Pentecost 9

Proper 12/Lectionary 17

July 29, 2007 Luke 11.1-13 “Teach Us to Pray”

“Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray.’” Boy, that’s a request that took some courage! After all, the disciples were devout Jews; they had been taught to pray as children, they had no doubt prayed throughout their lives, and here they are, disciples of the most famous rabbi of the day—and yet this unnamed disciple is willing to admit to a disturbing inadequacy in his own praying.

I suppose we can understand what he was saying. We, too, are people who pray, people who believe prayer is important. And yet we also often sense that prayer is just not as satisfying and as significant in our lives as it might be. So the disciple’s request might well be ours as well: Lord, teach us to pray.

It’s interesting to note the wording of the request. He doesn’t say, “Teach us how to pray,” but “Teach us to pray.” I suspect he was concerned, not so much with the specifics of how to do it; rather he wanted some help in finding a deeper life of prayer. Perhaps an analogy might be how one goes about dieting. It’s easy enough to figure out how to diet; you can walk into any bookstore and buy a dozen books that will give you instructions and supply you with recipes and strategies. But that’s not the hard part. The hard part is finding the will and the eagerness to do it! That’s how it is with prayer as well. This disciple knew how to pray—and we generally do as well. His problem, and ours, is to find the will and the eager desire for it.

Jesus’ response is warm and quick. He doesn’t criticize this disciple because he feels inadequate. He answers straightforwardly and personally. He wants to teach his disciples to pray, you see—and he wants to teach us, as well. But notice that his teaching comes only when they have asked. He waits until they are really ready to learn. And so he deals with us. Prayer is such an intimate thing between us and Christ that it cannot just be laid out in simple instructions like “love your neighbor as yourself.” Instead it is taught by Christ to those who ask, revealed to those who seek. If we want to learn to pray, the first step is always to ask Christ to teach us.

I’d like to suggest that in this lesson, we can discover three important principles that can help us learn to pray—not just learn how to pray, but develop the passion and the love for prayer. The first is the need for discipline. I think that’s why Jesus teaches the disciples a form—we call it “the Lord’s Prayer.” But his point is that for us to be successful in our praying, we must be disciplined. We must have a pattern, a consistent way of going about, a consistent time for doing it.

Sometimes you will hear people criticize that discipline of form. Prayer, they say, should be spontaneous. There have been groups in the history of Christianity who wouldn’t even learn the Lord’s Prayer because they felt it smacked of formalism, and that was bad. But that is not Jesus’ attitude, nor was it Martin Luther’s. Luther urged that the Lord’s Prayer be said every morning upon awaking, and every evening before sleeping. He understood that Jesus offered this prayer as a discipline, a kind of pathway we can follow that will lead us into a more serious life of prayer.

The truth of the matter is that we need discipline in order to accomplish anything. We can be very much in favor of oral hygiene, but unless we have the discipline to brush and floss, we won’t be very successful. But we don’t approach this haphazardly; we don’t just brush our teeth whenever we happen to think of it. Nearly all of us have established times when we routinely take toothbrush in hand. And perhaps we also pick up the toothbrush spontaneously, but that’s in addition to the regular times, not in place of them.

It is the same with prayer. All the good intentions in the world are great, but if we don’t develop the discipline of prayer, the regular pattern of praying, then chances are we won’t become very successful pray-ers.

Of course it isn’t easy. We tend to put it off, to say, “Well, I don’t have time this morning to pray” or “I’m just too tired tonight to pray.” To go back to my analogy, most of us would almost never say, “I’m in too much of a hurry this morning to brush my teeth,” or “I’m too tired tonight to brush my teeth.” That’s because we’ve disciplined ourselves so well in tooth-brushing that we simply don’t go out in the morning or go to bed at night without doing it. Would that we were as disciplined in praying! Jesus tells us that if we would learn to pray, we must first learn the discipline of praying.

The second principle is the virtue of simplicity. Perhaps the disciples are expecting an elaborate instruction here, but Jesus teaches them just a few words. He’s telling us, you see, that prayer need not be complex. The fact that he addressed God as “Father” here is a good clue—when we pray, we don’t need complicated formulas or pages of rhetoric. We talk to him as simply and as concretely as a child talks to his or her father. If your son asks you for a fish, Jesus says, you give him a fish. So it is with God. Our simple requests are met with simple and loving answers.

Luther somewhere says, “The fewer the words, the better the prayer.” Prayers should be simple. This principle really ties in with the first, doesn’t it? It is easier to be disciplined in doing something simple than in doing something complex. You don’t learn to pray by trying to spend an hour a day at it; you learn by trying to spend five minutes, or three minutes, or whatever is accomplishable for you. And then, after starting simply, you can grow.

The third principle Jesus offers is the need for steadfastness. This really grows from the previous two principles, for it means that in our discipline and in our simplicity we must also be praying faithfully. Our prayer needs to be as persistent as a man knocking on his friend’s door at midnight because he needs to borrow a loaf of bread. Keep knocking, Jesus says, keep at it until you get what you need.

I saw a sign in an elevator one time that said, “In case of emergency, please bang on the door, scream loudly and panic.” That’s often the way we approach praying, isn’t it? We wait until there is an emergency, until we’re ready to panic, until we have exhausted all other alternatives, and then we pray! And we expect immediate results! But Jesus says that prayer must be consistent, that our praying should be going on all the time, whether we’re in a crisis or not.

The point, you see, is that growth requires consistency. Your plants don’t grow unless you are consistent in watering and feeding them (and in keeping the deer at bay!). Sometimes in our prayer we may feel like we’re not making much progress. We don’t feel like we’re getting closer to God; we don’t feel as if we’re learning anything. But prayer is like anything else in this regard: you don’t see your progress day to day, but it only becomes apparent as the days turn into weeks and the weeks into months and the months into years. Then you begin to realize that you have grown, and that you are growing.

Discipline, simplicity, steadfastness—these are the guidelines that Jesus gives us if we want to learn to pray. And with the principles there comes a promise: whoever seeks will find, whoever asks will receive—a promise that the Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask.