The Prayer that Jesus Taught

        One of the titles applied to pastors in the old Book of Church Order was the title "bishop." Since I was ordained under that book, you’d have to say that I was ordained a bishop. This explains why Presbyterians pay so little attention to bishops. We have far too many of them.

        Some bishops, however, are worth our attention. The current Bishop of Durham in England is Tom Wright – N. T. Wright to those who know him as a famous Bible scholar.* Bishop Wright received this letter from a boy named David.

Dear Archbishop (clearly he thought flattery might help):

If more people pray for the same thing, is God more likely to answer?

If so, will you pray I get a go-kart for Christmas?

Yours faithfully,

David, age 8

        As children often do, David raises some thorny theological questions. Does prayer work? Does it work better if there are more people doing it? And, if it doesn’t work -- if it can’t get you something so obviously desirable as a go-kart -- what’s the point?

        Perhaps those same questions were in the minds of Jesus’ disciples when they said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples" (Luke 11:1). Maybe they were so impressed with Jesus’ utter commitment to prayer that they wanted to follow his example. Or maybe they just wanted to keep up with the Johnses. Whatever the case, Jesus replied with words that have become a kind of template for Christians ever since:

That’s Luke’s version. I grant you, Matthew’s version is a bit longer, and the English translation we Presbyterians use says "debts" instead of "sins," but this is clearly the kernel from which we get what we all know as the Lord’s Prayer.

I invite you to notice something about this prayer, because it’s important for understanding the very nature of prayer for Christians. Before it is anything else, this is a prayer about God’s kingdom -- God’s reign, God’s commonwealth. The prayer begins by honoring God as sovereign and by calling for the full arrival of God’s sovereign reign on earth: "Thy kingdom come," and, as Matthew adds, "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven."

Christians pray as kingdom people. We do not pray merely to get what we want.

Remember the children in the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe? (Sorry, I don’t have any sermon illustrations from the latest Harry Potter.) Passing through the back of that old wardrobe, the children find themselves in Narnia -- in a snowy wood with a lamppost, a family of beavers, and the rumor of a lion called Aslan.

One of the first things the children learn about Aslan is that he isn’t a tame lion. You can’t get him to do tricks. He is powerful, wise, and loving, but not tame. With Aslan, the question is not, can you get Aslan to do things for you, but can Aslan enlist you in his service?

It’s the same in the land this side of the wardrobe. The question for us is not, "Can we get God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ to work for us, but are we willing to work for God?" As soon as we pray, "Thy kingdom come," we put God’s reign, God’s priorities, ahead of our own.

Knowing this puts a rather different spin on the example Jesus employs to illustrate the importance of persistent prayer.

A friend knocks on your door after you’ve got the baby down, the dog settled, the dinner dishes washed, and your teeth brushed. You’ve just fallen asleep when he starts pounding on the door, waking up the whole household.

Turns out, he’s got unexpected guests and he needs three loaves of bread. Right now. Not tomorrow morning. Right now. You try to put him off, but he keeps pounding. Bread! Give me bread! I know you’ve got some in there! Hand it over!

By now he’s making such a constant racket, you give him what he wants just to get some sleep. You fork over three loaves of bread and a bottle of wine for good measure. Then you slam the door and make a mental note to get back your hedge clippers, which are still hanging in this guy’s garage.

Persistence. Keep at it! I think the point of Jesus’ example is not to compare God to a sleep-deprived neighbor, but to show us that prayer isn’t a one-off thing. It’s a matter of persistence, of daily practice, of discipline, in the same way that Jesus practiced the discipline of prayer.

Keep pounding away, day after day, and you will find that you yourself have been hammered by your prayers into a new shape. You are being re-formed into a kingdom-shaped person, into a person who is seeking God’s reign not only in your own life, but in the life of the whole world.

As we keep praying, day after day, week after week, year after year, Jesus says to us:

After all, our heavenly Father will surely behave better than we. If our own children ask for a fish, we aren’t going to give them a snake instead. If they ask for an egg, we won’t give a scorpion. "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Luke 11:13)

Notice, please, that Luke’s text says nothing about go-karts, or ponies, or even cures for cancer. It’s says God will give the Holy Spirit. It doesn’t say we will get everything we want, despite what the "Gospel of success" preachers keep telling us.

When Jesus came to the Garden of Gethsemane to pray, he didn’t get everything he wanted. He wanted to escape the cross, the cup of suffering that he was about to drink. "My Father," he prayed, "if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want" (Matthew 26:39). He was praying, in other words, "Thy kingdom come."

The Holy Spirit Jesus promised changes us as we pray. We find ourselves longing for peace and justice in the world. We find ourselves longing for reconciliation in our relationships with one another. We find ourselves longing for a fresh start, for abundant life. At some point it dawns on us that these longings come from God himself, at work in our hearts and minds through the Holy Spirit.

As Bishop Wright says, ". . . we find ourselves caught up in the mystery of the Triune God, and the mystery of new creation, in which all things are possible to those who believe."

We encounter this kind of prayer every time we celebrate the Lord’s Supper. We pray that as we remember the death and resurrection of Jesus and receive the bread and wine, our lives will be transformed: "As this bread is Christ’s body for us," we pray, "send us out to the body of Christ in the world."

Sometimes God says "No" to the things you and I ask for. But God never turns us away; God never slams the door in our faces. Instead God gives us the bread we need for each day, the daily bread of the kingdom, which, Luke reports, is precisely what Jesus taught us to ask for.

Our Father in heaven . . . your kingdom come. Let that prayer shape us until the whole creation is kingdom-shaped, and all our prayers find their answer in Christ.