7th Sunday after Pentecost

It’s quite a mystery, isn’t it? this whole notion of prayer. What is it? Why do we do it? What do we expect it to achieve? What does God want from us?

The best way I have come to conceive of what prayer is, is to look at Jesus’ most elemental teaching of what it means to live by faith – to live righteously:

Love God

and love your neighbor as yourself.

That’s it, right? This is what we do. If we’re following Jesus, if we’re trying to be like Jesus: we love God and we love our neighbors. It all comes down to that.

And so, for me, what prayer has principally become, is that sacred place where I can love God and experience God loving me. The world’s a mess. I’m a mess. We’re all a mess. And being messes in this messy world is tiring. And overwhelming. And frightening. And, at a very basic level: lonesome.

But the invitation of prayer is an invitation that says, “God is love. And you are God’s beloved. So come and be with God.” It takes faith, I know, because it all feels so much “in our heads,” that it’s just a concept we’re choosing to be believe, but that – what we’re really after – is more than “a concept.” We want “a God.” We want a relationship. We want an actual other, who meets us where we are – who meets us in prayer; who says by their person and presence: You are not alone.

It would be preferable for us (by which I mean, “easier”) if God always appeared to us in prayer with some tangible, miraculous, tingly manifestation of his presence. Absolutely. That’s absolutely what I’d want. But it hasn’t been my experience. More often than not, prayer is far less spectacular. And it does rely on faith: “I choose to believe that God is real – that you are real; that your love for this world is real; that your love for me is real.”

And faith is a growing thing. It begins in our minds, as: a proposition; a theology, a philosophy; an aspiration. And then it grows – if we let it – if we avail ourselves of it: “God, here I am. I want you. I want to be with you and in you, and to know you, in me. I want you to be, my father.”

That’s the welcome language that begins Jesus’ prayer: Father – a father who loves, who protects, who provides; a father from whom we come – who is the source of our being; a father whose lap is big enough for us to crawl into when the world is too big and overwhelming, a lap we can fall asleep in.

To that point, if you sometimes fall asleep when you’re praying, maybe that’s just as it should be! What good father doesn’t want, and enjoy, the feeling of a child falling asleep in his arms?

For me, to pray, “Father,” is the most welcome of prayers. It is the assurance that I am welcome there, with God – that I am desired there; that I belong there – not because of my virtue, but because of God’s nature.

Father, hallowed be your name.

“Hallowed” isn’t a word we often use. It means, “holy.” Maybe holiness is also a word or concept we don’t often consider. But I assure you: it is, absolutely, a concept we always desire. In this muddied world of sorrow and confusion and tawdriness, our souls yearn for that which is pure and good and utterly worthy of giving ourselves to, with passion and energy.

And by “giving ourselves to,” I’m not talking about our behavior (although that, too, can certainly be done with passion). I’m speaking far more internally: What do we give our spirits to – our affections, our allegiance?

It is God’s holiness that is such a beacon and a refuge for me. Last year, when I was in the process of coming out to myself as a gay man, it was done first with God. For me to make that step, I absolutely needed to rely on a living faith in God’s fatherly goodness, that God loved me as I was. And, having done so, it was then God’s holiness that held me.

I wasn’t ready for several weeks to talk with anyone else about it. And it wasn’t fear of their rejection or reaction that stopped me from sharing. Rather, it was the purity of my relationship with God that I wanted to dwell in for a bit longer. It was just God and I together: God who is holy, whose love is holy, whose knowledge of me is pure and complete. The time would come, I knew, when I would need to start sharing – to graft others into my life, into this part of my story. As it should be. But I knew intuitively that, whenever you share with someone else, the story gets a little distorted. Everyone has their own lens on everything – a lens that’s a little foggy, a little “not right,” not clear. That’s simply the way it is in all our relationships in this muddied world. All except one. “Father, hallowed be your name.” God is always that room, whose door is always open to us, “Come, be in me.” It is the one relationship we have that is pure, unmuddied, uncorrupted, and safe.

“Give us each day our daily bread.”

