The lectionary texts for this week are here. I’m reflecting on the gospel reading.
The last two weeks we have heard again stories which we have heard before. The good Samaritan, Mary and Martha and this week we hear Luke’s particular version of another very familiar piece of scripture – the Lord’s prayer.
When I reflected on the Mary and Martha story last week, I shared about the life changing shift that happened for me when I stopped treating the familiar tasks of my life as the frustratingly repetitive, necessary chores and errands of maintenance, and instead approached them with energy and attention.
No longer just keeping things going, no longer just loading endless piles of laundry into the washing machine, making endless trips to the supermarket to prepare an endless round of meals for my continuously hungry family.
With energy and attention, I’m not involved in maintenance, I’m taking care of things. I wonder if you tried this shift in attitude, in bringing energy and attention to the familiar, mundane aspects of your life this week? If you did try it, you may well have noticed that it’s hard. It’s hard to bring active interest to the familiar. After all, we develop routines so that we don’t have to bring active interest to things! We keep things the same so that we don’t have to think about them – we can just do them. We think that’s going to save us some time or some energy somewhere down the line…
But what actually happens is that our routines let us cruise so much that we kind of fall asleep at the wheel of our lives. We’re not really giving any attention to what we’re doing. Have you ever got in the car to go somewhere and then found you’d gone the wrong way- and you find yourself driving to go to work even though you were meant to be going to the movies? Or have you ever arrived somewhere and had no real memory of the journey – it was all on autopilot while your mind was somewhere else entirely.
If you start to pay attention to what you are doing, especially when it’s familiar and part of your routine or your habitual patterns, you might be surprised to discover how much of your doing is really running a maintenance programme. That doesn’t mean your life is dull and uninteresting. You may be very active, very busy, very interactive. There may be many dramas, many happenings, many big moments. The thing is, we can do all of those on autopilot too. If pretty much anyone in your family can accurately predict how you’ll react to a certain kind of news, a certain kind of invitation, a certain kind of person – you know you’ve got autopilot patterns.
I can say this with complete confidence, and also without any judgement or sense of superiority, because we all have them. We all get into comfortable routines of life and when that happens, we start to live less.
It takes energy and attention to live fully. It takes energy and attention to learn how to live life in all its fullness, which is the promise of Jesus for those who follow him.
So, it’s really interesting that in the reading today, we hear how the ones who were following Jesus have been watching him repeatedly taking time to pray and now they ask him to teach them how to pray.
These are people who have grown up with prayer as part of their family lives, as part of their social and cultural identity. They had been taught to pray, been saying prayers and hearing prayers their whole lives, but now they ask Jesus to teach them. Perhaps they see Jesus bringing energy and attention to his prayer. Perhaps they see that when he recites a prayer, he’s not just saying the words. Perhaps they see that when he prays, something shifts. Sometimes that means something amazing and miraculous happens. Sometimes that means something shifts into clarity and he asks a question or makes an observation or tells a story that goes to the heart of the matter. Perhaps they sense the depth of his inner silence. Perhaps they sense the fullness of his presence, the freedom of his being, and they think: we want to live, to be fully like that.
So they ask. And Luke gives us the Lord’s prayer in these five sentences. Just these.
So we start with a term of relational intimacy that conveys God’s enduring commitment to us.
Does Father say that to you? If you bring energy and attention to this opening, connecting, reassuring name of God, does Father resonate? If not, what is the name that does sound like that to your soul? And with this intimate connection framing the prayer, we recognise God’s holiness which was, at the time of speaking, currently embodied in a brown skinned middle aged Jewish man, so we hold that beautiful, redeeming paradox of holiness and earthliness in our hallowing of God’s name.
Now we invoke and invite the kingdom of this holy and intimately loving God,
opening our hearts and minds to this other vision of how we are to be in relationship with each other and all creation. Those three words – your kingdom come – name a wholly new reality. You may have already prayed them a million times before. Have they been alive in you with attention and energy? Have they signified a shift into clarity about what’s important, about who’s important? Have they reoriented your desires, have they softened you where you are overly rigid, or given focus where you are prone to be rambling?
