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Foundry United Rev. |
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Mindful Praying Sunday, May 7, 2006 |
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Matthew 6: 7-15
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The
prayer that we have come to call the Lord’s Prayer appears in two places in
the Bible: the 6th chapter of the gospel of Matthew and the 11th
chapter of the gospel of Luke. The
context and setting for the prayer in each gospel is different. Both have
important things to teach us. Both are important to help us understand the
significance of the Lord’s Prayer. I would like us to think about the Matthew
passage this week and the Luke passage next Sunday. In
Matthew, the Lord’s Prayer is offered as an alternative to other ways of
praying. Matthew quotes Jesus as
saying: “When you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the rest of the world
does. They think they will be heard if they talk a lot. Do not be like them
because God already knows what you need.” So what
we come today to call the Lord’s Prayer is offered in Matthew as an example
of an alternative to heaping up empty phrases. Sometimes
we don’t like to admit this, but sociologically religion has its roots and
origins in magic. Human beings, when
we began walking upright and maybe even sooner, began to understand very
quickly that we are vulnerable creatures. There are a lot of things in our
world that we cannot control. We
cannot control nature. We cannot control disease. We cannot control whether
or not we will have a good harvest and whether there will be enough food to
survive through the winter. We can’t control fertility. We can’t control
death. So
early humanity began to experiment with ways to try to control the things
that are out of our control and that make us feel vulnerable. If I pray to
the sun, will I maybe get a better crop?
If I make a statue of a bull and pray to it, will I be more fertile and
have more children? Two
things actually emerged out of this: one of them is religion and the other is
science in the broadest term. Science
became the effort to learn how the universe works so that we might do what
would actually change the world in such ways as to make us less vulnerable. Praying to a bull might not increase our fertility,
but through scientific understanding of the world we have figured out how to
increase our fertility. Praying to the sun might not assure us good crops,
but we have learned other things that will help us to make it more likely
that we will have good crops and have enough food to make it through the
winter. Religion
evolved out of the same impulse, but religion turned in another direction and
asked another question, which is: what kind of people, individually and communally,
do we need to be spiritually and ethically in order to live meaningful lives
in the world in which we find ourselves?
Science
is the attempt to understand and influence the world around us, so that we
might make the world a safer place and feel less vulnerable. Religion is the attempt to understand ourselves,
individually and communally, in order to figure out how to live rich and meaningful
lives in this world. The
kind of praying that Matthew has Jesus critiquing is the kind of praying that
thinks that by pleading or begging or pounding away or trying to make
bargains with divinity that we are going to get the world to give us what we
want. What Jesus was trying to teach
in Matthew was an alternative in which prayer is a way that we shape ourselves
and we shape our communities of faith, not so much magical praying as mindful
praying. Now let
me admit that there is still a lot of magic in religion. I would not actually want it otherwise
because I think the world is sometimes a magical place beyond our
understanding. There is a lot of magic
in religion. In some
branches of Christianity, a traditional crossing oneself
in order to remember the cross of Jesus Christ became a physical way of
praying that we might be shaped by the cross of Christ. But I suspect that when
a baseball player crosses himself before going up to bat, what’s in his mind
is not “Please, make me more like Christ.”
So,
there are things that we do as part of our religious life that have elements
of magical thinking in them. That is because the world is a mysterious place.
I have seen too many miraculous things happen in people’s lives to be
scornful of the idea that prayer can make a difference in what happens in the
world around us. But Jesus’ point in teaching
the Lord’s Prayer was to teach his disciples a prayer that had more to do
with shaping who they were than with influencing God or changing things in
the world. God
already knows what you need, Jesus says to his
disciples, so don’t focus on trying to get from God what you want. Instead, focus on praying in such a way
that you will become what God would want you to be both as individuals and as
a community of disciples. That is
why Jesus teaches his disciples the Lord’s Prayer. If you look at the Lord’s
Prayer, this is what it does. First of
all, it reminds us to pay respect to God, to be respectful of God: “hallowed
by thy name.” Then, it
focuses next on what God is doing in the world, not on what we want, but what
God is doing in the world: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it
is in heaven.” It focuses on us aligning
ourselves with what the sprit of God is trying to do in the world. Then,
it asks for what we really need in the way of material things: bread for
today, our daily bread, because that’s really all we need, our daily bread. It doesn’t ask for a big pension fund. It just
asks for what we need really, which is our daily bread. It reminds us that
that is all we really need. Then, it
reminds us to be forgiving of others because we need God’s forgiveness for
ourselves. The purpose of the prayer
is to shape us, to make us what we need to be and to come to bring us into a
right relationship with God. It is a
model prayer that helps to shape us. There
are other ways of praying – those are the alternatives to which Jesus offered
the Lord’s Prayer. We can pray prayers,
and sometimes I have, that leave us as self-centered and as focused on
ourselves and as selfish by the time we’re done praying as we were when we
started. We can pray prayers that
leave us as anxious or actually make us more anxious after we’re done praying
than before we began praying. We can
pray prayers that leave us as discouraged and as defeated by the time we’re
done praying as if we hadn’t prayed at all. The purpose
of prayer is always to focus us more on God and others than on ourselves, to
cause us to take greater responsibility for the world around us and for our
lives than to leave us feeling either passive or sorry for ourselves. The purpose of prayer is to leave us more
trusting of God and the universe. When
we understand this, that prayer is a way of allowing God to shape us, then we can understand that there are a lot of things that
are prayer. Anything that leaves us
more caring, more accountable, more faithful is actually prayer. Talking to a
friend can become a prayer. I don’t
know how often I have had some of the most profound prayer of my life come
across a table from someone at Trio’s. Watching a movie, not every movie, but
watching some movies can become a form of prayer if it leaves us more caring,
more accountable, and more trusting in God.
Even our work can become prayer, if it focuses us on God and others,
if it engages us in working for a world that is more true to God’s will and
God’s kingdom and if it leaves us more confident of God and the universe in
which we find ourselves. Even our work can become prayer. The
Lord’s Prayer serves us best as we read it and pray it, the Lord’s Prayer serves
us best by helping us to think about the outcomes of praying: who we are
called to be, what we are called to become, how we should live. If we can
learn from this how to pray individually and together, not just when we are
speaking words but when we are living our lives, the apostle Paul told us to
pray without ceasing, to pray without ever stopping so that everything we do
every moment of our life helps to shape us to be more Christ-like and more in
right relationship with God. Everything we do becomes prayer. Everything we
do in our life becomes the Lord’s Prayer. www.foundryumc.org |
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