"Lord, teach us to pray": A sermon for the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost

Gloria, Lord's Prayer, and Creed (plus alphabet!),
'Shaftesbury Psalter' (12th c., England)

Preached at St. Andrew's Anglican Church, Moscow, Russia, on 28 July 2013.  (In preparing this sermon, I was surprised to learn that the readings—Genesis 18:20-32; Psalm 138; Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19); Luke 11:1-13—were the same as those for one of the first sermons I preached as a seminarian [here]; the three year lectionary cycle has gone by quickly!)

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“Lord, teach us to pray.” — Luke 11:1

When the Lord Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, he gives us a prayer that contains and patterns all other prayers.  It has been called “an epitome of the whole Gospel,”[1] a summary of the teaching of Jesus.  As “an epitome of the whole Gospel” the Lord’s Prayer shows us how to order our desires toward the love of God and neighbor.  In it our Lord teaches us what to ask for and what to desire.  To pray his prayer is to ask for what he wants us to ask, to seek what he wants us to seek.  Put differently, in the language of Paul’s letter to the Colossians, learning to pray the Lord’s Prayer is one of the ways in which we who have “received Christ Jesus as Lord” continue “to live in him” (Col. 2:6), because in praying this prayer we are drawn close to the heart of Jesus, close to the heart of God.  As we learn from the Lord Jesus how to pray, he makes us more like himself.  So this morning, I want to look with you at how our Lord teaches us to pray, in order to see what he would have us desire, what he would have us love.

To begin, Jesus teaches us to address God as “Father.”  He teaches us to become what we are in him by grace.  That is, by the grace of adoption in Christ, we are made worthy to name our Creator as Father.  As St. Paul says, “God sent his Son….so that we might receive adoption as children.  And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’” (Gal. 4:4–6)  So when we say, “Our Father,” we remember the great love the Father has given us in adopting us as children, the love from which absolutely nothing can separate us.  So to pray, “Our Father,” is the greatest of gifts.

And it is also a great responsibility, for we show by our actions that we are God’s children.  “Love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return,” Jesus teaches, “...and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked” (Lk. 6:35).  To pray “Our Father,” then, is to ask to become like God.  St. Maximus the Confessor put it this way: to pray “Our Father” is to be “eager to set on our life the features of the one who gave us life.”[2] “To set on our life the features of the one who gave us life.” We most truly pray “Our Father” to the extent that our lives are conformed to the life of Jesus the Son, the perfect image of God.  Jesus teaches us to seek to become a people whose entire lives say, “Our Father.”

Miniature of the Wheel of Sevens, from the 'De Lisle Psalter' (14th c., England)
(From the center the rings contain: 1. the seven requests of the Lord's prayer;
2. the seven sacraments of the Church; 3. the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit;
4. the seven spiritual weapons of the virtues; 5. the seven corporeal and spiritual
works of mercy; 6. the seven principal virtues; and 7. the seven criminal vices.)

Calling on the Father with the Son by the Spirit, we learn to desire most what the Lord desires most when we pray “Hallowed be thy name” and “Thy kingdom come.”  To pray for God’s name to be hallowed is to ask that God would be recognized as holy, that God would be praised.  It is a petition that we ourselves would praise God and that the whole creation might sing the praises of the Creator.  The psalm we read today [Ps. 138] expresses both aspects well.  In verse 2, the psalmist says, “I will bow down towards your holy temple and will praise your name for your love and your faithfulness,” and he prays in verse 4 and 5 that “all the kings of the earth” might “sing of the ways of the Lord.”  We praise God, and all the nations praise God, all creation praises God.  We hallow God’s name when we praise the One who called light of out darkness, Israel out of Egypt, and Jesus from the dead.  We were made to praise God, so when we pray “Hallowed by thy name,” we ask God to bring to completion the work of redemption that all creation might join in our praise.

Similarly, when we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” we ask that God’s reign would become fully manifest on earth.  We pray that the unjust and idolatrous kingdoms of the world would become the just and peaceful kingdom of God, the kingdom intimately connected with the presence of Jesus the Messiah.  We hope for the final fulfillment of the promise spoken to the Virgin Mary that her son “will reign over the house of Jacob forever and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Lk. 1:33).  Setting our hope in him, we pray, “Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!”  When we pray, “Thy kingdom come,” we learn to desire that God’s reign would be manifest in our lives and to look for the renewal of all things at Christ’s return.

