Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's Julu 25, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.  If you would like to read sermons from previous services, please click HERE.

The latest sermon will be posted here as soon as it is received – usually by Tuesday or Wednesday following the Sunday that it was presented.

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My father is a person of fixed routine, if ever there was such a person. Throughout my growing up years, it was the same hour on Friday for the weekly trip to the grocery store, same clerk to go and see at the checkout counter, same food items purchased each trip. It was the same good night routine, same routine for adjusting the heat or checking the A/C, same triple check to see that all the doors were locked at night, same smile whenever he addressed someone. And it was always the same 30 minutes of bible reading, devotion, and prayer in the morning and the same 30 minutes of bible reading, devotion, and prayer in the evening. You could almost set your watch to it. He seemed to never miss his quiet time with God.
It is one of my deepest adolescent memories. While, on occasion, I do remember being a bit jealous that routine left little room for interruption, the twice-daily turn to that “Sweet Hour of Prayer” was a constant reminder of the importance of solitude and solace before God.

Sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer, that calls me from a world of care,
And bids me at my Father’s throne make all my wants and wishes known!
In seasons of distress and grief, my soul has often found relief,
And oft escaped the tempter’s snare, by thy return, sweet hour of prayer.

Prayer was a path to escape troubles, a way to turn burdens over to Jesus, a posture of submission to the divine will, and a regular practice in the formation of discipleship.

Ever since the first disciples first asked Jesus, “teach us to pray,” people of faith of every generation have been making that same request. “Lord, teach us to pray.”

I set out this week to try and figure out just how many different ways there are to pray. There are of course, patterned prayers like the “Our Father” Jesus gives the disciples, here in Luke 11, better known to us as the Lord’s Prayer; there are collections of prayers aplenty and “how to” manuals; there is extemporaneous or free prayer and charismatic prayer; there’s concert prayer when everyone speaks aloud voicing his or her own prayer; there’s liturgical prayers of adoration, confession, thanksgiving, intercession, supplication and even the benediction is a kind of prayer; there’s prayers of the people and grace over meals; there’s private prayers, prayers of civil religion, poetic prayer and prayers of lamentation; prayers from the heart and prayers from the head, prayers meditative, prayers contemplative, some pray the rosary and some pray for the dead, and all of that doesn’t even begin to address the posture of prayer: kneeling, lying prostrate, standing, hands lifted, eyes opened, eyes closed, and the list seems almost endless and soon I concluded that the word “prayer” represents just about the most elastic concept in the world’s rich religious repertoire of spiritual practices.

Prayer can serve as a symbol of nostalgic or as a code word for a certain political agenda, as when the phrase “prayer in school” is used to evoke a certain ideology for the nation or as an attempt to preserve certain normative values such as the stability of the family or to try and make the connection between God and the constitution. Of course, we need not worry about the disappearance of prayer from schools, for regardless of what the courts say, as long as there are tests in school, we know there will always be prayer in school as well.

Lord, teach us to pray. But what exactly are we asking for when we make such a request?

Is prayer a noun or a verb? An action or an attitude? Is it speaking or listening? Something that we can use to persuade God to change the way things are, or simply a practice that ultimately helps us adjust to the reality of what God has predetermined will happen anyway?

“Lord, teach us to pray,” say the disciples. As usual, they hardly know what they are asking for. And still, Christians and devotees of other religious traditions around the world continue the search for the right techniques and formulas, the proper imagination and commitment in order to learn how to pray as we know we ought to pray.
Model prayers, such as this one that we have from the lips of Jesus -- one of the few pieces of liturgy that most people, even the unchurched, still often know by heart – are wonderful resources, but sometimes prayer follows no set model but simply adapts itself to the urgency of the moment.

Thus, in our text for this morning, not only do we get Luke’s version of the Lord’s prayer, quite different from the more familiar version from Matthew, but we also get this rather strange parable about the sulky friend at midnight who requires constant banging on the door in order to get the household’s attention – suggesting that prayer isn’t always composed of lofty-sounding words or even courteous phrases. Prayer, if you’re trying to get a neighbor’s attention in the dead of night, might not be so pleasant to the ears!

Today, I’d like for us to consider what this little parable says about prayer and persistence, prayer as a dangerous, dare I say, subversive activity.

Prayer, if we are to take this little story seriously, upsets the status quo, shakes the slumbering from their sleep, and demands an answer. Walter Brueggemann, an Old Testament scholar whose work some of you have been studying in one of our adult education classes, says that “the task of prayer is to re-imagine our life in the presence of God and therefore to offer direct address to God . . . [which is itself] a dangerous act . . . it is an awesome matter to voice one’s life before God.” (Awed to Heaven . . . , xvi).

