Mindset and Attitude (Seventh Sunday after Pentecost)

Sermon Reflections

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I remember years ago when we would go up to Mar-Lu Ridge, everybody would gather together in the dining hall before one of the meals.  And someone on the staff would welcome folks, make any announcements and then, before we ate, would invite one of the campers who was NOT a pastor to lead us in saying grace.

And the whole room would get completely quiet! For something most of us do, at least in church, prayer can sometimes be difficult, and even daunting. And that’s in spite of the fact that:

  • it’s not technically hard to do… (fold you hands and close your eyes and talk…)
  • we don’t know the right words … (most of us remember a bunch of prayers, including “grace” before meals that we could say at camp, too…!)
  • we can’t find the time… (sometimes, all we need is a short prayer on the fly, kind of like a prayer before a meal…)

Those aren’t the reasons prayer is daunting.  Instead, prayer can be daunting because prayer is fundamentally about being in a conversation with God. It’s about entering into the presence of God. It’s about being open to the will of God.  And it’s really about mindset and attitude.

And I think that’s the reason that Jesus’ disciples asked him to teach them to pray. At first glance, this is an amazing thing to read in today’s Gospel.  It’s one thing for an average Christian to wonder about prayer, but these are the apostles – Jesus’ prime students who had been with him for a while now! Even they apparently were daunted by prayer.

And for those first disciples, also, the problem was NOT that they:

  • found prayer so technically difficult… (they knew the routine, and there were lots of ancient routines that could help them…)
  • didn’t have the words… (they had the whole book of Psalms…)
  • couldn’t find the time … (there were times of prayer set for them…)

Instead, their request to Jesus was about the desire to have Jesus help them be people who could be more fully in touch with the power and the presence of God that the disciples saw in Jesus himself. They saw in Jesus someone who not only said prayers, but who lived his prayers.  And they wanted to be more like that.

And so Jesus gave them a prayer – a prayer we call the Lord’s Prayer.  But he gave them much more than a prayer. Jesus taught them also about the attitude and the mind-set that they should have about God and about themselves when they prayed this or any other prayer. He taught them how to live their prayers.

So one of the things that we teach the kids in Confirmation is that the Lord’s Prayer is more than simply one prayer among many. It’s also a model for prayer that teaches us of some basic things for all Christian prayer that can help us live our prayers and keep spiritual dryness from setting in.  

And a couple of the things we always try to stress is that Jesus teaches us to pray:

  • In the first-person plural – that is OUR and US… – that is, we don’t seek God’s will by ourselves, or simply for ourselves… (and this is maybe part of what causes difficulty with public prayer – this is about asking God for us, not just for me… )
  • Using command forms of the verbs – that is, Jesus teaches us to pray “give us” and “do this” – so that we pray as though we’re talking to a parent who really WANTS to give us good things to help us… and sometimes, I think in English we really have a hard time with this because a lot of our old English prayers come originally from the middle ages and are modeled after addressing the king (“Oh, if it might please my lord to perhaps consider, if it please the king….!) But Jesus never, in any version of the Lord’s Prayer as it’s come to us, “Our Father, we prayer that your name might be holy, that you might forgive us as we may (or perhaps may not!) forgive others, or that “we just want to ask for”…! Part of what causes difficulty with prayer for some people is that they have the wrong image of who God is – either a distant despot who’s looking for an excuse to smite us, or an ambivalent spiritual force who has bigger fish to fry and can’t really be bothered with us…)
  • In a way that should compel us to become part of the prayer – sometimes, we even look at the Lord’s Prayer as a wish list for a heavenly Santa Claus – “Please give us all this stuff! We’ll go to sleep now and hope we find it in our stockings tomorrow morning!” But Jesus teaches us to pray stuff like “forgive us as we forgive others…”; Moreover, Luther always says that every petition of the Lord’s prayer should compel us to be active participants, not just passive receivers – to be willing to share what we receive with others and be agents of God in doing what we ask for. So, Luther teaches us stuff like this:

For “your will be done”: “to be sure, the good and gracious will of God is done without our prayer, but we pray in this petition that it may also be done by us.” 

And, “give us this day our daily bread”: “to be sure, God provides daily bread, even to the wicked, without our prayer, but we pray in this petition that God may make us aware of his gifts and enable us to receive our daily bread with thanksgiving.” And, in the Large Catechism, to be agents of sharing daily bread with others in need – to actually be “daily bread” in the lives of our neighbors.

You’re supposed to live your prayers. And this is why Jesus says we should be “persistent” in prayer (which is a word which actually means “shameless”!). It doesn’t mean to go on and on with lots of words. 

And so Jesus then unpacks the meaning of prayer by teaching people to boldly ask and search and knock, because prayer isn’t finally about saying the right words to God.  It’s about a way of life in which you grow in trust and hope so that your whole life becomes a prayer, because you invest yourself in a relationship with a God who loves you and the world around you.

So in giving the first disciples, and us, the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus gave us a powerful prayer in and of itself. But even more importantly, Jesus shows us what it means to live our prayers. And it’s in living our prayers that Jesus tells us that we’ll find that God really does want to be in conversation with us. It’s in living our prayers that Jesus promises us that we’ll find that God is even more ready to give than we are to ask. And it’s by living our prayers that Jesus invites us to be part of the work of God in fulfilling that for which we pray.

Amen.