Lord, Teach Us to Pray
Mark 9:14 - 29
Luke 11:1 - 13
Text: "I believe; help my unbelief." . . . Mark 9:24
Marcy had just turned eight. Her 8-year-old neighbor had been given a BB gun for his birthday and was trying it out on all the birds that came within shooting distance. This made Marcy both sad and angry. Each night her mother would hear Marcy add to her regular prayers, "Please, God, stop Tommy from shooting at the birds." After a week of this prayer the mother was surprised to hear, "Thank you, God, for stopping Tommy. I'm sure he won't shoot at the birds anymore." Overcome with curiosity, the mother asked, "Marcy, how do you know Tommy won't shoot at the birds anymore?" Marcy replied, "Because I took his BB gun and threw it in the river!"
Ah, the power of answered prayer.
Sometimes, it seems as though our prayer life is so bad that our prayers are like calling a phone that has been disconnected and that the only solution is to take things into our own hands, as little Marcy did. I'm not sure the disciples ever reached that point of desperation, but none-the-less they felt that they needed instruction. And so, upon watching Jesus pray, they said to Him, "Lord, teach us to pray." It's not an uncommon request. I suspect most of us would, if we were able to spend some time with Jesus, be sure to ask Jesus, "how should we pray?"
And Jesus responds by giving them a prayer - a set of petitions that we still teach and learn inside out, forward and backward. But He doesn't let the disciples go without adding one more thing: a little parable of sorts, with some curious comments about gifts.
A couple of points - I think that interrelate to the Scripture Lessons.
1.) The first is that the disciples came to Jesus and one of them asked to be taught how to pray. In fact, their request to Jesus was, "to be taught as John taught his disciples". That seems to imply that followers of John were given a certain form, or at least a patterned discipline of prayer. Such a request implies that the text treats prayer as a learned experience and not simply the release of the heart's longings. "Lord, teach us to pray."
This morning's Scripture Lessons may help us attain a better understanding of our faith and our life of prayer. We may feel like the father of the epileptic boy who said in Mark's Gospel, "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief." We consider ourselves as Christian people who have faith and belief. But we are also people who have doubts and insecurities - and sometimes it seems that those doubts and insecurities are the places in our lives where we are vulnerable, and sometimes powerless. That was the case of this father. His son had been afflicted with what probably would be diagnosed as epilepsy since childhood. He had taken his son to all the faith healers available, including Jesus' own disciples (the junior varsity) - all to no avail. But now the varsity was in town. Jesus Himself was here; and if anyone were going to be able to cure his son, it would be Jesus. So out of the midst of the crowd, the father called out to Jesus asking for help. After telling Jesus' the medical history of his son, the father said, "If You can do anything, have pity on us and help us."
And Jesus responded, if not with the best of bedside manner, "If you can, all things are possible to those who believe." Jesus was throwing the question right back to the father, as if to say, "It is not a question of 'if I can,' but rather, 'if you can.' It is a matter to be determined by your faith." And the father immediately cried out, "I believe, help my unbelief!"
The boy's father was to the point of total honesty. Perhaps it was because he had pursued so many blind alleys that he figured that he had nothing to lose. Or perhaps, the father was able to sense that he was face-to-face with the Truth about life - the ways things are. And when you are face-to-face with that which there can be no nonsense about, how can you do anything but tell the truth?
At any rate, the father said what we could all say when we come face-to-face with absolute reality - he told the truth. "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief."
No sense hiding. No sense pretending. No sense trying to appear more holy than we really are. "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief."
"Lord, I go to church, I believe in God, I try to pray, I try to do right; but, but, . . . but Lord, sometimes I wonder. Lord, help me with my uncertainty."
And, what does Jesus do in the face of this confession? Well, we don't actually know, but the end result is that the father's son is healed.
What kind of prayer is it that says, 'Lord, I believe; help my unbelief.'?" And yet, . . . just possibly, that is the way to pray.
"Lord, I believe; help my unbelief."
Some years ago Mother Teresa, that wonderful woman who dedicated her life to ministering to the outcasts diseased with leprosy in India, was interviewed on educational TV. The interesting thing was that Mother Teresa and the interviewer were speaking in two different worlds. The interviewer asked, "Mother Teresa, do you ever get discouraged?" Mother Teresa said, "Why should I get discouraged?" The interviewer said, "Well, you seem to have so many failures; none of your people ever seem to get well."
Mother Teresa answered, "Yes, that's right, none of my people ever get well, we've never had any of them get well. But why is that a failure? That's not failure, that's . . . called life. In the course of life, people die all the time."
The interviewer went on, "Mother Teresa, you're a woman of such deep faith."
"Oh no, I haven't got much faith at all. I had to come to India because I didn't have enough faith. I just needed to be as close to Jesus as I can. Some people don't need to be that close. But I have to be very, very close to the Body of Christ. I need to touch dying people - a lot. But someone with more faith than I might not need to that much."
"Lord, I believe, help my unbelief." Indeed, the world may believe that faith and belief is based on demonstrable miracles and acts of goodness, but indeed, it is only by God's grace that we are healed, only by the grace of God we are forgiven.
