7 Pentecost

July 27, 2025

 

Luke 11.1-13

 

+ So, let’s start with a hard question.

 

Are you ready?

 

OK.

 

How many times, through the entire course of your life, have you prayed the Lord’s Prayer?

 

Just think about it for one moment.

 

Do you have an answer?

 

Can you answer it?

 

Or. . . is the answer something like, “as many stars as in the sky.”

 

If that’s your answer, that’s a good answer.

 

Because, let’s face it, we pray the Lord’s Prayer a lot.

 

We will do it today in a few moments.

 

We pray it almost every time we gather in church.

 

We pray it at every wedding we do.

 

We pray it at every funeral.

 

We pray it at the graveside when we bury our loved ones.

 

Many of us pray it on our own every day.

 

For those of us who pray the Daily Office, we pray it at least twice a day.

 

But, as much as we pray—maybe because we pray it so much—we sort of take it for granted.

 

We pray it without thinking about it. 

 

It is an important prayer for us, so important in fact that it is the actual answer thot her question Jesus receives from those disciples asking him how to pray.

 

Now, I love the Lord’s Prayer.

 

I hope we all do.

 

But let’s face it, so many of us take for granted.

 

But if you ever really study it, you will see it really is the very perfect prayer.

 

And it definitely has its roots in classic Judaism.

 

Last week I talked about the Shema—the summary of the Law, which is basically, Love God, Love others as yourself.

 

Every Jewish male prays that prayer twice a day, once upon awakening, once upon going to bed.

 

But there is another prayer that is  required to prayed three times a day in Judaism.

 

It is called the Amidah.

 

The Amidah is the central prayer of the Jewish liturgy.

 

And it was so important that is was prayed three times a day every day since the First Century.

 

Jesus’ prayer—the Lord’s Prayer—is essentially a summary of the Amidah.

 

And early Christians, who were closer to their Jewish roots than we are, actually prayed the Lord’s prayer three times a day every day, like the Amidah was prayed three times a day in Judaism.

But, let’s take a moment to actually look at this pray we pray all the time.

 

It begins, as we all know, with

Our Father.

 

Jesus sets a tone here.

 

God is not being referred to as Lord, or Yahweh or Holy One.

 

Jesus refers to God on intimate terms.

 

God is our Father, our Abba, our Parent.

 

He then references that fact that God is in heaven.

 

Pretty straightforward.

 

Hallowed be your Name.

 

That’s a very Jewish way of praying.

 

Blessed is your Name, O God.

 

Your Name is holy and blessed.

 

Your name, O God, is sacred.

 

Then we come to your Kingdom come.

 

In this we know that God’s Kingdom is what w are striving for, and that it is our goal as followers of Jesus to bring that Kingdom into our midst, now—not just later.

 

God’s Kingdom comes into our midst when we love God and love others as we love ourselves.

 

Your will be done.

 

This is our completely surrender to God.

 

It’s not our will that we are trying to accomplish in prayer.

 

It is God’s will.

 

And one of the hardest things we can do as followers of Jesus is to accept God’s will.

 

We know that all prayers are answered, as you’ve heard me say many times.

 

The answer however is just not always what we might want to hear.

 

Our God is not Santa Claus in heaven, granting gifts to good children, nor is God a projection of our own parental expectations (to which many of us act like spoiled children).

 

God always answers our prayers, but sometimes the answer is “Yes,” sometimes is “not yet,” and, sadly—and we have to face this fact as mature people in our lives—sometimes the answer is “No.”

 

And I can tell you from my own experience, the greatest moment of spiritual maturity is accepting that “no” from God.

 

But, that is, of course, the petitionary aspect of prayer, and very rarely do most of us move beyond asking God for “things,” as though God is some giant gift-dispenser in the sky. 

 

(I am telling you this morning, in no uncertain terms, that God is not a giant gift-dispenser in the sky. Sorry!)

