Sermon for Second Midweek Lenten Service
March 5, 2015
“The Jesus Family Prays Together”
1 Thessalonians 5:12-18
But we appeal to you,
brothers and sisters, to respect those who labor among you, and have charge of
you in the Lord and admonish you; esteem them very highly in love because of
their work. Be at peace among yourselves. And we urge you, beloved, to admonish
the idlers, encourage the faint hearted, help the weak, be patient with all of
them. See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to
one another and to all.
Rejoice always, pray
without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God
in Christ Jesus for you.
Matthew 6:5-13
“And whenever you pray, do
not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues
and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell
you, they have received their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room
and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who
sees in secret will reward you. “When you are praying, do not heap up empty
phrases as the Gentiles do; for they think that they will be heard because of
their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need
before you ask him.
“Pray then in this way: Our
Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us
our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And do not bring us to the
time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one.
In the first week of this series, we discovered that we are
a part of “the Jesus Family,” not because we have chosen or fashioned it for
ourselves, but because we have been called children of God and made brothers
and sisters to one another by divine proclamation in Holy Baptism. We began to explore what it means to be a
part of the Jesus Family last week by saying, “We don’t care what the world
says about leadership, in the Jesus Family we follow together.” We learned that, in a world that values
leaders, we are called to identify ourselves first as followers. The Jesus Family is not just another group or
club to belong to. It is a movement with
Christ as its leader.
This week, we turn to another aspect of the Christian
life. Ask any relationship guru and they
will most likely tell you that the key to a healthy relationship is healthy
communication. Communication, at its
essence, is the process of sharing information with one another. It can be as simple as a nonverbal glance or
gesture (think Robert Redford and Paul Newman placing their fingers alongside
their noses in “The Sting”) or as complicated as what I’m doing right now:
using a series of sounds organized into a complex pattern that we all have
learned to associate with a particular meaning. It’s incredible!
When it comes to relationships, communication is essential
because it’s how we build trust with one another. From birth, we are wired for these kinds of
connections. Infants are the best
creatures in terms of facial recognition on the planet. One of the first skills they learn is how to
recognize facial features and expressions.
Did you know this ability goes down as you get older? I know my one year old daughter is going to
be more exceptional than I am at pretty much everything in life someday, but
already she’s got me beat at this! As a
parent, it’s hard to take your eyes off of this tiny child that is suddenly in
your arms, but it turns out it’s not just because they’re so cute. It’s also because we need to form
connections! As much as we change and
grow over the course of our lives, these early communication skills remain
essential for us, seated deep in our subconscious, unfolding without our even
thinking about it or being aware of it.
Just like human relationships require communication, so does
our relationship with God. Even as some
would say that God is largely silent in our world, we know that God continues
to communicate powerfully with us in a variety of ways. Certainly we can receive messages from God
through our experiences of the world around us (things like a beautiful sunset,
listening to Beethoven’s 5th symphony, or in my case, maybe even watching a
train go by), but the clearest communication we have from God, we call God’s
Word. You may think that I’m referring
to scripture, to the Bible, and I am, but only because it tells us about God’s
Word. We do not reverence the Bible as
an object of worship. Rather, these
words (lower case w) are sacred because they reveal to us God’s Word (capital
W): Jesus Christ. Jesus is the Word of
God, the divine communication sent from God to the world. The words of the gospel are, as Martin Luther says, the
cradle of Christ, but they are not Christ himself.
We have received God’s communication and continue to receive it through daily devotion, through the Sacraments, through things like preaching and teaching. Prayer, then, is our communication to God, and it is
essential for our relationships in the Jesus family Martin Luther said of prayer, “To be a
Christian without prayer is no more possible than to be alive without breathing.”
Prayer is not talking to our imaginary friend. It is communicating with the deep, abiding,
living presence within and around us all the time. It is participating in the ongoing and unfolding conversation between God and the world. It is essential for building and maintaining
our relationship with God.
Even so, we often
find ourselves at a loss for how to pray.
Indeed, instructions for how to pray are as old as prayer itself, and
there are many ways to pray. The website
beliefnet has an article “21 ways to pray” and it includes everything from
praying while driving to praying while you brush your teeth in the morning to
praying along to some of your favorite songs.
I also like Anne Lamott’s recent book “Help, Thanks, Wow”, where she divides
prayer into those three basic categories: “Help!” “Thanks!” “Wow!” Help is that basic, desperate plea that we’ve
all uttered when we’re feeling helpless.
Thanks is being grateful for a gift received, even being thankful for
things it might not be obvious to say thank you for, even being grateful for
difficult experiences. Wow is when we
are overwhelmed by what God has done and words almost fail us.
