“When the Prayer is Jesus’ Own” Rev. Peter Hofstra
“Lord,
teach us to pray…” It’s not like they
couldn’t before. There is a powerful
tradition of prayer in Judaism. But
notice that the request comes with a clarifier.
Lord, as John taught his disciples, teach us to pray.” Like the prayers of John the Baptist are
something different from what came before.
Jesus begins the lesson, “When you
pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name…”
I believe we have learned that lesson well. Consider the prayers that are part of our own
worship service, including our service of healing and wholeness. In our unison prayer of confession, we lead
with ‘merciful God’. Our call to
worship, begins as joyful prayer ‘God is SO good…’ Today is our service of healing. How do we begin? We pray our way in with the words of Psalm 130,
“Out of the depths, I cry to you O Lord…”
Our call and response then, the “Q&A” segment, based on our Sending
Statement, begins with the same presumption, “Who are we, the church family of
Merchantville, that we come prayerfully before our Father in heaven?” And we close the liturgy again, in the name
of the Father, “Father, in your mercy, hear our prayers…” Our offertory prayer is also in the name of
the Father as we ask Him to bless the gifts we give back for God’s work in this
church and in this community.’
In addition
to giving us the template of wording that continues in our Lord’s Prayer,
offered weekly to this day, the prayer lessons include two other integral
components. The first is persistence. If you read the blog, you will find that I
had great fun looking at the parable Jesus tells of what should go into our
persistence in prayer.
The second
is the guarantee of response. As we have
sung in service, “ask and it will be given, search and you will find, knock,
and the door will be opened for you.”
Not only is a response guaranteed but the quality of the response is
also given, in another mini-parable. Ask
for fish, we do not receive snakes. Ask
for eggs, we do not receive scorpions.
The windup is wonderful. If EVIL
parents give their children good things, how much more will God give YOU good
things when you ask (because God isn’t evil)
More
specifically, “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to
those who ask him!” In terms of our
Trinitarian understanding of God, in God the Father we ask, and in God the Holy
Spirit, we receive response.
Now, as I
got to this point in preparing for this morning, I hit something of a
crossroads in my thought processes. It
is about the ‘giving of the Holy Spirit’.
Should this be the point in the sermon where we move down that
path? What are the things we might need
to know? In the bible of Jesus, “Holy
Spirit” is a gift from God that elevates the recipient. Samsom gains superstrength. Isaiah gains the power of prophecy and
speaking the Lord’s Word to the people.
David gains the power of kingship, becoming THE pattern of faithful
leadership to God. Moses is able to do
the work of more than seventy accomplished leaders-there is a passage where
part of the spirit upon Moses was divided among seventy others to help him with
the work of running the landless nation of Israel.
In the
Bible of the Church, the Holy Spirit is the power that jump starts the church
at Pentecost. In John 14, the Holy
Spirit is what Jesus self-identifies as the divine presence that will remain
with His followers after He as ascended into heaven. There are the fruit of the Spirit, the gifts
of the Spirit, the inspiration of the Spirit.
We could deep dive into the swimming pool that is the Holy Spirit and
explore far and wide how the gift of the Spirit is the answer God sends to
prayer.
Or we could
flip it. Let me explain. We have Bible Study on Wednesday
evenings. One evening, a number of our
phones kept buzzing-some we could hear but I know other phones were also going
off as well. It was the prayer-net all
abuzz. We had a real-time request being
lifted in prayer to the 20 people who make up this prayer group. We had real-time responses, real-time
updates, and real-time resolution, prayers answered to the relief and calm of
the person we were praying for.
That’s what
it means when Jesus says that our Father in heaven gives the Holy Spirit to
those who ask. Prayers answered are the
demonstrable evidences of the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives. What does that look like?
The person
being prayed for is undergoing medical care for their situation. The gift of the Holy Spirit comes in the
hands and talents of the nurses and doctors and others who are on hand to
provide the interventions that will lead to healing. The gift of the Holy Spirit comes in the
hands and text messages of a group of people who have committed to being on
standby to pray when the need comes down the pike. Twenty people in the one group, fourteen
listed in the other I have on my phone, no idea how many others are out
there. Perhaps this crosses over into
the lesson on persistence in the middle part of our passage that Jesus provides
for his ‘prayer lessons’. Ane while not
in this case, there was another where the person in question knew about the
activation of the prayer-net, and the feedback I received is how blown away
they were at the reality that there were people who cared enough to pray, but
in that reality were able to find the peace of the Lord, another expression of
the gift of the Holy Spirit, surrounding them in what might have been panicked
and dire circumstances otherwise.
This is one
episode in the life of the prayer-net of this church. On a given weekday evening, when a request
drops into the net, do we begin with the words “Our Father in Heaven”? Probably not.
But we pray those words every week.
Every time the Lord’s Prayer is offered, the persistence of our life in
Christ in prayer is reinforced. The Holy
Spirit is gifted to us every time around.
Does that mean we receive the Holy Spirit afresh every time we say the
Lord’s Prayer? No, that turns the Lord’s
prayer into some kind of conjuring magic.
The gift of the Holy Spirit is given to each and every one of us when we
come to Jesus as our Lord and Savior.
The reason we pray this prayer always and every time we worship is not
because God needs to be reminded of that, but because WE DO.
This is one
episode where we can clearly see the appeal to God the Father and the work
accomplished in answer to our prayer through the Holy Spirt. But what is the guarantee? How do we know? Well, to quote some of the most powerful
wisdom of the church, “Our hope is built on nothing less that Jesus and his
righteousness.” That’s another piece
that would do well in a hymn, don’t you think?
We depend
on prayer because we depend on Jesus, our Lord and Savior, as He who came down
and stood with us, between the Father above and the Holy Spirit within. John the Baptist knew that, had seen that,
was called to prophecy to that, baptized our Lord Jesus and saw how the baptism
of the Holy Spirit came upon him over and above the sign of the baptism of
water. So, consider this, John taught
his disciples how to pray in a way where Jesus formed the central emplacement
of the sure and certain knowledge that He is our Messiah, that, in Him, prayer
is answered.
That is a
piece that is not in the bible of Jesus when prayer is offered. There is faith in the Lord to answer prayer,
there is even the expectation of a Messiah, but the bible of Jesus ebbs and
flows, not with God’s faithfulness, but with the faithfulness of humanity. Until Jesus.
Until His death of the cross, the final sacrifice by the blood of the
Lamb, capital “L”, one of the most powerful names we have for our Lord Jesus
Christ, in turn the guarantee of life eternal in Jesus’ resurrection from the
dead.
What
exactly did John teach his disciples in prayer that was of such appeal to the
disciples of Jesus? We don’t know. But it is worth repeating that what was
different for John and his disciples from all the prayers that came before, is
that they were built upon the assurance of the reality of God’s promised
Messiah standing among them in the person of Christ Jesus. And Jesus himself has said that, in faith, if
they tell a mountain to jump into the sea, it will do a swan dive in the name
of the Lord.
So, I see
this passage as sudden insight and wisdom on the part of the disciples. They’ve lived in the presence of the light of
the world. Their hope is built on
nothing less. John is gone (his
beheading is reported earlier in the chapter).
Jesus has said there will be a time he no longer stands among them. How then can they be sure that they will
remain fully and properly ‘in touch’ with Jesus in that time? Jesus teaches them. And it is the gift of prayer, the gift of the
Holy Spirit, that we continue to see at work as we pray.
Hallelujah and thanks be to God.
Amen.
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