Teach us to pray: Trinity 6

Trinity 6 2025 Proper 12

I wonder whether you’ve ever been tempted by those self-help books that promise some new and clever way to sort your life out.  “Seven habits of highly effective people” and such like? Or perhaps you’ve been drawn in by clickbait headlines on the internet; 14 steps to becoming a millionaire, 27 ways to keep your cat happy. I made up those last two, but they’re probably out there somewhere. Human beings are suckers for a quick fix, a magic wand.   

It’s a hunger that’s as old as the hills and I think we see it in the request Jesus’ disciples put to him in today’s Gospel reading. They see Jesus praying and they ask him “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples” We don’t know what John  taught about prayer – this is John the Baptist we’re talking about - but any self-respecting religious leader would have been expected to have something distinctive to offer, a new technique or insight for their followers – otherwise, why follow them? But if that’s what Jesus’ disciples were expecting, I think they may have been a bit underwhelmed by his response. 

The prayer he gives them, which we know as the Lord’s Prayer, is just 38 words long in Luke’s version. Matthew’s version, and the versions we pray in church are slightly longer, but not much. None of them take longer than about 20 seconds to pray, even at a leisurely pace. 

But more to the point from the disciples’ point of view, there’s absolutely nothing in the Lord’s Prayer that would have been new to them, nothing that wasn’t already there in the Hebrew Scriptures, the books we know as the Old Testament, which they had grown up with.

The Old Testament often calls God Father, and sometimes Mother too. 

The importance of hallowing God’s name, respecting God, is there in the Ten Commandments. 

The prophet Isaiah spoke of longing for God’s kingdom to come on earth as in heaven  600 years before Jesus; he dreamed of swords being beaten into ploughshares and wolves and lambs living peaceably together. 

God had always been seen as the provider of daily bread - the things we need to live – like the manna he gave to his people in the wilderness. Forgiving and being forgiven – reconciliation - is a thread that runs right through the Old Testament, too, and the Psalms are full of appeals to God to deliver people from the trials that beset them. 

It's almost as if Jesus is saying “you don’t need to ask me how to pray. You know all this already.” Knowing what to say isn’t really the issue. The problems we have in prayer are rarely about techniques, they are about our image of the God we are praying to, and our relationship with that God.

Prayer, put simply, is just us as we are meeting God as God is. But who are we, and who is God, and what sort of relationship is it?

So Jesus goes on to use images of relationships which are meant to be  close and loving to help us think about our attitudes to prayer and the God we pray to – images of friendship and family. The man who comes at midnight to ask for bread isn’t knocking on the door of a total stranger. We could understand the homeowner’s reluctance if he was. And if he kept on badgering him as he does in the story, the homeowner would have probably called the police if it happened today. But these two men are supposed to be friends; that’s what makes the homeowner’s reaction so puzzling. If we feel we have to batter the door down to get a friend to help us, we might wonder whether that friendship is worth having.

The story is meant to be ridiculous. It’s meant to take us by surprise. We know this isn’t the way friendship is supposed to work, and yet, Jesus is saying, isn’t this sometimes the way we think about our relationship with God, that we have to wear him down with prayers, twist his arm to get what we want?  In the same way, we might rightly be suspicious about accepting food from someone we didn’t know – how do we know it’s safe to eat? – but a child should be able to trust that their parents won’t give them a stone instead of an egg, a scorpion instead of fish, and yet, do we think God wants us to be safe and happy, or do we sometimes think he’s trying to catch us out and punish us? 

Jesus asks his disciples to think about what’s going on in their hearts and minds as they come to God in prayer, and he asks us the same. Get that right and it doesn’t matter what words we use, or whether we use words at all – companionable silence is fine with those we’re close to. 

Prayer is us as we are, meeting God as God is. Understanding it is simple; it’s doing it that can be complicated and costly. First, it means knowing ourselves – being aware of who we are as we come to God, the things we are trying to hide, the burdens we bear, the things we really want to say, rather than the things we think we ought to say – it’s ok to shout at God. Read the Psalms and you’ll find he is quite used to it…

But it also means knowing who God is, or at least what our image of God is. And we all do have an image of God – we can’t help it. Even if you don’t believe in God, you will have in your mind some image of the God you don’t believe in, and maybe I wouldn’t believe in that image either…

Those images of God are shaped in many ways – by our families of origin, our schools and churches, through films or art. Whether we like it or not, they inevitably creep into our prayer life, affecting our ability to pray, so we need to be conscious of them, to ask ourselves why we think of God that way, and whether they are helpful images. Do we think God is the kind of friend who would turn us away if we came to him in desperation at midnight? Do we think of him as a fickle and demanding parent, who just might give us a stone or a scorpion instead of good, nourishing food? Or dare we believe, as Jesus did, that God is faithful, and loving, delighting in us, and wanting us to delight in him, even if life isn’t always easy or painless?

“Lord, teach us to pray”, ask the disciples, but Jesus knows that it’s not new techniques they need, not a big thick book of words, or some secret ritual. It’s their relationship with God which is the key to their prayers, what they believe about the person into whose presence they are coming.

Perhaps you think of yourself as a praying person. Perhaps you don’t. But maybe this week we could all take some time to ask ourselves the questions these stories ask. Who is God to me? And why? And what might happen if God and I simply sat down together for a while, or went for a walk in each other’s company - no agendas, no expectations, maybe not even any words; just us as we are, meeting God as God is?

