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.