Community
Church Sermons
Thirteenth Sunday
after Pentecost – August 29, 2004
Sandy and I had a truly wonderful vacation at our place in New Hampshire. The old oft-repaired Sears water pump worked like a charm. The fishing was great. We went to see the Red Sox play at quaint old Fenway Park and the Sox actually won – beating the Tampa Bay Devil Rays by a score of 14-4 – although I remembered that Dick Emory – who is also a Red Sox fan – reminds me constantly that wins like these are just teasers intended to draw unsuspecting Red Sox fans into the land of Hope only to have their hopes crushed in October by the Curse of the Bambino. Red Sox fans like us are – Dick and I agree – born to misery. But we had a nice time anyways!
Of course, the main attraction on our vacation was the time we got to spend with our grandson Ryan, now 2 and-a-half years old. What a great kid! He is a talker, and I see some possibility of preaching in him! We got to see Ryan learn the art of riding a tricycle, and by the time we left, he was pretty much an expert. And he loved watching the Olympics on TV!
In fact, Ryan loved the Olympics so much that he took to mimicking the gymnasts by running around the kitchen table, stopping every once in a while to jump, then dashing into the family room where we were, doing a forward roll, jumping to his feet, spinning around, raising his arms, and taking a bow with a great big smile on his face. He’s pretty much ready for the Olympics. Either that, or for a career with the circus.
Ryan is a great little kid. And you should hear him pray when he goes to bed at night.
Now I lay me
down to sleep
I pray the Lord
my soul to keep
May angels keep
me through the night
And wake me in the morning light. A-men.
That’s a much better version than the prayer we learned when we were kids, isn’t it?
I so admire our son Peter and his wife Melissa. They are terrific parents. And I’m so especially happy that they are teaching their son at such an early age to become fluent in four languages – English, Spanish, sign language…and the language of prayer.
While I was away, Margaret preached a three-week long series on The Lord’s Prayer, and I’ve heard many enthusiastic reports from you about how helpful those sermons were. For many of us, prayer has existed mainly as an ornamental element of our faith – used as a part of worship ritual. And ALL of us – I dare say – have turned to prayer from time to time as a sort of religious ejection seat that pleads, “Lord get me out of this!!!” when times get rough.
A 2001 survey by George Barna revealed that 82% of adults say they pray at least once-a-week, and that 89% believe there is a God who watches over us and answers our prayers.
But think about this for a moment. If you really believe that God answers prayer, and that prayer somehow unleashes the power of God, would you only pray ONCE a week?
There seems to be a disconnect between what we believe about prayer and how we actually use prayer in our day-to-day lives. And I think I may know the reason.
One of our church members told me about getting elected to the highest Board in her former church. She was very excited about it, imagining that serving on the Board would be a deeply spiritual experience - like being with Jesus and the disciples. The meetings would be full of conversation about the Kingdom of God and how the church could further it, and about the experiences of faith the people were having, and she imagined there would be prayer – prayers of thanksgiving, prayers seeking guidance for the future, prayers for the people of the church, prayers aimed at discerning the will of God.
Then she went to her first meeting.
There was a brief prayer - at the beginning. Then followed two-and-a-half hours of reading committee minutes, crunching numbers, arguing about things much less significant than the Kingdom of God, and following Roberts Rules of Order. It was not at all like Jesus and the disciples! It was like any other business meeting she’d ever gone to in any other secular organization.
She was disillusioned. And well she should be. The Church in our day seems to have become much less like the Church and much more like a business, or a club, or a civic organization.
And we need to understand why.
You see, the secular world is where we live, and most of us have become very fluent in and comfortable with the language of minutes and budgets and organizational minutia. It’s the language we speak and live with every day.
And, in the meantime, many of us have lost the language of prayer.
I read a while ago that there are about 6,800 spoken languages in the world today, but that many of them are threatened by extinction. In fact, experts fear that at least half of those 6,800 languages will be dead by the end of this century. Languages die for a number of reasons – war, genocide, low birth rates, government policy, and so on. But the biggest threat of all is globalization because as the global village spreads and various economies become more and more intertwined, many people who speak minority languages will stop using them. For very practical reasons, they will switch to the dominant language of commerce. A good example is in Australia where British colonization introduced English as the language of government and commerce. As a result, 138 of Australia’s 261 native languages are now virtually extinct.
So is it surprising that we in the Church feel more comfortable with reports and budgets and Roberts Rules than we do with the language of prayer and the guidance of the Holy Spirit? Is it any wonder why so many of us – though we believe in prayer – find ourselves unable any longer to speak the language of prayer with fluency and ease?
This is not a new problem. It existed in Jesus’ day, too, and it’s a problem Jesus often spoke to.
Did you notice in today’s reading from Luke 11 that it all starts with Jesus praying, and the disciples watching? And when Jesus is done praying, one of the disciples says, “Lord, teach US to pray.”
Now why in the world would they ask Jesus to teach them something they already knew? They were Jews after all, and like all Jews of the period, they prayed three times a day! Prayer was not unfamiliar territory to them, and by comparison, prayer was much more a part of their lives than it is a part of our lives!
But they had never seen anyone pray like Jesus!
