Teach Us to Pray by Cheri Holdridge (with an assist by Patti Lusher)

Are you comfortable praying out loud with other people? If not, you may have something in common with this guy. Let’s watch.

*** play video.

Lots of people are uncomfortable praying with another person, or in front of a group. When I married Kurt, his grandmother always said the prayer at the family Christmas dinner. She did a lovely job. But over the years, somehow I got asked to do the prayer, because I am a pastor. We seem to have this idea that pastors are the professional “pray-ers.” Grandma is also getting up there in years and I think there is just no one else in the family that feels that comfortable praying in front of a big crowd, so they always ask me. I don’t mind doing it. But if I had a chance to be with them more than once or twice a year, if I were their pastor, I would say: you can all pray. We can all pray. Anyone can pray.

You don’t have to go to seminary to pray. Obviously. Jesus invites us all to pray every day.

But even his disciples felt unsure about how to do it. Most of you hesitated when I asked if you like praying out loud.

Do you ever wonder: how should I pray? My prayers don’t sound like the pastor’s or like my grandfather’s or like my mom’s. Well, of course they don’t; and God does not expect them to. Just as we celebrated the wonderful diversity of the Body of Christ last week, God welcomes the diversity of our prayers.

Jesus’ disciples came to him one day and one of them asked: “Jesus, teach us how to pray.” You see, they wanted to communicate with God. They wanted to know how to pray. At least some of them had grown up going to the Jewish synagogue. Certainly they had prayed before. But they sensed that Jesus came with a fresh new approach to this God thing and so they were hungry to learn everything from him. They knew when he was tired and needed to restore his soul, he would go away to a quiet place. Presumably he would pray there.  He would pray to God to fill up his well.  They wanted the inside look at Jesus’ prayer life. They knew he was like this (hold hands palms together) with God, at one. They wanted that sense of intimacy and peace and they had a sense that prayer was the source… the place where Jesus filled his well when he felt dry and weary.

So Jesus gave them an example of a prayer. We have turned it into a crafted piece of poetry that we sometimes repeat without thinking: “Our father who art in heaven, HOWARD BE thy name…”

But when Jesus said it, he wasn’t expecting them to repeat the same prayer every day. He was simply giving them an example. “Start like this, call God something intimate, like Abba, which means Daddy. Then say, you are holy. Reveal your holy presence to us. Then ask God for sustenance – your daily food. Ask God to make you a forgiving person, and to forgive you. And finally ask God to keep you safe from turning to evil ways.”

That was it.

Be aware of the holiness of God. And then pray for three main things: 1) sustenance. Ask God for what you need. Notice that it was not about luxury or comfort, it was about what was necessary for well-being. 2) relationship. Ask God for forgiveness and to help you forgive. Jesus knows that we are people who need to be forgiven. We are imperfect people. So every time we pray we need to clear things up with God and we need to remember that we need to, in turn, forgive others. 3) safety. Keep us safe from harm and from evil. This is a big one. This is when we ask God to keep us on track. There are some evil forces in this world over which we have no control. There are natural forces and people who will do us harm. But there are also choices we can make for evil and for good. Asking God to help us, means that we are asking God to help us make choices away from evil when this is in our power. We ask God for the power to resist evil. 

This is a good prayer. God you are holy. Give us what we need. Help us stay in relationship with you and others by forgiving. And keep us safe from evil, from making really bad choices.

You see, when Jesus answered the question from his disciple his answer shows that prayer is really quite simple. We don’t need to make it hard.

Prayer, mostly, is about relationship. The importance of prayer is getting into and staying in relationship with God. Think about it this way. If you are in a relationship with someone, you generally stay in contact with that person, right? Now, of course, there is the old friend who you may not see for years, and you can get together and it’s like you never missed a beat. But that is unusual. For the most part a relationship means communication.

For example, if you are dating, and you want to consider someone as a potential life partner, then you expect that person to make time for you, right? If they keep being too busy at work to see you and you feel like you are always the one calling or texting and you never hear from them, you start to feel like this is not a relationship, right?

Well, God gives us this beautiful world as God’s phone calls and texts to us. God gives us the Bible as God’s love letters to us. And God is waiting to hear from us. God wants us to pray, so that God can hear what is on our hearts. Prayer is our relationship with God.

Writer David Lose says: prayer is not really about the outcomes, it is about the relationship (http://www.davidlose.net/2013/02/what-is-prayer/). When we pour our hearts out to a good friend, it’s not like we necessarily expect that friend to fix everything, we just want to know they care. Sometimes we just need to vent. In letting it all out, we feel better. Often we find clarity about what we need to do next when a friend just listens to us.

It’s the same way with prayer with God. We know something of God’s heart because we have studied scripture and we have learned from one another in Christian community. God speaks to us through one another. When we pray, and pour out our hearts to God, God’s response comes to us in our own insights into the situation.  When we ask God to help us with a situation, we are asking God to act in our lives. What we are also doing is asking God to influence us. We are asking God to change us. I wasn’t the first to say it but it is something I rely on: prayer doesn’t change God; it changes the person who prays.

Another thing about prayer is that it attunes us to God. It helps us bridge the gap between our faith life and our daily life. When we pray every day, we are asking God to be connected to every part of our lives. We ask God to bless our hopes and to calm our fears. We invite God into our lives.

Anne Lamott is one of my favorite writers. She has a fairly new book about prayer called: Help, Thanks, Wow. She says these are three simple prayers essential to coming through tough times, difficult days and the hardships of daily life. We can say to God “help, thanks, and wow.” So, the best way to learn to pray truly is to practice, so I am going to invite you now to turn to a neighbor and practice praying. But first we are going to model the praying for you using these three words.