Sunday, July 24, 2022

Proper 7

Hosea 1:2-10; Psalm 85; Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19); Luke 11:1-13

The Rev. Clint Brown

Imagine that it is the year 3022, exactly one thousand years into the future, and archaeologists are excavating the site of the ancient city of Houston. In the course of their excavations, they discover the remains of a public swimming pool. Now the purpose of the large, concrete hole in the ground might not be altogether clear to them, but they would know two things about it based on the list of rules displayed on a nearby wall. It was not a place intended for running or diving. And they would learn that people both ran and dove, hence the need for rules against these actions.[1] This is how rules work. To see a list of prohibitions is to discover the kinds of problematic things that people have done. In my teaching, I have long used this illustration to introduce the purpose of the Creeds. “Creeds speak especially to those matters that were controversial at the time the Creeds were written,” the problems that needed solving, the heresies then current that had the potential to divide and wreck the Christian proclamation, and since most of the controversies were related to belief in the Holy Trinity, our Creeds are heavily Trinitarian and careful to speak with clarity and precision about this all-important, distinctly Christian doctrine.[2]

As I reflected on the Lord’s Prayer this week, I realized that this same logic might apply. In giving us a model for prayer, in telling us the things for which we should pray, the prayer is, ultimately, telling us what we lack. It seems a simple outline for how to do a task, but it is also a theological anthropology. It is an answer to the question: who are we?

We are, says the prayer, first of all, dependent: “Give us each day our daily bread” (v. 3). We have need of provision that comes from outside us and for which we are obliged to ask because it is beyond our control. The laws of nature operate, most of the time, beneath our awareness, in ways we do not fully comprehend, but reliably and to our benefit and for that we should be thankful. Somehow the plants grow due to a magical chemical and electrical phenomenon called photosynthesis providing, in their turn, fodder for animals, and then many hands – mostly invisible and unknown to us – link together to bring that food from farm and ranch to market through impressive supply chains that crisscross continents and oceans and time zones and international borders to arrive, eventually, on store shelves and in restaurant larders, and then, through either our own skill or that of others, it is cooked and prepared and dished out ready to enjoy onto our plates to fuel the incredible electro-chemical engine that is us – the human organism that Carl Sagan once observed is stardust having attained the capacity to contemplate itself. In the face of all this staggering providence, that should strike us as nothing short of miraculous, we are right to be moved to gratitude, a sense of something given. “Thank God for that,” we often say, before we realize what we’ve said, as we reach instinctively for someone to thank.[3] But occasionally what stops us short is not our gratitude but our finitude. We plunge ahead confident in our self-sufficiency and mastery until, inevitably, we are confronted with how little control we have. Perhaps it is a diagnosis, or a financial set back, or a death, or an addiction spiraling out of control – eventually something shakes us to our foundation, and we know that we can’t pull ourselves out of this one alone. “Many a bargain is struck in the recesses of the heart when things look black, only to be discarded with embarrassment when the good times return. But it may still be a reminder that none of us is self-sufficient; we all face situations when we know we could do with someone big on our side…[and] reaching out beyond ourselves is the first move of prayer.”[4] We are, first of all, dependent.

Second of all, the prayer says we are guilty: “forgive us our sins” (v.4). Not only are we in need of daily provision, we are also in need of daily forgiveness, because, as any of us can testify, in the scales of cosmic justice we are always tending toward the wrong. It is in our nature to be always choosing the worse over the better part, to be falling short, and so, each day, we are instructed to confess our failings, both in the things done and those left undone. And why this is is not just to secure an extra week of grace for ourselves so that when we rise from our knees we have a clean slate with which to make room for another week of sinning. We are to become instruments of reconciliation ourselves. “Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Here in slightly different wording is the crucial insight that we can’t recognize forgiveness unless we are living that way in relation to others.[5] It’s nothing new. Long ago, God commanded our ancestors, “You shall not oppress an alien since you know the alien’s soul, because you were aliens in the land of Egypt” (Exodus 23:9).[6] Jesus made the same point when he stared at the crowd and said, “He that is without sin…let him first cast a stone” (John 8:7, KJV). We are all in this together, sinning and being sinned against. None of us is guiltless, which is why we must pray, daily, “Forgive us our sins.”

And, finally, the prayer has us calling out to God, “Lead us” and “Deliver us” (v.4b, in its traditional rendering), because we cannot make our own way in this world in any satisfactory sense without divine guidance. We are lost and vulnerable beings who, left to our own devices, will only make misery for ourselves. We cannot be our own source. We cannot be our own salvation. Our impulses lead us only as far as self-interest can take us, to a hollow existence of petty greed, power lust, violence. So into the breach comes a Savior, Christ, to show us a better way and to save us from ourselves. Ever our model, we see him in the garden, in prayer, submitting himself to the perfect will of the Father. We think that we are our highest good, but not so proclaims the Cross – only death brings life. In the great debate about whether prayer changes God or changes us, I don’t think there can be any real doubt. Prayer changes us. “God is perfect love and perfect wisdom,” wrote William Temple. “We do not pray in order to change His Will, but to bring our wills into harmony with His.”[7] “Deliver us,” we pray, from all that would try to tempt us away from the arms of perfect love.

In this brief survey of the Lord’s Prayer, we have discovered ourselves a frail creature: dependent and guilty and vulnerable. This is not the way we like to think of ourselves. We do not like to think of ourselves as either deficient or weak or out of control, and yet this is the reality of who we are. The story is told that Karl Marx’s daughter once told a friend that she hadn’t been brought up with any religion and therefore wasn’t religious. “But,” she confessed, “the other day I came across a beautiful little prayer which I very much wish could be true.” And when asked about it, she began repeating slowly, “Our Father, who art in heaven…”[8] Well, it is true. It tells us exactly who we are.

[1] Scott Gunn and Melody Wilson Schobe, Walk in Love: Episcopal Beliefs and Practices (Cincinnati: Forward Movement, 2018), 171.

[2] Ibid., 172.

[3] John Pritchard, How to Pray: A Practical Handbook (London: SPCK, 2011), 3.

[4] Pritchard, How to Pray, 4.

[5] Ibid., 18.

[6] Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), 201.

[7] Quoted in Bruce Barton, Dave Veerman, and Linda Taylor, Luke, Life Application Bible Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1997), 291.

[8] Quoted in Pritchard, How to Pray, 19.