Praying Shamelessly

Text: Luke 11:1-13

This is not a cat-and-mouse, hide-and-seek game we're in.* So says Jesus in Luke, as he helps his disciples understand the prayer he just taught them. This is not a little formal dance we go through with God. Prayer is not a contrivance, some convoluted religious contraption designed to deliver effective requests to heaven. There is not a special way to pray. Just as there is no special way to have a conversation. There are some models for prayer, just as there are some models for conversation. But the models for prayer, just as the models for conversation, are starter kits, ice breakers, and forms of art.

A friend tells me he sits and talks “to the man upstairs.” Maybe that is how you think of prayer, too. It is a nice way to describe a relationship we might have with God. Respectful, direct, and expecting something. There is not need in our prayer to beat around the bush, to begin with elaborate preambles, to apologize ahead of time for bothering God, as we sometimes do. “If you have a moment, God.” God always has a moment. When we pray to the one upstairs, we can expect that God is listening, paying attention to what we have to say in our words and in our hearts, taking an active role in the conversation.

Master, teach us to pray, the disciples ask. The disciples have seen Jesus pray. He prays a lot in Luke. In the desert, at night, before he feeds a crowd, near his death. In Luke (and in Acts, the other book that Luke wrote), prayer is the first Christian practice. The community of the followers of Jesus is a community of people who pray.

Maybe “ask” is too weak a word for what the disciples do. They seem to have an urgent need to pray. Their request is immediate and demanding. Teach us to pray. We need to pray. They are not really wondering how to pray, in what way, what stance or attitude to assume (and if so, Jesus does not really tell them). They need to pray. Jesus gives them a prayer.

They are direct. Jesus is direct. When you pray, say this. And what they are to say, talking to the one upstairs, is direct.

This foundation in Luke to the Lord’s Prayer is short and straightforward. So is the similar one in Matthew. You may find the words from our usual Bible more familiar than the ones we read this morning:

“Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

The prayer starts with a short salutation, a sort of respectful: “hello, how are you?” It identifies the person to whom we are speaking. We call that person “father.” I’ll talk some more about that at the end. Partly, this salutation is just polite. When you speak to someone, you get their attention first. Partly it clears up in our minds that person to whom this prayer is addressed. Not some vague deity, but the particular creator of the universe. A personality, so to speak. God, even if not the gray-haired old man in a white robe, is an entity, a person with whom we can talk. Who has a name. The one upstairs. God, I’m talking to you. It reminds both of us.

But God is more than a person. God is special somehow. Holy, formally meaning set apart. But more to the point, uncorrupted by the ways and things of the world. God is not just like a human, only more so, only bigger, longer lived, and more powerful. But God is actively interested in humans, not just cosmic, essential, and life-giving. God up there, but not just up there.

After this introduction, the prayer goes immediately into four petitions, four things we need. These sentences are demanding, pushy even, abrupt. Four imperatives: lead us, feed us, forgive us, save us. There is no begging, no “please,” no argument. There is no qualification, no “if it be your will.” (That part goes without saying. It is not our job to give God permission. And besides, Jesus seems to be telling us that it will be God’s will anyway.)

God the creator wishes to provide for creation. We get confused: we ask God to lead us rightly. We get hungry, we are dependent: we ask God to feed us every day. We do bad and stupid things: we ask God to let us off the hook. We live in a scary and demanding world: we ask God to protect us from evil circumstances. We are human. We get physically, mentally, and emotionally troubled. Jesus says to pray: God, you are God. We could use some help down here.

There are other kinds of prayer. Thanksgiving, for example, or praise. But this one, the prayer Jesus teaches his disciples, is a prayer for help. We are taught by Jesus to pray for what we want. Not to pray for something we think God wants, not to pray for polite things only, but things we actually want. Things that matter to us in the moment. I’m starving, please feed me. I’m confused, please show me what to do next. I feel like an idiot, please forgive me. I’m scared, please keep me safe.

Later, Jesus tells a story about an inhospitable friend. This story is an elaboration of the prayer he just taught his disciples. It is kind of a case study. One of the points of the story is that we can be persistent in prayer. That we can bother God about what we want. That it is OK.