Amen

 

Who is my neighbour?

Colossians 1.1-14, Luke 10.25-37

The Good Samaritan Window
St Mary, West Malling

A lawyer – a religious expert – comes to Jesus, full of questions.  “What must I do to inherit eternal life?”  he begins. I’ll come back to that opening question later, so tuck it away in your mind somewhere. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” 

Jesus answers his question with another question “What does the law say?” “Love God and love your neighbour” says the lawyer. Perhaps he’s a little insulted – everyone knew that summary of the law – so he goes on quickly, trying to regain the upper hand in this discussion. “But who is my neighbour?” 

In response, Jesus tells a story, one of the most famous stories in the New Testament. It’s even featured in one of our stained-glass windows here at St Mary’s. It’s so familiar, though that the danger is it goes in one ear and out of the other. We know what it’s telling us, don’t we. Be kind and helpful, even to those who are different from you…  That’s obvious, isn’t it?

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that message, of course, but I’m not so sure it’s the message of this particular story. To explain what I mean, let me ask a question. Whose perspective is this story told from? Through whose eyes are we seeing what happens? 

The answer is that it’s told from the perspective of the unfortunate man who has been beaten up and left for dead. We’re not told anything except what he could have seen and experienced and known as the events unfold. 

The story doesn’t tell us, for example, why the priest and the Levite pass him by without helping - because the injured man had no way of knowing that either as he lay there watching them disappear into the distance. 

Their behaviour is often explained by saying that they were going to the Temple to serve there. They were in a hurry to get to their important jobs or didn’t want to make themselves ritually unclean and unable to serve because they’d touched a dead body. Actually, that’s very unlikely, because the story says they were coming “down” the road, and that means they must have been travelling away from Jerusalem, not towards it, because Jerusalem is up in the hills, and Jericho below sea level. I’ve been on that road, and it’s one long descent.

But now I’m doing it, aren’t I, centring the priest and the Levite through my speculations. It is so easy to do. We want to give them a back story, to understand, maybe excuse them, perhaps because we know we pass people by on the other side too. But I am sure it’s deliberate that we aren’t told their back stories, because the injured man wouldn’t have known those back stories either. All he knows is that he sees someone coming who could help, who should help – not least because he is a fellow Jew - but doesn’t. And then he sees another man who could and should help, but he doesn’t either. 

But then, when all hope seems to be lost, along comes a Samaritan.  Again, we are tempted to put him centre-stage. We even call this story “The Good Samaritan” though Jesus doesn’t give it a title and neither does Luke. But actually, we’re told very little about him, and again, nothing the injured man couldn’t have known, simply the fact that he is from the despised nation of Samaria, whose people the Jews saw as heretics and enemies. We don’t know why he stops, any more than we knew why the priest and Levite don’t. We don’t know what his motivation is, because the injured man doesn’t know it either. All he knows is that this very unlikely person has given him the help he needed. 

Why does this story work so hard to keep bringing us back to the injured man, despite our desire to wander off with the other characters?  It’s because he is the one we are supposed to identify with. We might want to identify with the Samaritan. We might hope we’d act like him. We might fear that often we’re more like the priest or the Levite, and identify with them through guilt. But they aren’t supposed to be the centre of this story.  

Its central question isn’t “who do we help? It’s “who are we be willing to be helped by?” We’re meant to be asking ourselves what we would feel like if we were vulnerable, helpless, hurting.

Most people, in my experience, find it a great deal easier to give help than to receive it. It can feel humiliating to need help, especially if the helper is someone you don’t get on with. If we have to fall flat on our faces, I’m sure there are people we’d rather weren’t around to see it. But like this injured man, we may not have a choice. 

And that brings me back to that opening question, which I asked you to tuck away and remember. “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” the lawyer asked Jesus. “What must I do?” This is a man who is used to being in control, having power and using it – doing things. He’s used to providing for himself through his own efforts. Eternal life, to him, seems to be just another thing that he can and should get for himself, if he does the right things, prays the right prayers, performs the right rituals, lives in the right way. 

Jesus turns his thinking upside down, though, by inviting him to identify with the helpless, injured man who is really at the centre of this story. This could be you, he is saying. It could be any of us. Frailty, pain, loss are part of being human. Whether it’s a mugging on the Jericho Road or some other disaster that befalls us, none of us gets through life without needing help at some point ; it’s not our fault, nothing to reproach ourselves about. That can be hard to acknowledge, because we like to feel that we are in control, but it’s true. This lawyer strikes me as someone who might struggle accept help, and who might especially not want to accept help from Jesus. A carpenter from Nazareth? Who does he think he is to be claiming to speak with the authority of God? 

In John’s Gospel Jesus is actually accused of being a Samaritan – either that or that he is demon-possessed, the crowd says – the one is as bad as the other to them. Either way, it shows how hard it was for many people to accept that he might have something to say that was worth hearing, and it casts this story in an interesting light. 

This is not a story about how we should help others, though of course we should. It is, primarily, a story about our need of help, and the importance of being open to it, however it comes to us. That might be in the small acts of kindness which we are tempted to rebuff because we want to go it alone and are too proud to accept help. But ultimately, it is surely also a story about the grace of God, that unearned and unearnable, gift which “rescues us from the power of darkness” and brings us to a safe lodging where all our hurts can be healed. Amen