This Week's Sermon: "Lord, Teach Us to Pray"

‘Father, uphold the holiness of your name.
Bring in your kingdom.
3 Give us the bread we need for today.
4 Forgive us our sins,
    for we also forgive everyone who has wronged us.
And don’t lead us into temptation.’” (Common English Bible)

“Sanctuary at Sixty: Five Acts of Worship to Make a Space a Sanctuary,” Week Two

It’s inevitable. Always. The words “would one of you like to pray?” followed by all eyes and heads whipping towards me. I’m the minister after all.

I remember one of the very first times that happened—I was not a minister then, or even a seminarian. I was on an overseas trip to sub-Saharan Africa with our denomination’s international mission arm, Global Ministries, as a college student, still two years prior to beginning God School. We were in Soweto, a suburb of Johannesburg, South Africa, at a community center primarily for school-aged children.

Understand that “suburb” has a very different meaning in the context of a city like Johannesburg rather than a city like Birmingham. Here, the suburbs surrounding us are largely wealthy, especially compared to the city that anchors them. In Johannesburg, it was the opposite. Soweto, while being one of the sites of some of the most moving protests against South African apartheid, remained a demonstrably impoverished place to live.

And so a place like this community center, which we might take for granted as a part of a city’s services to us, is absolutely vital for the safety and development of Soweto’s children. It is not just a place for them to pass the time outside of school or home—they take recreational classes, play sports, create art, all things kids want and need to be able to do in order to flourish.

To be asked—or expected—to pray in so lifegiving a context…there is a humility required that I needed to reach for before reaching for the words with which to pray.

I don’t remember the words I used to pray. But I do remember that feeling of humbleness. I hope I always do. It is the key I need to come to God in prayer.

This is a new sermon series for a special moment in Valley’s history, the 60th anniversary of our Gothic revival sanctuary, which was completed in October 1961. We celebrated the 70th anniversary of Valley’s planting back in the spring, and this sermon series mirrors that as a five-week celebration, but we will be focusing on the acts of worship that set this space apart as a sanctuary. Our order of worship can be broken down into five such acts, right in order: praise, prayer, proclamation, participation, and finally, partaking. Each of these acts is interwoven into multiple parts of our worship service, but each of them come to the forefront at a different moment in our order of worship. We began this series last week by talking about the act of praise, which is at the forefront with our call to worship and, appropriately enough, our hymn of praise (you can’t accuse us of false advertising!). This week, we move into an act of worship that, again, is integrated into the totality of our worship service but is specifically named in our opening prayer or invocation and the pastoral prayer: the act of prayer.

The practice of prayer is so integral to Christianity that it forms literally the very heart of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel—the absolute middle of the sermon is Jesus’s instructions on how to pray, which mirror His instructions here in Luke 11. If you imagine the Sermon on the Mount as a mountain itself, the slopes of each side, starting at the beginning and end of the sermon, rise up to meet at the peak that is the Lord’s Prayer.

Luke, as is often the case, presents material substantively similar to Matthew, but packages it differently, with part of the Sermon on the Mount showing up in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain in Luke 6, and with the Lord’s Prayer appearing here, in Luke 11. But one key difference is this: while in Matthew the Lord’s Prayer is the middle of a three-chapter sermon, here in Luke the Lord’s Prayer is the answer to a question from the disciples , a need to know how to pray as we ought. Luke establishes prayer as meeting a need for us.

Which is as it should be. Prayer is valued by God, cherished by God, prized by God, but strictly speaking, God does not require prayer in order to survive, to continue being God. God was God long before God spoke us into being, and God will continue to be God long after we are gone.

But for us, constrained by the coils of mortality and sinfulness, prayer is essential. It may come easy to you, or not, or easier in certain times and harder in others, but prayer captures well the lopsidedness between us and God. God needs prayer much less than we need it, because God needs less than we need.