A better word, though, than persistent, is shameless. We can pray and pray and pray shamelessly. We can ask for whatever we want shamelessly. This is the kind of God we pray to. In the first reading, Abraham negotiates with God to save Sodom. Abraham presents his argument, God agrees. Abraham presses his point, God gives ground. Abraham pushes beyond all civility. God relents. Abraham is shameless. He is not ashamed to speak to God this way, he is not ashamed to pray for the city, he is not ashamed to ask for more. Abraham knows his God. God expects shameless prayer.

The disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray. What Jesus teaches them, though, is what God is like. What kind of God they pray to. God is like this: God encourages prayer. God enjoys a good argument. God listens to people. God is interested in the day to day. You don’t have to do anything special to pray to God. God is, we might say, interactive.

“Here’s what I’m saying,” the reading says. I’m saying that though there are fathers who might torment their children, that’s not like God. Though there are fathers whom you have to approach cautiously, that’s not like God. Though there are fathers from whom you can ask only certain things, that’s not like God. God is like a father whom you can approach without fear, with words uncensored and raw, from whom you can demand much, and from whom you can expect much.

Not everybody thinks that God is like that. But Christians are a group of people who do. It is significant that in this prayer the people all pray together. Give us, forgive us, deliver us.

When we say this prayer in worship here, we acknowledge that we do so confidently and that we do in solidarity with the whole family of the followers of Jesus in every time and place. This prayer does more than give us words to recite. It defines what God is for us and what God is like for us. And it defines us. We are the ones who pray this way. It is what Jesus taught us to do.

*Reading today from The Message version of the Bible.

Distracted from Justice

Text: Luke 10:38-42
Other texts: Amos 8:4-7

All of us get distracted from time to time. It is our human nature. People are designed to focus intently on one thing, but still let other things grab their attention. That mixture of single-mindedness and sensitivity to events is what makes us able to do complicated human things like drive a car or run a company or be a parent.

Martha is distracted. The narrator and Jesus both say it. She succumbs to distraction, a word that means to draw away from. It is as if she cannot help herself, as if there were two forces working on her: her love for Jesus and her desire to be with him; and her love for Jesus and her desire to feed and care for him, to offer him hospitality. Both Mary and Martha are distracted: pulled one way or the other, succumbing to one or the other love. Martha is distracted in a way that seems obvious, but Mary is distracted, too, called away from serving Jesus by her longing to be with him in this very moment.

The comment Jesus makes to Martha is often interpreted as judging her. Making a judgment about her choices (as, we sometimes, judge her character). But there is no judgment here. Jesus, is not telling Martha (or Mary, either) what to do. He is merely telling them what they are doing. Jesus’ comments, as they often are, are descriptive, not proscriptive.

This means that the purpose of this passage is not to place Mary and Martha in opposition to each other. The situation in the story is particular. Jesus was a friend of the household (at least we think so from John’s gospel, and it seems so here, too). In this story, it is Mary who has chosen the better part. But you can imagine that there were other times when the three friends met, and that in some of those times Martha chooses the better part, whatever that happens to be.

It also means that Jesus is not making a general comment about how one should live one’s life. This is not about how the contemplative life is better than a life of action, or a life of learning is better than a life of industry, or that a life of devotion is better than a life of service. Jesus is not saying that we should all be more mindful (though that might be a good idea). Jesus, at least here, is not saying we should be anything at all. There is no “should” in this passage.

What happens in the story is that Martha approaches Jesus and demands that he do something about her sister Mary. This is extremely odd. Martha and Mary are hosts. It was not good form then—and is not good form today—for the hosts to ask a guest to get involved with conflicts among them. It is a sort of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” moment. That Martha does pester Jesus is significant.

What does Martha want? Does she want Jesus to boss Mary around: tell Mary to get in there in the kitchen with her sister? Not likely. Does she want Mary to stand up and leave Jesus alone in the living room? Not likely that, either. If she were the king of the world, what would she have happen?

