Prayer & The Kingdom of God’s Love Proper 12C

 Prayer & The Kingdom of God’s Love

Jesus was praying “in a certain place.” (Luke 11:1-13) The men and women disciples traveling with him ask him to teach them how to pray, just as John taught his disciples. What follows is a version of what we call The Lord’s Prayer, though our usual liturgical version is based largely on that presented in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew. The prayer is followed by a funny story about bread, scorpions, and the Holy Spirit. It seems it’s always about bread! 

Although Jesus launches right into a prayer, a close reading of the text suggests that the first step very well may be to find ourselves “a certain place.” As the final petitions are in the second person plural, “us and we,” Jesus is suggesting that we pray together. In his Jewish world, that requires a minyan, ten or more people. The “certain place,” then, appears to be with the Community of Love he is building. Elsewhere, Jesus appears to reduce the minyan to two or three: “wherever two or three are gathered in my name, I am in the midst of them (Matthew 18:20). Our certain place may not be a place at all. It can be wherever two or three or ten or more are gathered. We, the Community of God’s Love, are that place wherever and whenever we are together. At the time of Jesus, and even more so the time of Luke following the destruction of the Temple, finding a place to gather could be dangerous given the intention of the Roman Empire to put an end to Jesus and his followers who choose to follow the will of a higher power. 

Jesus begins our prayer quite simply: Father. This was Jesus’s personal address to the God of all creation, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of the Passover and Exodus, the God of the Wilderness Sojourn. That is, Jesus invites us to become part of his family, God’s family, and we are granted permission to address God as he does: Father. The Community of God’s Love becomes our fictive family – not related by blood or marriage, but on our mutual affection and mutual support for one another, and all those in need. 

“Hallowed be your name.” Holy, Revered, Honored be God’s name. How might we hallow God’s name? It begins with loving the God who loves us and all that God has created, and loving everyone and all that God has created ourselves. That is, we are to love one another, all others, in the sense of support and meeting the needs of others. 

Then comes the Big Ask: Your Kingdom come! I am quite sure we say this without really grasping that for which we ask. On this earth alone there are many kingdoms, with many kings or queens or presidents or whatever kind of leadership is in charge. We pledge allegiance to these kingdoms. But in this prayer we ask for something entirely different: we want God’s kingdom to come. Here. Now. Jesus’s whole ministry begins with him saying that God’s kingdom is at hand. Which is a way of saying it is here for those who recognize it and accept it and are willing to step into it. We are not praying for some distant future, nor some time to come after death. We are talking about living in God’s kingdom here and now, which can mean bucking the empire. 

The most basic element of God’s kingdom here and now is expressed in the very first petition: “give us each day our daily bread.” This recalls the wilderness sojourn during which time manna, a flakey kind of “bread,” was sent by God to his people each day. When they entered the land of promise the manna stopped. There were no real preservatives, no refrigeration, so grain would be ground and dough made in the evening. The next morning you take it to the community oven or furnace, or to a baker, to be baked for that day’s bread. A daily reminder that it is by the grace of the God whose name we are to hallow that we have been given the ingredients, the skills and a community of love to help insure there is bread enough for all. And enough to share with others. Yet even now, we store up food meant for children here and abroad, lock it up in a warehouse, let it pass its expiration date, and destroy it – while there are children and adults throughout our country, and far away in Gaza, who pray for a crust of bread even now as we come to break bread at the Lord’s table. [i] Just as the recent Reconciliation Bill cuts SNAP and school lunches for millions to give tax cuts for the country’s most affluent billionaires. 

At the very heart of our prayer is forgiveness: we ask for our sins to be forgiven “for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” I read poetry when waiting for the bar-b-q coals to get ready for grilling. I recently ran across the following line penned by W.S. Merwin about the danger of the Gray whale facing extinction due to over hunting:

