Talking to God

Scripture Reading

New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition Genesis 3

3 Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” 2 The woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, 3 but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ ” 4 But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not die, 5 for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” 6 So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eyes and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7 Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked, and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

8 They heard the sound of the LORD God walking in the garden at the time of the evening breeze, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the LORD God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the LORD God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?” 10 He said, “I heard the sound of you in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked, and I hid myself.”

New Revised Standard Version: Updated Edition Luke 11

11 He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2 So he said to them, “When you pray, say:

Father, may your name be revered as holy.

May your kingdom come.

3 Give us each day our daily bread.

4 And forgive us our sins,

for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.

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

WWTW

Introduction: Dear God!

One of my favorite stories about prayer:

I was working with a pastor at Westminster.

He has this habit of starting his prayers in groups with 1, maybe two minutes of silence before he hops in to speaking.

I always appreciated that.

One day, he and I were leading a program for the Preschool at our church around Christmas time.

I sang a few carols, and he led the kiddos in the Christmas story.

When we finished, he said “Can we pray together?” And he started with his classic 1-2 minutes of silence.

And a little boy in the front row piped up and said “Hey mister! It starts, ‘Dear God!’”

Hard to keep a straight face!

But as we’re approaching Lent, I thought it would be a good thing for us to spend some time on the subject of prayer.

What is prayer?

What are we supposed to get out of it?

Why does it feel like some prayers get answered, and some don’t?

What kind of prayer practices can we engage in as a community and as individuals?

And so today we’re going to start in a strange place…

Start in the Garden

We were perfectly connected with who God is.

When God creates humans, there is no barrier between us and God.

God walks with us.

God talks with us.

God is made perfectly available to us.

We are completely and totally connected with who God is.

And that relationship lasts all of…two chapters.

Sin separates us from God.

Because in what we read here this morning in chapter three, humanity discovers sin.

Lots of people have lots of different definitions of sin, and in fact I myself have a few different ways to describe it, but for our purposes here today let’s define sin this way:

Sin is when we have a choice between the way God wants the world to operate…and the way we want the world to operate.

You can pick just about any sin that’s out there, and this will be the principal behind it.

Greed

God has designed the world and all those of us who occupy it to be generous, and so when we decide to hold on to whatever we can, we’re being greedy, and we’re choosing our own way over God’s.

Judgment

God is the judge, and we are not. And so when we decide that we get to judge other people’s lives and sins, we’re actually the ones doing the sinning at that moment, because we’re choosing our own way over God’s.

Anger

God is a God of steadfast love and compassion, and so when we loose our minds because someone has the audacity to drive 30 miles an hour in the 35 zone that you would rather be driving 45 in (real life example from yesterday!) you are choosing your own way rather than God’s.

Deciding to eat fruit to be like God.

This is the ultimate sin, because what the serpent does to convince these first humans to eat the fruit is to tell them that they’ll actually be like God.

You don’t have to live in the world the way God created it.

You can do it your own way.

The power of the story is not so much that it happened…but that it happens.

You and I, we’re taking bites of that fruit all the time.

We’re choosing our own way over the way that God has laid out for us.

We think we know better.

So we eat the fruit.

And then we realize we’ve screwed up, just the same as these first humans have.

So in Genesis 3, we find the first humans hiding.

The more and more we choose our own way over God’s, the farther and farther away from God we’re getting.

They have a perfectly connected relationship with God, and yet they’d rather run.

The theological term for what we’re witnessing here is “busted.”

How many of you when you were a kid got in trouble with your folks, and decided that the best thing to do was go run and hide under the covers in your room?

I’ve been there!

Sin and shame get along super great.

Our sin will inevitably push us to run away from God.

These first humans have a perfect connection with God and who God is, and yet they start running away from it.

And as it turns out, that’s no good for us!

Running away from the source of life has some kind of devastating consequences for us!

It creates a real thirst and desire for who God is.

Teach us to Pray

Irony abounds: Jesus is God

God has taken on flesh and blood in the person of Jesus, and so the disciples are sitting face to face with God.

If you think about this for too long, it gets really trippy.

But on the surface, it’s just actually kind of funny.

“A Certain Place”

This is an aside, but an important one.

The Greek for where Jesus is praying is “Topo Tini”, which literally translates “any place.”

