Teach Us to Pray

Thank you so much Amanda. It is truly an honor for me

to be with you all this morning to bring this sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer to close,

and to lead you later in the communion liturgy of the Anglican Church of North America.

I don’t know about you but I’ve had a pretty volatile relationship with prayer throughout my life.

Prayer has been

a regular and rich practice,

it has been a formality,

it has been my cosmic fire alarm,

it has been something I’ve had no interest in doing,

and it has been something I couldn’t do.

It’s something I’ve seen all my life but not something I’ve understood well.

So I can appreciate Jesus’s followers asking him to teach them to pray.

And I wonder can you relate to this at all?

What is prayer?

Is it a duty?

Is it a formula that pins God to act in our behalf?

Is it a supernatural begging session,

a divine Grub Hub or Door Dash order?

Does it do anything?

Does it work?

How many times have you prayed and not received an answer?

If God knows what we need before we ask, why does he ask us to pray at all?

Have you ever been here before?

Well just to set the expectations, I’m not necessarily going to answer all these questions to your satisfaction,

but want to hit on a couple points from the last line of the Lord‘s prayer as it relates to the whole prayer.

“for yours as the kingdom, and the power, the glory forever and never.”

The first thing is we end the prayer where we began, focused on God.

And in some way or another every one of our speakers has addressed significant assumptions made in each line of this prayer.

I wonder if you’ve noticed these.

Dylan began by observing that we are addressing God as father.

This suggests God exists,

has some relationship with humans,

stands in some relationship to us as father,

and that we have the privilege of addressing him.

And as he encouraged us realize, God is parenting redemption in our lives.

Salvation is not just a past event or even some thing that will happen to us in the future,

it is some thing that is happening right now.

Friends, God seeks to birth new life in our ordinary and messy lives.

Prayer, has something important to do with this.

The good news Branches is that God invites us to participate in bringing his kingdom here and now through prayer.

Justin used his fancy word, penumbra, to highlight the tension we feel between our redeemed status and the fact that we don’t always live under the authority or reality of the kingdom of God.

The assumption here is that God‘s kingdom is possible in our ordinary and messy lives.

It also suggests that we have some role in whether or not God‘s kingdom will be made manifest in our midst.

Imagine any given family feud, scuffle with a coworker,

or disagreement with a close friend, spouse, sibling or neighbor.

What would happen if one of the people involved asked for God‘s kingdom to come here on earth as it is in heaven?

What if two or three or four people did that?

Amanda challenged us to see that whether rich or poor, we are invited to trust God by asking for our daily bread.

The assumption here is that we are not in control of our livelihood to the extent that we believe.

Or it challenges us to see that perhaps the livelihood we are pursuing

or the way in which we are pursuing it is not the one God desires for us.

It assumes that we need daily bread.

We live in dependence upon God and that he has the ability to provide for our needs.

How often do you struggle with yourself and others for this provision?

Our entire financial system and economy are designed around this.

David totally distracted us, I mean instructed us by his cheeseburger metaphor.

We need every part of this Lords prayer in our lives.

He reminded us that

whether literally or figuratively we are all punched in the face and punch others in the face

and that forgiveness fully names evil for what it is while offering a new way of being and a new way forward.

The assumption here is that we can live in a way that promotes brokenness and evil just as we can be affected by it.

BUT we can also live in a way that counters evil and we can experience that new life as well.

Finally this past Sunday Amanda reminded us that because Jesus went where we never could,

God is with us in the midst of temptation and testing.

We are not hopeless to be overcome by evil or the evil one.

The assumption here is that evil exists,

that we encounter evil in the world,

that we are unable to deliver ourselves and that God desires to deliver us.

The good news, again, Branches is that God invites us to participate in bringing his kingdom here and now through prayer.

Returning again to the last line why do we pray these things?

Because his is the only kingdom worth living and dying for.

Only he has the power to transform us,

and there is no other glory worth expending our lives for.

Now this is very important for you to see,

if you’ve wandered off I need you to come back to hear this.

Jesus is not just giving his disciples and us a formula,

he is asking us to do some hard work.

We cooperate with the father

not resist him.

We must exercise our creativity and attentiveness

that we might invite his kingdom in the ordinary moments of life.

We have to examine the ways we trust in our own strength and possessions.

We name evil for what it is specifically

even as we forgive those who wrong us

and seek forgiveness of those we wrong.

Places of temptation and testing include less obvious things

like communication issues with your spouse, roommate, coworker, or sibling,

as well as s systemic forms of evil in society or in the church.

In all the ordinary places of life,

this prayer invites us to explore how God‘s kingdom can come instead of our own,

how his power might do in us amazing things,

and where his glory needs to outshine our own.

This is just plain hard work.

And I hope that you are starting to see some answers to the original questions I posed at the beginning.

Prayer is not a formula

but rather a posture.

