As we travel to Luke’s house for the summer we meet Jesus at prayer, and as a disciple asks him for a lesson he stops and instructs his disciples about prayer and its promise.
     I thank God; Jesus doesn’t leave us to our own plans when it comes to prayer. If we were praying on our own, would we admit our sin or that we had sinned against someone? Probably not. There would be little way for us to pray faithfully in Jesus name if he weren’t there coaching us, prodding us, praying for us, saying, “When you pray, say this….”
      One preacher puts it this way, the pinnacle of Christian worship and its most challenging moment, is that risky, countercultural, against-our-natural-inclination moment when someone stands amid the congregation and says, “Let us pray.” ⁱ
      When I was a child, my dad considered an education to be incomplete unless his children were fully versed in classical film. Not soccer, not games, but film. It’s one of the treasures that he gave me. Over the years, we literally watched hundreds of films in many languages: Battleship Potemkin, Judgment at Nuremberg, Ship of Fools, Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House, Rebecca, Battle of the Bulge. My dad was a smart guy, because as a father, he could parent and cover lessons in history, literature, languages, music and faith, all at the same time.
      One evening we watched Frank Capra’s film, It’s a Wonderful Life. Do you remember the opening scene of It's a Wonderful Life? The camera angles in and around the snowy, blizzardy streets of Bedford Falls and from every single house on just about every single block city we hear people praying. They’re praying for George Bailey. With tenderness and voices tumbling over one another, we hear over and again, “Dear Lord, be with George. Lord help George. Bless George, O God. Be with George, George Bailey. You just got to help my friend George. Bless George Bailey. Help George O God.” There is a great cacophony of voices, a huge chorus of prayer knocking on heaven’s door.
      I’d look over at my father, with tears streaming down his face. We didn’t even need to say anything. Just a nod and we’d know. It wasn’t about a sentimental classic moment in film or some precious memory of days gone by. It’s about faith. It’s about prayer. It’s about how God has given us a gift so priceless that we can all join the great cacophony of voices lifting up thanks, praise, and petitions on behalf of others.
      It’s the epiphany; when you realize that at the very same moment you are praying for your son in Iraq, your neighbor is praying for his child to recover from the flu, and meanwhile the folks in the house across the street are asking God to help those they love in Myanmar, and two doors down from them they’re praying to God to ask for help to make ends meet, even as the people in the house next to that one are praying for rain to fall over in Iowa so their brother-in-law’s corn crop won't fail. In the wider cosmic scheme of things, prayer is the universal constant and its promise staggers the imagination. ⁱⁱ
      Living in a culture where prayer has faded in the consciousness of many (believers and non-believers alike), prayer sometimes remains little more than a quasi-superstitious activity in which God can be manipulated or appeased by our words. And many Christians are uncertain about the why and when of prayer and, perhaps more tellingly, many are afraid to ask God how to pray.
      Today, Luke leads us right to the door. “Lord,” says one of the disciples, “teach us to pray.” Jesus answers,

“ When you pray, say:
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.”

      Jesus shows us a faithful God, one who will always open the door to us. His prayer is a prayer for the community. This prayer from Luke is shorter than the one we pray together from Matthew’s gospel, but both prayers lead us to praise God out of our deepest needs and teach us to trust God to know what is best for us. ⁱⁱⁱ
      Fred Craddock puts it this way, for Luke, prayer is to be a continual asking, searching and knocking. Since God is eager to hear and respond, we may confidently ask, search and knock, no longer on human doors, but on the gates of heaven. Jesus’ instruction on prayer turns out not to be techniques for effective prayer, but assurance about the nature of God. Prayer turns out to be worship and praise. ^iv      
      Bill Moyers, the PBS journalist, served as Special Assistant to President Lyndon Johnson in the 60’s. One Sunday he was invited to the family rooms of the White House for a meal. Since Moyers is an ordained Baptist minister, the President asked him to bless the meal. As he was praying, the President could not hear him and said to Bill Moyers, “Bill, I can’t hear you. Speak up man, speak up!” Moyers responded, “I am not speaking to you, Mr. President.” And with that there was a very long pause. The President was silent then lowered his head for the rest of the prayer.
      Shawn Copeland says prayer is a real, demanding, loving and engaged conversation between a real person and the real, living God. This conversation initiates, sustains, and augments a dynamic relationship full of risk and joy. We bring to this relationship the whole of who we are – history and culture, body and personality. We bring to this relationship our very own memories, hopes, sorrows, disappointments and achievements; we bring our deepest joys, most humiliating moments, and most excruciating pain. We bring ourselves to the One who loves us most completely. And as Dorothy Soelle and Fulbert Steffensky say, God is not a prayer machine that we insert a coin into and then expect to get whatever we want. Prayer changes the one who prays. Prayer changes the one who prays.^v
      Back to film.
      Shadowlands is a film based on the life of C. S. Lewis and there is a scene from the end of the film that opens with C. S. Lewis returning to Oxford from London. He has just married very late in life. He has married Joy Gresham in a private service at her hospital bedside.
Joy is dying of cancer and through their friendship and the battle with her illness; she and Lewis have discovered that they love one another. It's a love that surprises them; it startles and astounds them. Neither one of them saw it coming; both of them thinking they are well past the age for love to bloom.
      And so they marry; celebrating this new found love; knowing Joy very possibly has not much longer to live, and yet claiming the hope they have in God and one another.
      As the scene opens, C. S. Lewis arrives back in Oxford and makes his way to Magdalen College; he is met by his friend, Harry Harrington, an Anglican priest who asks what news there is. Lewis hesitates, and then, deciding to speak of his marriage and not of the cancer, he says, "O, good news Harry. Yes, good news."
      Harry Harrington, not aware of the marriage and thinking that Lewis is referring to Joy’s cancer, responds, “I know how hard you’ve been praying...Now God is answering you.”
      " But that's not why I pray,” Lewis says. “I pray because I can't help myself. I pray because I'm helpless. The need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping. It doesn’t change God; it changes me.” ^vi

      It doesn’t change God, it changes me.
      Long ago, a follower of Jesus asked, “Lord, teach us to pray.” And millennia later our Lord is still at work, calling us to prayer, calling us to himself, calling us to become part of the redemptive work of God, calling us to raise our voices with the cacophony, the chorus of prayer knocking on heaven’s door. Our voices raised in praise and worship on behalf of others; on behalf of those unable to do it for themselves, on behalf of a world that no longer expects God to listen.
      And together, let us pray,
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be your name, thy kingdom come,
thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread;
and forgive us our debts,
as we forgive our debtors;
and lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
forever. Amen.

Thanks be to God.

Endnotes

ⁱ William H. Willimon. Blogging toward Sunday on “Theolog: the Blog of the Christian Century.” The Christian Century Foundation. Luke 11:1-13, July 2007. www.theolog.org.

ⁱⁱ This Week in Preaching, Luke 11: 1-13.Center for Excellence in Preaching. Calvin Theological Seminary, July 23, 2007. www.calvinseminary.edu.

ⁱⁱⁱ Dan R. Dick. Commentary on Luke 11:1-13 in “Lectionary Homiletics” by Lectionary Homiletics Inc., Midlothian VA.

^iv Fred Craddock and M. Eugene Boring. The People’s New Testament Commentary. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004, 224.

^v M. Shawn Copeland in her chapter “Saying Yes and Saying No” found in Practicing our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, edited by Dorothy C. Bass. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997, 68.

^vi Shadowlands. A film directed by Richard Attenborough. 1993. US release date January 14, 1994. Based on the life of C. S. Lewis and his marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham. A stage play of the same title by William Nicholson was produced by the BBC in 1988.

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