TEACH US TO PRAY

Luke 11: 1 – 4

Prayer is like a familiar road you walk everyday. If it is not, it should be. You can walk on it with your eyes closed. You know what”s there. You feel comfortable and safe. It is like a conversation with someone you love. You are so familiar with it and do not notice it”s so precious. Like a glass of water. If conversations with someone you love becomes a chore, maybe there is some problem in your relationship.

Unfortunately, because we clatter our lives with too many things to do, many of us are forgetting how to listen. Consequently, prayer no longer is our daily practice. This is why it is good to know the Lord”s prayer. It is familiar to us and gives us an opening ritual, when we don”t know what words to pray. Rituals are useful to break the ice. You say, "Hello, how are you?" as an opening ritual when you meet someone. If you still don”t know what to talk about, you talk about weather. It is safe, familiar, and offers a way of entering into conversation. Lord”s Prayer is like that.

Prayer is a conversation with God. So it should be easy, like any conversation with someone you know. But it is difficult to start a conversation with someone you are not familiar with. When we are not used to thinking about our relationship with God, we need a ritual we are familiar and comfortable with. So Jesus taught us Lord”s Prayer. It is a good opening ritual to our prayer life.

Lord”s Prayer is made up of three parts: the first part is about God, the second about our physical needs, and the last part is about our spiritual needs.

We begin by invoking the name of God to make sure in our mind we are speaking to God. When he taught the disciples how to invoke the name of God, Jesus taught us to address God as "Father". It was an incredibly blasphemous teaching for the time. The Jewish religion does not allow any familiarity with God. God is so holy that nobody should even know the name nor should one depict God in any way. Allowing the disciples to call Jesus "Son of God", and addressing God as "Father" were the very acts of blasphemy which sent Jesus to his death on the cross. So what was he saying, when he taught others to address God as father, despite the objection of the authorities?

Jesus was trying to tell us that "yes, God is holy and almighty. But God is also a loving God", like the God of Hosea, who is like a man pathetically in love with his unfaithful wife and goes after her to a brothel, while others laughed at him. He wanted to tell us that our relationship with God can be of the most intimate kind. This is why he called God father. Jesus must have had a good and loving father in Joseph. If someone does not have a good father, God can be some other loving person like a mother. Didn”t he also use other images like friend, brother, teacher? God can be compared to whoever one feels comfortable and intimate with, and, who can also command respect. I like the way French people address God. They use "tu" just as they would use it for a family member. We should be able to feel comfortable being with God, like being with your father, a mother, a spouse, a good friend. That”s why in the Lord”s Prayer we call God, "Father" even though our language fails from time to time to mean what we want to mean.

We believe also, however, that God is almighty, just and wise. So the best thing that could happen is to make the rule of God reality. Wouldn”t it be wonderful if a loving and merciful figure also has absolute authority and power to rule in our universe? This is why we pray that God”s will be done. And that the world will be his kingdom.

Now about the petition asking for bread : We are not always comfortable when we ask for something we really want or need, because those things are often too intimate. I don”t think many of us can go up to a stranger and ask, "Give me food." When we are intimate with someone who seems to know everything we need, we feel a little more comfortable to ask even for something that may be a little bit too personal. Still we feel a little shy but we can do it if that person is intimate. The god of the Jewish and the Muslim people knows everything before we ask, so they don”t ask. They simply ask that the God”s will be done. Yes, God of Jesus Christ also knows everything we need, but our relation with God is more intimate, he loves us. So we are not shy to ask anything, even though we know we ask not-very-wise things sometime.

We parents know our children”s need, most of the time. But it would be a sad day when our children feel too intimidated to ask for something they want. Our relationship is not only that of supply on demand. Demands and requests form a part of our relationship. They reassure us of our intimate relationship. We can reassure each other of our affection and love, by asking each other for what we really need. It can be another way of saying "I love you." So we say, "Give us our daily food." to reassure ourselves of our intimate relationship with God.

The last two requests in the Lord”s Prayer have to do with our spiritual life: with forgiveness and avoiding evil. And they both have to do with love or lack thereof.

The question of forgiveness here can not be understood unless one speaks about it in the context of a relationship of love. Forgive others? We do that all the time amongst loved ones. Relationships do not work, unless there is forgiveness. Loving people forgive and give each other all the time. Being forgiven and accepted by God, as we accept each other, is our most fundamental spiritual need.

The last request has to do with avoiding evil. There are some people who tell you that there is no evil. They say, "There can be a temporary laspe that makes people to commit evil. But there is no real evil in the world." I, for one, don”t buy that. There may not be evil people by nature. But people can be possessed by evil, and commit horrendous evil acts. Murders, sexual assaults, violence, and acts of callous neglects do happen. We hear about them in the news. And evil, again, has to do with love; it is opposite of love. We find repeatedly teaching of Jesus saying that the fundamental basis of our spiritual life is love. And the opposition to love is the source of evil.

You see, love motivates us to give to others. So opposite of love is to rob others for selfish reasons. In other words, without love you take others as your means to achieve selfish goals. Utter disrespect of other people”s interest is the result of lack of love. That can range from a simple act of omission by ignoring poverty in our society to the extreme case of murders and holocaust.

We want to pray very hard to keep such evil far away from us. And the best way for us to work on it from our side is to keep praying that we be loving always.