Lord, teach us to pray. Teach us to pray with words, and with silence when words fail us. Remind us to pray with persistence, even and especially in the middle of the night.
Help us remember that you are the source of all good things. Amen.
Last summer, the first time I stood in this pulpit, I was nearing the end of three months of Clinical Pastoral Education or CPE – an intensive 300-plus clinical hours of chaplaincy training in a hospital not far from here. Most seminarians are required to do at least one unit of CPE as part of their preparation for ordination; and during those three months we are often with people at their most joyful, most frightened, most grief-stricken, and in their most life-changing moments – births, deaths, difficult diagnoses. They are managing chronic illnesses, or trying to overcome addictions, or facing surgery, or making end of life decisions. Stepping into a hospital room meant stepping into someone’s life story for a little while, bringing a listening ear, a compassionate presence, as they talked about whatever they needed to talk about. Sometimes it was about their illness or injury that brought them to the hospital in the first place, but often they talked to us about everything else but that – their families, their childhoods, their work, their regrets, their joys. We would talk about politics, science, religion, art, or travel. Often at the end of a visit, we would ask, would you like to pray before I leave? Most of the time, the answer was yes.
Those prayers could be challenging. Our patients came from all denominations – Catholic, Jewish, Mennonite, Baptist – our theologies, our backgrounds, our politics could be radically different – and they were in many different places emotionally and spiritually. What words did this particular patient need to hear? And how could we, as chaplains, be channels for those words, trust the Spirit to work through us and pray through us in hospital room after hospital room?
I spent a number of weeks getting to know an extended family who came to the hospital every day to be present for a family member who was very ill. Because of our religious and doctrinal differences we could not and did not pray together, but we sat together and talked about life and art and work and travel, and I would visit their patient as she healed and grew stronger and was finally able to go home. On the day she left, she asked not for prayer, but to take my hand. We said nothing to each other, but simply sat in silence, each of us, I am pretty certain, praying in the way that we knew to pray, and the silence held our thankfulness.
That profound experience of shared prayer was not, by any conventional standards, a prayer at all, and yet it stays with me.
Lord, teach us to pray.
Today’s Gospel reading begins with the disciples asking Jesus to teach them something they already know how to do. As writer Debie Thomas points out, “The disciples were not ignorant or inexperienced when it comes to prayer; they were devout Jews who had most likely grown up attending Sabbath services, lifting their hands upward in worship, or lying prone on the ground to make their confessions. They knew how to pray.” (essay can be found here.)
We, too, are familiar with liturgical prayer. Our worship is built on prayer – case in point, the daily office of Morning Prayer that we are celebrating together today. In the Episcopal Church, the Book of Common Prayer and the Hymnal give us the building blocks of our worship, beautiful and rich collections of the language of prayer – the Psalms we pray together, the liturgies for baptisms and burials, collects for the feast days of saints and the seasons of the year, prayers for families and churches and entire nations.
But the disciples saw something different when Jesus prayed, something more personal, a quiet communion between Father and Son. And so they asked Jesus, and he gives them new words: Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Right from the start, Jesus’ first words bring together the sacredness of God, the set-apartness of God as hallowed and as king, and the closeness of God as Father.
And then he continues:
Give us each day our daily bread.
When his disciples ask him how to pray, the first words Jesus gives them move from kingdom to…bread. From transcendent to everyday. From glorious to mundane. This is a prayer about the kingdom of heaven, and it is a prayer about food.
And in the entire prayer that we have come to know as the Lord’s Prayer, the one physical object mentioned is – bread. It was an everyday staple in the lives of the poor in Jesus’ day, nourishing the body, while the Eucharistic bread, Jesus the Bread of Life, nourished and nourishes the soul. The prayer Jesus taught the disciples is not a prayer for one day a week in the temple or in church, but a prayer for every day, a prayer for every meal, suggesting that the sacred – the hallowed – and the ordinary – our daily bread – are not that far apart, that prayer is an ongoing conversation that weaves through, shapes and is shaped by our everyday lives.
Lord, teach us to pray.
Last year, poet Terry Stokes published a book entitled Prayers for the People: Things We Didn’t Know We Could Say to God, a collection of prayers he initially was publishing on Instagram. They echo the world we’re living in, from humorous to heartbreaking. Here’s a glance through the table of contents:
Prayer for theological disagreement
Prayer for food justice
Prayer for letting go of toxic relationships
Prayer for organizers and activists
Prayer for before eating Krispy Kreme
Prayer for before listening to Lionel Richie
Prayer for wrestling with God
Lord, teach us to pray.
What are the disciples asking Jesus? What feels missing in their prayer? What feels missing in our own?
Another poet, Mary Oliver, writes:
“I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.”
Another of her poems, “Praying,” may be familiar to some of you:
“It doesn’t have to be
the blue iris, it could be
weeds in a vacant lot, or a few
small stones; just
pay attention, and patch
a few words together and don’t try
to make them elaborate, this isn’t
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.”
Mary Oliver recognizes prayer as silence as much as words, as paying attention, as listening for another voice. I do not think this is far from Jesus’ teaching his disciples to pray for daily bread – that our prayer should not begin and end on Sunday, but should be part of the fabric of the rest of our week, whether we are cooking meals, eating donuts, kneeling in the grass, or coming across weeds in a vacant lot. Or listening to Lionel Richie, or listening to those voices around us who are suffering. Prayer is not an elaborate string of words, but an invitation to God to be part of whatever we are doing, an invitation to us to carry an awareness of God’s presence in whatever we are doing, a presence and an attentiveness that turns action into prayer and prayer into action. To look back at our last two Sundays’ readings, prayer is the Good Samaritan stopping to help an enemy by the side of the road; prayer is Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, and prayer is Martha doing her work in the world.
Lord, teach us to pray.
Show us where we are most disconnected from you,
that we may invite you into the daily bread of our work;
remind us to listen for your voice,
to be present to your Spirit,
to pay attention,
to quiet our hearts,
to give thanks.
In the name of your Son Jesus Christ, Amen.
— The Rev. Cara Ellen Modisett, Curate, Trinity Episcopal Church of Staunton
Seventh Sunday After Pentecost, Year C, July 24, 2022
Gospel: Luke 11:1-13
