Teach us to pray

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Proper 12: Hosea 1:2-10; Psalm 85;
Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19); Luke 11:1-13

“Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”

So, like many of us, the disciples were not sure they knew how to pray. It’s reassuring, isn’t it? And so in today’s reading we have Jesus offering the prayer we know as the Lord’s Prayer to his disciples. It is important to us because Jesus taught it, but it is valuable because it is a general purpose prayer.

Each of the petitions in the prayer reflects particular needs. After the declaration (Hallowed be thy name), the prayer seeks the coming of God’s kingdom, a time of plenty for all. It is the world we want to live in. So we look to the kingdom, to God’s creation.

But then we get to our needs. Give us each day our daily bread. Make sure we are fed, physically as well as spiritually. Then our psychological and spiritual needs: forgive us our sins. There are times when our sense of our own unworthiness is overwhelming. Yet this petition comes with an addendum: for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. That is claiming a way of being where we are willing to forgive, to not hold on to harms.

It’s hard, isn’t it, to do that? How do we forgive those who are indebted to us, who owe us for whatever reason? It’s tempting to hold on to resentments. Yet my experience has been that forgiving others is freeing: I never forget, but the debt does not have a hold on me. If we can do that, Jesus’s prayer suggests, we will be forgiven.

The final petition, do not bring us to the time of trial, is a hope we all share. We do not want to be tested, we want to be protected.

Where ever we are in our lives, the prayer has something for us. Whatever our needs at any time, they are covered. There’s no catalog of needs, but the broad categories of need we all have.

One discipline I’ve occasionally undertaken has been to pray each petition of the Lord’s Prayer, and then take time to focus on specifics I am concerned with for that one. In series, my concerns, both personal and global, are all covered.

The promise Jesus offers is extraordinary:

Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.

Sometimes it is hard to believe this promise: too often specific requests have not succeeded: an illness has not been cured, people have suffered from war, famine and other catastrophes. Those who are expert in prayer remind us that prayers are answered, but not necessarily the way we want them answered. But God is with us, no matter what.

Teach us to pray: Jesus gives not a how to manual, but a set of petitions for the needs of life. As we continue to learn to pray, these petitions give us a clear path for prayer.