Luke specifically won’t tell us where Jesus teaches these disciples to pray.

Because maybe we’d be tempted to turn it into some kind of shrine or temple or holy place.

When maybe the point is that this kind of prayer is available to us anywhere.

Yeah, it can happen in a church building like this that is architecturally designed to focus us on God…

Or maybe it can happen in the freezer section in Aldi.

Any old place will do!

Topo Tini

Teach us to pray

I love this question, because I love what’s behind it.

Help us reestablish the connection we had with God back in the garden.

Prayer is ultimately the way that we connect with God and who God is.

Prayer is a way to push back against the fall, against that separation that we’ve been experiencing for so long.

When the disciples see that Jesus has a fair amount of communion with God, they want in on that!

Teach us to pray like you do!

Teach us to have that kind of connection with God.

Lord’s Prayer as a Way of Connection

The danger here is that we’ve turned the Lord’s Prayer into something we do so frequently that we can do it absent mindedly.

Last weekend I was talking to someone about how many things I can think about at once while I’m leading worship.

While I’m leading us in the Lord’s Prayer, sometimes I’m speaking those words while simultaneously wondering what part of the flow of worship comes next, and are the ushers ready to come forward to collect the offering? And I should check with that person I haven’t seen in a while, and oh no I just made eye contact with…

Turns out I can say the Lord’s prayer without ever giving a second thought to what I’m actually saying…

I think actually a prayer that is that in-grained in us can be a good thing, and something we’ll turn to next week.

But I wonder if Jesus didn’t mean it like that?

I wonder if Jesus was giving us a roadmap to connect with who God is?

Holy Father- Recognize it’s God’s world, not ours.

If sin is all about us forgetting who’s world this is, the first part of the prayer that Jesus taught us is to remember who’s world it is.

Let’s recognize God for all that God does in the world.

Let’s recognize that it’s God’s name that is holy, not Jason’s.

Let’s pray that the world would look a little bit more like the Kingdom of God every day, and a little less like our Kingdom.

A subtle little thing in here:

A pastor friend of mine once said that the way we introduce the Lord’s Prayer leaves the first word out, and it’s the most important word:

It’s our Father.

Not my Father.

Not the Presbyterian Father.

Or Beulah’s father.

It’s OUR father.

There is something inherently communal about this idea of placing God on the throne.

Living in to the world as God would have it means it has to work for everyone.

It might be that if we think we’re living in the world as God would have it, but God always agrees with me personally, that we have to reexamine the situation…

Daily Bread- God is in all things, even certain places.

There are what I call “vending machine” prayers.

You put two token prayers in, push a few buttons, and hope that a new job or a better car or an A on the test come out.

And that’s just kind of a cynical way to pray, as though the only thing it does is give us what we want.

Prayer is deeper than that.

But at the same time, in this prayer that Jesus taught us we see that we can ask for things.

Can we have our daily bread?

Can we have what we need to get by on?

And if there are people who are out there who don’t have their daily bread, maybe we should play a role in getting that bread to them.

But I also love the simplicity of this idea of daily bread.

Bread is about as basic as it gets when it comes to nutrition.

And yet again, Jesus shows us that God will show up in the simple, everyday bits of our lives.

God is available to us in the bread.

God is present with us in traffic.

God is alive in the snowfall.

God is rejoicing over deep belly laughter with our kids.

Out of all of this, there’s gratitude, isn’t there?

It’s not just give us our daily bread, it’s thanks that we have it.

It’s not just give us a more joyful day, it’s help us see the joy in everything.

It’s not just help us to to get through our work, it’s thank you for allowing us to work in this way.

It turns out that gratitude is at the heart of a lot of prayers.

Forgive us our sins

This one can be a little tricky!

Not out of self-preservation

There is a self-preservation side to forgive us our sins.

I personally don’t want to bear the weight of all of this sin.

I don’t want to carry that punishment.

I don’t want my soul to go down to the pit.

So if you could just take care of that for me…

And to be clear, God is always happy to answer that prayer.

Through Christ, indeed we are forgiven our sins.

Indeed we don’t have to bear that weight.

We don’t have to carry that punishment.

We won’t go down to the pit.

But…what if there’s more?

