How Do We Pray?: A Sermon for 7 Pentecost, Proper 12

Just the other morning, as I was headed to visit a parishioner in the hospital, I stopped to grab a bite to eat. As I am prone to do, I read the Daily Office lessons and prayers while I ate my breakfast. When the server came by to check on me, he asked, “What are you reading? Is that the Bible?” I told him that it was called a Daily Office book, which includes daily prayers and scripture readings. He then asked me, “Are you a priest or something?” I’m guessing my collar prompted the question, and I said “yes.” Then the young man – he couldn’t have been older than 18 or 19, asked me, “What can you tell me about faith?” Not, “would you like a biscuit or toast?” or “would you like grits or home fries?”. This pleasant young man at Don Pedro’s asked me, “What can you tell me about faith?”

 These are the sort of questions that, when I reflect on them later, I find myself thinking, “I should have said this or that…”. What I told him was that my experience with faith has been that it is a lifelong journey, and just like any other thing that you are seeking to be proficient at, it takes steady, persistent practice. I couldn’t tell if that answer was what he was looking for or not. We went on to have a brief conversation about the church he used to attend when he was younger, and then that was it.

 I find the timing of this conversation to be rather providential, because in our gospel lesson today, after Jesus finished what was perhaps his own daily prayer ritual, a disciple said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples." Jesus was clearly more prepared for this sort of question than I was, because his answer ended up becoming one of the most impactful prayers in the history of world. In this first part of Jesus’ response, he was offering an example of what one might say when they pray to their Father in Heaven. He was giving this disciple, and all who would follow, a prayer to pray when words escape us.

 But in the second part of his response to the disciple, Jesus goes a step further than just offering an actual prayer to pray. He teaches the disciple to pray by offering a parable that illustrates what a life grounded in prayer might look like. The parable of the friend at midnight points to the fruit born out of bold, persistent, steadfast prayer. The man who knocked on his friend’s door late at night asking for three loaves of bread for a late-arriving guest is initially rebuffed by his understandably-grumpy neighbor. And it is clear that when the sleepy man finally conceded and gave his neighbor what he asked for, his generosity was attributed to his neighbor’s persistence. The neighbor wouldn’t have received the blessing of bread if he hadn’t been steadfast, persistent, and even forceful in his request.

 The editors at Synthesis point out that “although God knows our needs before we ask, persistence strengthens our resolve and develops our openness to receive the blessings God has to give. Giving up easily shows no real concern for what one seeks.” Jesus then follows the parable with some sage wisdom that illuminates the belief that “persistence strengthens our resolve and develops our openness to receive the blessings God has to give.” This wisdom isn’t as well-known as the Lord’s Prayer, but they are indeed some of the most well-known of all of Jesus’ sayings - “ Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

These words from Jesus have received a good bit of pushback from folks who assert that this simply isn’t always true. And I think that we all can relate to doors that have never been opened for us… prayers that have seemingly gone unanswered. So what do we do with this news that Jesus offers that seems too good to be true? It is important for us to remember the context in which these well-known sayings fall. Jesus says them immediately after telling the parable of the friend at midnight. I believe that “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” is more about how we pray – and how often we pray - than a quick-fix reward we will get when we do.

The neighbor who asked his friend for bread at midnight didn’t receive his wish upon his first request. But he persisted in his asking, and ultimately, his wish was granted. Jesus is challenging his followers to ground our lives in persistent, steadfast prayer. When we soak ourselves in a life of prayer – not only when we need or want something right now, we will drawn into an intimate relationship with God. This intimacy with God is exemplified by Jesus when, in the prayer that he taught his disciple, he refers to his Father in heaven as “Abba,” which is translated best as Daddy or Papa. And by instructing his disciple to address his prayer to Abba, Jesus was inviting this disciple into the same intimate familiarity with his Father in heaven. And so it goes for us too. When the friend knocked on his neighbor’s door, his persistence paid off, but equally important, so did his relationship with that neighbor. Had he been a complete stranger, my guess is that he could have knocked all night but never received a response.     

Prayer was clearly an integral part of Jesus’ life and ministry, and when this disciple asked Jesus to teach him and the others how to pray, Jesus offered a tangible response – the Lord’s Prayer – as well as some sage wisdom on how one, in general, is to be grounded in a life of steadfast, persistent prayer.

As I mentioned to that young server at Don Pedro’s last week, my experience of faith has been a lifelong journey. I have no quick-fix, easy answers to finding or experiencing God.

The most practical advice I can give in terms of how we might be steadfast and persistent in our prayer life is to use what our Anglican tradition has given us – the Book of Common Prayer. Praying the Daily Office – Morning and Evening prayer – has had a profound impact on my spiritual life. In a week where one prays Morning and Evening Prayer every day and then attends the Holy Eucharist service on Sunday, one will have prayed the Lord’s Prayer 15 times that week. And one will have also prayed the Psalms and read the Hebrew scriptures that Jesus prayed and read, as well as the scriptures of the New Testament. One will have affirmed their faith twice a day through the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, while also praying the collects that have been passed down through the generations, and prayed by the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us. This sort of repetition ends up forming us in the same way that repetitive drills in sports or musical instruments form athletes and musicians. Just as the concert pianist forms an intimacy with her instrument, such is the case with our intimacy with God.

It is this steadfast, persistent, form of daily prayer and scripture reading that has drawn me closer to God, and been the source of answered prayers in my life. There are many other ways to ground yourself in daily prayer – there are Contemplative Prayer forms such as Centering Prayer, body prayers, meditation, and lectio divina. There are devotionals like Forward Day by Day. The options are vast, and certainly not “one size fits all.” But what is critically important for us to strive for is creating a habit of prayer in our daily lives. This is the steadfast persistence and intimacy that Jesus is speaking of to his disciple in our lesson today.

As the Psalmist says in our Psalm for today, “When I called, you answered me; you increased my strength within me.” And such a commitment to prayer is what allows us, as our Collect for the Day says, “to pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal.”  So as we pass through this temporal life, let us do so grounded in steadfast, persistent prayer to our Father in heaven, who is up waiting with the light on.