What Martha wants is justice. She sees injustice in the situation. She pesters Jesus because Jesus is a person of justice. Not that Jesus is just, though that may be so, but that justice flows from Jesus. The provider of justice, in the world of Mary and Martha, is God. Mary turns to Jesus not because he is her friend, and in spite of the fact that he is her guest at the moment, but because she recognizes and appeals to the divine in Jesus.

The prophet Amos, who provided us with today’s first reading, is known for his defense and definition of justice. It is in Amos that God calls on the world: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” And today, he gives examples of injustice. Cheating the poor (giving them smaller containers and charging them more); taking advantage of the fact that they need food so desperately that the merchants can sell them grain cut with the sweepings; making them slaves and servants and indentured employees because they have so little. You trample on the needy and bring ruin to the poor, the prophet says.

Justice is not making everything the same. It is not an even allocation of resources. And it is not giving everyone the same chance. Some people need more help than others. Some people can do more with what they are given. A just distribution of food is not one in which everyone gets the same bag of groceries. It is one in which no one goes hungry. Equality and fairness are not the same as justice. In a just system, even if all do not have the same, no one goes wanting. If some do, even if all have the same, the system is unjust.

And justice is not the same as revenge or redress. A just system is not one that counters one evil with another. Two wrongs don’t make a right, children rightly say. Justice is not served when one pain is inflicted to compensate another. The balance scales we use to symbolize justice are there to remind us that a thumb on the scale is injustice. They do not encourage us in retribution to harm others who harm us.

To whom do we turn to see justice done? If to ourselves, the goal is to balance sorrow against sorrow. Doing justice is to make sure that all suffer equally. Justice is done if you pay for your crime. Justice is done when your hurt matches mine.

But if we turn to God’s way of justice, the goal is to heal the hurt. To restore what is broken. The goal of justice is in the end to restore humanity to Eden. Justice is done when none suffer and all have plenty.

The deeds listed by Amos directly cause suffering and deprivation. The prophet is rightly angered by the merchants and wants them punished, but justice will be restored only when the people have food and strength and peace.

When we think about what we do, as individuals and in groups, and if we hear God’s call to be just, then we have to ask: does this hurt or heal? Does this heal or does this hurt? Does this bring us closer to Eden or extend our exile from it?

This is not easy. It seems complicated. And we are easily distracted by ourselves and our own hurts. Jesus, can’t you do something about Mary? Don’t you care about me? It is not fair. Like Mary and Martha, we are pulled away from God by our concerns.

It is not easy because doing justice is not a political activity. We do not do justice because it is better practically, though I’d say it is. We do justice because we belong to God. Doing justice is an expression of faith. It comes from our faith. Justice is not an act of expediency but an act of devotion. We try to act justly—that is, to heal people—because we love God. We work to act justly because God tells us to. And because we are God’s, we listen.

Hard News

Text: Luke 10:25-37

Purity rules, like taboos, exist for two reasons: for identity and for safety. People who obey the same cultural rules and agree on what is nice and what is disgusting are my people. My people are the ones who obey the law. The law they obey is the one that they established. Other people obey other laws. Those people are not my people. Their rules seem foolish or evil, sometimes.

We, my people, all obey the same rules because they separate the world into two kinds of things: Things that I know are safe and things that are maybe not safe. Things that we do or avoid because the law demands it are safe. Other things might or might not be safe. The point is: I don’t know. I don’t know if they are. Therefore I avoid them, for good reason.

The same thing applies to people as to things. People who are not my people might not be safe. They might be, but I don’t know. I do know, or suspect, they don’t follow the same, safety-proven, rules. People who are my people I call neighbors. People who are not my people I call aliens. Or foreigners. People who have foreign—different—rules. They are not exotic and desirable. They are potentially unsafe and scary.

Purity rules—sometimes called holiness codes—are therefore less an issue for a dominant, powerful, ruling culture. Such a culture is less fearful. An oppressed, weak, occupied culture is, rightly, more fearful. When something bad happens to a powerful culture—9/11, financial weakness, inability to control nature and nations—that culture too begins to wonder: who is the alien and who is my neighbor.