Gray whale

Now that we are sending you to The End

That great god

Tell him

That we who follow you invented forgiveness

And forgive nothing 

Forgiveness, says Jesus, is to be at the heart of our prayer. And yet, as Merwin observes, we often forgive nothing. Look at how we over hunt the Grey whale and other species. Look at how we routinely and without thought poison the environment. We rarely ask for forgiveness, and rarely offer forgiveness out of our outsized sense of hubris. It is meant to be the heart of God’s kingdom, what the Bible calls Jubilee: “a wholly new basis for human interaction – the polar opposite of the systems of debt and obligation, patronage and merit, honor and shame, that characterize life under various human institutions and authorities. In the realm of God, those old rules are cancelled, and all things are made new. This is a prayer to be both spoken and lived.” [ii] 

We are to conclude, “and do not bring us to the time of trial.” This could be reference to that day when we all must give an account as to how we have or have not lived into this vision of God’s kingdom for which we pray. Jesus calls us to follow the ways in which he offers endless examples of just how to live into this vision here and now. It may also refer to the trials we may face as we oppose the very systems of indebtedness and injustice that seek to grind up the people of God into so much fodder for corporate and industrial greed, power grabs, and endless conflict and wars. Jesus knows as well as anyone that to live the Jubilee of God’s kingdom can lead to trial. And crucifixion. That is one reason why following Jesus is called The Way of the Cross. 

To illustrate the need for shamelessness and perseverance in the prayer he teaches us, comes the story of a neighbor who needs bread in the middle of the night to provide hospitality for an unexpected house guest. He wakens a neighbor, who is reluctant to get out of bed, but who eventually opens the door and provides the very bread we are to pray for daily. In the dark of night in today’s world, there are many who knock on our door asking for just a crust of bread, let alone three loaves. We pray and pray as Jesus instructs us. But the question remains, what do we do? It seems that now is the time of trial. It is always now. What we do or do not do will make all the difference as to whether this prayer changes us to be more like the unchangeable God we call Father who promises to give us the Holy Spirit if only we will ask, seek and knock. Amen.

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[i] US News and World Report, July 17, 2025

[ii] Ringe, Sharon H., Luke (Westminster John Knox Press, Louisville, KY (1995): p. 165

Being Martha Proper 11C

 Being Martha

Nestled between the parable we call The Good Samaritan and the Lord’s Prayer, in a section of Luke’s gospel focused on hospitality, is this brief story about two sisters in Bethany, a village just outside of Jerusalem (Luke 10:38-42). It only occurs in Luke’s gospel, which paired with his volume 2, The Acts of the Apostles, seems in part to be a guide for how Gentiles might be incorporated into the Jewish world of Jesus, and his Father’s “kingdom of God.” A world in which hospitality toward strangers, wanderers, and even resident aliens is a hallmark of what it has meant to love God and love neighbor all the way back to the nomadic days of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Moses. 

It is an odd little story, and can seem out of place coming after the extravagant and generous hospitality of the Samaritan in the previous story, and the forgiveness of sins and debts we pray for in the Lord’s prayer following. Most of us have heard it interpreted from a protestant reformation point of view, extolling the devotion of Mary, reclining at the feet of Jesus listening to his “word,” his proclamation of the need for repentance and accepting the invitation to enter into the life of his Father’s kingdom, while demeaning the “works” of Martha preparing a meal for Jesus and his disciples as wrote, routine, tradition, and devoid of true faith. “Faith, not works!” proclaimed reformers like Martin Luther. Luther, who wanted to rip the Letter of James out of the New Testament – a letter that loudly proclaims that Faith without Works is Dead. 

This despite the fact that the only other mention of the two sisters occurs in John’s gospel. They call upon Jesus to come to the aid of their ailing brother, Lazarus. Jesus is delayed. Lazarus dies. The women are sitting shiva, neighbors are visiting, when word comes that Jesus is at the edge of town. Martha jumps us, marches out to meet him half-way and chastises him. Had you come when we called our brother would still be alive, she says. Jesus assures her that her brother will rise again. Not impressed, she says, oh yes, on the Day of the Resurrection of all faithful people, but I mean now. “I am resurrection and I am life,” says Jesus, “Do you believe this?” At which moment Martha becomes the first person in John’s gospel to confess, “Yes, Lord, I believe, you are the Christ, the Messiah, the Anointed One who is coming into the world.” A much more powerful, more assured declaration than Peter’s confession at Caesaria Philippi. How could this same Martha be saddled with a reputation as the least spiritual of the two sisters? How could her confession not be the preeminent confession of all the New Testament? 

