Sermon, Sun 20 Sept: Lord's Prayer: For what shall we pray? pt 2 life, forgiveness, protection

Readings/ 
Exodus 16:1-12
Ephesians 6:10-20
Luke 12:22-32 

SERMON ‘For what shall we pray? Pt 2/life, forgiveness, protection’
Let’s pray:
May the words of my mouth and the meditations
of all our hearts be acceptable in your sight,
O Lord, our strength and our redeemer, Amen.

As some of you know, I come from Queensland, in Australia.
Now, Queensland rejoices in having - if I recall correctly -
7 out of the top 10 most deadly snakes in the world.
It also has its share of incredibly poisonous and deadly spiders.
And, should you decide that seeking refuge in the water might be a good idea,
well, you’ve got box jellyfish, sharks, and crocodiles to deal with.
So many things designed to kill you.
I’m often asked why I moved to Scotland.
I’d say it was pretty obvious!!

A story goes that, in the early days, when Queensland 
was being settled by the Brits, a Scottish missionary travelled away 
up to the far north - the pointy bit - of Queensland.
He encountered many dangers as he travelled in this wild, exotic, and strange place.
One day, he was fording a creek, and as he crossed, he was suddenly very aware 
that two eyes were watching him from the water:
a crocodile.
The missionary began to sweat a little,
moved a wee bit more quickly,
and started to pray rather fervently:
‘Lord, oh Lord, hear my prayer!’
He paused, the panic causing him to struggle to marshal his thoughts.
The two eyes, and a now visible snout, were getting alarmingly closer.
‘Lord - please, make this crocodile a Christian!!’
It felt as if the whole world was standing still
...and then...
the croc swam across to the bank, and waited for the 
missionary to emerge from the creek.
‘Greetings, brother!’ it said.
The missionary, relieved, walked up to the croc,
thanked God for hearing his prayer, and replied: 
‘Greetings to you, brother!’
The croc looking at the missionary, smiled a toothy smile, and said:
‘Let us pray.’
Both bowed their heads, and the croc said:
‘Lord, for what I am about to eat, I give you thanks. Amen.’ 
 
What is prayer?
To whom do we pray?
How do we pray?
These are the questions that form the heart of this series 
on the prayer that Jesus taught us: the Lord’s Prayer.
And we are nearly at the end - week 4 of 5.
A quick recap, then.
What is prayer?
And to whom do we pray?
Prayer is keeping company with God.
It’s an ongoing conversation - with words and with silence.
It’s being present with God, or, another way of looking at it:
it’s remembering that God is always present with us.

And how do we pray?
Prayers of grace by crocodiles aside,
our reading in Ephesians observes that there are many kinds of prayers:
‘pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests.’
There is our community prayer: the Lord’s Prayer,
which provides a working template for how we direct and shape our prayers,
and which is also the prayer that unites Christians all around the world,
reminding us that we are a community.

And for what do we pray?
Last week, we began to tease this out.
We reflected on the first section of the requests within the Lord’s Prayer:
praying for God’s kingdom to come,
God’s will to be done, on earth as it is in heaven.
This week, we look at the second section of requests in the Lord’s Prayer,
and here, the focus turns ....to us:
‘Give us this day our daily bread,
and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. 
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil...’

Over the course of these last weeks,
I’ve been reading Tom Wright’s wee book on the Lord’s Prayer - 
The Lord and his Prayer.
And, having arrived at this point of the prayer, Wright observes that:
‘the danger with the prayer for bread is that we get there too soon.’
What he means by this is that, when it comes to the matter of prayer,
it’s really quite easy to fall into the habit of racing ahead 
in our prayers in order to get to that part where we, in effect,
present to God a kind of shopping list of wants, desires, and needs.
Wright says that ‘to do this...is to let greed get in the way of grace.’
Perhaps that’s a little harsh, particularly if you’re not actually 
praying for a gold Mercedes or the latest new technological gadget:
when you’re not praying for wants, but are praying out of dire need.
When a loved one, is ill - or when you yourself are ill, in pain, are anxious,
it’s hard not to just launch straight into a list -
‘please...help her’
or ‘please...help me!’
But:
I have a strong suspicion that to do so actually ends up 
undermining the way we pray.
We begin with ‘Our Father...’
and this reminds us that we take our cares and concerns
to the One who formed us and made us for his own.
We move to ‘thy kingdom come, thy will’
to remind us that in God’s kingdom, all anxieties cease,
and that, as we seek God’s will,
turn our minds to seeking his kingdom first,
and strive to bring in a foretaste of that heavenly kingdom to earth, 
we work towards bringing in all that is life-affirming, and life-giving.
These parts of the Lord’s Prayer provide the foundation upon
which we’re able to base our own requests.
And, as we look at the type of requests given within the Lord’s Prayer,
what is it that we’re bidden to pray for ourselves?

