give us this day

 

SERMON PREACHED AT St MARY’S, Nth OAMARU

and St ALBAN’S, KUROW

SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME (July 24^th) 2022

 

 READINGS:

 

Hosea 1: 2-10

Psalm 85

Colossians 2: 6-15

Luke 11: 1-13

 

 

I have always wanted to be one of those super holy people that other people come to and plea, “come and lead our retreat. Teach us to pray.” In reality I’m just not that kind of person, so I guess it’s just not going to happen. 

Nor should it happen. In prayer I stutter. 

Something about Jesus made him a somewhat better target for someone wanting to learn about prayer. Not that, it seems, he really needed to pray. Being divine is a bit like that. Elsewhere, in John’s gospel account, we find Jesus saying that he was praying for what the army call “demonstration purposes only.” I remember a couple of Pentecostal pastors attempting to show me how to pray in so-called tongues, blithering away in something that they no doubt thought was the language of the angels Meanwhile I wondered what “demonstration purposes only” prayers really meant or sounded like to God. Then I fled.

Nevertheless “teach us to pray” was a reasonable demand to put to Jesus. They added of course a little blackmailing element, just pointing out that that’s what John the Baptist was doing for his disciples. Come on Jesus don't let your cuzz show you up! But the problem remains: what is prayer and how is it done? Whenever I find myself speaking about prayer I find a little monkey on my back. She;s  named Janis Joplin, and she snarls in her inimitable style, “Lord won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz.” 

I'd prefer a Porsche, just in case God doesn't know that. or an E-type. 

I tend to think of prayer as learning to participate in the will and purpose of God. It’s doubtful that my having a Porsche or even a Merc is likely to be a priority in the heart of God, especially when a large proportion of my sisters and brothers on this planet have little hope of putting food on their table today. So forget the Porsche. Even if I told God that I really really would pick up hitchhikers in it and talk to them about Jesus I suspect God would see through me like crystal glass. I was picked up by a woman in Merc once. She told me she picked me up because she was a Christian. I'm not sure it showed. 

I don't think God is persuaded by self-centred prayers. Mercedes-Benz prayers of the Joplin genre are simply not prayer at all. Lord teach me to pray does not invite, as another song put it, “I know what I want and I want it now.” It’s not a prayer.

Still there are many times when you and I have prayed for loved ones, for a suffering world, for a more just and fair society, for rain, for no rain, for whatever our priority might be. Some seem to be deeply, deeply reasonable and loving requests to make of God. Lord protect my child. Lord heal my loved one.

There are there many times that my stumbling efforts at prayer seemed to be no more than launching thoughts into an empty universe. It is a lifetime task to come to terms with the suffering that sometimes seems inexplicable, unmanageable, a relentless pointer to an empty universe.

And yet there are those other times when I have prayed and found that I am engaged in a dialogue with love. Love does not always serve at my beck and call. Love asks me to have faith and battle on even, when the universe seems at its most cruel and empty. I think I can safely say, though I would not want to be put to the test, that even in the emptiest of times in my own life, a light has dawned in the darkness.

Perhaps there is a kind of catch to prayer. Often at the end of our liturgy we offer ourselves as a living sacrifice in the service of God. That relates somewhere, somehow to being prepared to be a part of the answer to my prayers. Asking that I may be forgiven entails asking that I may learn to forgive. Not yesterday, not today, probably not even tomorrow, but in the lifelong journey that God gives me, may I learn those harder lessons and so grow closer to Christ.

What then of praying for a hungry world? At the very least I suspect I need to learn, as the Roman Catholic Church put it for a while, to live simply so that others may simply live. I cannot redeem the suffering of whole nations, or even the underclass in my own nation. But I can learn to live so that my footprints are gentle on God’s earth and do not devour the life of others.

When it comes to prayer I can only muse. I am not great at it. I, you, we are all called to connect with God – both in the wise and formal prayers of liturgy, and in the little bullets of prayer as we recall individual matters, small and great, before the God of love.

So what do we say of prayers for Ukraine? I can only say that in the great catastrophes of human conflict I think prayer does play a part. So, sadly perhaps, does free will. Putin’s free will. The free will that people have, will to turn national identity into a God and to trample over the rights of others in the race to further their own perceived rights. It was ever thus, since Adam raised a Cain.

Innocent people will die because selfishness and greed continue to exist. None of us are immune from either fate. But for us the challenge is to continue to pray, as best we can, because to pray is to participate in the love of God, is to be transformed ourselves. In the purposes of God perhaps the breath of our prayer may be the beginnings of a wind of change, swords may be turned into ploughshares and spears into pruning hooks.