I want to focus on our Gospel reading, but I cannot let the Hebrew Scripture lesson go by without comment. Hosea – a prophet of Israel – is crying out against the people of Israel for breaking the covenant by not worshipping God alone – a covenant that requires full-bodied attentiveness to the Holy One of Israel. Idolatry and whoredom, in ancient Hebrew, are the same word – the same thing. Fidelity to the Holy One of Israel is expected and the people have been seeing other gods. They have been engaged in lewd living, moral defection, improper intercourse with other deities. “When the Lord first spoke within Hosea, Hosea heard, ‘find a wife who is seeing other gods – because you’ll not be able to find one who is not seeing other gods – everyone in the land is doing it.’”

In our reading from Colossians today, the writer is reminding those gathered in Jesus’ name not to let anyone convince them that they are not one with the Holy One. Don’t let anyone convince you that you are somehow inadequately faithful. Continue to live your lives in the redeeming love of Christ Jesus, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving. Don’t let them steal your dignity. Don’t give away your joy. Seems like a great text to return to when (and whenever) one group of Christians is trying to make another group of Christians feel badly about the inadequacy of their faith.

This is the only time in all of the Gospels that the disciples ask to be taught. They don’t ask to be taught how to behave better. They don’t ask to be taught to think more clearly or more accurately about God. They’re not asking for a systematic theology. They’re not seeking better strategic plans or stronger managerial skills, or more effective organizing tactics. “Teach us to pray,” they say. Now my strong hunch is that they already knew prayers – my strong hunch is that they were looking for something deeper, something better, maybe something more satisfying and effective. My hunch is that they saw Jesus and they saw him praying (and praying often, according to Luke), and they wanted some of what he had.

What Jesus taught them is simple and direct. It’s essentially Jewish – with lines similar to the Kaddish, ideas found in Hebrew Scripture and in teachings of other first century Jews. None of the words or ideas are elaborate or innovative, in spite of what your Sunday School teachers might have taught you. I think Jesus is saying, there’s nothing magic about the words of prayer and there’s nothing new under the sun. There are five petitions here:

1. Pray for the hallowing of, the holiness of God’s name. Pray that God’s name be Holy for people.

2. Pray for the manifestation of the realm of God. The kingdom, Jesus says again and again, is very near, it is within, it is at hand. Pray for it to be so. Pray for the justice and the mercy and the compassion that are so close. Pray for a world where the most basic needs of all are met. “Your kingdom come.” It’s imperative.

3. Pray for enough to eat each day. There are centuries of debate about whether this means actual food or spiritual sustenance. I don’t know why it cannot be both, but I do think it’s morally dangerous for people like us to focus on an interpretation of spiritual sustenance when we are among the 1/3 of the world’s population that is overfed and wasting food, and when 2/3 of the world’s population is underfed or starving to death. Furthermore, the parable that comes next seems to emphasize a need for physical bread for someone who is physically hungry.

4. Pray for forgiveness. Now I imagine that the starkness of the wording, “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us,” might bring you up a little short. It does me. I’m always hoping that God (if there is a God) will do a better job of forgiving me and my sins than the job I do of forgiving others who owe me one (or who owe me a lot). But that is a quid pro quo way of hearing these words. What I think Jesus was getting at, is an idea already established in Jewish teaching that linked giving and receiving of forgiveness. Forgiveness requires an open circuit. Mercy flows through the same channel, and one who will not forgive, cannot receive forgiveness because it is all part of the same gift.(1)

5. Pray for deliverance. Pray that we will be saved from ourselves and from others. Pray that we might be spared from that which is too great to bear.

And then Jesus told them a parable. Like all parables, this one is subversive and funny. But we’ve lost the humor in the translation of time, and culture, and in this one in particular, by a weird translation into English(2)of a word that means “with no shame” (in other words, “honor”) into the word “persistence.” The story Jesus tells about a grumpy man who won’t open the door to give his neighbor bread is absurd. It would make his disciples laugh. It’s as funny as someone ringing a doorbell and hearing a voice from inside yell, “go away, there’s nobody here.”  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 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. It’s not the persistence of the person knocking that results in the gift of bread, it’s the “without shame” or the honor of the person who has been awakened which will cause him to rise to give his friend what is needed.

The peculiar theology that results from this parable seeming like a lesson about persistence in prayer, makes God seem like a reluctant grouch who answers our requests to get some relief from our constant nagging. And it makes anyone who hasn’t received what he or she has been asking for into someone who must not have been asking often enough or crying out loudly enough. And that makes me so mad (crazy and angry both). That kind of theology oppresses the very ones Jesus sought to liberate. David Buttrick, in his book about parables, writes: “the notion that, repeatedly, we must bang on the doors of heaven if we are to catch God’s attention is hardly an appropriate theology of prayer.”(3)

So what is an appropriate theology of prayer? And what do we make of the directives to ask and to search and to knock? What do we make of the promise of giving, finding, and opening that will happen when we ask, seek, and knock? What might we know about the efficacy of prayer? I’ve always loved the line from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King.” Perhaps you know it: “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.” And I think it’s true. Do I believe in prayer? Yes I do. Heck, I’ve seen it! Yes, in my heart of hearts, I believe strongly in prayer. Do I know how it works? Not at all. (But I believe in all kinds of things that I haven’t the foggiest idea about how they work. As the Queen of Heart says in Alice in Wonderland, “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”) It seems to me that prayer is a calling and a practice that reminds us just who and Whose we are. Prayer is a reminder that the realm of God is in us and among us. Ask and you will have it. Seek and you will find it. Knock and it will open. It’s in you. It’s among you. Praying, according to Jesus, is to be liberative, just, loving, compassionate, and redemptive (because God knows we all need liberation, justice, love, compassion and redemption). According to Jesus, this is how we are when we are God’s people. This is how we act. This is our stance. Prayer is not a transaction, it is a posture.(4) Prayer is an open posture of humility and vulnerability and the kind of bravery that comes from acknowledging our weakness. As Soren Kierkegaard wrote “Prayer does not change God, but it changes [the one] who prays.”

And as a postscript, I want you to notice Jesus’ emphasis on everyone in this teaching – three times he includes everyone. Everyone who asks, everyone who searches, everyone who knocks. If that isn’t a proof text for open communion, I’ll eat my vestments.