The first: ‘our daily bread’
The second: ‘forgiveness’
And the third and fourth: ‘protection’
But actually - they all amount to the same thing:
we are praying    for life.
Each prayer bidding concerns that which sustains,
that which gives life.
At its most basic, we need our daily bread to enable us to keep 
putting one foot in front of the other.
Without food, we die.
I’m minded of our reading from Exodus:
having escaped from slavery in Egypt, to a strange freedom 
that involved wandering in the wilderness,
the Israelites were naturally anxious...
and yet, they’d seen miracles,
been delivered from oppression in quite marvellous ways 
by the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
They had visible evidence that God was with them as they
watched the pillar of cloud by day,
and the pillar of fire at night.
Nevertheless, in the midst of the desert, slavery in Egypt 
was beginning to look rather attractive:
‘If only we had died by the Lord’s hand in Egypt! There we sat round pots of meat
and ate all the food we wanted, but you have brought us out into this desert
to starve the entire assembly to death!’
Oh dear.
And there, in the desert, in the midst of the muttering and complaining,
God listens to their cries.
...Give us this day our daily bread
And God did:
in the miracle of the manna in the desert.
A strange bread, but life-giving.
Giving enough life to the Israelites to ensure that
they could continue their wilderness journey.

When we pray for our daily bread,
we’re asking for God to sustain us -
to give us that which enables us to live...
so that we can seek first the kingdom,
as we worship and serve Our Father.
And so, even in that very basic prayer request for physical sustenance
there’s an added a spiritual dimension.
And let’s not forget that Jesus is the bread of life upon whom we also feed.
We pray for our daily bread:
for body and for soul...
for life in all its fullness.

I think that it’s no coincidence that immediately
following this request for sustenance, for life,
is a request that concerns forgiveness.
‘forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors’
If we have prayed to the One who, in Jesus, 
embodied grace, mercy and forgiveness,
so too, we must embody grace, mercy, and forgiveness.
To choose to forgive is to choose to live.
Holding on to hurts, slights, and righteous grievances
has the effect of destroying us, in the end.
And forgiveness is not a soft option:
I’ve said it before, I’ll very probably say it again:
forgiveness is not for wimps.
It’s tough stuff.
Perhaps the very stuff that requires the spiritual armour of God
to help us stand firm,
to help us to overcome the temptation of coorying into our hurts
keeping them close to our hearts,
wallowing in unforgiveness to the point where we see nothing else;
like being weighed down by heavy iron chains
which keep us pinned down, unable to fly.
That way is not life-giving, it’s life-sapping.
 
Forgives us our debts...as we forgive:
it’s an interesting prayer bidding.
We’re asking that the measure that we forgive others
is the same measure of forgiveness that we ask of God.
Given that human beings can be our own harshest critics,
I’m rather glad that God has limitless grace and forgiveness -
more than enough to go around.
We forgive, so that we can live.

Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil...
I like this two-parter section of the prayer:
There’s the acknowledgement that we will be faced with temptation.
Sure we’ll put on the armour of God and fight it.
But, we’ll also mess up.
It’s what we do.
We make our choices - sometimes good, sometimes ...less so.
And because we have that propensity to mess up,
the prayer acknowledges that we need saved:
deliver us, Lord.
This part of the Lord’s Prayer is asking for God’s protection.
It’s an acknowledgement that, this side of heaven,
life does have its struggles and we need God’s help - 
we can’t do this by ourselves.

Turning back to our gospel reading, and borrowing again from Tom Wright:
‘Reflecting on the birds and flowers isn’t meant to encourage
a kind of romantic nature-mysticism, but to stimulate serious understanding:
God, the creator, loves to give good gifts,
loves to give you the kingdom - loves, that is, to bring his 
sovereign care and rescue right to your own door. ...
If your God is the father who calls you his child, what is to stop you from trusting him?’

What then, shall we pray?
Here, in this template of prayer,
this prayer that Jesus - the bread of life - taught us,
we find that what we’re bidden to pray for is life - 
life, in all its fullness.   Amen.