In teaching us to pray first for the hallowing of God’s name and the coming of God’s kingdom—and for God’s will to be done—the Lord shows us what we should desire above all else.  After all, our Lord said, “Seek ye first the kingdom of God.”  There is a prayer of the saintly Dominican priest, Vincent McNabb, that expresses this well:  “Bend my stubborn heart, my Master, make my lips truthful. May my prayer be a prayer of truth as well as a prayer of petition. May I desire what I say I desire; and may I desire as first what Thou hast put first, at the head of all our desires—Thy Will, Thy Kingdom, and the hallowing of Thy Name.”

As Fr. McNabb’s prayer suggests, our hearts must be transformed if we are to desire first what God puts first, at the head of all our desires.  We need to be taught to pray aright.  And our need for transformation is perhaps especially evident in the final petitions of the Lord’s Prayer—“give us…forgive us…lead us not…”.  For, damaged by sin, we are not inclined to trust in the Lord’s provision, not inclined to forgive others, not inclined to flee from evil.  But confident that God, for whom nothing is impossible, is able to transform our hearts, let’s keep looking at what the Lord teaches us to desire.

When we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we seek from God the provision of what is necessary for life.  I don’t need to tell you that we need to eat and drink to sustain our lives; you know it because it is a need we feel so deeply, that drives us so urgently, that makes us so liable to worry.  Yet we need to hear this petition for daily bread alongside what Jesus says elsewhere: “Do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying.  For….your Father knows that you need them” (Lk. 12:29–30).  Jesus calls us to give over our most basic needs to God, trusting that our Father will provide what is necessary for each day, just as he feeds the ravens and clothes the lilies.  Trusting in his provision, we are freed to be “rich towards God” (12:21) by selling our possessions and giving to the poor, imitating God’s generosity.  And in praying for “our daily bread” we learn not to greedily heap up treasures for ourselves, but to ask for only what is necessary for our life.[3]

And it is not only food that is necessary for life.  For Jesus said, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Mt. 4:4), and, “I am the Bread of Life” (Jn. 6:35).  Accordingly, the Church teaches that “our daily bread” also refers “to the Bread of Life: the Word of God and the Body of Christ.”[4]  It is this bread we are chewing on right now as we ponder the Word of God and this bread that we will receive in a few minutes in the Eucharist.  Christ calls us to be a community nourished by the Bread of Life and freed to live according to God's economy of abundant provision.

Detail of miniature of Christ praying at Gethsemane,
'The Taymouth Hours' (14th c., England)

In the petition, “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive everyone indebted to us,” the Lord Jesus teaches us to be a people who love mercy.  As Paul writes in Colossians, God “forgave us all our sins” on the Cross of Christ and washes our sins away in Baptism (Col. 2:13).  But in this life we will always have occasion to confess our sins and implore God’s mercy.  God is eager to forgive us, for “if we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn. 1:9).  Since God so readily forgives us, we also ought to forgive others.  If we withhold forgiveness from those who have wronged us, we show that our hearts remain hard, closed to God’s merciful love, clenched like a fist.[5]  Our hearts become unclenched, open to receiving the full extent of God’s purifying love, as we, with God’s help, forgive whose who have wronged us—even our enemies.  So praying for God’s mercy also entails praying that we would be merciful, which is to say, that we would imitate God: “Be merciful,” Jesus says, “just as your Father is merciful” (Lk. 6:36).

Just as in this life we will always need to ask for nourishment and for forgiveness, so also do we need to pray, “Do not bring us to the time of trial,” “Lead us not into temptation.”  We ask that God would give us the strength to resist temptation, that we would not consent to desires which lead us away from the love of God, that our suffering would not lead us to hate God,[6] that we would be protected from the Evil One.  When we pray to not be overcome by temptation, we are drawn close to our Lord Jesus, who was tempted in the wilderness and in his agony but did not sin.  It was by prayer that Jesus himself endured temptation,[7] so let us join with him in praying that the Holy Spirit would enable us not to allow anything to turn our desire away from the love of God.

Let us pray as the Lord taught us so that we would learn to desire nothing more than the love of God, which has been poured into our hearts through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Lord, teach us to pray! Amen.

[1] Tertullian, De orat. 1.

[2] Maximus the Confessor, Commentary on the Our Father §4 in Maximus the Confessor: Selected Writings (Classics of the Western Church; trans. George C. Berthold; Paulist Press, 1985), p. 106.

[3] Cf. John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Gospel of Matthew, Homily 19.8.

[4] Catechism of the Catholic Church, §2861.

[5] Cf. Ibid, §2840.

[6] Drawing on Maximus the Confessor’s discussion of voluntary and involuntary temptation in the Commentary on the Our Father, p. 119.

[7] Catechism of the Catholic Church., §2849.