Sermons

“Praying with Jesus – An ‘Our’ Prayer”

Luke 4:1-13; Luke 11:1-4 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – February 14, 2016

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that we might grow closer to your Christ and follow in his way. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

And so Lent has begun. For those of you who haven’t been here during this season before or in case you need a little reminding, let me take a minute to talk about Lent here at Vista La Mesa. First of all, what is it? The liturgical season of Lent takes its pattern from the forty days Jesus spent in the wilderness, prior to beginning his public ministry, which we read about this morning from Luke 4. Lent is also forty days, if you don’t count the Sundays (which is kind of a tricky way to count, but there you go). You could also sort of roughly say it’s the six weeks before Easter. And the before Easter part is the most important.

Like Advent, when we also use the liturgical purple, Lent is a season of preparation. But rather than getting ready for the Baby Jesus, we are preparing to welcome the Risen Christ. Thus Lent is a time for examining ourselves and making sure our hearts are ready to do that. We don’t want to have unresolved conflicts or lingering unconfessed sins blocking us from whole-heartedly celebrating the Resurrection. So we make our worship a little more solemn on these six Sundays, by removing that joyful word we buried in the garden on Ash Wednesday and giving more attention to prayer and confession of sin.

Many of you may associate Lent with Catholics eating fish, or to be more specific, Catholics eating fish because they’ve given up meat for these six weeks. That is not really what is going on here. As it turns out, you don’t have to be Catholic to observe Lent. Many traditions do Lent, including many freer church traditions like ours that began to embrace the season about 30 years ago. The nice thing about doing Lent as Disciples is that, like with all liturgical traditions, we have the liberty to use what is helpful and ignore the stuff that isn’t. You may decide to give something up for Lent, or as many people do these days, take something on, but I’m not going to tell you that you’re going to hell for eating chocolate or having a cheeseburger on a Friday. We are offering a Lenten devotional booklet this year, which is a nice way to start a new habit of daily prayer and reflection, but there isn’t going to be a quiz on it. I will suggest to you that this is a good time to do what you can to reconcile the broken relationships in your life and to take a look at whether your life matches your convictions or not, but I’m not going to make you do that. As Disciples, our responsibility for our faith journey is our own. Neither your pastor nor your elder can do that for you. We do it together, but only as much as each of us participates.

And that right there brings us to our theme for Lent this year. We will be focusing on prayer, primarily as presented in the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, which we have come to call the Lord’s Prayer. There is a lot to learn from Jesus about prayer. I strongly encourage you to attend Michael’s Bible study, if you aren’t already, because they are going to be looking more broadly at prayer in the Bible and many of the stories about Jesus praying. There is a lot to work with. Here in worship, I will be preaching about just a few of the lessons we can learn from the Lord’s Prayer, but we will also be experiencing the Lord’s Prayer differently than usual. Each week, we will use a different version of it, either simply spoken with different words or a musical version. It is amazing the life this prayer has taken on, beyond the scripture passage we heard today and its counterpart from Matthew, which we will look at in a few weeks. Every culture has made this prayer its own, as illustrated by this artistic calligraphy rendering of the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic. It is simultaneously one of the most varied but also the most unifying things within Christianity.

I want to tell you a short story about this prayer, from early in my ministry. There was a somewhat unfortunate man in my first church named Larry Swindal. Larry had sustained fairly major brain damage from a gun accident. Most of the years I knew him, he was confined to a wheelchair, and he had to have caregivers helping him out 24/7. He was in the hospital and nursing homes frequently, as is common with folks who more or less bedridden. One time when I had gone to see Larry in a nursing home, as we were nearing the end of the visit, I asked if he’d like to pray now. Now you need to know that a visit with Larry was always a little difficult because he couldn’t speak clearly and it was never all that obvious how much he was following a conversation. But before I could even say “Dear God,” Larry had launched into the Lord’s Prayer all on his own. He may not have enunciated every word, but it was obvious what he was doing. What was there to do but join him in prayer? What a joyful lesson, to realize that underneath all the confusion of Larry’s brain and the difficulties he had speaking, there was still a direct line to prayer, this prayer we share, that so many of us learned from such an early age we don’t even remember not knowing it.

It’s an important prayer. It binds us together and connects us to our faith in ways we may not even realize. But when we say it the same way every single Sunday, we risk having it become just words. So this year, during Lent, we’re going to look a little more closely, in hopes of renewing our appreciation for those words and finding deeper meaning to them that we can carry into Easter and beyond.

