How to pray
Luke 11:1-13
:1 One day Jesus was praying, and when he had finished, one of the disciples asked, “Rabbi, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” 2 Jesus said to them, “When you pray, say, ‘Abba God,
hallowed be your Name!
May your reign come. 3 Give us today
Tomorrow’s bread. 4 Forgive us our sins,
for we too forgive everyone who sins against us;
and don’t let us be subjected to the Test.’ ” 5 Jesus said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, a neighbor, and you go to your neighbor at midnight and say, ‘Lend me three loaves of bread, 6 because friends of mine on a journey have come to me, and I have nothing to set before them.’ 7 “Then your neighbor says, ‘Leave me alone. The door is already locked and the children and I are in bed. I can’t get up to look after your needs.’ 8 I tell you, though your neighbor will not get up to give you the bread out of friendship, your persistence will make your neighbor get up and give you as much as you need. 9 “That’s why I tell you, keep asking and you’ll receive; keep looking and you’ll find; keep knocking and the door will be opened to you. 10 For whoever asks, receives; whoever seeks, finds; whoever knocks, is admitted. 11 What parents among you will give a snake to their child when the child asks for a fish, 12 or a scorpion when the child asks for an egg? 13 If you, with all your sins, know how to give your children good things, how much more will our heavenly Abba give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?”
Priests for Equality. The Inclusive Bible (pp. 2247-2248). Sheed & Ward. Kindle Edition.
How did you learn to pray?
In our gospel reading, Jesus returns to his disciples after time away in his own personal prayer practice, and one of his students asks him to teach them how to pray—after all, John the baptizer taught his disciples to pray in their own way!
So Jesus gives them a prayer—one that echoes the prayers of their Jewish tradition. Here, in Luke’s gospel, we have a condensed version of the familiar Our Father, or, “The Lord’s prayer.”
Now in typical Jesus form, he doesn’t give this prayer as a formula to follow or an art to master—instead he follows it with a couple parables to help understand what kind of prayer he means to inspire.
In one parable, he gives a hypothetical scenario based on their standard social expectation in their time of hospitality to travelers—an expectation that his disciples would have understood, likely from their own experience. He says, “imagine you have an out-of-town friend show up late one night, and you have no food to offer them—you go to your neighbor and knock on the door asking for help, and your very tired neighbor yells from the inside, “no, go away, my kids are already asleep—I can’t help you.”
Jesus says, even if the friendship isn’t enough to pull this person out of bed to help you out, sheer persistence will get you what you need.
The story from Genesis that accompanies this gospel reading in the lectionary gives another illustration,
and the theme of hospitality to strangers rings through this story, too.
Abraham goes head-to-head with God to defend Sodom and Gommorah from God’s judgment. You might remember that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah were condemned for their act of inhospitality—not only refusing hospitality to strangers, but treating them with violence.
Even here, Abraham argues with God—what if I can find 50 righteous people? Will you relent on your judgment?
And when God agrees, he lowers the stakes to 40…and then 30…and then all the way down to 10 righteous people. And God agrees.
Apparently persistence is key.
Ask, and it will be given; seek, and you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened for you.
These are some of my favorite words Jesus offers his students—and that’s us, too!
To illuminate these words, he gives a second hypothetical situation—if the first parable wasn’t relatable, maybe this one feels more familiar. When your own child asks for a fish to eat, would you ever give them a snake instead? Can you even imagine a person giving their child a dangerous creature instead of the nutritious food they asked for?
Once again, Jesus tells us we must be like children. We must ask for our needs to be met like a child would, trusting that we are not on our own to figure things out.
We ask in faith that there is a Goodness into whose arms we can throw ourselves in a trust fall.
And when we land safe in that loving embrace, when we receive what we need, we realize that the point was never just in having our daily bread or an egg to eat—the point was the relationship that was strengthened when we made ourselves vulnerable enough to ask.
Ask. Seek. Knock. Bring your needs to God. Admit your limitations. Name your dependence. When you do, Your Good and Gracious Father will give you what you need.
These parables help us to understand that the Lord’s prayer is a practice not for getting prayer right, but for recalibrating our relationship with God: we come to the divine in prayer as children in need—
in need of daily sustenance,
in need of forgiveness,
in need of guidance.
We may not be in the habit of feeling our need of God’s guidance, love, and provision very often. Comfortable circumstances may have shielded us from our true dependence as God’s children. Who among us doesn’t fall into thinking we are in control as we move throughout our human world?
Which is why this prayer begins by naming God as Father—the prayer is powerful because we are confident whom it is we pray to, and what our relationship is with them—and the rest of the prayer is grounded in that.
Our prayer book is full of prayers that begin with centering some attribute of God’s character—“Almighty and ever-living God,” “Holy and gracious Father,” “O God of Peace,”—take some time later today to thumb through the prayers in the back of your BCP and notice the variations in how they begin.
Each prayer’s beginning is intentional—they’re meant to direct our thoughts and hearts toward a particular quality of God
in a way that grounds our prayer in confidence.
Jesus’s prayer and parable use the term Father to describe the warm relationship he wants for his disciples with the divine.
I used to find a lot of comfort in this paternal language for God. I have years of prayer journals addressing my prayers to some variation of Heavenly Father. But for me, those prayers were wrapped up in a constricting, patriarchal, dogmatic Christianity, and when the patriarchal walls began to cave in, I found that I couldn’t find comfort or hope in this “Father God” anymore.
It was in that season that God gave me permission to use feminine pronouns for her—yes, I asked, because I was so afraid of the slippery slope to heresy I’d been warned about for years!
But with confidence, I began addressing my prayers to the feminine form of the divine, and it took almost no time to realize that the Holy Spirit is often portrayed as feminine in our tradition. In the Bible’s original Hebrew, there are two main words that refer to what Christians call the Holy Spirit, both are feminine:
ruah, meaning spirit or breath,
and shekinah, meaning the presence of God.
Not only is the Holy Spirit often feminine in our Scripture, but in a tradition dating back to some of the earliest generations of the church, she has a name: Wisdom, or in Greek, Sophia.
Mother God. Sophia. Wisdom. When I take a breath and utter these names aloud, I find a warmth in my heart and a connection to the Source of Life that gives me the confidence to ask for what I need, to seek what I hope to find, to knock on closed doors.