The man who approaches Jesus, who is described as a lawyer in our Bible, might be called a rule expert. The Bible makes him sound a little like a jerk. But if on the one hand we give him the benefit of the doubt, he has a legitimate concern. He wants to know who is safe, in the way I’ve been talking about. He knows that the rules say that everyone should love their neighbor (it is in Leviticus, chapter 18). Loving a neighbor is safe. But it sounds safer if there are fewer neighbors. And besides, it is less of a nuisance. So, Jesus, what does God have to say about this?

If on the other hand we don’t give the benefit of the doubt to the lawyer, then we might say he is trying to get Jesus to tell him how far he might go. He does not want to know so much whom he should love. He wants to know whom he does not need to love. Whom can he exploit, or ignore, or be excused from being kind to? In that way he is like a child who wants to know the exact letter of the law so that he can find a way to do what he wants without violating it. What he can get away with. Who exactly is it that I don’t have to love?

Jesus, being kind of a lawyer himself, and wily in the ways of argument, instead of answering tells a story.

There is a man by the side of the road, beaten and left for dead. Two guys walk by, see the man, and do nothing. The third man does something. That is the first point of the story. What God asks seems, in light of the story, to have nothing to do with what you think or believe or profess. It has to do with what you do. This story is about doing. What shall I do, asks the lawyer at the beginning. Do this, says Jesus. Go and do likewise. The two men who pass by don’t do anything bad. Their fault is that they don’t do anything at all. The man who does help sees the injured man, is moved with compassion, and goes to him.

If that were the whole story, it would be a moral tale, but kind of boring. Being nice is better than not. What makes it interesting is that the two men who do nothing are neighbors of the injured man. At least by the definition we are using. He is their people and they are his. But the other guy, the one who helps, is a Samaritan.

What is important to know here is that the Samaritans and the Jews—that’s who the others were—Samaritans and the Jews were really enemies. They hated and feared each other. They burned each other’s buildings. It was not safe for a Samaritan to walk in Judea or the other way around. This was not like Minnesotans and North Dakotans. Not a friendly rivalry. If you asked either one who was their neighbor, you’d get an answer like: Anybody but him. So the story that Jesus tells is very shocking. It is hard to imagine what the other Samaritans would have thought of the Good Samaritan, who was by their lights not good at all, if they had known.

For he cared for an enemy. And really cared for, spending about $400 equivalent on a hotel room, with promises of more. Aiding and abetting.

Who is your neighbor? I mean, actually. That person who lives next door or down the street. In our world, and especially in the city, neighbors are people who are close geographically. They live near each other. Saying that someone is your next-door neighbor conveys real information. People can imagine it. Your neighborhood is a special place. But neighbors also tend to be alike in ways that a random assortment of people might not be. They might be alike in income, or lack of it, or education, or whether they have children, or how much they can spend on housing. Brattle Street is not the same neighborhood as East Cambridge. So in some sense every neighborhood is an exclusive one. When people come into the neighborhood from outside the neighborhood, people can tell and are suspicious. Even modern neighborhoods in a diverse city have a sense of identity and safety.

Neighborliness can trump culture. There was a story in the paper last week about a neighborhood that was originally made up of Italian immigrants. But gradually people from Mexico moved in. This particular neighborhood was in New York; the same thing is happening in East Boston. But living side by side did not overcome people’s fear. The Italians and the Mexican were not each other’s people. They did not feel safe with one another. But during the World Cup four years ago, the Mexican team was defeated in an early round. When the Italian team won, the Mexican neighbors ran down the streets waving Italian flags, shouting “We won! We won!”

This is a happy story. But the point of Jesus’ story is that neighborliness is not sufficient. Shared values, even ones acquired by proximity, interest, and affection over time as with the Italians and Mexicans, are not the answer to the lawyer’s question. Who is your neighbor goes beyond the neighborhood.