One needs to sit with the stories in Luke and John and listen to them over and over again before being able to hear what is going on that day in Bethany. It is Martha who invites Jesus, we are told, “into her home.” Yes, women could be successful businesswomen. Yes, women could own their own home. Mary, we are told, reclines at Jesus’s feet listening to him. Martha is busy with “her many tasks.” She asks Jesus to send Mary to help her. This prompts Jesus’s strange reply, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."   

Strange, that in a world in which hospitality was a cardinal virtue, and just after a parable in which generous hospitality is championed, that is doing many things for the strange man lying by the side of the road, doing “works” to insure that the stranger might live, Jesus appears to be saying that Mary is doing the “one thing,” “the better part,” suggesting that Martha has chosen a lesser set of tasks and ought not be worried about her sister. And in teaching the Lord’s Prayer after this episode, he tells a story that says if someone knocks on your door in the middle of the night asking for a few loaves of bread, no matter how inconvenient, you ought to get up out of bed, open the door, and provide for that person’s needs. What is Jesus up to? Or, what is Luke up to? 

Sitting with the story, we notice that Jesus does not tell Martha to come sit down and listen to him. Nor does he tell her to stop doing her household tasks – literally deaconing, serving, waiting on other’s needs. Luke simply does not tell us what happens next. It is possible that Jesus recognizes that Martha understands that these are unusual times, given the Roman occupation, roads lined with crucifixions, taxes at an all-time high to feed the empire, the rich and the greedy who need more and more pairs of shoes as Amos proclaimed some seven centuries before (Amos 8:1-12). And he can see that Martha has a full grasp of the kind of hospitality he encourages toward all newcomers, outcasts, and even dreaded enemies like the Samaritans and Gentiles. In fact, she does not appear to be trying to curry his favor. She is not trying to earn God’s favor. Martha seems to understand it is not her hospitality at all, but it is God’s hospitality she enacts with no expectation of reward or thanks. 

Indeed, some thirteen hundred years later, the Dominican Meister Eckhart when preaching on just this story suggests that when Jesus addresses saying her name twice, “Martha, Martha…” it is not out of exasperation, but in recognition of her seeming spiritual completeness: the first ‘Martha’ recognizes her temporal completeness providing for the needs of all, and the second ‘Martha’ refers, suggests Eckhart, to her relationship to eternity, not some sequential future eternity, but what he calls the “equal eternal Now.” Martha lives comfortably in both worlds. She is at home in God’s kingdom, which Eckhart calls “the circle of eternity,” and in this world of daily needs. Martha already seems to know that the ‘way to God’ is not a ‘way’ at all. It is not a destination, but rather a way of being – a way of being home in God. Her actions, her works, her activities are without a “why.” Friends of God like Martha have nowhere to go and need no means of getting there because they are already Here and in the Now: she lives out of an already-arrived-ness which involves no means, no why, no reward, no return. 

“Now listen to a marvel! How marvelous to be without and within; to embrace and be embraced; to see and be seen; to hold and be held – that is the goal, where the spirit is ever at rest, united in joyous eternity.” (Meister Eckhart Sermon 86) 

Eckhart goes so far as to translate the opening of the story from the Latin Vulgate, “Our Lord Jesus Christ went into a little castle and was received by a virgin who was a wife.” By ‘virgin’ he means one who is “free of irrelevant ideas, as free as he was before he existed.” And by ‘wife’ he means someone who is free and unfettered in affections, near both to God and to self, who brings forth much fruit every day (works of faith) one hundred and one thousand-fold. Thus, a virgin wife bears fruit out of the ground of God’s eternal Word – which is, Jesus Christ. Christ who lives in the “little castle” of our soul. 

So it is that in the medieval church, Martha became the very icon of the living Christ, patron saint of hospitals, doctors, nurses, women’s communities and all who serve God by serving others. Concludes Meister Eckhart: What I have been saying to you is true, as I call on Truth to bear witness and my soul to be the pledge. That we, too, may be castles into which Jesus may enter and be received and abide eternally with us in the manner I have described, may God help us! Being Martha is being at home in God with Christ. Amen.