 

That’s what it means to be pray for God’s will to be done, not only here on earth, but also in heaven.  

 

Then we get to the part about bread.

 

Give us today out daily bread.

 

In Jewish culture, bread is the essence of our wellbeing.

 

It is what sustains us and feeds.

 

And it is so vital, so holy, that bread should never be discarded, it’s believes, because it shows ingratitude to God.

 

Bread here means more than just a loaf of bread.

 

It means all the blessings and sustenance we receive from God.

 

Give us, we pray, what we need to sustain us, to keep us vital and doing what we must do to love and serve God.

 

Forgive us our trespasses.

 

We of course need repentance.

 

We know we fail sometimes.

 

We know we fall short.

 

Those are our trespasses.

 

And when those things happen, we need to ask forgiveness for them from our God (and from those we “trespass” against).

 

And it’s not just enough to ask forgiveness for ourselves.

 

We also must forgive those who trespass against us—who fail us, who hurt us, who wrong us.

 

This is important.

 

It’s hard to forgive.

 

I sometimes don’t want to forgive those who have wronged me.

 

But it’s not healthy to carry around those grudges.

 

It’s not healthy to be angry and bitter about past hurts.

 

Because pain like that festers.

 

We must forgive others as well.

 

Then we get to this kind of elusive petition.

 

Save is from the time of trial.

 

Trial?

 

What does that mean?

 

Well, trial is a tome of resting, or temptation.

It is the moment when we find ourselves on the “left hand of God,” as you’ve heard me talk about regularly through the years.

 

In this petition we acknowledge that we are often weak and vulnerable.

 

It is God who is the one who can save us from the dark moments of this life.

 

Finally, we get to evil.

 

Deliver us from evil.

 

This one you might think is an easy one to figure out.

 

And it kind of is.

 

But it’s also hard.

 

The Hebrew word for evil is ra.

 

Ra means danger or misfortune as well as evil.

 

When we ask God to deliver us from evil, we are not just thinking here of the so-called “Devil” or sin.

 

We are also asking God to deliver us from misfortune, from a bad person, or a bad injury, or illness or doubt.

 

Deliver us from all the bad things that happen in this life.

 

As we can see, the Lord’s Prayer is really kind of the perfect prayer.

 

It encompasses every thing we need to pray about.

 

The point of all of this, of course, is that Jesus is making clear to us how important it is to reach out to God regularly in prayer.

 

In prayer we come to a meeting place with God.

 

And in that place of meeting, we come to “know” God.

Jesus is clear that prayer needs to be regular and consistent and heart-felt.

 

Certainly, prayer is essential for all of us as Christians.

 

If we do not have prayer to sustain us and hold us up and carry us forward, then it is so easy to become aimless and lost.

Prayer essentially is simply about us opening ourselves to God, responding to God, seeking God and trying to know God.

 

Prayer doesn’t need to be hard.

 

We do not do it only when we are pure and holy and in that right spiritual state of mind.

 

We pray honestly and openly when it is the last thing in the world we feel like doing.

 

We pray when life is falling apart and it seems like God is not listening.

 

And we pray when we are angry at God or bitter at life and all the unfair things that have come upon us.

 

So, let us go hear what Jesus says to us our Gospel reading for today.

 

Let us be mindful of this incredible prayer he taught us.

 

Let us actually pay attention to those words and petitions we find in the Lord’s Prayer.

 

And let the prayer become the prayer always being prayed withing our hearts.

 

Through prayer, let us go to meet God.

 

Through prayer, let us seek God.

 

And definitely, through prayer, let us strive to know God.

 

God is breaking through to us, wherever we might be in our lives.

 

Let us go out to meet the God who is our father, our Abba, our Parent, who feeds us, who sustains us, whose Kingdom we long for and who delivers us again and again from the evils that sometimes assail us.

 

When we do, it is then that we truly come to know our God.

 

Amen.