7th Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 12
July 27, 2025
Luke 11:1-13
How many of you like Dr. Pepper? I mean, we’re Texans. It’s a requirement to like Dr. Pepper and HEB, isn’t it? So suppose you really want a Dr. Pepper. You’ve been out in the Texas heat and you want, you may be tempted to say you need, a Dr. Pepper. So you find a vending machine, you look for the right amount of change, or these days, a credit card, and you put your money in. Then you select the right buttons and…nothing happens. Or you asked for a Dr. Pepper and you got a Sprite. You did all the right things and did not get what you asked for. This is often how we treat prayer. We either think of God as a vending machine dispensing out our prayer requests if we do all the right things, or like it’s a genie in a bottle. Polish the bottle and God will grant you what you want.
Too often that’s the way prayer has been taught to us. Ask and you shall receive, knock and the door will be opened. Right? And you have asked until your throat was sore, knocked until your knuckles bled and…God is on mute.
So, what is prayer? And why did the disciples ask Jesus, “Teach us to pray?” I mean, they had prayers. They said prayers in the synagogue. They said prayers at home. They prayed for food, they prayed for healing, they prayed for loved ones. They recited the Psalms. So why did they ask, “Teach us to pray?”
At this point in the Gospel story, they had been following Jesus around Galilee, wandering into enemy territory, and were now headed to Jeruslaem. They had watched Jesus heal, feed, exorcise demons, console the broken, confront authorities, and teach the Word of God. His life had been threatened, yet the crowds just kept coming and the need was never ending. And in all that, they watched him consistently draw away to pray. They had watched John the Baptist do the same thing. That was the prayer they were observing, the pattern of Jesus’ work and ministry that seemed different, a depth of meaning and understanding they did not know.
Teach us to pray, Lord. You have something we are longing for. So, Jesus tells them, pray like this:
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.
That’s it. Probably not the one you are used to reciting from the Gospel of Matthew, but it is simple, short, and not all that eloquent. But there is a lot here that Jesus is teaching about prayer. Even the first word is startling. He addresses the Almighty God as Father, Abba, a very endearing familial term. The people of Israel had addressed God as Father in the Old Testament but Jesus used the more intimate term, Abba. It’s like saying, Papa. Immediately following that loving address, he says “hallowed be your name.” May your name be sacred, revered, and honored. It is loving and intimate, and at the same time deeply holy and respectful.
Then it is a request to bring in the Kingdom of God, may it come here, now. It’s not an acknowledgment of “some day,” but bringing it on earth without waiting for that some day in Heaven. May your Kingdom of Heaven come among us! (The irony was, it was sitting in front of them! So maybe it should be “help us to recognize the Kingdom among us.”)
Give us each day our daily bread–daily is not really the best translation. It really means an abundance, every day, give us the bread each day that we will need for tomorrow. It’s not a prayer for survival but for thriving. Give us what we need to thrive.
And isn’t it interesting that in the prayer Jesus gives them to pray every day, he addresses forgiveness. “New Testament scholar Alan Culpepper writes that what Jesus was getting at was an idea already established in Jewish teaching, which linked giving and receiving of forgiveness. Forgiveness requires an open circuit. Mercy flows through the same channel: one who will not forgive cannot receive forgiveness, because it is all part of the same gift. Pray for an open channel; and finally, pray for deliverance. Pray that we will be saved from ourselves and from others. Pray that we might be spared from whatever would be too great to bear and for mercy at the end.”1
Luke’s version stops here. Then Jesus launches into a story about a neighbor in the middle of the night. The situation is one drawn from Palestinian folk-customs and Near Eastern expectations of hospitality. The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz writes, “In Jesus’ time, no one in their right mind would deny bread to a nighttime traveler or the friend of a nighttime traveler, and they all knew it. It was a pain, but it had to do with life and death, and it had to do with honor: the honor of the individual, the honor of the family, and the honor of the whole village. In this case, we lose something in the translation into English of a word that means with no shame into the word persistence.” Surely Jesus is not teaching his disciples about how to badger the Divine. Nor is prayer calling God’s attention to something or someone where God is not already present. Rather, prayer brings us into a deeper relationship with the Divine and makes us more open to responding to the needs of others, as a way to honor our dignity and theirs. A friend, a neighbor, should always be ready to share bread.
Ask, search, knock. Again, to get away from the vending prayer machine, we have to read the entirety of this passage, and really understand it in the context of what the message is of the entire Gospel of Luke, bringing about the Kingdom of God within. Jesus now explains what prayer does in you and for you. Ask for that to be given to you, search for the Divine within you, knock and the door is open to the kingdom of heaven for you–and “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Now, I do believe God answers prayer. If we pray, like Jesus, Abba, Father, then like children, ask for what we need, we do search for answers, we do bang on the door for God to let us in, to help us. Perhaps the greatest difficulty of prayer is that sometimes we just want to offer our coins and push the button. We don’t want God. We want something from God. I cannot answer the question as to why God seems silent at times, but I can say that prayer is a conversation with the One who created and loves you and will walk with you in that valley of the shadow of even death. Silent or loud, God is with you. And prayer is about what happens in you and me as we learn through prayer to embrace the Love that transforms and sustains us in joy and in our darkest hours.
On Maundy Thursday, Jesus prayed in the garden before he was arrested and beaten for that cup to pass from him, and as he prayed, he was able to finally say, “not my will, but yours be done.” On Good Friday, Jesus prayed the prayer some of you may have prayed at some point, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”
Pete Grieg writes in his book, God on Mute, “There is faith for life, and then there is a darker faith for death. There is faith for miracles, but also for pain. There is faith for God’s will when it’s our own will, too, but there is also the grace to trust God when [God’s] will is not what we would choose.” God answers our prayers. But when we feel we are in the night time garden sweating blood or even living a Friday of utter abandonment, Easter does come. Resurrection always comes.
Prayer is thanksgiving and prayer is lament. Prayer is joy and prayer is anger. Prayer is a response to love and prayer is a response to one’s life being gutted. And all of our humanity is captured in the prayers of those that wrote the psalms. Of the 150 psalms, 67 of them are lament. 21 of them are Psalms of praise and thanksgiving. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that lamenting means a lack of faith. There are times when lament is necessary.
Our prayers are communication, one that indicates a relationship with God that is close and intimate enough to pour out all of one’s honest thoughts of the heart and mind. Our prayers are of value when they are honest, and are not based on whether you have enough faith, or whether you have failed to live up to God’s or anyone else’s expectations. It is not a merit system. God is not Santa Claus who gives out gifts only to the good boys and girls. Jesus is a friend of sinners, prisoners, outcasts, strangers, and the poor. God hears our prayers.
The blessed saint Oscar Romero reminds us that “Christianity discerns that beyond the night the dawn already glows. The hope that does not fail is carried in the heart. Christ goes with us!”
So let us pray as Jesus taught his disciples: My Abba, may your name be always sacred. May your Kingdom come among us all. Give us and our neighbors what we need to thrive and may that channel of our forgiveness and the forgiveness of others flow with mercy, and deliver us from what is too great to bear on our own. Amen.
- The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz, “Claim Check.” 2022 Sermons ↩︎
Magdalena's Musings 