Lectionary Reflection for Proper 12C on Luke 11:1-13

PRAYING IS HARD

Praying has always been hard for me. Even when I was completely sold on the fundamentalist version of prayer that promised me a Divine Being who heard every word and answered every request, if not always in the way I hoped. Strangely, I was always comfortable praying publicly. As a liturgist, I value the task of discerning the hopes, longings, and concerns of a community and finding the words and rituals that will express them and connect them with transcendent realities. But liturgical prayer and personal prayer are very different things. I have never felt a deep connection with God by sitting alone and speaking or thinking praises, confessions, or requests. My most profound moments of prayer have always been in conversation with others, often when God is the last thing on our minds; or in a flash of awareness of all the life going on around me as I hiked through the wilderness; or in silent moments of intimacy or stillness with a loved one. But prayer as a spiritual discipline? As a way to get some God out there to act on my behalf or that of someone else? That has always been hard for me.

Perhaps it’s because what I was taught about prayer was contradictory. On the one hand, I was told that the Bible calls us to pray without ceasing (1 Thessalonians 5:17), but on the other hand, I was told that prayer is a conversation with God—which is impossible to do continually. I was warned that if I didn’t pray with enough faith, God wouldn’t hear my prayer, but I was also assured that God would never leave me and would always hear me. I was encouraged to believe that my personal prayers mattered to God, but I was also instructed to get as many people to “agree in prayer” with me, so that God would respond. I can’t count how many meetings I sat in over the years listening to leaders complain about the lack of prayer in our church, and knowing that the real concern was that we weren’t having enough public prayer gatherings—which seemed to matter more than all the prayers being offered daily by our people. Somehow, prayer became not just about speaking words to the sky, but about getting as many people as possible to speak those words so that God would be forced to hear and answer affirmatively.

THE GOD OF OUR PRAYERS

When I discovered Matthew Fox’s book on prayer (which originally had the wonderfully whimsical title: On Becoming a Musical, Mystical Bear),¹ it was a massive relief. For Fox, prayer is not saying prayers. It’s not a way of either withdrawing from or submitting to cultural norms. It’s not trying to make God change by our petitions. It’s not “talking to God” or liturgy. It’s not some kind of exceptional spiritual experience. Rather, as the subtitle of his book puts it, prayer is A Radical Response to Life. Fox taught me that our thinking about prayer is influenced by, and influences, our thinking about God and it also shapes our attitudes, actions, relationships, and lives in significant ways. He helped me to see that much of our theology and practice of prayer misses the heart of what Jesus said about it.

Prayer and holiness are often associated in Christian thinking, and in Luke’s Gospel, both are interpreted differently from how we might expect. Where Matthew writes, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48 NRSV), Luke writes, “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (Luke 6:36 NRSV). In the Revised Common Lectionary, the readings for the last few weeks have focused on Luke’s ‘travel narrative’ as Jesus set his sights on Jerusalem and journeyed toward his execution. Unexpectedly, the primary theme of Luke’s account is not the meaning of Jesus’ sacrifice or how we can get to heaven; it is hospitality. After dismantling the idea of holiness as perfection in another of his books, Matthew Fox explores the idea of holiness from the perspective of creation spirituality:

Having criticized the dominant definition of holiness as perfection, what does the creation-centred tradition have to offer as a substitute? In this tradition I believe it can be said that holiness consists in hospitality. Cosmic hospitality.²

In Luke’s Gospel, hospitality is an essential divine characteristic, a central metaphor for the reign of God, and a defining facet of the Christ-following life.³ However, prayer and hospitality are seldom connected in our theology and teaching—which reveals how easily we have forgotten the significance of hospitality in our understanding of God and our faith practice. Matthew Fox, in his exploration of hospitality as holiness, explores how God has become host, guest, and nourishment for all of humanity:

…the Creator God is a gracious, an abundant, and a generous host/hostess. She has spread out for our delight a banquet that was twenty billion years in the making…

[In the Eucharist,] God—the host—in an amazing act of imagination—actually becomes the food and the drink at table…

God not only plays the host for us and becomes the banquet for us; God also has become guest for us. This is one of the deep meanings of the Incarnation, that God let go of hosting long enough to become guest as well…

We see from the prophets and from wisdom writers that the banquet God extends to humankind is not an elitist one—the poor are fully represented there, the outcasts and the forgotten ones.⁴

The Gospel reading for Proper 12C includes Jesus’ teaching about prayer and Luke’s version of what we know as the Lord’s Prayer. Many churches repeat this prayer weekly in their worship services, and it is often one of the few things people of faith remember on their deathbeds.⁵ But we make a mistake if we believe that it is a simple prayer. As Jennifer S. Wyant notes, “This is not just a prayer to recite. It is also a way to live before God”.⁶ But what we cannot miss, especially if we remember the long exploration of hospitality in this part of Luke’s Gospel, is the centrality of hospitality in Jesus’ teaching.

In other words, the starting point for understanding the Lord’s Prayer is to recognise God’s amazing hospitality. The prayer that Jesus taught his disciples boldly presumes on this divine hospitality—asking for bread, forgiveness, and protection from temptation. But it also expects that our response will be to extend that hospitality to others by forgiving them, and, presumably, by ensuring that the bread we pray for each day is enough to provide for those unexpected guests who may need to rely on our hospitality—which brings us to the parable Jesus told to explain his understanding of prayer.