Their prayers were perfunctory – his prayers were POWERFUL. Their prayers were words hurled off into space– his prayers were CONVERSATIONS WITH THE DIVINE. Their prayers expected nothing in return other than reward points for praying them – his prayers expected MIRACLES.
They had never seen anyone pray like Jesus! Have you?
So they said, “Lord, teach US to pray.”
And that’s where you and I need to begin as we seek to renew the language of prayer in our lives. We need to begin at the feet of the Master. And I would challenge each person here today – no matter how much or how little experience you have with prayer – to go home today and begin with THAT prayer – “Lord, teach me to pray.” Teach me. Show me. Help me. Guide me.
“Lord, teach me to pray.”
That’s always the first step, you see, because learning anything new always begins with a decision on your part that you want to start. It’s true of golf. It’s true of computers and the internet. It’s true of winemaking. It’s true of anything worth doing. You have to decide to start.
“Lord, teach me to pray.”
In Luke 11, Jesus goes on to introduce the disciples to what we today call The Lord’s Prayer. If you weren’t here for Margaret’s three sermons on that, I suggest you go to the web site – www.tellicochurch.org - and pull them down. Or get a CD from the church office if you’d rather listen to them. Or check the video out of the church library if you want to see them! You’ll learn a lot about the language of prayer!
But today, I want to move more deeply into Jesus’ response to the request of the disciples to teach them to pray.
Jesus tells a story.
It’s midnight, and this guy is sound asleep when, all of a sudden, there’s a knock on the front door. Now its never good news when the door knocks in the middle of the night. So this guy rolls out of bed, puts on his robe and slippers, carefully steps over the bodies of his children who are sound asleep (the whole family slept in the same room in those days, you know), and he goes to the door. Through the peephole, he sees his next door neighbor, and so opens the door.
“What’s the matter, Harry? Is someone sick? Is there a criminal on the loose? Is there some kind of emergency?”
And Harry says, “Uh, no Frank. I just need to borrow three loaves of bread!”
Can you imagine that? It’s midnight and your next door neighbor wants to borrow bread! Well, if I was Frank, I’d have slammed that door right in Harry’s face! And as a matter of fact, that’s exactly what Frank did! Then he stomped back upstairs, stepped over the kids again, took off his slippers and robe, and slid back into bed next to Phyllis his wife, hoping to get some sleep.
But just as Frank is dozing off, the phone rings. Now, its never good news when the phone rings in the middle of the night. So Frank reaches across the sleeping form of Phyllis, and answers.
“Hello?”
“Frank, it’s Harry. I really need that bread! Florence’s second cousin on her mother’s side just showed up and they haven’t eaten and, well, we thought we’d whip up some tuna fish sandwiches. We’ve got plenty of tuna, but we’re all out of bread. Do you think…?”
SLAM goes the phone! And Frank tries to get back to sleep. But Harry calls again. This time, Frank doesn’t answer. But Harry leaves a message on the answering machine. “Uh, Frank, when you get a chance could you call me back? We need some bread.”
Frank throws the phone AND the answering machine out the window. But just as he thinks all is quiet, from the corner of the room he hears that familiar AOL voice on his computer say, “YOU’VE GOT MAIL!”
Now, it’s never good news when you get email in the middle of the night…
“Frank, I need bread…”
So Frank does the only thing he can do if he’s going to get any sleep. He goes downstairs to the kitchen, picks up every loaf of bread that’s there, carries it across the street to Harry’s house and throws it on the doorstep and hollers, “Now leave me alone!”
And Harry pokes his head out the door and says, “Hey
thanks, Frank!”
End of story. What a sense of humor Jesus has!
And we and the disciples are left to figure it out. What do you think it means?
Is Jesus saying that God is like Frank and will finally cave in to your requests if you just bug him enough? Is this a story about the importance of being persistent in prayer? Many people think so.
Well, persistence is important, but its not what this parable is about. You see, sometimes parables show us what God is like. And sometimes parables show us what God is NOT like.
Here’s what Jesus says. “If you who are evil – meaning ordinary, ornery human beings like Frank who just want to get some peace and quiet – will get up at all hours of the night and give good things to your friends and neighbors just because they’re driving you nuts – HOW MUCH MORE WILL YOUR HEAVENLY FATHER RESPOND TO THE CHILDREN HE LOVES?”
You see, God is not like Frank.
God is like you were when you first brought your baby home from the hospital. You would have given your life in response to her cry. God is like you were when your kids first got their driver’s licenses and were late getting home from a date. You paced back and forth waiting to hear the thump of the big sub-woofer in the car announcing their safe arrival. God is like a parent who lies awake at night listening for the sounds of his children, and rushing to their side when they call!
In other words, if the first step in learning the language
of prayer is to ask the Lord to teach us to pray, the first lesson he teaches us
is…to pray knowing that God is listening, and at the ready to respond!!!
So Jesus says, “Ask, and you will receive. Seek, and
you will find. Knock, and the door will be opened.”
These are the promises of prayer, and we’ll take a close look at them next Sunday. But today, I just want to leave you with this…
…God is waiting…anxiously waiting…listening for the sound of your voice. In the morning, at noon, and even in the night, God is listening for you.
Why?
Because just like you love your children, God loves you!