The Prayer the Lord Taught Us

Text: Luke 11:1-13

Jesus was praying.

What was he saying? What was he thinking? He was praying in a certain place, it says. Did the place matter? Did he stand or kneel or sit in a special way? What did he do with his hands? His head?

The disciples want to know. Certainly no strangers to prayer, an important part of a faithful life in Palestine, yet they see or infer something in the way Jesus prays. Teach us to pray, Lord.

So Jesus recites to them what we now know as the Lord’s Prayer. It is not quite the same version we pray. There is another version in Matthew chapter 6 that is more like ours, a little longer, a little more familiar than Luke’s. And wordier.

This prayer is very old. And it is short. As concise as possible, essential, straightforward. Easy to remember, quick to say, suitable for all occasions. Martin Luther wrote that the Lord’s Prayer was one of the things all Christians should memorize and recite at least daily (he said that children “should be given neither food nor drink” until they do so). It is so familiar to us that we forget how odd it might have sounded.

First: Though people often say this prayer in private, it is a prayer prayed for all people together. Though we often mean it to be about each one of us, it is written in the plural—we, not I; give us, not give me. We thus speak it aloud whenever Christians assemble. It is a prayer for the people of God, yet adopted and implemented, so to speak, in the lives of individuals—you, me.

Second: The prayer is full of demands. This is not a shy prayer. The verbs are in the imperative. We are not begging God here. We are making a claim on God. Give us, forgive us.

The demands are simple and basic. This is a prayer about human need. To be fed, to be forgiven, to forgive others, to live a life without undue trials. (And also to know a holy presence and to hope for a godly world). There is nothing about a distant God out there or up there (at least not in this version), a god who is only vaguely interested in us. This is a prayer to God who knows what it is to be a person in the world.

Third: This God we can call father, parent. This does not imply by itself that God is good and compassionate—though that is so. It does imply a connection between God and us that is strong and direct. We are able to make these demands in this prayer because God, whom we can call our father, is as close to us as a parent would be. God is not some dispersed ethereal force, nor just a good idea, nor an inattentive creator. To open our address with “Father” indicates our own stance that the God to whom we pray will welcome our petitions as legitimate.

Our prayers are legitimate without condition. We do not have to adopt any special posture. We do not have to come to God in a special frame of mind. We do not need to be in a special spot. In the Lord’s Prayer, we do not have to thank or praise God or give fancy titles or add flattering adjectives to God’s name before we get down to business. This prayer is about us, not about God (except as we imagine God listening). God is not so insecure, Jesus seems to say, that we cannot just right off tell God what is on our mind, what we need.

That all works out because, Jesus explains, God desires to provide for us. Jesus tells us this by way of two stories. Both use a logic common in Jesus’ time: if something is true in the small it must be even more true in the large. An argument from lesser to greater.

A man approaches a friend. The time is inconvenient. The friend is annoyed. Give me some bread for my guest, the man says. Get lost, says the friend. Yet because of the man’s dogged persistence, the friend gives in. Jesus begins this story by saying in essence: Can you imagine such a thing? Can you imagine a friend, a friend, mine you, not some stranger, going against all the rules of hospitality, refusing to get up, no matter what a bother it is, and to not give the man some bread? And the words Jesus uses imply that the expected answer is: No! No way could that happen. It is a rhetorical question, a rhetorical story. If you cannot imagine one friend telling another to get lost, certainly God would not.

In the same manner, Jesus asks his disciples: which of you would give your child a snake if he or she asked for a fish, or a scorpion if asked for an egg? And in the same way, the expected answer is: No! None of us would. This is not a comment about the real behavior of some parents. The parent in the story is the disciple, the listener. “Which of you parents?” Nor does it imply that God gives us what we need, not what we want. The child is not denied what he or she asks for. As before, it is a rhetorical story of the same sort. If you who are just an ordinary person would not give poison when food is asked for, certainly God would not.

These verses are not about theology. They are not treatises about the existence of evil in the world. Or about whether prayer is effective. There will be other times for that. They are about praying. About how to pray. Teach us to pray, the disciples ask Jesus. This is a practical instruction, with illustrations.

We are sometimes tempted to edit our own prayers. We think that what we pray for is too outrageous. Too impossible. Too deviant. Too trivial. Or too grand. So we do not pray for those things. We censor our own prayers, thinking God does not wish to hear them, or that certainly God would never grant them, or even that perhaps God cannot grant them.

But Jesus is telling the disciples to pray for what they want. To pray their deepest desires. To pray their shallowest whims. The heroic things and the stupidest. To ask God. Just talk to God. Do not try to be God’s gatekeeper of worthy prayers. You wish to receive, to find, to have doors opened. Therefore ask, search, knock. That is our job. In prayer, our only job. Do not remain silent.

The Lord’s Prayer is a rude prayer. It does not equivocate. It is not vague around the edges. It is not sycophantic. It does not consider or inquire about God’s will. It is a human prayer about human desires. All that is needed to pray the Lord’s Prayer is that we acknowledge the depths of our own need and be willing to reveal them to God.

The man in the story with the sleepy friend, we heard, was persistent. But the better word for it is “shameless.”

Pray for what you really want. The impossible, the minor, the weird, the honorable. Pray shamelessly. Pray for what you want.