Note: Because this service was held outdoors, no recording is available.
Proper 12 (17), Year C
27 July 2025
Hosea 1:2-10
Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19)
Luke 11:1-13
There is a German proverb that says that deep need teaches us to pray. This is true, not only for people of faith. We read now and again about people facing very difficult circumstances giving witness to having prayed, even though they did not know who if anyone would hear their prayer.
A prayer that is prayed in such circumstances is a prayer profoundly aware of our human limitations. Most of the time we forget about our limitations, or at least try to, but we are human, so our limitations are always present, acknowledged or not. And in this sense a prayer spoken in profound need is not to be dismissed as the prayer of those without religious practise, for such prayer is deeply honest about ourselves.
Not all prayer is offered with such honesty. In the Gospel of Matthew Jesus introduces the Lord’s Prayer with these words: 7When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. 8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
Our prayer is always as honest as we are toward ourselves, so it is comforting to know that God our Father knows what we need before we even ask.
As Jesus’s admonition is directed at religious performers we know that prayer is not to be performative. It is not about what words we use, or how many, whether our prayer sounds pious, uses churchy language, or is merely a “God help us.” And our prayer to God does not need any fillers, like “Jesus, I just wanna …” At the same time, God puts up with our prayer because God longs to be in communion with us, and God puts up with our stumbling and our “Jesus, I just wanna.”
I was raised in the church, if not by the church, and in this particular congregation it was common for us to pray together extemporaneously. Not in Sunday worship, but in Bible study or youth group. There was no pressure to participate with a spoken prayer but I felt that that was important, but was nervous and struggled to find the right words.
In my personal devotions during those years, and for many years, I always prayed but quickly ran out of words. That I ran out of words was alright, but it shortened my prayer, which I was torn about. I did not want to talk for the sake of talking, but I also longed to be in the presence of God. Eventually I began to use liturgical forms of prayer which allowed me to pray with others, though not present, with words that had been and were being said by too many to count.
The disciples’ request for Jesus to teach them how to pray comes on the heels of the story of Mary and Martha. Near the end of that story, Jesus names what is troubling Martha who had complained about her sister and who had solicited Jesus to side with her against her sister. Jesus had answered, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.” Then he says, “Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”
The story of Mary and Martha is not a story about how to be a host or hostess. It is also not a story about archetypes and that those of us who like being busy are being misunderstood or not adequately valued by the church. It is a story about being in the presence of God. Mary and Martha are in the presence of God. But Martha is distracted by her anxiety, as many of us are. Mary gives Jesus her whole attention.
This then is the time when the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. Prayer is about seeking the presence of God. We are in God’s presence all the time, but like Martha, often we are distracted. And like Martha we too may judge the Marys in our life. Yet those who seek the presence of God let God do the judging.
I came upon a piece in Eastern Orthodox writing last week. The Orthodox theologian Sergei Bulgakov speaks of the human spirit as that which is uncreated in humanity, and that which proceeds from God as an outpouring from his essence as God breathes God’s own Spirit into God’s human creation. (Genesis 2)1
This is not how Lutherans usually speak about human existence, yet the affirmation that God indwells us somehow, whether we know it or not, corresponds with St Augustine’s observation and prayer, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”
In other words, there is nothing else that can take God’s place.
Prayer then is seeking the presence of God.
There are many ways to pray.
In his first letter to the Thessalonians Paul admonishes us to pray without ceasing, something that has puzzled minds ever since. If we all entered a monastery to dedicate ourselves to a life of prayer, all productivity as we know it would end. Of course, that is not entirely true as monasteries were and are centres of intellectual life, agriculture, and food production, but still, there is a point.
It is this verse about praying without ceasing that led the Russian Pilgrim2 to learn the Jesus Prayer (“Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a sinner”) and to pray it in such a way that it became part of his breath, which – considering what we just said about the breath of God – is intriguing. The Russian Pilgrim’s prayer was not the end of all other activity, but the infusion of all activity with the presence of God.
