How should I pray?

 Trinity 6 - Year C – Eucharist – 24.vii.2022 

(Genesis 18.20-32; Colossians 2.6-19; Luke 11.1-13)

Today’s Gospel reading addresses that most basic of questions: “How should I pray?” And Jesus gives two answers. The first is simply a prayer you can use… and it’s the Lord’s Prayer. The second answer is an encouragement to go on praying, be persistent just as you’d go on asking for something you really need.

 “How should I pray?” It’s a basic question for us as Christians, but it gets asked as well by people who might never call themselves “religious.” It comes when you feel that need to pray. It was brought home vividly to me as an undergraduate nearly 50 years ago, when a fellow student described a nightmare he’d had. He wouldn’t have described himself as religious. But he left a lasting impression on me. He’d try to wake up from his dream, and as he tried he found himself wanting to say the Lord’s Prayer, but he couldn’t remember the words. And part of the nightmare was whether he couldn’t actually remember the words or whether he couldn’t remember the words because he was in such a terrible state. How do you begin to pray? And the dream was right - you can make a start with the Lord’s Prayer… And that’s where he’d been overcome with fear, because the nightmare was that he couldn’t even make a start with that prayer.

You might think that praying the Lord’s Prayer is basic. It is! But I’m afraid we can’t rely on people to know it. I tell couples who want to produce an order of service for their wedding that we’ll be saying the Lord’s Prayer in its familiar traditional form. But then I have to advise them that they can’t count on people joining in unless they print it. When we get to the point of saying the Lord’s Prayer at funerals these days I suspect that many people are not joining in quite as confidently as we used to expect. At school assemblies I’m pretty sure that I can’t count on all the children to know it, and we live in a culture now where it’s pretty difficult to expect that we have the right to teach it. In any case - as I sometimes say at Baptisms - shouldn’t parents have taught it to their children before they get to school? I hope they will. We need to treat prayer as central to Christianity - and when Christians start praying, they start with the Lord’s Prayer.

Whether or not people in general today know the words of the Lord’s Prayer shouldn’t be a matter for recrimination with them. As Christians we need to start by asking, “how do I pray?” Do I take the time and trouble to pray? Do I pray every day? Do I even get round to saying the Lord’s Prayer sometime each day?

We need a desire for prayer. Jesus teaches the disciples to pray when one of them comes and asks to be taught. Do you want to pray in the first place? Why should you want to pray? The disciples want to learn how to pray because they’d seen other people pray. They knew that John the Baptist had taught his disciples how to pray - so now they want to learn how they should pray as disciples of Jesus. Is there something for us to learn there? What can we learn from other religions and the people who practise them? The psalms which we share in the Jewish scriptures say, “Seven times a day will I praise you, O Lord,” but how many Christians manage once? Against this we know that Muslims take seriously their call to prayer five times a day - they know what their faith requires and they act upon it. So perhaps we should ask, “teach me as a Christian to pray, even as I see my neighbours who happen to be Muslim pray!”

But there’s something more. It’s not just that the disciples see other people praying. They see Jesus pray. The disciple who asks, “Teach us to pray,” does so when he’s with Jesus – at a time when Jesus had gone, we’re told, to “a certain place” with the definite intention of praying. It’s when Jesus has finished praying that the disciple makes his request. That’s a reminder to us that to pray is to learn what it is to be Christ-like. Jesus prays, and we can pray and grow with him. By prayer we can grow to be like him. The first word of the prayer Jesus gives his disciples tells us that prayer is a shared calling with Jesus: “Father…” When we address God, we address him as Jesus addressed him. God is our Father, and Jesus is our brother in prayer.

 “Our Father…” We speak to God as a member of our own family - or rather we come each as a member of his family, and we come to him as the one we expect to listen to us. There’s a familiarity in the way we address God which distinguishes Christian prayer from that of other religions. Jesus uses the prayer, calls God his Father, and we are let in on the same terms. But then there’s that second phrase, “hallowed be thy name.” We’re invited to recognise the holiness of God. Prayer is not a matter to be taken for granted, and God is not to be taken for granted. If there’s one quality above all that is deficient in the life of the Church today it’s a sense of holiness. Religion is not just to cheer us up. It’s not about wielding our moral strictures wildly against people with whom we don’t agree. It’s not even about having faith in the face of adversity. It’s not about feeling “spiritual.” It is about a sense of the sacred. Unless we recognise a holiness which comes from God and to which we may aspire, we remain earth-bound and dragged down by the very issues which we need to address in our prayer.

Turning to prayer is not about being an escapist. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done…” is to be our prayer. Prayer for the coming of the Kingdom is prayer that God’s will and purpose be revealed. His will and purpose are to be made real in the world which we inhabit here and now. We need to want what God wants, and prayer can show us the way. Prayer is not about God keeping us safe. Prayer entails confronting those issues which might seem to deny the reality of God’s power. Natural disaster, war, poverty, injustice. Widespread fear, violence, the millions of refugees fleeing their own countries. None of this is God’s will. When we address these things in prayer, then we know that we are beginning to look at the world with his eyes.