As helpful as all of these things can be, we also have
received instruction from Jesus himself about how to pray, so it’s probably
good to listen to him on the subject, too.
I could preach on the details of the Lord’s Prayer and each petition as
I have done in the past. This evening, though,
there are two things I want us to see.
They are the instructions that Jesus gives his disciples before giving
them the Lord’s Prayer:
First, prayer is
not about putting on a show, for God or for others. If your prayer is a performance, you’re not doing
it right.
Second, prayer is not about length or ostentatious
language (like the word ostentatious).
God knows what you need. Ask for
it simply and directly.
These instructions are good reminders for us, especially us
pastors, who can easily see prayer as a performance and are prone to heaping up
phrases when just a few words will do.
No, Jesus encourages direct, honest communication. And so the prayer Jesus gives us is simple. It can be memorized by children at an early
age. It is direct. It doesn’t use flowery language or go on for
pages and pages.
These two instructions are also important because they
address two issues that hinder us in our prayer.
First, we don't pray often enough. We forget to pray, we get distracted, we convince
ourselves that we should wait until we have enough time to pray properly, or we assign prayer to a particular part of
our life, like only before meals or only at church. Luther’s encouragement in a short instruction
on prayer he wrote for his barber almost 500 years ago is to do it right
away! Don’t wait! Consider it your most important task for the
day and do it right away in the morning before you get distracted. I’ll add that we ought to consider it our
most important response to anything that happens during the day. Keep the lines of communication open at all
times. Don’t worry about doing it
perfectly.
The second thing that hinders us in our prayer is perhaps
even more serious, and that is we don’t know how to communicate honestly. As great as we are at communicating, we’re
also really lousy at it. Most of us have
all of the hardware in place to excel at communication from an early age, but
for some reason we let all sorts of things get in the way of communicating
directly and honestly with one another.
Every company and politician has a director of public relations where
everything that is said by the organization gets filtered, run past lawyers,
and scrutinized so closely that in the end you never really knows how much you can trust
any of what they say.
As much as we’d
like to say it’s only a problem with corporations and politicians, we know that
we’re not much better either. We have our own internal filters that decide how honest we are with each other. We face
great obstacles in our lives to honest communication, and they’re only increasing
in this digital age. We communicate more
frequently in short, shallow messages like tweets and texts. Anything longer than a paragraph is met with
the response of “tl;dr” (that’s "too long; didn’t read"). Yes, the age of the media soundbite has met
our personal lives in a profound way.
The biggest problem we face with this is that honest communication requires
vulnerability. We see how people are
torn apart on social media or in public because of one phrase that is taken out
of context. We know that being honest
with someone means that we could be hurt.
As easy as communication is for us, vulnerability is incredibly
hard. We trust very few people to share
the kinds of things that are in the darkest recesses of our minds and
lives. Honesty is hard because trusting others is hard. It's easier to be closed off and guarded, unwilling to let anyone in on who we really are.
Now I’m not saying we should start airing our dirty laundry
to everyone we meet, but simply naming this as a hindrance to our prayer
life. You see, communication with God is
supposed to be different. Our prayers are not supposed to calculated and guarded. So here’s the
good news that frees us to communicate directly and honestly with God: God
already knows! God already knows more
about you than even you do. God knows
absolutely everything about you.
So “baring your soul” to God is not necessary for God, but
it is necessary for us. When we cling to
the idea that we can hide something from God, we don't allow the light of God’s
forgiveness and redemption into those places of our lives. We deny ourselves the very salvation that God
so desperately wants to give to us. But trying to hide these things is a futile effort. God
already knows what you’ve done, what you’ve thought, what you’ve said. God knows, and God has already promised you
forgiveness. God has already claimed you as a part of God's family, and that can never be taken away from you.
You've been promised forgiveness, but it will not mean anything to you so long as you cling to parts of yourself that you'd rather God not see. So don't hide behind the false veneer of perfection, acting as if we have it all together as the Jesus family. We know the danger of "keeping up appearances" in our personal lives. We don't want others to know that we're facing challenges in our marriages, or that we're struggling with addiction or alcoholism, or that we live in the shadow of depression or mental illness, or that our financial burdens are sometimes too great to bear. This cannot be our motivation with God. Making sure other people know that we have everything under control cannot be our goal as the Jesus family. No, in the Jesus family we admit that we are broken people with broken lives. We allow ourselves to be vulnerable before God. When we do, that brokenness is taken up by Christ on the cross and in return we are given new lives of wholeness, forgiveness, and freedom. It’s that promise of forgiveness granted in Jesus
Christ that allows us to pray boldly the prayer that Jesus teaches us. That’s why “We don’t care what the world says
about direct, honest communication. In
the Jesus Family, we pray together.”
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