Luke 11:1-11
11 He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 So he said to them, “When you pray, say:
Father, may your name be revered as holy.
May your kingdom come.
3
Give us each day our daily bread.
4
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.”
Perseverance in Prayer
5 And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, 6 for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ 7 And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything out of friendship, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.
9 “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 11 Is there anyone among you who, if your child asked for a fish, would give a snake instead of a fish? 12 Or if the child asked for an egg, would give a scorpion? 13 If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!
Let us pray. May the words of my mouth and the mediation of each heart here this morning be acceptable and pleasing in your sight. Amen.
Most of you probably know that both my husband and I are pastors. My husband is the pastor over at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church on Hendricks Avenue and I know I haven’t been here in a few weeks, but I am one of the priests here at Redeemer. It’s good to see you again. (Haha)
As a double clergy household, we try to pray with our children as often as we can. We aren’t great at it, but we try.
Our 4 year old will often sit down to dinner and remind us to pray before we eat. And one thing we do everything single night, is pray together before he goes to bed.
In the story we heard this morning, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. We know Jesus isn’t very good with clear answers, but here he does give a pretty good answer— he basically gives us what we will use for thousands of years, known as the Lord’s Prayer.
But then, because of course he can’t just stop with a simple answer, Jesus goes on to tell this story of a man and his sleeping neighbor. And the reason Jesus tells this story is that when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, they weren’t really asking for a prayer they could recite. What they wanted to know was about their relationship with God.
Before then, if a person had the good fortune to encounter God, they were known to drop dead immediately. But somehow Jesus had this sort of normal, casual relationship with God and the disciples were curious about it. And as Jesus tells this story, he invites the disciples into an intimate relationship with their creator…
When I began praying with our son, I would ask who we should pray for and he would list off people in his class, his teachers, his grandparents, the neighbors… I’m not even sure if he totally knew what we were doing. But then we would bow our heads, fold our hands, and I would pray for all of the people he listed off.
But he started to get sort of bored and squirmy with that way of praying, so one night a few months ago, we started saying the Lord’s Prayer together. Kids are like sponges, so it wasn’t long before he had the prayer memorized and would pray it with me. And then eventually he insisted on praying it by himself.
A couple of weeks ago, something different happened. I would ask “do you want to pray tonight?” And he would say, “no., I’m too tired” or he would say he felt too overwhelmed or distracted to pray. I’d ask, “Well, could I pray for you tonight?”
So I’d start the Lord’s Prayer and by the second or third line, he would be saying it with me, whispering under his breath the words that he knows so well now. Every night, this is how it happens.
There is something so good and familiar in that prayer, that it seems that he simply can’t resist praying it.
That is what our relationship with God is supposed to feel like— something that is just so familiar and good and comforting, that we cannot help but join in the community.
Jesus tells the story of a visitor has just arrived at a man’s house and he has nothing to feed him. So this man walks over to his neighbor’s house in the middle of the night, wakes him up, and asks him for some bread. The text we read says that because of his persistence, the man gets up and gives him whatever he needs. But a better translation would be shamelessness. Because this man is so shameless in coming to ask for bread in the middle of the night, the neighbor gets up and gives him whatever he needs.
And it *is* shameless isn’t it? Imagine the kind of relationship you must have with your neighbor to go pounding on their door in the middle of the night? I know people who have been living in the same house their entire lives and they don’t have that kind of relationship with their neighbors. It’s shameless and vulnerable to go to a person in the middle of the night and ask for bread.
You see, I don’t think Jesus is teaching his disciples about what kind of prayers to pray, or even the frequency or urgency with which to pray. Jesus is telling a story about the kind of relationship we are invited into. Unlike ever before, the disciples were invited to be vulnerable and shameless before God.
When the disciples say, “Lord, teach us to pray,” what they are really saying it, “tell us about our relationship with God.” And Jesus gives them the most well-known prayer in all of Christianity, a prayer that begins with “Father.” Not “Lord,” or “Almighty” or any other number of names for the our most holy and ever gracious God, but Jesus invites his disciples and invites us to call God “Father,” “Abba,” “Dad.”
We are invited into a relationship so intimate that Jesus says we can ask anything of God. And God says that this relationship is so good and wonderful that God will not only gives us everything we need in this life, our daily bread, but God will also give to us the Holy Spirit.
You see, prayer is not about how, or why, or when we pray. The invitation to prayer is an invitation into a relationship with the Trinity, an invitation into a relationship with God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
It is the same invitation that allows us to come to this table and eat the body and blood of Christ Jesus. It is the same invitation that dips us into the waters of baptism and renews our spirit. And God in Christ has already accepted this invitation for us, we don’t even *have* to respond.
But we get to. We have the incredible privilege of reaching out to our creator, the one who was, and is, and will be forever more, the one who created the interstellar workings of the entire universe. And more than that, God listens. God wants to be in relationship with us and even more, the only reason we are able to reach out to God and be in this relationship is because God first began this relationship with us. In the very beginning. And continued that relationship despite our nonsense, when God sent God’s very self in Christ Jesus to be with us, journey with us, die on the cross, and be raised again for the forgiveness of our sins. That God— our God— as ridiculous as it sounds, wants us to be in relationship, to talk, and listen, and converse with us. That’s wild and full of grace and mercy and it truly doesn’t make much sense, but it is true.
God created you and adores you and wants to be in relationship with you.
And Jesus has gifted us these words— these familiar, comforting words that many of us have had memorized since we were 4 years old— to be in relationship with God. When the world feels too overwhelming and we don’t know what to pray or we simply don’t want to— we can turn back to these words that we know, these words that are like coming home… and we can join in this prayer and engage in relationship with our God. Amen. Amen.
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