The Real Thing of Prayer
The question underneath "How do we pray?"
He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” So he said to them,
“When you pray, say:
Father, may your name be revered as holy.
May your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.”
And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything out of friendship, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.
“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to 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. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asked for a fish, would give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asked for an egg, would give a scorpion? If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Luke 11:1-13
Maybe you’ve heard some variant of this idea: “the Thing is never about ‘the thing.’” That is, whenever there is a problem, particularly ones that get entrenched and difficult, the issue is often something happening underneath the supposed problem we’re talking about. I’ve seen this a number of times.
When I was in middle school, my mother was a community college math professor who helped run those MathCounts math competitions for middle schoolers. I didn’t really want to do it because math wasn’t my favorite. So when I was asked if I wanted to, I shrugged and maybe had a little attitude in saying that I wasn’t going to. Next thing I know, my dad came to my bedroom and told me with certainty that I would do the math competition, because, “This is your mom’s thing.” So I did (and it went fine). But ultimately, my parents didn’t care if I kept doing the hardest math; I didn’t even take AP Calculus. Even though it was my mom’s “thing,” the Thing wasn’t about “the thing.” It’s about the relationship underneath, and it is in relationships where God works.
Last week, we heard about Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus, joining his disciples, and now we get a chance to sit at Jesus’ feet alongside them as we learn from him what it means to pray. You can almost hear their child-like questioning, “Well, John taught his disciples to pray, teach us! It’s only fair!” And so Jesus gives a truncated form of the Lord’s Prayer that he will say more fully in Matthew 6.
Jesus doesn’t just teach them this prayer, because Jesus knows the unasked question behind the question, the Thing underneath the thing: his disciples don’t know how to relate to God. Isn’t that the question underneath our concerns about prayer? “How am I supposed to relate to God with my little words?” Then come all the follow-up questions: are we supposed to ask for things? What to ask for? How to ask? What if we don’t feel God when we pray, and it just seems like a monologue to the air? What if we have been praying wrong our whole lives? What does even prayer do? Who is it for? I can imagine the disciples had all these questions and more.
In fact, this desire expressed to Jesus, “teach us to pray,” is itself a kind of prayer, and an endearing one. You could do much worse than praying, “Lord, I don’t know how to pray. Where do I begin?” And just keep talking, asking, seeking, knocking.
And Jesus answers this prayer with, mercifully, a very practical prayer that he would further teach elsewhere which Christians have prayed ever since. It is less a magic formula and more like a model relationship, beginning with who God is to us: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name.”
But because “the Thing is not the thing,” and the desire for the right prayer is a desire for a right relationship with God, Jesus also gives them even more than what they ask for—just as he says God does. This is Jesus at some of his most light-hearted and joyful. We don’t often hear Jesus’ sense of humor, but this bit almost sounds like Jesus is doing standup when comparing prayer to annoying your friend into bread, or how even your mean old self wouldn’t give snakes and scorpions to your kids asking for fish and eggs If you and your evil self would give good gifts to your kids, how much more will the Father give you the Holy Spirit?1
So in response to their asking for one thing, a prayer rubric, Jesus gives them the Real Thing: the presence of God with them, loving them, the Holy Spirit laughing with them. Last week, Mary might have wanted some lessons, but the Real Thing she wanted was just to be with Jesus. She got it.
So with prayer, we might ask for all sorts of good things (and truly want them), but the Real Thing we need to know is that God is with us. In all our prayer is an asking, a seeking, a knocking for communion with God, and to ask that he share his communion with the people we love, andthe people around the world who need him. And he gives us that, always, whether we feel it or not. And so besides beginning our prayer with, “How do I even pray to you, God?”, we can also begin prayer by sharing that desire for communion with God: “I don’t know what to say, God, I just want to be with you and for you to be with the world.”
All this said, I will admit that it’s sometimes hard to talk with much confidence about prayer and petitioning God for help in such a broken world. It is hard to pray for our daily bread when children are starving to death in Gaza. It is hard not to feel like I’m just saying platitudes when we think about the moral calculus of war while also reading the Genesis story about Abraham pleading for mercy, where over and over again, Abraham asks, “Will you destroy the city if there are fifty righteous people there? If there are forty-five? Forty? Thirty? Twenty? Ten?” To which God says, “For the sake of ten I will not destroy it.” (Gen 18:20-32) The mercy of God is nonsensical in modern war. He is absent from this calculus.
In such times, all I can hope and pray is that anybody who has died has our savior with them. That when prayers for bread failed, when people have died trying to get bread to those people to save lives, that when our own sense of helplessness and grief and self-preserving political maneuverings ultimately failed those made in the image of God, that the innocent were given something more than bread, that the Spirit of God was with them in their last moments, that those who have been destroyed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time have been gathered in with God in the right place and time. And we still pray that food and water and medicine and peace and justice and mercy finally get to those who need it, in Gaza and everywhere.
It can be hard for any Christian to know that our prayers for these things have failed. But we can still pray. Not only for these things, but that we and they may know they are in communion with God whose heart breaks. We can sit in silence as we hope something of God’s presence might fill the room when our chatter dies down. We can pray for others so that, even if things don’t change how we would like, our relationship with the people we care about may be transformed through him. We can pray to our Father that if his intervention in the immediate will not save enough, that in the long stretch of time and the final balance of things, he has already intervened on the cross, and that he will intervene in The End in ways only God knows how.
Whether current events or in our personal history, we’ve all prayed prayers that, from our vantage point, went unanswered. But those prayers were, if nothing else—and indeed maybe nothing else—were heard by God, and felt and understood and communed with on a mysterious level beyond any explanations of why God allows all this to happen. And our help and our hope come in the name of the Lord who says, “My spirit is with you through it all. My spirit is wherever people are broken or bloodied or hurting. My spirit is with you whenever you call on me.”
And so we can pray that, in the midst of all the evils in this world, the people who did nothing to deserve it are given even greater gifts of grace they also didn’t deserve, for Christ also died a death he didn’t deserve that we might receive a love where “deserve’s got nothing to do with it.”2 Whenever we pray, however we pray, whatever things we ask for, whatever evil there is, the presence of Jesus Christ through his Holy Spirit will always give you the Real Thing, the abiding presence of a God who made you and loves you and will never forsake you.
H/t to At Home with the Lectionary podcast for their discussion on the text
The Wire and Unforgiven (though in quite a different way from grace).
Beautiful and needed, thank you