There is a wonderful story about a man - a very good man who died and went to heaven. As most of these stories go the man was greeted at the gate of heaven by St. Peter to go over the accounting of his life. St. Peter asked the man what it was in his life that would permit him to be let into heaven.
The man replied, "Well, once when I was in my thirties, one of my employees had a child who was desperately sick - I provided the funds to have a world renowned surgeon from Europe come and save his life. St. Peter, smiled, stroked his chin and said, "That's good, I'll give you one point for that. . . . Is there any thing else that you have done?"
The man responded, "Well, my company did very well, and my wife and I gave millions of dollars to my alma mater!" St. Peter again, stroked his chin, smiled and said, "That's very good, I'll give you one point for that." "Is there anything else?"
At this point the very good man was showing some frustration, and asked, "St. Peter, just how many points do I need to get into heaven?"
To which St. Peter very calmly replied, "One hundred."
The man then, out of total frustration, blurted out, "One hundred points?!?!? I'll never be able to get there - nobody will ever be able to get in!" And then he muttered under his breath, "Only by the grace of God can anyone get in."
To which St. Peter immediately replied, "That's worth 98 points!"
2.) Well, there is still another Scripture Lesson to consider this morning - the teachings by Jesus on prayer as found in Luke's Gospel. As I mentioned earlier in the sermon, prayer is difficult, and the disciples, apparently inspired by the prayer-life of Jesus, asked Him that He teach them how to pray, because praying isn't something that we are born good at, rather it is something we learn.
A 5-year-old girl said, "It must get monotonous for God to hear the same prayer all the time. When God gets to my house: God must think, 'Now here's where Laurel lives, and I know just what she's going to say.'" A two-and-a-half year old, who hadn't said her prayers for several days, finally announced, "I want to say my prayers tonight. Won't God be surprised?"
Jesus responded to the disciples' request to be taught how to pray with a form of prayer and a lesson. The form of prayer - a series of petitions, by the way, in the imperative tense (translate, demands) - we have come to know as the Lord's Prayer. The second was a lesson; a story of a person going to a friend's house asking for food because he had guest arrive unexpectedly - at midnight - and goes and asks "with persistence" until finally the friend gave him the needed food. A story to which Jesus concludes with a question - if your child asked the parent for a fish or an egg, what parent would give the child a snake or a scorpion instead?
And Jesus answers in each instance: you would not deny your neighbor food when he needed it, even if he came at midnight. And if "your child asked for food you wouldn't give the child a snake or a scorpion instead. How much more God will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask."
Stephanie Frey once said in a sermon, "I can think of no one other than Jesus who actually encourages us to be annoying with God!" Jesus invites, even cajoles, us to be as shameless and irritating in our prayers as that noisy neighbor at midnight. We should persist until our prayer becomes the ongoing conversation between us and our parent. Then we will never come away empty-handed from prayer, because even if we wind up with none of the things we though we needed, we will always wind up with God listening, attending and answering our prayers in ways we hadn't imagined.
Ah ha! What we receive, according to Luke's Gospel, when we ask, seek, and knock, is the Holy Spirit. Now it can be a slippery slope when we are given permission to ask, seek and knock. So often we pray for specifics. But in the Scripture, both how to pray and the story, we are told that it is the Holy Spirit that we are supposed to ask for, to seek and to knock at the door for.
But what is this Holy Spirit and how can it be helpful?
Perhaps we need to go back and look at the form of prayer Jesus offers.
This prayer, known as the Lord's Prayer, consists of two brief petitions of praise to God and three petitions for the ones praying. It is a community prayer, not a private prayer (using the words "our", "us" and "we"), and assumes that the community longs for the coming of God's realm on earth. Therefore, it would seem that the Spirit exists in our relationships to others. And perhaps that is the key.
What Jesus seems to be suggesting to us is that we ask, seek and knock in our prayers - with all our might; shamelessly and with persistence that our prayers be for right relationships with God and with others - for it is there we meet the Spirit. Those petitions - those demands we make on our parent God in the prayer - "GIVE US our daily bread!" "FORGIVE US our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us!" "LEAD US NOT into temptation!" - those petitions are not the superfluous things of life, they are the bare necessities of getting along with one another in the world.
And why shouldn't that be the answer to the question of what is the Holy Spirit? After all, when pressed to sum up all the Law and the Prophets, Jesus said, "You shall love the Lord your God with all you have, and that you shall love your neighbor as yourself." Jesus understood that the bottom line is that our health and well being is in our social relationships and in our relationship with God. As we get along with and relate to one another so we experience that Spirit of God's realm in our midst.
"Teacher, . . . Jesus, . . . . how are we to pray?"
Begin by acknowledging the truth about yourself.
"Lord, I believe; help my unbelief."
And then pray with all that you have to get your relationships with God and with people in order.
"Ask, seek, and knock."
"For everyone who asks, receives; and the ones who seek, will find; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened."
May you find God's Spirit in your communities - in your friends, in your family, in your place of work, and, of course, in your church.