The kind of prayer that bangs on a neighbor’s door at midnight is dangerous first, because it disturbs the neighbor, that is, it disturbs God, when conventional etiquette would endorse more polite behavior. The kind of prayer suggested by Jesus in this parable seems to care little about who gets disturbed. Couldn’t this really wait until the morning? But Jesus tells us that it’s the urgency of the problem, not courtesy or propriety, which really matters. The desperate neighbor cares not what the neighbors will think. He just wants an answer.

I take this parable to mean that if you really need something, if your community or this world really needs something, we shouldn’t worry if our prayers offend the republicans or the democrats, we shouldn’t worry if our prayers shame the congress or the president or the courts – we shouldn’t worry even if the prayers embarrass the church with all our wealth and self-worship.

This parable teaches that prayer can be a powerful, risky tool for breaking taboos and challenging worn out conventions, calling the powers that be into accountability.

Perhaps you recall the Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor, who 12 days after the September 11 attacks, joined representatives from a variety of religious traditions in a service of interfaith prayer at Yankee Stadium for the victims and their families. For his action of praying with non-Lutherans and non-Christians, Church authorities threatened to defrock him, that is, to strip him of his ministerial credentials. The argument made by his ecclesiastical superiors was that true believers should not pray or have fellowship with those who are not of the same mind and piety.

Because prayer is one of those universal rituals that places us into close communion with God, there will always be a concern to protect prayer from theological misuse. Thus, for some, praying “in the name of Jesus” will be the only way to ensure that God actually hears. For others, however, the emphasis will be less on correct language and more on the certainty, like this neighbor in distress in this parable, that God hears regardless of the religious labels we wear. Those Christians who worry about whether God hears the prayers of Jews or Muslims or Hindus know little about the ethic of Jesus and the fact that he never endorsed his own way of prayer in exclusion of all others. Here, he simply advises his followers to be persistent, to trust that eventually God will provide what is needful.

Lord, teach us to pray. . . . the result might just be that our prayers move us into fellowship with those we thought we were never supposed to have fellowship with in the first place. Many of the grassroots peace movements of our time – in Israel, in Lebanon, in Ireland, in South Africa, in America’s inner cities have found that true peace and reconciliation only come as old enemies learn how to open the door to one another, to learn how to pray together.

Prayer is dangerous, second, when the one praying dares to get up off the knees and do something about it. That’s what happened in this parable. This neighbor in distress wanted results, so he went and banged on his neighbor’s door, demanding an answer. There is an old African proverb: “When you pray, let your feet move.” If prayers hadn’t been acted upon, if feet hadn’t been moving, there would have been no civil rights movement, no protest against the proliferation of nuclear armaments, no end to apartheid in South Africa, no fall of the Berlin Wall.

The hard thing, of course, is when we have to deal with long waits for an answer to prayer. Sometimes our feet are on the move, but it seems that God isn’t, and we still don’t get the answer we had hoped for. Yet, this parable suggests we are to continue to annoy God, to be as shameless and as irritating in our prayers as that noisy neighbor was at midnight. We should persist until prayer becomes the ongoing conversation between us and God. That way, we will never come away empty-handed from prayer, because even if we wind up with none of the things we thought we needed, we will always wind up with God listening, attending and answering our prayers in ways we hadn’t imagined. (Christian Century, 7/13/04, 17)

The most dangerous and risky thing about prayer is that it always holds the power to change us.

Kathleen Norris writes that “prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can’t imagine. To be made more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been. People who are in the habit of praying know that when a prayer is answered, it is never in a way that you expect.” (Amazing Grace, 60).

This story Luke records doesn’t tell us what became of these neighbors, if the one harbored resentment about being so rudely awakened in the middle of the night. We do know that, while God might at times grow impatient with us, God never turns a deaf ear to us. Eventually, God gets up and answers the door. The primary lesson on prayer, then, becomes plain: “Ask and it will be given you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you.” The one who is the object and subject of our prayer gives what we need, when we need it.

Prayer, then, is finally a matter of trust, the hope that things can be different between us and God, and if that divine-human relationship can be different than it has been before, then there is even hope that our relationships with neighbors and each other can be different as well.

The moral of the story is, if we dare say, like the disciples, “Lord, teach us to pray,” we had better be prepared to live, act, care, and decide in ways we never thought of before.