Yet that does not mean that God does not gain from prayer either, for God rejoices with our rejoicing and mourns with our mourning. God experiences existence just as we do, and God is burdened with knowing that of all the possibilities that could happen, only one actually will happen, and very often not the best or even second or third-best possibility. We bring about the possibilities that are sometimes truly painful, awful, devastating even, and God has to experience them with the added burden of knowing that a far better world was possible but for our own errors and sins.

If you see as one of the consequences of sin being further separation from God, it is easy to see how prayer can become more difficult in such moments. Because it isn’t that God disappears from us or stops speaking to us, but that we choose to cover our eyes and plug our ears to God. It is a bit tougher to hear what is being said to you in those circumstances after all.

But not impossible. That is the other miracle of prayer—that however far gone we are, however unnecessarily difficult we have made it for ourselves, prayer is still achievable. The channel between us and our creator is not gone for good, but we can make that chasm grow--we separate ourselves further from God--with our sinfulness. That is what Father Abraham tells the rich man after he and Lazarus have both died--that there is a chasm between them, of the rich man's own making. So to navigate that channel when we have made it even wider, well, we need help.

I played tons of the computer game the Oregon Trail growing up--many in my older millennial generation did, so much so that we are sometimes called the Oregon Trail generation. And in the game, you have to cross several rivers of varying depths and widths. You can ford the river or try to float your wagon across, but each of those options becomes more and more difficult deeper and wider the river gets--but not impossible. That is how separation from God can be. It may be more difficult to navigate, but it is never impossible to navigate. Because we have been given the right tools.

That is why I have never understood my connection to God as a purely personal one—I have needed that help that the disciples did, to be taught how to pray when I did not know how. You have at some point as well. Luke’s telling of the Lord’s Prayer should give us permission to be honest about such moments. If Christ’s disciples did not always know how to pray, why should we expect perfection in prayer of ourselves? We may be born wanting to know the love of our creator, but we are not necessarily born with the tools to do so. We must hone those tools, perfect our use of them, but first we have to be handed down those tools, bit by bit, generation to generation.

Prayer, then, is not only a medium of communication—although it is that as well. It is not only an intermediary between us and our creator—although it is that too. It is nothing less than a generational inheritance, given to us by our predecessors, and which we in turn will bequeath to our successors. It connects us to God while also connecting us to each other across time, and so is a perfectly fitting part of our celebration of sixty years of sanctuary here in Birmingham.

Time is so essential an ingredient of prayer that in other traditions that they add to the lives of the gods. I spent an afternoon this week tooling around Birmingham, going from motel to motel to arrange emergency shelter for families, and at one, the fellow was telling me about how in Greco-Roman mythology, prayer to deities contribute to those deities’ immortality.

I don’t think that is the case for God. God does not need us in order to be immortal. But I do think prayer adds immortality to humanity’s shared relationship with God, because prayer is how that relationship gets passed down to the next generation of seekers and disciples. When we pray, when we act as Christ to help another person to pray, or when we accept that help ourselves, we are participating in a tradition that makes prayer, our medium of communication to God, immortal.

So by being taught to pray, as the disciples are here, and in teaching one another to pray, as the disciples go on to do, we participate in, we contribute to, that immortality. We are not immortal and never will be in this world. But we can make our faith immortal by surrendering it anew in all its splendor not only to God, but to each new generation of the church to make its own.

And therein lies one of the most important reasons why we differentiate prayer from praise: both are important, but prayer is meant to encompass far beyond praise to include everything else, the totality of our connection to God. Praise is a vital dimension to that connection, but prayer is meant to make space for all other dimensions, the needs and concerns, the lament and mourning, all of it. Praise is one form of prayer, and prayer includes praise. But our medium of communication to God is not limited to praise; if it were, then there would not be anywhere near enough space for us to be changed by prayer.

Because ultimately, prayer is meant to change us. God changes us through our prayers to be more the vessels of God’s passion, justice, and love. And it was, and will forever be, the creator’s privilege to continue honing and perfecting their creation. What a blessing it is that God seeks that for us.

By the grace of God, may it be so. Amen.

Rev. Dr. Eric Atcheson

Birmingham, Alabama

September 12, 2021