There are other ways to pray. Perhaps something that many of us practice in the mornings or evenings, or both. A giving thanks, and asking for God’s presence and protection for us and the world, including those we love, an asking for forgiveness at the end of the day, and a reading of the scriptures as the primary place where God is revealed to us. All this in some kind of order, which is a liturgy. And perhaps we end our prayer with the prayer Jesus taught his disciples.
There is also a way to pray that is called centering prayer. It is not so much about words, rather it is about one word, or one image for us to focus on, creating space for God in the business of our lives and of our mind. It can happen in the sanctuary but also elsewhere. It can happen on a walk, or in the labyrinth. Like all prayer it is about sitting at the feet of Jesus.
This seems easier than extemporaneous prayer, at least to some of us, but in a society where we are constantly bombarded by media and by many narratives it takes practice to learn to be silent. It is, however, a good practice that will help us pay attention not only to God but also to each other.
The sixth century monk Dorotheus of Gaza said, “This is the nature of love: to the extent that we distance ourselves from the centre and do not love God, we distance ourselves from our neighbour; but if we love God, then the nearer we draw to him in love, the more we are united with our neighbour in love.”3 Prayer then means to draw close to God who has drawn close to us, and by doing so we draw closer to our neighbour.
The disciples have seen Jesus pray and they have seen the devotion of Mary at the feet of Jesus. They ask Jesus, Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples. And Jesus teaches them the Lord’s Prayer. A prayer that is said in community and for the community (the personal pronouns are plural). A prayer that first of all directs their attention to God, who they call Father, Abba, parent; whose name shall be hallowed, set apart; whose reign shall not be a distant reality but present in their life together, in the life of the church; and who provides for today by giving us daily bread; who provides for yesterday by forgiving us our trespasses, our debts, our sins; and who provides for tomorrow by saving us from the time of trial.
It is a prayer that draws them to God even as God has long drawn close to them. It is a prayer that saves them from Martha’s anxieties.
We learn from Jesus, from Mary, from the disciples, from Bulgakov and Dorotheus of Gaza, and from St Augstine, that prayer is innate to us. It is part of what it means to be human, for our heart is restless until it rests in God.
Amen.
1 “Bulgakov is surely right, and on the soundest scriptural ground, when he speaks of the human spirit as that which is uncreated in humanity, and that which proceeds from God as an outpouring from his essence; and Bulgakov is right also in saying that, in creation, God calls his own breath to hypostatic existence—calls his own Spirit to indwell his creatures as their spirits—and thereby gives hypostatic life to the rays of his own glory. As Eckhart says, ‘Hie ist gotes grunt mîn grunt and mîn grunt gotes grunt.’ [‘Here God’s ground is my ground and my ground God’s ground.’] This is the ultimate reason that the first moment of the creature’s being is at once a vocation issued by God and yet also an act of free self-positing on the part of the creature. Just as the Holy Spirit is not some limited psychological individual consciousness possessed of an isolated self, who is first himself and who then only latterly assents to the Father’s self-utterance in the Logos, but is instead hypostatic as God’s own eternal assent to and delight in his own essence as manifested in the Son; so also the spirit in us is nothing but a finite participation in that eternal and infinite act of divine affirmation and love.” – David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods (Chapter SIX. “The Chiasmus: The Created Supernatural and the Natural Divine” paragraph 36 within section VII: “THE CHIASMUS OF THE SPIRIT (2)”).
2 The Way of the Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues his Way, translated by Helen Bacovcin, New York, NY: 1992 Image Books
3 Take the analogy of the circle, or better still of its radii. The radii are separate. But at the centre they meet. To approach the centre, which is God, is to have the revelation of one’s neighbour. For only by revelation does one know another person as a person, with a knowledge that is also unknowing. Love is poverty, kenosis. Knowing one’s neighbor is inseparable from an attitude of non-possession. (Olivier Clément) “This is the nature of love: to the extent that we distance ourselves from the centre [of the circle] and do not love God, we distance ourselves from our neighbour; but if we love God, then the nearer we draw to him in love, the more we are united with our neighbour in love.” Dorotheus of Gaza, Instructions (SC 92, p.2.86)
