The audacity of this poor wretched creature asking for more! And many of us have learned to approach God in this way. As if God is a cruel and heartless master ready to throw us back onto the streets if we mess up. And so we never ask for what we need, let alone what we want. Children who rarely or never get their needs met stop asking.
In our moments of spiritual poverty we are likely to do the same with God. Forget to ask. So it’s wonderful to be reminded in Luke’s gospel that God intends to give us what we need. That persistence (or what we may call practice) can pay off. That God wants us to pester him/her. “Give us this day our daily bread…and a little extra for tomorrow.”
I get vocal in my prayers from time to time. I yell at God (in my car where no one can hear me). Right now I’m yelling, “Your kingdom, needs to come down here now and stop all wars, end all poverty, provide the sick with healthcare insurance!” As my father would say, “now don’t get me started.” Or maybe we do need to get started, we need to knock so loud it wakes God up in the middle of the night.
In my favorite Peanuts cartoon the kids are out in the ball field and it is raining buckets of rain. All of the kids head for the dugout except Charlie Brown who stands there looking up. Lucy yells out at him, “Charlie Brown, the game has been called on account of rain.” And he yells back “I know, but I’m yelling at the umpire.” I yell at God sometimes. We have that kind of relationship.
But I’m not good at silent prayer, neither are most protestants. We don’t learn to meditate in Sunday school. We learn to bow our heads and talk to God. We are verbal worshippers too. Introduce more than 45 seconds of silence into the prayer time at church and you hear complaints about it on Monday morning. We’re not used to it. Silent prayer doesn’t come naturally to me because I’m protestant and I’m an extrovert. I’m a person of action—I keep busy. I keep my mind occupied. Thoughts roll around in my head like bumper cars at the arcade. Thoughts spin, back up, lurch forward, speed up, and crash into each other randomly in my head.
I went to a mediation class for many months to learn to slow my thoughts down. It was like wrestling with a rhesus monkey. When it happens, when it really happens I am always amazed. The heart rate slows down, the brain waves change, the body relaxes.
A school principal introduced 10 minutes of morning silent meditation at his elementary school. After three months they noted marked improvements in overall levels of concentration and cooperation, leading to better grades and improved social relationships. We know that the disquiet mind clearly leads to anxiety disorders, depression, substance abuse, and family violence. And rather than slow down, we are becoming a caffeinated culture. You can get water that has so much caffeine in it that you will not be able to slow your mind down for several days!
I can’t actually say what this quieting of the mind does to the physical body, but your M.D can tell you that. I believe that prayer works relationally. It improves relations with yourself, God, and others. You can obtain a good relationship with God by nurturing it with prayer, spending time together, sharing your intimate thoughts, or even angry demands. Communication with God is vital to an ongoing lively relationship, even if it all boils down to “help” and “thanks.”
Jesus has some prayer suggestions here in Luke’s gospel. There are at least a dozen textbooks on the issue of whether or not Jesus actually wrote what we call the “Lord’s Prayer.” The text of it is different in Matthew’s gospel – where it is longer and leans toward his Jewish audience. Here in Luke it is short, sweet and to the point. Both of these gospel writers put the words to papyrus a half century after Jesus would have spoken the Lord’s prayer and taught it to them. Scholars in the search for the historic Jesus say at best these verses were from a collection of sayings.
I picture Jesus sitting with his disciples talking about prayer. And he says, “Well, if you’re at a loss for words, try something like this…” And out comes some of these lines in the Lord’s prayer. In Matthew’s version he uses words that appear in worship literature from the Hebrew Kaddish in the fifth century CE – sayings like “hallowed be His great name…may He cause His Kingdom to reign.” Or, a later text with the exact words, “forgive our debts as we forgive our debtors.” Prayer is calling on God, offering praise, asking for what you want.
In Luke’s gospel the opening address is sweet and simple. Abba, most literally “daddy,” implies a loved one in loving relationship. It’s a child reaching out for help, honoring the wisdom of the father, and asking for what he needs: bread, forgiveness, a forgiving spirit, the ability to avoid landmines (i.e. temptations) that might get the better of him. It’s a protection prayer. It’s a prayer you can picture Jesus praying when he was wiped out and felt frail and lonely.
The rest is embellishment to put the prayer into liturgy. To codify it. The formal version lacks some luster. But the essentials are good. Scholar John Crossan said that he didn’t think this prayer actually originated with Jesus, but rather was composed by the early church to summarize his themes. The themes hold up over time. And I have no doubt that Jesus wants us to engage in prayer. Even to persist if we perceive they are unanswered.
There’s a mystery to this prayer stuff that is beyond me. A group of researchers took a group of people form Florida and gave them the first names of people in San Francisco who were having open heart surgery and asked them to pray for them. There was no set way to pray, no time frame, no words given to them. The people who were praying had just a first name and the date of the person’s surgery. What they found was that the people who were prayed for during surgery and the week following it fared a lot better than a control group who had no one praying for them. Ruling out all other factors, they found that the group of people who were prayed for got better faster and had fewer complications following surgery.
I don’t know how this works. And I believe that God is particularly resistant to answering some of my prayers. I think God is terribly slow sometimes at finding lonely people new partners who love them, and way too lackadaisical about world peace. I prayed a long time for my mother’s cancer to go away and she didn’t live past sixty four. That was a prayer not answered. Doesn’t God get it that these things really inhibit our ability to fully trust that our needs are important down here, right here, right now?
What do you do when it doesn’t appear to be going your way? Sometimes we are consoled by saying that God must have another idea. For example, every job I lost was a step forward in my life. Jesus says even if you are lonely, even if a loved one dies, and war rages, keep praying. Keep on knocking. Keep on asking. Your wants and needs are blessed when you tend to them in silence and prayer. And God honors your right to ask.
What God brings you during or after prayer isn’t always an answer you can see or touch or feel, or even understand. What God brings you in prayer is Godself. And that will happen with every “help.” And that is why we say “thanks.”

Amen