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Two weeks ago the expert in the law asked Jesus what he must do to inherit eternal life, and Jesus told the story of the Samaritan who showed mercy to the man who had been beaten and left half dead by the side of the road. And Jesus said to the lawyer, "Go and do likewise, and you will live." This morning the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray, and once again Jesus gives them something to do, something to do "likewise." "When you pray," he said, "pray like this: 'Our Father, forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.'" Prayer is not easy for us, I think, because prayer, in its essence, is not words, but deed. Prayer, as Jesus teaches it, hits us where we live. Recently many have been praying for rain, and we've discovered this month that when we pray for what we need, not just what we want, God gives it to us. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Vietnamese Buddhist monk, reminds us of what Jesus has to teach us about the relationship between prayer and life. "People pray to God," he says, "because they want God to fulfill some of their needs. If they want to have a picnic, they may ask God for a clear, sunny day. At the same time, farmers who need more rain might pray for the opposite. If the weather is clear, the picnickers may say, 'God is on our side; he answered our prayers.' But if it rains, the farmers will say that God heard their prayers. This is the way we usually pray. "In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught, 'Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God.' Those who work [or pray] for peace must have a peaceful heart. When you have a peaceful heart, you are the child of God. But many who work [and pray] for peace are not [themselves] at peace. They still have anger and frustration, and their work is not really peaceful.... "To preserve peace, our hearts must be at peace with the world, with our brothers and our sisters. When we try to overcome evil with evil, we are not working for peace. If you say, 'Saddam Hussein is evil; we have to prevent him from continuing to be evil,' and if you then use the same means he has been using, you are exactly like him. Trying to overcome evil with evil is not the way to make peace. [Nor is it the way to peace taught by Jesus.] "When you pray only for your own picnic and not for the farmers who need the rain, you are doing the opposite of what Jesus taught. Jesus said, 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you.' When we look deeply into our anger, we see that the person we call our enemy is also suffering. As soon as we see that, we have the capacity of accepting and having compassion for him. Jesus called this 'loving your enemy.' When we are able to love our enemy, he or she is no longer our enemy. The idea of 'enemy' vanishes and is replaced by the notion of someone suffering a great deal who needs our compassion. Loving others is sometimes easier than we might think, but we need to practice it. If we read the Bible but don't practice it, it will not help much." Tony Campolo tells a similar story. He tells about the time he was invited to speak at a women's group in a church in Philadelphia. The group had a relationship with a poor congregation in a third-world country, for whom the Philadelphia Christians regularly prayed. Their sister congregation needed a new roof, because the roof of their old church was decaying, and the Philadelphia women had decided to help their sister congregation replace their roof. The roof would cost two or three thousand dollars, and one of the women asked Campolo if he would pray for God's blessing on the project and ask God if he would send the necessary money their way to complete the project. And Campolo said, "No, I won't. You already have the resources to complete this missionary project right here in this room. It would be wrong, presumptuous, to ask God to do it for you when you can do it yourselves with the abundance God has already blessed you with. What I will do," Campolo added, taking out his wallet and placing some money on the table, "is make my own contribution toward the new roof; and after you take an offering and raise the money to replace the roof yourselves, I will lead us in prayer, thanking God for freeing us to be the generous and responsible stewards that we are called to be as his disciples." The people in that church in Philadelphia were not desperate; they had pocketbooks, most of them fat ones. God had already given them the resources they needed to answer their own prayer; they already had the resources to do what they asked Campolo to pray for. When you pray, says Jesus, start this way: "Our Father,...." "This will remind you," says Jesus, "that we are all in this together. It will remind you that we are all in relationship with each other as brothers and sisters, responsible for one another, and that everything else about prayer flows from this." Have you noticed that in the short prayer Jesus teaches us - only thirty-eight short words in the Greek - Jesus has taught us the way to answer the prayer ourselves: "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us." It's the one petition in the prayer that we ourselves have direct control of, and it's the key to all the other petitions as well. Ask that God will do unto you as you do unto others, Jesus says; ask that God will forgive your trespasses in the same way that you forgive those who trespass against you. Kierkegaard once said about his native Denmark: "There is no lack of information [about the Gospel] in a Christian land; something else is missing." Similarly, there is no lack of words for prayer in a Christian land; something else is missing. We may have difficulty praying because we confuse the forms for prayer with prayer itself. Maybe, like the disciples, we have difficulty praying because, while we know the right words for prayer, our lives themselves have not yet become prayer, so that in our living we have not begun to frame what we ask for with our words. Maybe we have not learned to pray because we have not yet learned to live. Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun returned to Broadway this year. It's about a black family, the Youngers, who live in a rundown apartment in Chicago in the late 1950s. The father has died, leaving the family a $10,000 legacy from his life insurance policy. Everyone in the family has a dream of what he or she sees as the best way to use the money. Lena, the mother of the family, wants to use the money as a down payment on a small house in a better neighborhood. Her dream is to have the home the family has always needed and wanted. Beneatha, a grown daughter, sees the money as a chance to realize her dream of going to medical school. She needs tuition money, and the inheritance could be a big step toward her dream. But Beneatha's brother Walter Lee, who works as a chauffeur for a rich white business man, sees the money as a way for him to become independent, independent especially of the rich white people he works for. Walter Lee is a proud young man who has experienced one disappointing setback after another in trying to make a life for himself and his own family, and he persuades his mother to let him use most of the money go into business for himself, and for the family. He wants to open a liquor store in their neighborhood with his friend Willie. He promises that when he's successful, he will be able to give back to the family all the blessings their hard lives had denied them so far. Against her better judgment, the mother agrees, and sure enough, Walter's liquor store "partner" skips town with the money, leaving everyone's dreams in shambles. Walter Lee, of course, is distraught. He can hardly bring himself to tell his mother and sister what has happened, and when he does, his sister Beneatha has nothing for him but contempt. She denounces him angrily, unmercifully. But their mother intercedes. "Beneatha," she says, "I thought I taught you to love your brother!" "Love him!" Beneatha responds contemptuously. "There's nothing left to love!" But her mother stops her. "There is always something left to love," she says. "And if you ain't learned that, you ain't learned nothing. Have you cried for that boy today? I don't mean for yourself and the family because we lost all that money. I mean for him - for what he's been through and what it done to him. Child, when do you think is the time to love somebody the most? When they done good and made things easy for everybody? Well then, you ain't through learning, because that ain't the time at all. It's when he's at his lowest and can't believe in himself 'cause the world done whipped him so. [That's when it's time to love somebody the most.] When you starts measuring somebody, measure him right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into account what hills and valleys he come through before he got where he is." Loving those who love you, doing good for those who have done good things for you - there's nothing special in that, Jesus reminds us. Even tax collectors and sinners do that. What is special is loving those who have not loved you, what is of God is forgiving those who have trespassed against you. So ask God to love you the way you love those who have not loved you. Ask God to forgive your sins the way you have forgiven those who have sinned against you. "Because if you ain't learned that," Jesus says, "you ain't learned nothing. All the law and the prophets, everything you need to pray for, boils down to that." All the law and the prophets hang on that, because when we do it, when we forgive those who have sinned against us, then our lives themselves are in a position to presume to ask - in a position to "be bold" to ask, as we say when we pray the prayer Our Lord taught us - that God will forgive us in the same way. Because, as Jesus tells us in another place (Matthew 5:14-15), "if you forgive the wrongs others have done you, God will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, then your Father will not forgive the wrongs that you have done." And notice something else as well. Notice that when we do that, when we forgive those who trespass against us, then all the rest of the prayer is answered. When we forgive those who have sinned against us, then God's will is done, his kingdom does come on earth as it is in heaven. So, Jesus, teach us to pray. Teach us to pray as you prayed - by living as you lived. Help us daily to hold God's name in reverence. Teach us to live in gratitude for our daily bread, in gratitude for all the abundance God has already given us. Teach us to acknowledge and love each other as brothers and sisters, because God is our Father and you are our brother. Help us to love those who do not love us, and to forgive those who sin against us, so that we ourselves may do for your kingdom what you've already given us the power to do. For we know that if we do not forgive those who have sinned against us, then we dare not be bold to presume to ask forgiveness for ourselves. Lead us from the temptation to live by ourselves and for ourselves, apart from you, Jesus, apart from God, and apart from our neighbor who sits next to us. And especially lead us from the temptation to live for ourselves and by ourselves and apart from the neighbor we do not particularly want to sit next to us. Teach us to pray for our neighbor, for we know that if we do not live for our neighbor, then we cannot live with you. And without you, we fear to be put to the test. Teach us, Jesus, to pray even for our enemies, so that like you and Abraham Lincoln and Thich Nhat Hanh, we might destroy our enemies, not by killing them, but by making them our friends. Teach us to pray for them, not that they might become like us and want what we want, but that together we might become like you. Above all things, lead us to the desire to live what we pray for, that our lives themselves might be an offering acceptable to God. All this we ask in your name, because you know how to pray because you know how to live, and how to live because you know how to pray. Amen. In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. |