One steamy morningsthis week on an early  walk along the river. I heard voices that seemed to float up through the trees from down near the water.  It was misty and smokey. I couldn’t see anyone, but finally figured out there were rowing crews out practicing together.  They were rowing faster than I was walking because suddenly a disembodied voice called out loud, not far away, but right over my shoulder. With a megaphone,
C’mon.  Pay attention to how, how you’re doing it!  Pay attention to how?”

I took it as a personal message.

As it was moving out of range, The Voice began giving explicit instructions to all those teammates on how best to row.

Friends, the disciples were in that boat…or at least the same boat…when they ask Jesus “Teach us to pray.” “Coach, we need instruction!”

Jesus needed a time of prayer!  He’d just come from Martha and Mary where he’d deftly side-stepped having to arbitrate the sisters’ needs and preferences.  “There is need of only one thing,” he’d said when Martha wanted to dislodge Mary from Jesus’ feet to get a little help.   And he didn’t say what it was.

Right before his visit to the sisters Jesus had dealt with a challenging lawyer.  He told the story of the Good Samaritan.  He got that smart, but not wise, man to understand that mercy tells us who our neighbor is.

It had been quite a mission trip for Jesus and the 12.  A lot of work.  A lot of emotion.  And a lot ahead!  Herod’s government was already after Jesus.  He and his crew were heading right into its perilous heart.  By this time in their life together on the road, the disciples knew that Jesus stopped often for prayer.  Needed it to keep going.  But they didn’t know how he prayed or for what.  Now they longed for a good prayer to keep them company as they walked right into troubles.

“How should we pray,” they ask.  “Tell us the right way.  Maybe it will work for us, O Lord, as it does for you.

Jesus had no megaphone for his small group gathered ‘round.  But his words are clear.  He offers a simple version of what we call the Lord ’s Prayer.   I tend to see that title, The Lord’s Prayer, with capital letters.  That may not be so great.  Caps somehow suggest that Jesus had one way to pray, known to insiders, a way that somehow “worked.”  But his prayer isn’t a formula for insiders.  Just catch the straightforward simplicity of what he says.

You’re our father.  You want what is good for us.

Bring your kingdom to us.  We pray for it to be right here, right now.   The way your creation was meant to be.  Do we know exactly what that is, how it will feel?  No.  We can’t even imagine, truth be told, wolves and lambs lying down together.  Much less all divisions of the world re-woven. But bring it on, God. 

Meanwhile, feed us all.  Keep us safe on the way.   Give us the grace to start over when we are hurt or hurt others, when we can’t pay our debts of gratitude.

Whatever happens along our path, forgive us so we can hang together with you and each other.

That’s it!  A great travelers’ prayer.   This is a straightforward plea to the creator of the universe to accompany us.  Us Into whatever will come.  It’s a prayer for people like us who are always on the way from here to there.  From the fragile realms in which we spend our days…and end them… to God’s realm that grounds all realities.  We may not be walking into clear and present danger, dear church, but we are walking into the unknown.  And that worries us.  Teach us to pray, here in our boat, rowing against the current.  Help us pay attention to how we row.

 

Jesus didn’t give his disciples then and doesn’t now explicit instructions that we have to repeat just right.  Matthew and Luke wrote his words differently.  Then those words were translated into languages and words that Jesus could not have known.  For two thousand years, around the globe, we’ve adapted these words in order to pray as best we can.

These are good words.  We have come to trust them and we care about changes.  Yet, Jesus’ teaching is about something more, something deeper, than the words themselves.

In fact, Jesus tells a story to show us how to pray.  You heard it.

There were two men.  One needed bread.  In the middle of the night???  “Knock anyway.”

The request is annoying, unrealistic, even selfish?  “Ask anyway, Jesus says.”  Ask in unabashed trust for your hearts’ longing and your bodies’ needs.  Don’t stand on ceremony.  Don’t wait for the right words or times.  Just ask.”

 

About a week ago I got a real life lesson in how to pray.  The one praying wasn’t much with words.  Two-year old Molly got home from pre-school late in the afternoon, trundled up the steps to her house, and spotted her Dad in the kitchen.  She ran to his leg—all she could reach—and hung on, as we say, for dear life.

Dad greet her, tousled her hair—all he could reach—and kept at his tasks.  Molly hung on and didn’t go, standing on his toes so that she could be moved around the kitchen with her Dad.  He kept talking to her until she finally had what she needed and let go.

What did she want?  Just to know her Dad was there and wouldn’t chase her away.  Just to know that as the world kept moving, she had a safe place to stand.  Just to know that she was grounded in love.

When we baptize little Hazel today, we entrust her to a God on whose toes she can stand, to whom she can cling.  Someday even with words.  Today only with our words.  We ask on Hazel’s behalf.  And we trust that she receives the very same gift God promises all of us.  Jesus says, “How much more will God give you, that’s you all…how much more will God give you all the Holy Spirit!

 

God isn’t our coach with a megaphone helping us shape up and perfect our praying skills.  Though we may get messages that surprise us.  God’s the one with strong legs and sturdy toes who continues to cook up a better world, find ways to clean up our messes, and keeps things going.  Who brings us along in the process.  Who comes to help us even at midnight.  Molly couldn’t see what her Dad was doing, anymore than we have a clear vision of how God’s kingdom comes.

But on the road with the other disciples, or even in the same boat, we pray by clinging to the best hope we know, so that heartened in every sense of that word, we walk (or row) into what awaits us.

That was Jesus’ own prayer and the one he taught us.  Amen.