We are not sure if or how prayer works, if or how God works.
But I say pray and praying will increase your faith in the power of prayer. We will start to find insight, we will start to see responses from God, we will see a positive change in ourselves.
Knock and the door will be opened.
It is always fascinating to me when scientists study prayer. Who God is and what prayer is, what prayer does and accomplishes is so enmeshed with individual psychology, the community and culture that we can safely assume science has almost no ability to determine its full benefit.
While it may be hard to study scientifically, we can assume that due to the virtually universal tendency of human beings to pray, there is an evolutionary benefit. Evolution has selected for it, so it must do something that helps humans survive. Somehow, some way, prayer works.
So, what is prayer? Prayer is having a conversation or opening or sitting and listening in the presence of the divine Spirit. It is opening our consciousness to mystical processes greater than ourselves. Prayer is searching for the sacred meaning and flow in a particular situation and life in general. Prayer can be asking for specific things or asking for help from God. But ideally, we are in a walking relationship with the divine, so a particular specific ask is only a small portion of our prayer life. So also, receiving the particular things we are praying for in a particular prayer is a small portion of what we as individuals and as community receive from God in prayer.
What does prayer engage? What are the interrelated elements that get put into motion when we pray? Here is a short list I came up with:
1. Humility
2. Gratitude
3. A cosmic cry of helplessness and anger – a cry for justice. (These last two are likely how prayer originated.)
4. Internal, psychological dialogue with your highest self, your highest ideal, the spirit of God within, the shaping and maturation of who you are and who you want to be.
5. Focus and clarification
6.The healing power of mystical hope
7.. Community building and support, evoking and proclaiming solidarity
8. The shaping of community meaning and goals
9. The physical act and space designated for both individuals and community, a pulled out sacred time and place.
10. Both individual and communal courage and hope. I suspect this is one of the big reasons prayer was selected in human evolution – prayer is often goal setting for the future and the evoking of the hope and courage to get there.
11. The establishment of patience, endurance, and tenaciousness.
12. The experience of grace and gratitude, peace, and comfort.
13. Mystical vision and insight, both individual and communal; a vision and experience of oneness with God and life. Prayer is not just forward looking but establishes who and whose we are in the present.
We could probably think of more, but if we were trying to determine from a scientific point of view if prayer works or is beneficial, we would have to figure out how to measure each of these things as well as how they are interrelated with one another. Because one works on the other and all the others and vice versa. So, if we were going to try and draw a picture of how prayer works, it would not be one single line from one single request to one single outcome, like asking for a bike for Christmas and getting it. Rather, it would be like a spider web or a mobile. We know that when we touch a mobile in one place it moves all other places. Prayer is like that.
I would love to elaborate more on those 13 points, but I will refrain for now and move to the prayer Jesus gave when the disciples asked him to teach them how to pray.
Our Father who art in heaven, hollowed be thy name.
Jesus starts out with a humble acknowledgement that we are not God, and that God’s name is holy. When we think we are God, and know everything, it limits our ability to see beyond ourselves. We are more likely to be stubborn and arrogant. Now we know that human sinfulness will work its way into anything. So, this benefit may backfire as we decide we know who God is and then we get arrogant about that. Unfortunately, we can pray in arrogance. We might be self-righteous or show off. But that is not what Jesus is teaching.
Our Father: there is something personal about this God of ours. This doesn’t mean God is a dude with a white beard and robe hanging out in a heavenly castle. But it does mean God is not just a nebulous spirit but one whose love for us is personal, like a father or mother for a child. And it does not matter who your earthly father or mother are, and we know there are some not so good ones, we have a heavenly father. Even if we suffer from loneliness or alienation from our parents or others, we are personally loved by God.
Thy kin-dom come, thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven.
Here is another stroke pure genius. There is an assumption that we may not even know what is best for ourselves or the world, that God’s will may not be our will exactly. So, we are to ask for God’s will to be done, assuming that if there is a difference, God’s will is better. This should keep our minds open to what God’s will might be.
Thy will be done also creates this ideal to which we hope to live up to. Consider this our highest ideal. So, for instance in our Declaration of Independence we read “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This ideal is set up for our nation even though the founders and each and every one of us and all of us collectively do not fully live up to these values. And honestly even as we work and hope to improve year after year, we will never reach the full ideal. But we have to hold it up, we have to hold up the vision of heaven on earth. Heaven is, among other things, the ideal we hope and wish to reach, which we don’t reach on earth, but we should try anyway. God, take us past our own sin so that we might reach this goal of heaven.
