A sermon on Luke 11: 1-13 by Nathan Nettleton

One of the main reasons that this worship service in this style moved from being a midweek alternative here to being our main Sunday service was the number of people who reported that their involvement in the midweek alternative had taught them to pray, really pray. And in the story we heard tonight from Luke’s account of the gospel, the disciples come to Jesus and say, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Perhaps Jesus could have sent them here! No, just kidding. But actually, even joking about that reveals a danger for us. The ever present danger in growth is to think that we’ve made it. When we say, “Through this, we learned to pray,” it sounds like the learning has been completed. We’ve made it now and there is nothing more to do. But like most things that really matter, learning to pray is never completed. Through this we are learning to pray, and we can always go deeper as we continue to learn and grow and develop the courage to take the risks of fearful intimacy into which God is inviting us.

Sometimes though, an important part of continuing to grow is going back and revisiting the basics to review and refresh and remind ourselves. And so, since tonight’s gospel reading contains Jesus’ basic teachings on prayer, including the model prayer that we call “the Lord’s Prayer”, I want us to do just that — revisit this basic teaching and look especially at how it relates to the ways we pray here within the worship service. The timing of this coming up in the lectionary is rather fortunate for us, because in the home group that meets with our catechumens, Jessica and Rita, we are now beginning the studies on the Lord’s Prayer after recently completing the series on the church’s worship practices.

One incredibly important thing to note about the Lord’s Prayer is that it is “our prayer” addressed to “our Father”, not my individual prayer or your individual prayer. Listen to how different it sounds if I were to pray it as my personal prayer:

My Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give me each day my daily bread.
And forgive me my sins,
for I myself forgive everyone indebted to me.
And do not bring me to the time of trial.

It sounds a bit narcissistic doesn’t it? And a bit arrogant and presumptuous? Like I think I’m the centre of the universe and all God really cares about?

It is not my prayer. It is our prayer. It is the prayer given by Jesus to his Church, rather than to each individual, one at a time. That’s why when we use it in worship, we always pray it out loud in unison. Here, we sing it, in fact. Now this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use it unless you are praying with others in a gathered group. Certainly, you can use it when you are praying alone. But you still don’t pray “My Father, feed me, forgive me, deliver me,” do you? Because part of what the prayer is doing is reminding you that even if you are unable to gather with others at a particular time, the prayer that you offer is still offered as part of the church and “in unison” with the church. Sure, you can’t hear the other voices joining with you at that moment, but Christ’s church spans the globe and spans the centuries, and the Church’s prayer rises like incense before God without ceasing, and so all we are ever really doing is joining in. We don’t create prayer, or make it happen; we simply join in. We add our voices to the prayers of the Church that are rising in Christ every minute of every day from every corner of the planet.

Now I want us to think about this for a minute in relation to the way we handle the “Prayers of the People”, or the intercessory prayers for the Church and the world that we will be offering in a few minutes. As most of you are aware, it is just a little over a year ago that we changed the way we do this most weeks. With the exception of some weeks during the Christmas Season and during Lent, we changed from staying in one place on our knees and having various people leading us out loud in the prayers that came to their minds, to a form of stational prayers where we all randomly move around the room to various stations to offer prayers for different kinds of needs. Now I had some misgiving about this at first for precisely the reasons we have just been talking about. It seemed to me that this stational form was more individualistic. It seemed that we stopped being a united group for a few minutes and each went about our own individual praying before coming back together when we sang the Lord’s prayer. I still think that that’s a danger, but over time I’ve come to see that it needn’t be so.

If all I do during that prayer time is single-mindedly focus on adding my own prayers to the stations, or stay in my seat and offer my own prayers from there, then the danger of it becoming individualistic is heightened. It is not inevitable, but it becomes more likely. And when we first began this pattern, adding my own prayers to the stations was all I thought about. Perhaps it was the same for you. Perhaps not. But now what I have come to see is that this pattern perhaps offers even more opportunities for sharing our prayers than our old pattern of a few praying out loud while the rest of us added our amens. And of course, it was only a few, and in the time available, it could only ever be a few, and that was part of the problem. What we do now, allows a lot more people to initiate prayers which can therefore cover a lot more topics. And the opportunity that can make it thoroughly communal again is that we don’t have to, and I’d suggest shouldn’t, just focus on adding prayers ourselves. I can also walk over to one of the stations, stand back a few paces, and join in with the prayers that others have begun. I can stand over here at our “wall of injustice” and be prompted by what others have written in the “sky of freedom” beyond the bricks they have pulled down, and join my prayers with theirs and add my amen. Thus I might enter fruitfully into the prayer of the church at that wall without writing anything at all. I might still remove a brick as a way of symbolising my amen, or I might not even do that, but either way, what you have written prompts my prayer and it becomes our prayer and the prayer of the church.

Similarly, if I go over the windows where the healing prayer flags are hung for “those who are sick, hurting, fearful, despairing or grieving”, I might not have anyone immediately in mind, but I might see names that you’ve written and be reminded and so join in with your prayer. There’s no need to write the same name again, although there is nothing wrong with doing so. The one who writes the name initiates the prayer for those people, but we can all join in. And the same again under the gallery of saints over here. After this Sunday it will be a bit easier there, because there will be some new beams added under the existing one where you can easily add prayers. There will be laminated hand shapes on which you can write your prayers for “those who work for good with integrity and faithfulness” or you can bring pictures from home and pop them up there where they will attach with magnets, and then others can see or read them and add their amens as they move around to be led by the prayers of others. So the stations are not only for contributing your own prayers, but for being led into prayer by one another — for joining in to the prayer of the whole Church — and they actually offer greater opportunity than our old spoken prayers for more people to lead and for a greater range of situations to be brought to prayer.

Now given that I’ve spent the entire sermon so far on the first word of the Lord’s Prayer, you’re probably all desperately hoping that I’m not just getting started and am now ready to move onto word two in similar detail. Well, your prayers are answered! “Ask, and it will be given you … For everyone who asks receives!”

All I want to add is to point out that most, if not all of our worship service is prayer, not just the intercessions. And if we were to follow it through now, we could see that the themes in the model known as the Lord’s Prayer come through repeatedly. “Our Father in Heaven, your dominion come.” We invoke God and the dominion of God with the opening words of our liturgy each week. We hallow God’s name, or declare and praise the holiness of God’s name repeatedly at various points. Our gathering prayers after the first hymn express the yearning of all the earth for the coming of God’s dominion when God’s will will be done on earth as in heaven. That last phrase is not present in Luke’s version of the prayer, but its desire is implicit in the prayer for God’s kingdom to come. We pray for the provision of bread to the hungry in our gathering prayers, and in our intercessions and again as we break bread around the table. We pray for the forgiveness of our sins in our prayers of confession, as we offer forgiveness to those who have sinned against us in the sharing of the peace. We pray that we might be saved from trial and delivered from evil as we prepare to go out into the world to live out our prayer in our daily lives.

This is our prayer, the prayer of the Church, given to us by the Lord of the Church. This is the prayer we would live, and the life we would pray. To the glory of God. Amen.