There are two things I especially appreciate in this part of the prayer. The first is the sheer practicality of it. We are physical beings whose existence depends on certain things to survive: food, air, water. Every day. And to pray for them is appropriate. It’s shocking, in fact, how abrupt and demanding the prayer is. It’s an imperative verb: “Do this, God.” To ask this of God (to demand this of God!) is rooted in an elemental understanding of the nature of our relationship with God: “God, you are the creator of this world and the way it operates. And so it is your duty, God, to provide what we creatures need to survive here.” But there’s a second element to this prayer that’s paired with it that I also appreciate. And that’s its limited nature: our daily bread – our “just enough for today” bread. We want to hoard – to have deep pantries (as it were) for whatever threats tomorrow holds. But this prayer invites us into a different way of living: Have faith for today. Trust me today. There’s actually quite a freedom in this. We don’t need an enormous faith – an everlasting, eternal faith for all days. We just need a “today faith.” “Give me the breath my lungs need, right now.” And, look, we have it. “Give me the water my body needs now.” And look, we have it. “Give us each day, our daily bread.” And look, we’re each here, today, because that need has been met for each day that’s come before.

There will, of course, come a time, when God’s answer to that prayer will change – when it will be, “Not today. Not today, my beloved. The time for bread – for water, for breath – is ending. Today the story changes. Today you lay down your life, and all you have known it to be. Your life ends today. And today begins your new life in me.”

I trust this to be true for everyone, that whatever the cause of death – be it from natural causes or from sinful violence – each life is ultimately held in God’s redeeming love. We are hearing these days of the starvation happening in Gaza – not because there is no food, not because of drought or famine – but because of human willfulness to withhold it. It is but the latest evidence of human sin writ large in this world. For that is what sin is: it is living in a contrary spirit to the spirit of God. So although I trust that each dying Gazan is being received into God’s redeeming love; and although I trust God to make a thorough redemption of this sinful world, we do need to name that what is happening is sin. It is the opposite of how God calls us to live in this world with one another.

And so we pray, “forgive us our sins.”

Forgive us, God, for each way we are complicit in the brokenness of this world: for our hoarding, our dehumanizing, our violence. Forgive us, God, for every way we step out of the purity of your peace and love, and into the fray of division and enmity.

“Forgive us our sins, as we forgive everyone indebted to us.”

There is a sobering counterpoint to this prayer for forgiveness: that in receiving forgiveness, we ourselves are forgiving people. Many of us were raised with a form of Christian belief that is rather lopsided. We were taught to believe that in order “to be saved” we must confess our sins and receive God’s forgiveness through Christ’s atoning sacrifice. But that narrative of salvation is woefully individualistic and self-centered. It’s entirely about assuring our own eternal well-being, with no particular attentiveness to who we are saved to become in this life. Which means, it is a narrative of salvation that is totally inconsistent with the ministry and witness of Christ. To “be saved” means we are set free to live now into our true humanity as God’s beloved, in union and partnership with God, joining God in godly living: as family (father, mother, sister, child); in hallowedness (in holiness, purity, peacefulness); in feeding one another (not starving them!) with daily bread; in forgiving (in seeing even the humanity of our enemies, and – with compassion – setting people free from any way they have sinned against us).

“And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

So ends this prayer.

I’m not certain to what this “time of trial” refers. Is Jesus speaking of a specific cataclysmic event for all humanity and creation? Is it any time of extreme duress? Is it a final judgment (a literal trial) for our particular sins, or our corporate sins as a human species?

I’m not entirely sure.

But whatever this “time of trial” means, I find solace in the simple observance that Jesus includes it is his prayer: “By all means, pray that you not be brought to a time of trial.” That is an appropriate thing to desire. That is an acceptable prayer to bring to God.

And in bringing it to God, we are trusting God with our desire, knowing that – in the end – God will do as God will do. Most days, for most of us, the answer is a rather consistent one. We do, for the most part, live peaceable lives.

But it is not universal, for all people or for all times. There are times of trial. And there are times when these trials are absolutely the consequence of sin. So it was for Jesus himself, when he prayed at Gethsemane, “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.”

Jesus’ first prayer was not answered. The cup of suffering and death – wrought by human sinfulness – was not removed from him. His second prayer was answered. “Not my will but yours be done.” It was a prayer of trust in God’s sovereignty.

It is natural and fitting to desire and to pray for deliverance from all suffering. And, most days, it’s the answer we receive. But there are other times, when the answer will be, “Not today, my beloved. Today will be a difficult one. But whether you strive in hope, or succumb to fear, you remain my beloved. There is no sin or sorrow that is stronger than my arms to hold you in love, this day and forever.