Ask and it will be given to you.
Seek and you shall find.
Knock and the door will be opened to you.
Lord, teach us to pray.
At some point in our lives, often in our childhood, many of us probably have memories of someone teaching us to pray. I remember, as a child, praying these words – which I’m sure my parents, my grandmother, my Sunday School teachers taught me – familiar words, somewhat dark, given that they are a children’s prayer, but you may find them familiar:
Now I lay me down to sleep
I pray the Lord my soul to keep
If I should die before I wake,
I pray my soul to take.
And then after that, “Bless Mom and Dad, and everyone that we could possibly name and remember. Amen.”
So today, we hear the origins of another familiar prayer, one of the most beloved passages in the Bible, the prayer that Christ gave us, that begins, Our Father.
Lord, teach us to pray, the disciples ask. They’ve been watching Jesus – noticing how he seeks out time and space by himself to be in conversation with God his father – and they ask, how can we do this too? They must have been feeling the weariness and weight of endless travel through wilderness and unknown cities, the oppression of the Roman government, the suffering of the people around them, the poor and the sick – they felt sadness, I am sure, at leaving family and loved ones and homes behind, taking this leap of faith to follow an upstart preacher, and they felt the need for grounding, for comfort, for encouragement. Lord, teach us to pray.
And Jesus responds by teaching them what to pray – the words that we hear and say every Sunday, and at other times – and also how to pray – and the reassurance that when we pray, God is with us, listening and answering.
Jesus starts with the what, with the words to say:
Our father in heaven,
hallowed be your name.
Give us this day our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins
for we forgive our debtors.
Save us from temptation.
Jesus’ words, whether we hear them here or in the Gospel of Matthew, or speak them in our liturgy, aren’t flowery or elaborate – in fact, they are almost rude – a series of demands, one after the other. Give us. Forgive us. Save us. As theologian Douglas John Hall puts it, “there is no Please” in this prayer.
Prayer doesn’t need to be a lot of beautiful words, Jesus seems to be saying – it doesn’t even need to be a lot of polite words.
Poet Mary Oliver writes, and some of you have heard me quote her before – prayer doesn’t need to be a beautiful flower, a blue iris – it can be “weeds in a vacant lot” –
just
pay attention,
she writes,
patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate,
this isn’t
a contest
Author Anne Lamott writes that prayer can be distilled down to three words, that I have a feeling some of you know:
Help. Thanks. Wow.
Part of the challenge is to find opportunities to pray all those things – help tends to come up most frequently, most immediately, but not just the “help,” but the “thanks,” and the “wow.” Keeping all three of those in mind nudges us to be in more constant conversation with God, bringing to God not only our needs and hopes and fears, but sharing with God how we experience God’s work in our lives and the world around us.
Which brings us to the how of prayer.
After Jesus teaches his disciples what to pray, he goes on to teach them how to pray. And he, like Anne Lamott, distills it down not quite to three words, but to three instructions or ideas:
First: Ask and it will be given to you. Prayer speaks out of our human need. Perhaps, to go back to Anne Lamott, that’s the “help” prayer. It may be a loaf of bread for an unexpected dinner guest in the middle of the night – or courage during an emergency room visit in the middle of the night. Help me, God, get through this hour, or this day. Help me do my work well. Help me apologize. Help me find the right way to comfort a grieving friend. Help me know what to say to my child, or my parent; help me know the right path forward in my job, or for my family.
The second instruction: Seek and you shall find. Prayer acknowledges that we can sometimes be at a loss, that we don’t have all the answers, and that sometimes we must be still and listen for the answer, whatever that answer is. Richard Rohr talks about prayer as quieting ourselves, opening ourselves up to God, in the moments when we are uncertain or anxious:
“Prayer,” he says, “is largely just being silent: Holding the tension instead of even talking it through… loving reality as it is instead of understanding it fully. Prayer is … a willingness to say, ‘I don’t know.’” Rohr describes God as a river, always flowing, and prayer is something like stepping into that river, and giving ourselves over to its currents.
And the third instruction: Knock and the door will be opened to you. Prayer, Jesus says, is like a door. And this is the image that stayed with me as I was reading and re-reading this week’s Gospel. If prayer is a door, then it is also an invitation, and it is an invitation that goes both ways. Sometimes we knock, waiting for God to invite us in – we seek refuge, we seek sanctuary or comfort, a safe space when we are feeling lost or afraid and need to find grounding, energy, assurance.
At other times, we knock at the door to invite God to come out – needing God to step through the door into our world, to enter our lives, to be with us in the chaos and the disorder, whatever wilderness we are navigating – or whatever joy!
Let us pray.
Our father in heaven, remind us you are always at the door, that your heart is always open to hear us when we ask for help, when we give you thanks, when we can only stop in wonder at the glory of your work in the world and say “wow.” When we are lost, help us to listen for your voice; when we are grieving, help us to see your world anew; when we have failed, forgive us; when we hunger, feed us with the bread of life. In the name of your son Jesus Christ, Amen.
