The Rev. Kenneth H. Saunders III
Trinity Church
Towson, MD
RCL Year C - 10 Pentecost (Proper 12) - July 28, 2013
When was it when you
first learned how to pray?… I can
remember one of the first prayers I ever learned… “Now I lay me, down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep… If I
should die, before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take…
God Bless (and then
I inserted everyone and everything from my next door neighbors to the cat)… Amen!” Now,
I bet those of you that were paying attention to the readings this morning thought
that I was going to tell you about the prayer that Jesus taught his followers… In
due time… in due time…
Like you probably
did, I learned the “Now I lay me” prayer at a very young age… I may not have totally understood what I was
doing, but I knew I was praying – and that something exists that is bigger than
I am, bigger than even my mom and dad, or
even bigger than my Pop – my grandfather (who was the biggest guy I knew at the
time).
This was my first
formational experience with prayer… You probably can remember your parents or
someone significant in your life teaching you how to pray in a very similar
way… The church teaches us
that prayer is “responding to God – with or without words”… So our prayers are our response to God and our
recognition of God and how God works in our lives…
I can remember, one
of the things that I learned many years ago in Sunday School about prayer… Some
of you probably remember being taught this too…
It’s called ACTS A – C – T – S… A
stands for Adoration (or love of God), C for Confession (or confessing to God –
and release from the guilt of sin), T for Thanksgiving (or giving thanks to
God), and S for Supplication (or prayers that we say on behalf of someone else). We would put these
letters on our fingers A C T S --- then the thumb was always pointing back at
me… Then I was supposed to remember to
pray for myself…
Today, we heard the
lesson, from the Gospel according to Luke, of Jesus teaching his followers to pray,
using what we have come to know as “The Lord’s Prayer.” One of them said “Lord,
teach us to pray…” Teach us to
pray!
They were reaching
out for a deeper understanding of what it meant to pray to God. They were asking Jesus, “Teach us that
connection that you have to God… teach
us how to respond to God, with or without words!” Jesus didn’t make them put letters on their
fingers, nor did he sit patiently on the edge of their bed and have them kneel
there night after night. He didn’t go
through all the resource books that he acquired in seminary and pull off the
one off the shelf called “Prayer for Dummies…” But very elegantly, like so many other things
Jesus did, took the opportunity to remind them that they already knew how to
respond to God… After all, most of his
followers were faithful Jews, and they had been praying to God since they could
talk.
But his disciples
recognized a special connection between Jesus and God and they wanted in on
that secret… They thought that he was
doing something different from what they had learned as children… So Jesus reminded them, “when you pray
say: Father, hallowed be your
name…”
Within one swoop,
Jesus converts a menagerie of thought and images about God and who they thought
God to be into a very simple language and direct statement… He calls God “Abba” or Father with a familiar
intimacy – teaching them that God is approachable, but yet remains set apart
from the ordinary (therefore holy or hallowed)… Jesus’ teaching continues…
Your kingdom come – Calling
for immediate order to the chaos here on earth this echoes Jesus’ announcement
throughout the Gospels for the coming of the kingdom of God. This statement implies an urgency for this
announcement, similar to the story we heard a couple of weeks ago where we
heard that WE are to proclaim to others that the kingdom of God has come near…
Give us or daily
bread – the vital necessities that we need to sustain our bodies… Bread back then, as it is today, is the
difference for some folks between living and starving to death. If we dig deeper into the original language of
the Greek text, the word doesn’t necessarily mean to “give,” (as a once for all)
but quite literally translated it means, to “keep on giving.” So this portion of the prayer in today’s
language could actually mean “continue sustaining us, providing for our daily
needs like you did for the Israelites in the wilderness, we fully rely on You –
Our GOD – to do that for us.” He goes
on…
Forgive us our sins
– Jesus knows that all human kind is sinful, and that we miss the mark from
time to time when living out our daily lives.
He reminds us to use our prayers to acknowledge our wrongfulness and ask
for relief from the burdens of sin that only God can give us
And do not bring us to the time of trial – ask
God to keep us out of the trouble of temptation and our own desires that bog us
down…
Jesus uses the
simple rhythm of what we know as “the Lord’s Prayer” to remind us how we should
pray. How to connect to God and how to
respond to God with or without words…
Many folks criticize
the Episcopal Church for the multitude of written prayers that we have in that little
red book in our pews, our Book of Common Prayer. Some of them say, you don’t know how to pray
– you have them all written down for you…
prayer needs to be spontaneous & extemporaneous…
I don’t know about
you, but when I am confronted with this, I say…
“The book is great! Sometimes I get so caught up in trying to express
myself with words that the true expression gets lost in the search for proper
articulation… I am very thankful that I
have learned and read some of the beautiful expressions of prayer that have
lasted over the centuries.”
But the only prayer
I really need is the one our savior Jesus has taught to remind his disciples, for
me it is the foundational reminder of how we are to respond to God with our
lives… Of how we relate to God and how
we depend on God for our needs, our forgiveness and direction”
Whether we learned
“the Lord’s Prayer” from our parents or from the church… We still say it every Sunday… It is foundational and takes the central
position in our liturgy… It is the
prayer that Jesus taught his disciples to help them remember how they should
respond to God…
I even know some
folks with dementia or a diminished mental capacity that
cannot remember how to form a simple sentence in a discussion. But, they still remember the Lord’s prayer… We respond to God
with or without words in prayer… and
when we use words, we don’t need a bunch of flowery ones to help us talk to Our
Father in heaven… It doesn’t matter what
denomination the Christian claims, most of us all know “the Lord’s prayer,” It may have not been
the first one that we learned, but for those that grew up in a Christian home, it
was taught to us at a very young age… And
we all know it very well… Pray it with
me…
Our Father, who art
in heaven, hallowed be thy name… Thy kingdom
come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven… Give us this day, our daily bread, and
forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and lead
us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil for thine is the kingdom and
the power, and the glory… For ever and ever…
Amen!
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