Wednesday, March 10, 2010
Mid-Week Lenten Series on Luther's Small Catechism--The Lord's Prayer
One of the hardest parts of my first call was introducing myself to the home bound members and those who lived in nursing homes. They were members of a congregation that had seen a fair amount of turn over through the years. For some of the people, I was the third, fourth pastor to visit them since they had moved to the nursing home. It was, understandably, difficult to keep me and my predecessors straight. It made for very confusing conversations. They would get stories about us all jumbled up together and I would have to weigh whether it was worth trying to point out which tales were about me and which belonged to someone else. And, of course, their stories weren’t always clear to them any more either. Because we had just met, I had very little to go by…one woman told me about her travels from the east and the restaurant she had started. Some weeks the restaurant was back in New York, other times it was in Fargo, where she lived now. Some days her stories were full of references to her four sons and other times she would rebuke me for asking about more than two. Our visits were often confusing and filled with uncertainty about what we should talk about next. That is until it was time to pray. Each and every one of my visits—no matter how confused or discombobulated our conversation—ended with a firm and solid reciting of The Lord’s Prayer.
This prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples in the Gospel of Luke is one of the first we teach our children. We begin praying it with them at an early age…for many reasons…just one of them being…there are some tricky words in there, there is a lot to memorize and learn. We all have a funny story of how a child misinterpreted the words…
We also teach it to our children because we are told to; first by Jesus.. “When you pray, say…” and then in our baptismal promises. This prayer is a foundational piece to our faith development. We teach it so our children will have something to pray on those days so crazed or dark that they can’t find words to form a sentence, let alone feel prepared to pray. But ultimately we continue to teach and study these precious words from scripture because of what I witnessed upon the deaths of my newly met parishioners.
Martin Luther, in his Large Catechism, reminds us that prayer is not optional, but vital to our living our best life…much like the 10 Commandments are. Luther writes to people who would have relied upon the prayers of Priests and other Holy Leaders, he encourages and demands that each of us take up prayer…
Therefore you should say: My prayer is as precious, holy, and pleasing to God as that of St. Paul or of the most holy saints. since God does not regard prayer on account of the person, but on account of His word and obedience thereto. For on the commandment on which all the saints rest their prayer I, too, rest mine. Moreover, I pray for the same thing for which they all pray and ever have prayed; besides, I have just as great a need of it as those great saints, yea, even a greater one than they.
Let this be the first and most important point, that all our prayers must be based and rest upon obedience to God, irrespective of our person, whether we be sinners or saints, worthy or unworthy.
So often people hope that God’s will looks something like winning the lottery…or at least like their political platform. Anyone who claims to know the mind of God and then offer up a prayer or commentary should be viewed from a distance. Claims that God’s will is to use tornados or hurricanes or earthquakes like a protester uses her sign on a street corner, to highlight displeasure with our lives, are misguided. Likewise, we should probably be careful when praying for God to help us find the best parking spot when rushed or outfit to wear to a job interview. (both honest to goodness, prayer requests I have heard.) It isn’t that we shouldn’t be in communication with God about our concerns—mundane, trivial or life threatening, but our Lord Jesus, him very self, only said we should pray for the Kingdom and that God’s will be done…he didn’t tell us what that would be exactly in any given situation.
If want to know God’s will, we need only to look to the cross. If we want a clear example of how God has worked and will work again, we look to the cross. And as we pray, we tell our stories about how we were dead, but God raised us. In any given situation we can trust God is working to bring life from death, suffering and sin. What that new life looks like, isn’t for us to demand, we only pray that it happen among us and that we be a part of that new life.
The world lives by the story that our lives are rushing toward the end and that death is the enemy we must avoid… The world tells us a story that all of suffering, confusion or pain must be resolved now through human effort, drugs, economics development, medical technology or else life is doomed.
Without a different story it is no wonder the world becomes violent and turns in upon itself…but when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, God’s story gives us the freedom to be patient, to take time. In praying we are given something good to do in the meantime, while we wait for temptation to pass, humanity to heal and the longing to cease. We refuse to let the powers of the world rush us into despair or false hope, premature conclusions or frantic busyness. We are encouraged to live lives that resist the powers of the world.
Anything real and Godly in this world usually takes the form of a relationship, it takes communal effort: it requires us to confess and forgive. Anytime we catch a glimpse of the holy it has required patience, community, time… all of these are skills that are not naturally taught to us by the world. But God and God’s Holy Spirit have not left us…the holy comes to us as we pray, or rather, as we pray…we become holy.
This prayer, that most of us learned as small children, this prayer that we recite again and again, we must pray it so that it becomes us. It must not become a work done to look holy or used as a password to gain entrance to God’s favor…We must pray a prayer, taught to us by Jesus, so that our lives may bend towards his. We must pray as God would have us pray…so that we live as God would have us live. We pray as God would have us pray. Amen.
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2 comments:
I feel as if I just had the chance to listen to one of your sermons...which I would love to do one of these days, by the way! Thanks for sharing these deep and holy thoughts!
Really enjoyed this!
-BW
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