To restore connection

What if we desire to have our sins forgiven so that we can be connected to God the way we were before chapter three?

What if we desire to be as close to God as to hear God walking in the garden in the evening breeze?

What if we really desired communion with the triune God, Father, Son, and Spirit, and we were tired of these old sins getting in the way?

That feels a little different to me.

It feels a little more honest.

Don’t let us start that whole flow over again.

I found this video that could NOT more perfectly, at least for me, describe my relationship to God’s rescuing me from my sins in Jesus Christ, and what usually happens next:

<play sheep video>

Every time!

And you know what, God knows that’s what we do.

Jesus invites us to offer the prayer, maybe a modern version of it would be this:

Now that you’ve rescued me from that hole, give me the strength to quit running toward that hole.

Now that you’ve shown me how much better your world is, help me to not make it my world.

Now that I’ve prayed and connected with God, help me to not lose that connection again.

We’re either moving toward, or moving away.

The first humans in Genesis 3 are running away from who God is.

The disciples, however imperfectly, really want to run toward God in prayer.

And we are almost always doing one of those things.

Where are you today?

Are you on the lamb (pun intended), running from God?

Or do you find yourself drawn to God, desiring connection with God through your prayer life?

I hope it’s the later.

And if it is, a few thoughts for us before we dive in to this series?

Thoughts on prayer for today:

Right and Wrong are not as important as connection

I think that little boy that chimed in and said “It starts ‘Dear God’ speak for a lot of us, in that we assume there’s a right way and a wrong way to pray.

And we Presbyterians at least in my experience are horrified of the wrong way to pray.

When I end a meeting and ask if anyone would like to open or close us in prayer, we experience what I lovingly refer to as the Presbyterian shoe inspection!

Sometimes people will even tell me, or Alex, or Ann, or Kelly, that we are good at praying.

We’re not.

I think what folks really mean when they say that people are good at prayer is that they’re good at public speaking.

Because sometimes praying is completely silent.

If prayer is about connection with God, then some of my most effective prayers haven’t included a single word.

Right or wrong aren’t the best question to be asking.

There are better questions.

Are you closer to God at the end of that prayer than you were when it started?

Did you learn something about God in that prayer?

Did you learn something about yourself?

And even if the answers to all of these are still no, that’s ok too!

Because that prayer may have laid the ground work for the next one.

Right and wrong aren’t nearly as important as connection and belonging with God.

Never lift up a prayer you aren’t willing to be the answer to.

I hinted at this a little bit when it came to our daily bread, but let’s dive in a little bit deeper.

If I’m going to pray for world hunger, I had better be willing to share some of the abundance of food I have with those who have none.

If I’m going to pray for peace in this turbulent world, I had better be an agent for calm and understanding, and not lobbing political firebombs on Facebook.

If I’m going to pray for the lonely in our congregation, I had better be ready to throw some shoes on and go visit folks in the hospitals and nursing homes around here.

And (let’s get right to it shall we), if I’m going to offer up thoughts and prayers after yet another mass shooting this week,

if I’m going to be heartbroken about 12 kids being shot for simply being at a parade for their favorite football team,

if I’m going to offer thoughts and prayers for all of that,

Then I had better be willing to start seeking out and advocating for solutions, and not let the partisan cynicism machine get in my way.

One of the things I tell the staff here at Beulah is that I will never ask them to do something I’m not willing to do myself.

We should take the same approach with God.

We should never pray for something we’re not willing to be the answer to.

Let’s experiment this Lent.

To be extremely clear, there is no right way or wrong way to pray.

If it helps you in the goal of getting closer to God, then your prayer is doing what it needs to do.

But so often we are like the disciples, we want to learn more about this practice of prayer.

And so for Lent we’re going to offer a lot of opportunities to engage with our prayer lives.

In this series, we’re going to examine a bunch of different practices from the scriptures and beyond.

The Jesus Prayer

Prayer in Silence.

The Prayer of Examen.

And just down the hall we’re working through Justin McRoberts and Scott Erikson’s book on prayer, creatively titled “Prayer.”

However you encounter prayer this Lenten season, I invite you to open yourself up to try something new.

It’s ok Presbyterians, we can try new things together!

Whether it starts dear God, or with a dollop of silence, over these next 40 days, may we come to know God in new ways through our prayer lives.