It isn’t a secret code to force God to act,

but a means by which we align ourselves to what God is up to in our lives.

Prayer doesn’t work,

it is work.

It is a primary way that God invites us to experience the kingdom of God

around the dinner table,

at the doctors office,

in the break room,

cleaning up the house,

doing homework,

and all the myriad places we would never anticipate seeing the Kingdom appear.

I challenge you this week to not just prayer this prayer generally,

but do the hard work it asks you to do and pray it specifically.

Where precisely in your life do you need to invite God’s kingdom?

To ask for daily bread?

From whom do you need to ask forgiveness? And so on.

So, that is the first thing I wanted to address,

the assumptions made in the Lord’s Prayer and the work they call us to.

Well, this work brings me to the second point,

to call prayer work is to recognize that it is a form of liturgy, a word that means work.

If you read this passage in most any translation besides the KJV or NKJV,

it does not include the last line of the prayer because our best and earliest copies of the NT do not include it.

Notably, it does occur in in an ancient document called

The Teaching of the Lord by the 12 Apostles to the Nations

or the Didache.

This is early evidence that this is the form of the Lord’s Prayer prayed by many early believers

and points to liturgical development among Jesus followers.

Having been raised as an evangelical in Bremen, for most of my life,

I was highly suspicious of liturgy

and “praying other people’s prayers.”

Obviously, I’ve gotten over that and pray a lot of other people’s prayers when I use the prayer book.

Since we are about to do some liturgy together,

I want to prepare and invite you to join in a rich and scripture infused way of worship and prayer.

So, first, in praying the Lord’s Prayer, or any other prayer from Scripture,

you are praying someone else’s prayer.

Yeah, but that’s the Bible Ben, c’mon.

Ok, has your pastor, worship leader, or family member ever led prayer?

Did you pray along and affirm that?

Then you’ve prayed other people’s prayers.

Have you ever been in a worship set and the worship leader says,

“let this song be a prayer.”

Well, then, you’ve prayed another persons’s prayer.

Listen, if you can come into this place and allow a worship leader,

who is singing another persons’s song by the way,

lead you into into authentic worship,

you can pray other people’s prayers and enter into authentic prayer.

Here’s another thing,

liturgy is not just “other people’s prayer,”

these are prayers of the Church,

the congregation of Jesus,

the cloud of witnesses to which Hebrew refers.

It is also infused with Scripture.

And they are as valuable and spirit filled as any other modern prayer we might pray.

In my own experience,

the prayers of the liturgy offer a depth of wisdom and scope of maturity that escapes my best prayers.

The beauty is, liturgy always allows for spontaneity,

so we are not forced to choose between “other people’s prayers” or our own,

but rather, we gather our prayers together as the body of Messiah.

I pray with believers of centuries gone by even as they pray with you and me today.

Instead of doing the work prayer asks us to do alone,

we do it together.

One of the things I am most grateful for as a follower of Jesus in the Anglican way is the prayer book.

Not because it makes me all super spiritual,

but because I’m a wreck without Jesus and need my mind renewed daily. Amen?

Some of you who know me are like, Amen!

The liturgy of the prayer book helps me to do the hard work I need to do daily.

The good news, again, Branches is that God invites us to participate in bringing his kingdom here and now through prayer.

If you as a church or individually would like to learn more about using a prayer book,

I’ve offered to Amanda to plan some times to pray together and give you the opportunity to see what it’s like.

Please let me or her know if this is something you’d be interested in.

And don’t worry, I’m not secretly trying to get you to become Anglican

and you don’t have to be Anglican to pray the prayer book!

As we transition now to communion,

the Lord’s Prayer was associated with it very early on because of the request to provide our daily bread,

and we will pray it together as part of the liturgy.

Here are a few brief points of orientation.

First, you will note the communion liturgy is both a way of praying and it is interactive,

you will stand and sit as well as respond from time to time.

So, on the slides, I am the celebrant and you are the people.

You will say anything in bold print.

The important thing is not that we do this perfectly but that your heart is fully in it.

Finally, as Anglicans, we celebrate communion weekly.

It is our alter call if you will.

The reading and proclamation of the word serve as one major anchor of our service

and the invitation to the table is the second.

As we celebrate together,

you will notice that this liturgy invites you to participate in the story of God’s redemption of our lives through Jesus.

This may all feel awkward to you, and that’s ok,

it’s new and different.

Just keep your focus on the Gospel truth being declared and let’s worship our Lord and Savior.

Before we begin, here are the main movements of the Communion Liturgy.

We lift up our hearts & join the heavenly host and all believers

We worship with holy, holy, holy

We welcome our Messiah

The "unforgetting" - the story of redemption & Messiah's presence

Setting apart the bread and wine

The Lord's Prayer

Breaking of bread and eating together

Blessing & Sending