Next, we ask for what we need, not with pleas and explanations or justification, but simply and with rather direct frankness. So, is that how you ask God for what you need? Or have you learned to add extra details? Offer reasons…and have you learned how to discern between what you want and what you need? We often assume that we know what is needed, what the best outcome of any situation may be…. But how often is that just what we want dressed up as a real need?
After we’ve asked for our daily needs, we ask that God, who is forgiving, forgives our sin.
And, because the only response to that grace received is grace to give, we forgive those who owe us. Luke’s version of this prayer makes a distinction between our sin that is forgiven by God, and the debts that we forgive each other. We forgive those who owe us – and if I’m awake and alert when I’m saying this prayer and I’m bringing attention and energy to it, surely I’m going to start wondering …what is it that I think is owed to me?
And lastly, we ask that we not be brought to the time of trial – the implication in the text is that this is the trial of persecution. I’m sure you know that the early Christians experienced a great deal of persecution. God did not save them from that. God did not protect them from that. So how do we pray this? What are we actually asking for? It can’t be that we are asking for a free pass from challenges, pain and suffering – Jesus is also very clear that if we are following him then we will share in his sufferings. And if you visit the icon art exhibit currently on at the gallery, you’ll see some great examples of Christian art which is full of images of martyrs suffering quite hideously.
Perhaps that’s the clue for us. It may sound odd, but there were those who looked for martyrdom and hoped to be brought to the time of trial. One of the early church fathers wrote that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, implying that the martyrs’ willing sacrifice of their lives leads directly to – inspires – the conversion of others to the Christian faith.
So, we pray ‘let there be no fanaticism here’. No seeking after that kind of glory, no ego-fuelled self-sacrifice. You may not be tempted to look for ways to die for Christ, but the little martyrs are still among us, aren’t they? Some kind of heroic self-sacrifice is still one of the ways that we may try to find meaning, value or significance in a life of habits patterned on autopilot routines.
It’s so easy to be interested in what’s new – to give our attention to something that’s different, whether that’s because we love it or because we hate it. It’s easy to bring energy to something when you are learning it – you have to be interested if you want to learn, you have to give it your careful and ongoing attention. It’s much harder to bring that same level of interest, that same level of energy to the familiar thing, the well-known friend who reacts in the predictable ways, the well-known story with no new angles to explore, the well-known prayer which rolls off the tongue without thinking.
But here’s the delightful paradox in this prayer: it bears repetition. When we say the same words over and over, even if we say them without giving them our attention, they still sink in. They sink in and get lodged in your bones such that in moments of despair, or joy or deep grief they rise up out of nowhere and offer themselves.
When the archbishop of Canterbury’s envoy Terry Waite was kidnapped and held hostage for years in Palestine, much of his time was in solitary confinement. And he said afterwards that it was the prayers of the daily Anglican office which sustained him. He prayed his inner prayer book; prayed the words which had been layered into his being by habit, by daily discipline and repetition.
So, it is paradoxically a both/and situation. Habit, repetition, familiarity all help to form deep grooves of prayerful practice. Keep doing it, Jesus tells us.
And at the same time bring attention and energy into your awareness of God’s loving, faithful relational presence; into your intention to recognise the holy in the ordinary; into your desire to let the kingdom of Love come in you and through you; into your willingness trust God for what you need and to recognise the gift of grace which is a flow of give-and-take, receive and offer; into your surrender of every effort to make yourself worthy, and instead to accept your worthiness as a given and a gift of grace. It is through energy and attention that our prayer becomes transformational.
The homework from last week still stands for this week, then.
Bring energy and attention to the familiar things of life – the familiar things of prayer – and see if you don’t find something shifts for you, too.