And that’s only to make a start. We want to pray that we may see as God sees, but we need to start somewhere. Abraham’s prayer for the people of Sodom might seem to be fruitless, but perhaps he needs to do all that arguing with God so that he can understand the situation for the first time. And Jesus tells those who will listen that prayer at its most simple is about asking. “Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” Anyone who has had a cat knows something about this. The most frequently made request in any household with a cat is miaow. Invariably your cat will turn up on the wrong side of a door or window. And her miaow is a sort of prayer: let me in; let me out; feed me; brush me; stroke me. Jesus says that our prayers are answered in the way that you give in to the friend who bangs on your door in the middle of the night asking for help - even if you don’t want to, you’ll get up because of your friend’s sheer persistence. Cat owners know about that - don’t let them in the room they want to enter and they’ll tear up your carpet; don’t let them in or out at unearthly hours and they’ll keep you awake with their aptly named caterwauling. But while they demand your attention they might just have to learn that they can’t always get what they want. And so it is for us. It may not be that prayer will bring what you expected - but to find out you need to begin by asking, seeking and knocking at the door.

Very few of us manage to get our lives of prayer worked out as well as we might hope. That’s why some sort of structure helps. Someone just the other day was saying that the best practical reason for praying early in the morning is that if you don’t get your prayers started then you’ll probably find them squeezed out by everything else that comes up in the course of the day. 8.30a.m. is the time we’ve used for years whenever we have managed to have Morning Prayer in St. Cuthbert’s Church, and we’ve followed the prescribed Bible readings and a cycle of prayers to follow. For me one of the positive things to come out of the Pandemic has been the move to shared online prayer – wherever you are, you can join in with Durham Cathedral or St. Martin-in-the-Fields every weekday at 8.30am through their Facebook pages – and other times besides. Just turn up! Prayer depends not on our enthusiasms and whims but upon discipline, which involves the right use of time, a structure, content (Psalms, Bible readings, shared prayer), and - like Jesus in today’s Gospel - being “in a certain place.”

And always prayer should be more than we expect. Start out on the discipline of prayer and new elements of prayer emerge. Perhaps in our prayer as a congregation we need to do that. We expect prayer for the sick and the departed - quite rightly, though there are certain issues about what qualifies you for the sick list and how you get taken off it! But what about other areas of life? What about those for whom we don’t regularly pray: those who’ve been baptised here, those preparing for marriage or trying to get through or over a bad one… issues which it doesn’t occur to us have a place in our prayers.

There’s a lot there for any of us to address. But it all stems from the simple resolution to make a new start in prayer. And we can do that by taking seriously the invitation which Jesus makes to use that prayer he gives us, “Our Father”… and to ask, search and knock on the door.

Eucharist from St Cuthbert's Church

The Revd. Martin Jackson presides at the Eucharist in St. Cuthbert’s Church - with a midweek congregation and using readings for the Daily Eucharist, but we offer this also as our online service for Sunday 17 July.

And we reflect particularly on Jesus' invitation: ‘Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.’

Living in the Abundance of God…

 

I’m writing just after the weekend in which we had a parish celebration marking the 40^th Anniversary of my ordination to the priesthood. I still feel rather overwhelmed. Thank you for so many greetings and good wishes, cards, messages and gifts. I was quite taken aback when I opened the envelope which was put into my hand at the end of the Eucharist and can only thank all who contributed for your generosity – as yet the very special gin remains unopened!

There was so much went into the preparations. Thanks to all who were involved in catering, setting up the marvellous exhibition (and finding the material used!), in cleaning, decorating and flower-arranging. And those amazing cakes! I’m honoured by the bell-ringers’ “Date Touch” with the 2022 changes on the bells. Speeches which left me lost for words. And for the service, thanks to organist and choir, and to our servers – back in action for the first time since the beginning of 2020, and ready to keep the clergy right!

The service was, of course, a Eucharist – not my offering but ours. It was tremendous to have so many people in church (and mixing afterwards). It might have been my 40^th anniversary of Ordination – but a priest is nothing without the people who make up the Church. The singing, the prayer and the sharing in Holy Communion tell of what it is to be the Body of Christ and the People of God. For many of us it was perhaps the biggest act of worship we’ve been involved in since before the pandemic.

And here, I think, was a reminder of the direction we might now take. For two and a half years we have had to scale things down and to distance ourselves – not least from each other. Things have got smaller and our expectations have been reduced. As at last we were able to do something on a bigger scale – both in worship and in the party that followed – here was a reminder that our faith should not be one characterised by scarcity but one which is lived in the knowledge of God’s abundant provision. Sam Wells, Vicar of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London sums it up like this:

“God gives his people everything they need to worship him, be his friends, and eat with him.”

These are words to take to heart: God gives us everything we need; we have only to recognise the fact. I’ve just come from a planning meeting as we seek to re-launch Messy Church. Do we have the resources to do so? And I found myself quoting someone who said that a church which has the desire and faith to undertake a particular task already has in place at least 80% of what it needs. We might be conscious of things we lack, but the generosity of God and the celebration in which we can share tells us there is something more.

Stanley Hauerwas drew from what Sam Wells says when he spoke to seminarians training to be priests at Nashotah House, USA – and these are words which may speak to us all:

It is true that you will often find it hard to see any result from the work you have done. Even worse, you will sometimes see what you have worked hard to accomplish dismantled by those who come after you. But this is God’s work. It is work that is impossible to sustain if we do not trust in God’s determination to love us. God’s building is built of small acts of kindness and tenderness that are themselves all the results we should desire. For as Sam Wells suggests, God is a God of abundance who has given us all we need. We are not in a zero-sum game. Your life will not be wasted, because you have been made part of God’s abundance.

My thanks again for all you have shared with me as we travel together as God’s people.

Martin Jackson