Remember beloved
that Jesus has set his face
toward Jerusalem.
He’s going to confront
the religious and civil leaders.
He’s sent out the 72.
He’s debated scribes
about neighborliness.
He’s said that listening to him
is the better path
for laborers in the vineyard
while he is still with them.
After all of that,
the disciples want Jesus
to teach them to pray.
So far this hasn’t come up
in Luke’s gospel.
John the Baptizer’s disciples
learned to pray from John.
As they get closer to Jerusalem,
as the pressure on this ragtag band
of potential subversives
gets more intense
maybe they’re starting to realize
that Jesus won’t be with them always.
At least not the way he is.
What will they do,
how will they talk to God
when God isn’t walking among them?
Not only how will they talk to God,
but what should they say?
In Rite I we can say that
we are not worthy so much as to gather the crumbs
under God’s table
yet God is the same Lord
whose property is always to have mercy.
What do people who’ve left their lives,
lives of hard work and toil,
left their families
and left the dead to bury the dead
what do they have to say
to the creator of the universe?
Jesus has died and risen,
defeating death by death,
and ascended to the Father.
Like the disciples are getting ready for,
Jesus isn’t here with us to talk to us
though he joins us each week
in Bread and Wine
his Body and Blood.
As we say the Our Father each week,
we can be comfortable with it
and not pay attention to it in fine detail.
Don’t mishear me:
I don’t think communal public worship
is the time to meditate on every word
of every text that we pray together.
In high school
my band director had a sign on his conductor’s stand
that said “practice at home.”
When we were together,
we were rehearsing and building
on the work
we were doing on our own.
What we miss in this familiarity
with Jesus’ model prayer,
and what we miss about the gospels,
is that they are all apocalyptic.
Not as apocalyptic as Revelation,
but they all look
to the end of time.
In her spectacular book on Advent,
Fleming Rutledge writes,
“The disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain
that characterize life in this present world
is held in dynamic tension
with the promise of future glory
that is yet to come.
In that Advent tension, the church lives its life.”
No matter what schisms
are rending the church
nor the problems of the world
where the least of these
continue to be trampled
the saints keep their watch.
Their cry goes up,
“How long?”
Jesus has been saying in Luke
that the Kingdom of God
has come near
and is at hand.
We hear Jesus saying that to us
even among trial and tribulation
and tumult of war and genocide in Gaza
and what is probably a looming recession.
When Jesus teaches disciples of every age how to pray
he starts by saying to remember
that God is holy.
At the end of this passage,
when Jesus says “Ask and it will be given”
he’s not saying that God
is a cosmic vending machine.
Grounding our prayer in God’s holiness
grounds us in what God’s plan for the world is.
What we ask as we remember that
will be for God’s will as our wills
are united to God’s.
That’s explicitly a part
of the model prayer!
For God’s will to be done,
and for the end of times
when all is made well
to come here and now.
When this passage concludes
by saying what we ask we will be given,
he’s not only taught us that praying
conforms our wills to God’s.
He’s taught us that what we need to ask for
is enough.
Give us today,
our daily bread.
Give us what we need to survive,
like manna in the wilderness,
one day at a time.
Teach us how to forgive others,
because you Lord,
whose property is always to have mercy,
are always more ready to hear
than we to ask
to give more than we desire
or deserve.
Then again the apocalypticism
of the gospels
shines through.
As Luke puts it,
“And do not bring us to the time of trial.”
“Lead us not into temptation”
is usually a headscratcher
because why would God lead people
into temptation
so that we have to ask God
not to?
It’s a bad translation.
It was the first mass English translation,
so it’s hung on,
but it’s not true to the Greek text
nor to the spirit of the prayer.
We here say
“save us from the time of trial”
because we’re asking God to spare us
from the persecution of empires
and from those situations in our lives
where our better angels
are less likely to win.
Save us from two blow outs
on San Juan Island
where the nearest tires for a Tesla Model X
are at Les Schwabb in Anacortes.
Save me from that person knocking on my door today
because I didn’t sleep and the morning routine was bad
and I don’t know if I’ll love them
the way I’m called to.
As we live the tension of Advent all the time,
“[t]he disappointment, brokenness, suffering, and pain
that characterize life in this present world
is held in dynamic tension
with the promise of future glory
that is yet to come.”
My band director’s sign
told us to practice at home.
Sometimes the only practice of prayer at home we can muster
is this prayer that Jesus taught us.
It’s what Jesus told us to do,
and it’s more than enough.
God’s name is holy,
and death has been defeated.
God will give us enough,
and God will keep us
in God’s sight. Amen.