In praying Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, we confirm that we want to be a part of doing God’s will on earth, in our nation, in our relationships with family and others. Here at St. John’s, we have been saying they “Kindom” come, implying a familial, mutual aspect to God’s Kingdom rather than a patriarchy. While there is an aspect of our being that by God’s grace makes us “kin” with God, coheirs with Christ, it is still important to recognize that on this earth, humility is necessary, and God remains the one to whom we pledge our highest allegiance and give our highest respect.
Give us this day our daily bread.
This is not “let me win the lottery”, not make me “king of the world”, not make me rich so I can buy everything I may want. No, daily bread, that is it. So, if we have our daily bread, we have something to be thankful for. We may be frustrated about many things. We may want many things, but as far as material concerns, Jesus is keeping it small.
There is another aspect to this prayer for daily bread. God, help me with what I have to do today. One day at a time. A lot of worry and anxiety is about tomorrow, about the future, but all we can do is what we can do today. When folks come into my office anxious, I often find they are extrapolating their issues outward. Soon the issues they face are huge. She said this, so it must mean this. And if it means that, then it must be leading to this. And this will lead to this and that. Pretty soon they are stressed and anxious about a huge story they have just created in their mind about what might be. And we can feel overwhelmed, and stuck. It is too big a problem to fix so why try? Narrow it down. What can I do today. God, help me with what I can do today. Give us this day our daily bread. Keep it small. And small victories are still victories.
Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.
Forgive us our sins, forgive us our trespasses, we have heard it all three ways. It means the same thing. Again, we find humility, an acknowledgment that we are not perfect, that we have and will sin against others. And because of that, we too should be forgiving of others. If God can forgive us, we ought to be able to forgive others. Where have we been selfish, dishonest, or cheated? Where have we been cruel, or domineering? Where have we been a pushover? Where have I been lazy? Where have I been a workaholic and neglected relationships? Dear God, forgive us our sins. In the same way, knowing we are imperfect, we ought to be merciful and forgiving to others.
Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from the evil one.
Some manuscripts say, “from evil”, and some others say, “from the evil one.” Again, Jesus brilliantly puts the subject first, puts we who are praying first. May we not be tempted to be evil, even as we ask God to deliver us from others who are evil. The evil one is sneaky, so he will find sneaky ways to convince us to take our lives in directions God would not have us go. God, steer me away from temptation. God steer us away from destructive habits and patterns I am a sucker for.
But I think this prayer to deliver us from the evil one can be a somewhat more than those small temptations that haunt our daily lives. We know for instance that many in Honduras and Guatemala are threatened by drug cartels. They are given an ultimatum, join or die, join, or be abused. And once they join, they are enlisted to do horrible things in order to survive. And soon enough they lose track of who they are, and next thing you know they are the ones threatening and giving ultimatums to others. And as we have seen in our own nation, both around the cult of personality and the pandemic and climate change, whole groups of people seem to be susceptible to group think, to going along with lies and twisted plots that threaten democracy or to deny a clear message God is giving us.
David McPhail said he liked to use “the Evil one” because of an experience he had during the Civil Rights Movement. He attended a trial of Martin Luther King Jr. and said that when he was in the court room, he physically felt a darkness, a sense of spiritual evil, as if the Devil was not only real but present. The evil one can tempt us in small ways and big ones. We can get swept up in the grand movements of the evil one in society. To some degree these movements are bigger than us and we are not all knowing or powerful enough to stop them. So, we pray to God who is. We align ourselves with God and pray that we are not led into temptation and deliver us from the evil one.
Jesus ends his prayer here, but tradition has added in an ending,
“for thine is the kingdom and power and the glory forever. Amen"
Now one last word on prayer. I love the notion in Process Theology that God gives each of us a divine aim for each becoming moment. Given who we are, our abilities and limitations, the context of what has led up to this moment and the other agents relating to us in the moment, what is the best possible direction we can go. Since we have free will, and other people and things have free will, and they impact each other, there is some randomness that happens, so we do not always hit our divine aim. But God always picks us up from where we are to give us the next best possible aim. To the degree we can be open to what and where God would have us act and become, and move in that direction, then we hit our divine aim. God’s will is done.
So ideally prayer is our walking conscious relationship with God, our attempt to discern a truthful vision of reality and the possibilities before us, so that one step at a time, one day at a time, we can live into what God has called us to be. Our hopes and visions for health, healing, justice, and peace are part our action that evokes God’s divine aim, both for us, for others, and the whole universe.