Prayer Matters

1 – Lord Teach Us To Pray

Jeremiah 3:6-18, 22 Matthew 6:1-15

February 14, 2018 Ash Wednesday Dr. Edwin Gray Hurley

Lent is a season of repentance, reflection and renewal. As the days lengthen toward the coming of spring we are invited to lengthen, to stretch our life with God and with one another. Lent is a time of looking within and examining ourselves and our discipleship. Lent is a 40 day time of undertaking acts of charity in our Lord’s name.

I’ve always thought it particularly fitting that our Witness Season for strengthening and supporting God’s work around the world backs right up against Lent. Thus our Witness Season Gift becomes an integral part of our Lenten Discipline. We are called:

“To observe a holy Lent, by self-examination and penitence, by prayer and fasting, by works of love, and by reading and meditating on the Word of God.”i

Spiritual disciplines, patterns of prayer, scripture reading, and regular sharing in Holy Communion, small group sharing…these are not easy and take effort and intention. Yet, how much we need these if we would find the tiny seeds of faith, planted in and around us, nourished and grow into an abundant plant or tree.

The problem we address as we make this Lenten Journey beginning this Ash Wednesday is not new. The problem is sin. The solution is repentance. Turn away from evil and turn to God and God’s teaching, God’s commandments, God’s grace.

Did the Jeremiah lesson echo with some of the scandals cascading forth these days in the “me too” tragic stories and necessary falls? Israel 2,600 years ago was struggling with sin as are we are also struggling with many of the same ones. “Whoredom” is the way Jeremiah indelicately calls out the people and their corruption. “Because she took her whoredom so lightly, she polluted the land, committing adultery with stone and tree.”

Then, as now, God calls us to repent and return. “Return faithless Israel,” says the Lord. “I will not look on you in anger, for I am merciful.”ii “Return, O faithless children, I will heal your faithlessness.”iii God’s call and claim on us is severe. For God is holy, infinite, eternal; but above all God is merciful and compassionate.

One of the rabbinical stories tells how Rabbi Ishmael, once when he was acting as a priest, entered into the innermost sanctuary to burn incense. There he saw God, and prayed to God, “May it be thy will that thy mercy subdue thy wrath,” and God nodded in assent.iv

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Ash Wednesday is our opportunity for that mercy, for a second chance, for a new beginning. At the heart of Jesus’ message is this: change is possible. You and I can change. We can grow in the pattern Christ offers us.

Nowhere does Jesus show us how to do this more clearly than in the prayer he teaches his disciples. “Lord, teach us to pray,” they plead, in Luke’s account. “We have observed you in prayer, we have seen the difference prayer is making in your life and work. Now teach us.” That is to be our focus this Lent in sermons, small groups, daily devotion and prayer, at home behind our closed doors, in the Lord’s Prayer. We learn to pray like Jesus, and in the brief yet comprehensive pattern he gives us, to grow more and more into Christian maturity.

The old hymn says, “More about Jesus would I know, more of His grace to others show, more of his saving fullness see, more of His love who died for me. More, more about Jesus.”v Paul writes, “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”vi

Harvey Cox notes in his book, The Future of Faith,

“So much Christian theology and preaching has fastened onto the need for faith in Jesus that the faith of Jesus has often been ignored.”

The Lord’s Prayer is a brief but comprehensive x-ray into this faith of Jesus. It offers us a grid, a skeleton, a pattern for prayer that reflects the faith of Jesus. Here’s how he prayed. Here’s how he teaches us to pray. Here’s how he teaches us to live as a Christian Community of light in a dark and dangerous world.

The Lord’s Prayer, in a very real sense, presents a significant statement on the faith of Jesus. One author said,

“The Lord’s prayer sprang from the very depths of Jesus’ religious experience. It is the richest single word of his that has come down to us. No other one passage gives us so much of Jesus himself. Into no utterance did Jesus pour more of his life, thought, feeling and faith. Within the framework provided by the petitions of this prayer, every teaching of Jesus can be placed.” vii

Prayer, of course, does not begin or end in the Bible with the Lord’s Prayer. Prayer floods the entire Holy Book. The Psalms are prayers expressing virtually all our human emotions. These emotions we are invited to bring before God: praise, thanksgiving, suffering, guilt, anger, fear, surrender, trust. Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the observation that the entire Psalter may be comprehended in the Lord’s Prayer. Every Psalm fits under one of the categories for prayer in the Lord’s Prayer. As you study and pray the Lord’s Prayer this Lent, pray the Psalms: pray 5 in the morning and 5 at night and you will move through the whole psalter in 2 weeks, or 3 times through during Lent.

When Jesus begins to teach the disciples to pray, as Matthew records it, he spends considerable time urging them to secret prayer. “Go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.”viii 3

The point here, as we begin this Lenten Journey, is begin deep within yourself; no show. Make a serious moral examination. Engage in intimate back and forth with God. Take time at home - early in the morning, late at night, at noonday - to encounter God intimately. Read the devotional. Read through a Gospel. Listen to Handel’s Messiah. Begin there. The point of prayer is not public spectacle, such as the “prayer in Ash Cloth” show that a former Birmingham Mayor put on at Boutwell Auditorium.

Jesus shows his followers that prayer is intimate and personal, and spontaneous, but also ordered. The person who has learned to pray anyplace learned to pray someplace. There is specificity to praying in God’s House., “My House shall be a House of Prayer for All People,” says Isaiah and Jesus. Come here to pray in community. Not to make a public spectacle of prayer, but to be lifted and led and expanded, to pray for things beyond “us” and “our stuff”. “O love, how deep, how broad, how high. How passing thought and fantasy, that God, the Son of God should take our mortal form for mortals’ sake.”ix Amazing!

As William Barclay notes, in a book you are invited to study along with when we pray together, “The highest prayer is always the prayer of the community.”x Prayer comes at the high point of our worship services. Most always it concludes with the Lord’s Prayer. Note: there is not an “I, Me, or Mine” phrase in that prayer; it is always “Our”. We pray Together to Our Father for Our Daily Bread, for Our Forgiveness, for Our Deliverance from Evil.”

We are invited this Lent to Pray as Jesus prayed. To pray with Jesus. To pray with his spirit, his attitude, his outlook, and to trust, even as he did, that God actually hears and acts because of our prayers. As Karl Barth noted,

“Let us approach the subject from the given fact that God answers. He is not deaf, he listens; more than that, he acts. He does not act in the same way whether we pray or not. Prayer exerts an influence upon God’s action, even upon his existence. This is what the word ‘answer’ means.”xi

So come this Lent, preparing for Easter, come with repentance, come expecting renewal, come looking for resurrection. Come! I invite you to come observe the Lenten Discipline.

(Observe silence)

(Read the invitation to observe a holy Lent)

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i Book of Common Worship, PCUSA, p. 223 ii Jer. 3:12-12 iii Jer. 3:22 iv William Barclay, The Lord’s Prayer, p.9 v The Hymnbook, “More About Jesus Would I Know, P.316 vi Colossians 1:27 vii Charles M. Laymon, The Life and Teachings of Jesus, p.189, 190 viii Matt. 6:1-6 ix The Presbyterian Hymnal, 84 “O Love, How Broad, How Deep, How High” x William Barclay, The Lord’s Prayer, p.10 xi Karl Barth, Prayer, p.21