“Thoughts and Prayers” are not enough.
The readings for Sunday (7/28/2019)
Thank God for the guy who will ask the stupid question!
Can you imagine the scene, surrounded by disciples and bystanders, even scribes and pharisees, and you have been wandering around for months with Jesus. He seemingly prays often, according to Luke anyway they go off and pray, sometimes together sometimes by himself. You would think this was remedial information by now. But never the less he asks any way, thank God. “Lord, teach us to pray.” This brave question has provided a blueprint of prayer for two millennia of Christians since.
Jesus offers us what we have come to know as “the Lord’s Prayer.” While all prayer is different, and there are as many ways to pray as there are pray-ers there is something essential about this prayer, this is why we still say it. There is a kind of form or essence to this prayer that shows us what all prayer strives to accomplish.
The first thing I notice is that it is relational, there is no flowery introduction, just “Father.” Jesus is not praying to some far-off deity, some anonymous force of the universe, he is praying to one whom he knows and one whom he knows listens with an ear of love. No justification is required, no argument to be heard, he is simply talking to his parent who loves him.
Then Jesus names the things he needs: food “daily bread”, forgiveness, and safety “lead me not into the time of trial.” These are some of the basic needs for human beings to live and flourish. Building blocks for life, community and peace. Then of course come the more complicated bits, the parts that demand something of us. “Let your kingdom come, on earth as in heaven,” and “forgive us…as we forgive others.”
Prayer, real prayer, necessarily leads us from relationship with the divine into relationship with others. This work may start out between me and God, but it never stays there, it can’t. God desires relationship; with and for us, and with and for the world. Prayer issues out in more compassion, more relationship, more action, simply more. This is why Jesus’ instruction to pray for our enemies was so revolutionary.
We are not God’s local reporting bureaus. God does not need us to tell him where the pain and suffering and need is in the world. God is already there. Where there is trauma God is already walking with the victims, where there is pain God is already working for healing. God is already at work, and through prayer we discover how to be connected to that work.
When we pray for someone who is sick, we are committing to care for them. When we pray for those in pain we commit to comfort them. When we pray for those in trouble, and in distress we are committing to work for their safety, freedom and justice. When we pray for those who have died we witness to the eternal life promised in the resurrection. Prayer is necessarily tied up with the love God has for the world, it is tied up in the redemption and reconciliation God desires for us all. The Good News here of course, is that when we go to God with our own pain, and sadness and trauma, God is already there as well. It is the first step toward accepting the grace and love and relationship that God offers us. Our healing is also wrapped up in the healing of the world.
This is very different than the way we talk about prayer most of the time in our culture. Often prayer is treated like a heavenly lottery ticket, we buy ours, say our prayers and hope we win! Or we talk about it like a cosmic economic transaction: if we put our time in, are on our best behavior, and say our prayers, then we will get what we want from God. Not surprisingly, these approaches don’t bring us the desired outcome. If you think prayer is some kind of magic to bend the universe to your will, then prayer will disappoint you.
Even more troubling, is the way we use prayer to signal virtue in situations where we have no intention of acting. It has become popular in the face of the all too common tragedies and traumas of modern life, to invoke the trope of “Thoughts and Prayers.” We say to each other, that our “thoughts and prayers are with you” when we want to sound compassionate, without the hard work that accompanies it. Recently in the wake of one of these all too common events I saw a meme that said “Thoughts and Prayers are NOT enough.” We are complicit in teaching the world that our prayers are meaningless and our faith has no hope.
In our reading from Luke today, we didn’t just get a model prayer, we also got a weird parable, one that informs how we understand the prayer Jesus taught. It is about a neighbor who needs help to meet the needs of an unexpected guest. It is a parable about how prayer works, about how our grumpy neighbor will help us (though grudgingly) if we ask persistently, shamelessly. And if that old grump will help, how much more will God who loves us give us what we need.
It is not instruction to pester God into submission, but is instead a reminder that the generosity we give and receive in this life is a reflection of the one who is all compassion, and gift. Sometimes we are the late night emergency, and sometimes we are the one who has to get out of bed and help. Sometimes we are the desperate plea for help, and sometimes we are the answer to someone’s prayer. If we can give good gifts to each other, broken and selfish as we are, how much more does God desire to give us precisely what we need.
I believe now is the time to rediscover shameless prayer:
I don’t know how we solve our culture’s deadly addiction to violence.
I don’t know how we repair the damage we have done to creation with our carelessness.
I don’t know how we fix the epidemics of poverty or homelessness or drug addiction.
I don’t know how we overcome the generational sin of racism.
I don’t know how we transcend the polarization and tribalism in our public life.
But what I do know, is that we cannot be paralyzed by the magnitude of these and the many other challenges we face. We don’t have to be.
We must pray, really pray, and listen, and see. I will warn you, when I have done this I rarely like the things I discover. They usually require me to hear someone I’d rather ignore, or see someone it was easier to dismiss, to forgive someone, to serve someone, to become a more committed follower of Jesus on the way of Love. It is not easy, but it is holy.
Prayer is not a passive request, it is a call to live in the reality of God’s love for us and for our neighbor. It is where we speak to the one who has loved us our whole life and who will love us forever. It is an opportunity to bring the deep needs of our lives to light, and to have them met with grace and love and calling. Prayer is an opportunity to take a first step into the kingdom of God even when we don’t know how.
“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”
This is where God is calling the church, to prayer, and through it to action on behalf of the world we love.