So! What is our lesson for today? We’re going to start with the very first word. Starting with the first word does not mean it’s most important. We’re actually going to do the most important words last, on Palm Sunday. In fact, the first word that we’re starting with isn’t even in Luke’s version of the prayer. But it is in Matthew, and it is in the version of the prayer we say together on a normal Sunday. We’re going to start with “Our”. Right there, from the very opening word, we’re given a hint about a subtle but vital truth. This is not a prayer that allows us to think we are praying alone. In fact, the prayer helps us remember that we aren’t alone, on multiple levels. There are a lot of first person plural pronouns used in this prayer – that is, we, us, our. It is unequivocally a prayer for praying together. This has to mean something.

Many of the stories in the gospels about Jesus praying have him going off on his own to a mountaintop or some other remote location to do it. And yet, when the disciples ask him to teach them to pray, the prayer he gives them very clearly demands to be prayed in community. He does have a lot of other advice about prayer, some of which suggests individual practice, but this right here? It’s a prayer we pray together.

What is interesting is how much we have managed to ignore this truth in the practice of Christian piety. If you take a look, just as an example, at the hymns about prayer in our hymnal – just the section labeled that way, from numbers 569-599 – there are over twice as many songs there that use the words I-me-my than there are hymns sung from the perspective of we-us-our. What does that mean? Are we sure we’re doing this right? Certainly prayer is something we can do on our own, something we should do on our own. But not only on our own. For whatever reason (and there are no doubt many), our culture has tended to focus on Christian faith as an individualized experience, quite possibly to the diminishment of the importance of praying together. Even if we sing one of those I-me-my hymns together as a congregation, the emphasis still lands on our individual experience, which we may or may not ever share with our neighbor.

But the Lord’s Prayer calls us back from that isolation. It reminds us again and again that Jesus sees us as a We. It insists that we are a family, all children of one heavenly father. It reminds us that we all have physical needs that must be met every day, that we all need forgiveness and help with offering forgiveness, that we are all vulnerable and tempted to do wrong. Jesus sees us as a We, and so it probably would make sense for us to view ourselves as a We also. And that makes a difference. It tells us something about how we are supposed to relate to one another and to God.

Praying for our daily bread is simply not the same thing as praying for my daily bread. If I recognize that daily bread is a need of ours and not just mine, it means that I am claiming responsibility for sharing the resources God gives with all who are in need. If I recognize that God wants everyone to have what they need to get through the day and not just me, it means that I must accept that I am my brother’s and my sister’s keeper, and they are mine. It means that inasmuch as I claim to be a child of God, I must also embrace my fellow humans as my brothers and sisters.

Far too often, North American Christianity has narrowed its focus to “Jesus & Me”. Those hymns in our hymnal are a symptom of that. But that is only one tiny part of the story. Jesus sees us as a We. To seek forgiveness as an individual lets us off the hook far too easily. Sure, maybe you were cranky to your family, and maybe you took an extra box of paper clips home from the office because you were out. But it’s not that hard to feel like God has forgiven you; God knows you’re only human, after all.

But if we seek forgiveness as a We, it means we’re accepting the responsibility God gave us at our baptism to work for a world that better reflects God’s vision of shalom. It means that we’re called into ministry on the problems that are no one person’s fault, the systems of oppression that are so intricately woven into the fabric of our life that we find them hard to even identify. We are not responsible for saving the world, but if we believe Jesus when he calls us a We, we can only respond with lives that reflect a deep awareness of our connection with our fellow humanity and their preciousness in God’s eyes.

If we believe Jesus when he calls us a We, then we cannot look at the evils of the world and externalize them, blaming those other people, those other cultures, those other religions. The prayer of Jesus reminds us that We are led into temptation, that We are in need of deliverance from evil, from without and within. We have just as much need for repentance as anyone, and so we plead for it together.

And the truth is, this isn’t just about our cosmic, spiritual reality. It’s also about our humanity. Have you ever heard of a prayer partner? Have you ever had a prayer partner? There’s a reason we do that. It’s because the accountability of that relationship makes us much more likely to pray, which means much more likely to remember to turn to God, which means much more likely to stop assuming we should be able to solve all our problems ourselves and do things however we like best. Jesus calls us a We because we’re better at following him if we do it together.

Lent is often a time when people will take on an individual discipline, like giving up soda or swearing or committing to pray daily or give away unnecessary clothes. But quite possibly the most important part of the Lent is the part that doesn’t even officially count – the Sundays. Because that is when we get together and together practice the disciplines of reconciliation and confession and prayer. It is together that we are able to make the journey through the wilderness that is the shadowy corners of our hearts and our unrequited desires and our unconfessed sins. It is together that we are able to prepare for the Risen Christ to return in our lives. Let us give thanks that Jesus will not let us forget that we are a We. Amen.