Luke 11:1-13

by the Rev. Allison Liles

This sermon is based on Luke 11:1-13.

After a year out of the pulpit I can say with great conviction that I am excited to be here with you today. I was ordained seven years ago and served as a parish priest for six years before putting my collar on the shelf for a little while so I could focus on my calling as a parent of two small children. Presently I work part-time as the Executive Director of Episcopal Peace Fellowship and full-time as mother to Hill and Pailet Liles. Fortunately my life as a parent has proven to be equally as sacramental as my life behind the altar. While my attention might no longer be on bread or wine, I still find that I’m blessing and sanctifying things all day long: skinned knees, butterflies, altars built out of tiny stones in the backyard. I’m praying over the water in our children’s bathtub rather than that within the church’s baptismal font. My life as a priest has changed, not ended.

And some days priesthood and parenthood collide…Like the day in March when our four-year-old son asked me how to pray. During a video chat with an Alabama friend over the computer Hill heard his friend Catherine Ellis say the Lord’s Prayer, which she recently learned from her momma. Catherine Ellis knew something that Hill did not and his words to me later that night could have come right out of the mouth of the disciple from our gospel reading today. “Mommy, will you teach me how to pray like Megann taught Catherine Ellis?” And so it began. By the 4th night he had learned the Lord’s Prayer and it now accompanies all his other prayers of petitions and thanksgivings at bedtime.

This question posed by an unnamed disciple is the only time in the gospel accounts when the disciples ask Jesus to teach them something… Every other example of Jesus teaching the disciples is initiated by Jesus. It is not surprising when you think about it because prayer seems to be one of those things in which most people feel perpetually inadequate. We’re told as people of faith we need to pray, that we should pray and yet it’s one of the things we struggle the most at putting into practice. Perhaps because so many of us never really learned how to pray. We make New Year’s Resolutions, we take on Lenten Disciplines. We buy books on prayer and try to teach ourselves what we are too afraid to ask. So one of the disciples, probably speaking for most of us, comes to Jesus and say, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And Jesus responds with a sample prayer, a parable and some additional sayings about prayer that make it all seem so easy.

But prayer is not easy – it’s a spiritual discipline that requires a lot of patience and practice before it begins to feel natural. It requires that we look at our own strengths and weaknesses to find the best form of prayer that suits us. The way I pray might not be the way for you to pray. And the things that will cause me difficulties will not be exactly the same as what causes anyone else difficulties.

I took a course on prayer in seminary from a visiting professor who belonged to the Society of Saint John the Evangelist monastery in Cambridge, Mass. This Episcopal monk deeply believed that we should pray using our weaknesses so that we are more fully dependent on God’s assistance and intervention. An artist should not pray through icon writing, but instead try praying through lectio divina. A literal minded mechanical engineer would benefit from Ignatian Prayer or another form of praying through imagination. With that in mind I, an easily distracted person who enjoys being in control, tried centering prayer. For years I tried centering prayer and it took a long time before I felt it actually working. Working in the sense that I felt like I was praying. For weeks I found myself making to do lists in my brain rather than mediating on my chosen word. I felt my muscles twitch & my back itch rather than falling into complete stillness. I looked like I was praying to other people in the group, but certainly didn’t feel like I was praying. I think this might be what my son feels like when reciting the Lord’s Prayer each night. Those first few nights we talked through all the difficult words like trespasses, temptation, thy, and evil. And he memorized it quickly and now says it nightly even though it’s not yet something he believes. But praying shapes believing. Our faith is formed through regular prayer so Hill keeps saying those words…just like 9 years ago I kept at centering prayer.

Prayer is not easy – it’s a spiritual discipline that requires patience and practice but also courage, honesty and vulnerability. Real prayer is something that takes us into unfamiliar territory. We do not know how the prayer will be answered and the deeper we journey into the experience of a routine prayer life, into the experience of an ongoing intimate communion with God the more unfamiliar the territory becomes. Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” But what will be given? What will we find? What door will be opened? These answers come with time and vulnerability … not from one prayer offered at a time of existential crisis.

I think many of us avoid our routine prayer life because of this unfamiliarity. We fear we don’t know how to pray but also fear how God will respond to our prayers. And so many of us hang around in our safety zones, going no further than we’ve been before and where we still maintain control. We offer petitions. We offer thanksgivings. But we don’t ask questions, we don’t listen for answers even though deep down we know that’s what we should be doing. I struggle with my prayer life and I’m a priest. I often feel inadequate about my relationship with God. I feel a hunger to go further, to connect with God more deeply, to journey into the mysteries of God that lie beyond the end of my safety rope. But I’m scared. I know God talks to me. I know God calls me to great actions. I’ve heard and felt that call multiple times including at St John’s Norwood Parish in Chevy Chase, Maryland during my centering prayer sessions … but now I’m a wife and a mother and that voice from God is provocative and risky. I don’t always want to hear it – so I stop short in my prayers, never venturing into that unfamiliar territory.

And I think Jesus understands this hesitation. It’s why Jesus gives us a sample prayer. It’s why Jesus invites his disciples into a deeply personal relationship with God, encouraging us to call upon God using the same name he uses -- Abba, Father. He invites us as his disciples to call upon God as children call upon a loving parent, trusting that they belong to God and that God wants for them what is good and life giving. What Jesus says at the end of our gospel reading today reinforce this invitation. If human parents, with all our faults, know how to give our children gifts that are good for them, how much more will our heavenly Father give to us who ask? Praying seems risky because God’s answer is beyond our control. We do not know what the outcome of our prayers will be but are still called to trust in God’s response. Even if that response is no. Even if that response sounds risky.

Jesus calls us to be shameless in our prayers, to keep bringing our needs and our hopes to our heavenly Father, trusting that God is listening, trusting that God loves us. Establishing a regular prayer life will be difficult at first. But what’s essential in moving from nervous paralysis to competence and confidence is practice. It requires us going through the motions even when we don’t know what we are saying or when it feels awkward or when we feel like we aren’t even praying. We have to keep at it because prayer is something we learn by doing. Establishing a routine prayer life will require our honesty. Jesus’ parable invites us to imagine that, like a man confident of his neighbor’s hospitality, we should ask God for whatever we need. Prayer isn’t about saying the right words or sounding particularly eloquent; it’s about being vulnerable and saying what’s on our heart in our own words and being courageous enough to hear God’s response. We just have to do it. We don’t have to be “good” at praying for God to hear us. There are neither prayers that are too small nor are there wrong ways to pray. There are no wasted prayers. So however you pray be it contemplative or corporate, silently or aloud, with words or deeds or disposition, trust that God is eager to hear and receive and respond to our prayers because there is, I believe, nothing more that God wants than to be in relationship with us –all of us – and for us to flourish in this life together and with each other.