Who was the neighbor, Jesus asks the lawyer. The one who showed mercy, the lawyer says. Scholars complain that the lawyer hates the Samaritans so much that he can’t even say the name. That may be so, but it seems to me that lawyer has found the general conclusion in the particular story. Neighbors are people who show kindness to each other, and who accept kindness from each other. If the lawyer wants to know whom he can pass by, this is bad news. Because if he is to follow this great commandment, the answer is that he can pass by no one. And that he must be kind to everyone. This is the second point of Jesus’ story.

This is not easy. It is much easier to know right from wrong, which in itself is not so easy. But knowing what is right and wrong has a lot to do with the codes and laws that we talked about.

Being kind does not. Doing kindness does not. For the men who passed by the man who was robbed and beaten, somehow their definition of what was good did not compel them to love another person as they loved themselves.

Do not do what those men did, says Jesus to the lawyer. You cannot pass by. Be kind to all people, even those who are not your people. Go, do as the story says.

This is not easy. The world is not safe. If we want safe, that’s OK, but that’s not a value that we’ll find in the Gospel, not something that we’ll find in the words of Jesus. Not a Christian value.

Perhaps the man should have asked: Who is my God? We are commanded by God to love our neighbors as ourselves, and we are taught by Jesus that that means everybody. If our God is the God of the Bible, and if we believe both our God and believe Jesus, we are in trouble. There is no one to whom we can deny kindness.

And if everybody is our neighbor, who can be our enemy? And if everybody is our neighbor, who will be the alien? And if everybody is our neighbor, who is the foreigner?

Expecting Christian Virtues

Text: Luke 10:1-11, 16-20

Scripture only. Sola scriptura as Martin Luther put it in Latin, his motto for the authority on which Christians should base their faith. Our authoritative guide is the Bible, not the church or preachers or talk show hosts. In Luther’s day this freed people from the onerous power of the church. In our day, it gives Christians common ground for a faithful life.

A difficulty with “scripture only” is that the meaning of scripture is not self-evident. It is not as plain as the nose on your face. It is not as simple as pie. If you doubt that, come join the people who are now reading Acts after coffee hour or who just read the book of Job. The meaning of the Bible, like the meaning of any book, comes from a meeting of the words on the page with the feelings of your heart and the circumstances of the day. A match made, Luther would say, by the Holy Spirit. What makes the Bible so great is that is has proven to be a reliable place for such rich encounters.

I once worked with a guy named Joe Paul. We would sit in these long strategy meetings discussing some issue or problem, where everyone felt compelled to offer an opinion or a critique. Finally, Joe would speak up. He would always ask: “What does this mean for me, Joe Paul?” That is the question that scripture makes us ask. Having read about the disciples being sent out two by two, now what? What do I do with this? What does it mean for me, Joe Paul?

One way to think about this is to put yourself into the story. To imagine yourself being one of the characters. To sit where the disciples sit, to feel the air around them, and the dust on the road, the heat of the sun. Or to imagine what it would be like to hear a knock on the door from a stranger asking for food and shelter. To imagine what it would be like to be turned away. To heal someone as the disciples do. To come back to Jesus all excited.

And when you do that, to think: is this the person I am? Or could be? Or is called to be? Is this the action I am supposed to take now, or soon? If I were the only reader of this story in the whole world, and if the only purpose of the story were to tell me something, what would that something be?

You can, when you do this, even imagine yourself to be God or Jesus. It might be helpful, for example, to imagine how Jesus felt recruiting those seventy new disciples. How he dealt with the complaints, maybe, of the original twelve, or whether he looked at these agents of his with affection, amusement, or apprehension. In doing so, you might discover God’s expectations for those Jesus calls. I say this just so you don’t feel shy about imagining yourself as Jesus from time to time.

But today I’d like to think only about the thirty-five pairs of disciples, and about the people they meet, and about the people who observe from the sidelines. These three groups illustrate three Christian virtues, and are therefore likely candidates for models of action for us. Us as individuals and also us as a church and us as a nation. The virtues are humility, hospitality, and forbearance.

The disciples are recruited, commissioned, sent, and instructed directly by Jesus. There are seventy of them, which is a special Biblical number than usually means “everybody.” Not that they are everybody, but they are sent out to everybody.

