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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