Their situation seems to be a little iffy. They are sent as lambs among wolves, they are to leave their wallets and backpacks at home, they do not know whether they are going to be welcomed or not (they suspect not). They are to accept whatever they find, eating whatever is put in front of them. Which, as they are Jews, is a big deal.

These people are healers and preachers. They are given power (“in your name, Lord, even the demons submit,” they say when they return). But the power is not for their benefit but for those they serve. (Jesus tells them not to take joy in their power.) If we want to talk about this in terms of salvation (the word means healing), it is not the disciples who are saved but the people they meet.

The verbs that Jesus uses to instruct them—these imperative, directing verbs—are verbs of sending and verbs of accepting. Go, go out, enter, live with. Eat, speak, carry nothing. Chat with no one. This is not about the disciples. The disciples have no face. Self-effacing. They do not choose where to go, but go only where Jesus himself intends to go. They themselves are not the way. They go to prepare the way.

The disciples are models of humility. They are totally dependent on God and other people. They have shed themselves of all things that most of us depend on. Possessions, self-esteem, plans and preparation and self-purpose. They allow themselves to be vulnerable as most of us cannot. They have a freedom that most of us do not.

The people in the houses to which the disciples come welcome them. (Some do not, but never mind them, the passage says.) A stranger comes to their door. They hear a greeting. Peace to this house. Some of them are called “sons of peace”—a phrase that means more than “share the peace” as our Bible version calls it. These are people who are devoted to peace, to a life of peace. The children of peace are those who desire Godly contentment more than anything else. This is the peace that is the center of spiritual well-being, what we might now days call centering peace.

The children of peace welcome the disciples. They welcome these strange and foreign couples. They feed the disciples and give them shelter. They listen to them tell their stories of Jesus and the kingdom of God.

The children of peace are models of hospitality. There is no way to know whether they find the disciples strange and fearsome. No way to know whether these households are wealthy or poor, crowded or spacious. The people welcome the disciples because they are committed to welcoming those who come to their doors in peace.

There are others in the town, unmentioned in the Gospel and therefore about whom we can only speculate, which is often a bad idea when it comes to scripture. But maybe, when we think of ourselves in this story, we are not as humble as the disciples nor as hospitable as the children of peace. Maybe we, as the townspeople must do, watch these encounters between the disciples and their adoptive hosts with wonder.

I’m interested in these unnamed invisible people because that is who many are. People who watch Christians being humble in an age that mostly values arrogance, self-sufficiency, anger, and stuff. And who watch Christians being hospitable in an age that mostly values safety, caution, boundaries, and giving in to fears of strangers.

Some who see this perhaps wonder: what is it about Christ that lets people be vulnerable and generous? These wondering people are the people who make up the plentiful harvest. They combine a skepticism of doctrine and talk with a liberal willingness to be convinced by deed and action. They are models of forbearance, which is a kind of charitable open-mindedness. And which is the twin of forgiveness.

Three Christian virtues: humility, hospitality, and forbearance. Jesus teaches us that these are good and that they are essential to the kingdom of God. Together they make up a kind of three-dimensional grid on which Christian lives might be plotted. More in each direction is better. It is what we hope for. I think. Or perhaps they are like the gifts of the Spirit that the apostle Paul talks about so often. That some individuals might be better at one of these than the others. As long as we don’t take such comfort in the virtues that we ourselves possess that we feel safe to ignore the others. Being hospitable does not mean we can be prideful and greedy.

But of our institutions—the church in particular, and I would say the state too—of our institutions we can expect more. We are right to have Christian expectations of the institutions in which we participate and which purport to represent us. If we believe what Jesus taught—which in part is that the kingdom of God is characterized by humility, hospitality, and forbearance—we can hope that those should be the goals of our world.

The Gospels give us the instructions of Jesus in his teachings, sermons, prayers, and actions. In our quest for the good life and for a peaceful world, we have many guides. And if scripture is our guide, we can judge our actions as individuals and in groups by the criteria that Jesus gives us. When we think, what does this mean for me, Joe Paul, we can think: is this what Jesus taught us?