When/How did you learn to pray? Perhaps you absorbed the prayers and traditions of your faith community through worship or maybe you received your first prayers cradled on your grandmother's lap as she sang blessings over you rocking you to sleep? Or maybe it was the first time you clapped your tiny hands with joy or cried because you were frightened or lonely—because doesn't God hear the joys and fears, the sorrows and hopes of every heart even before we have the words to speak about them?

Maybe your first instruction about prayer was when your father knelt down with you beside your bed and helped you remember all the good things that happened in your day and thank God for them and all the worries or sad things or mistakes and ask God for help? When did you learn to place the deepest part of your heart, whether it was bursting with happiness or broken to bits into the heart of God? How did you learn how to go to the Source of love and warmth when you were confronted by hatred or coldness, your own or someone else's? When did you first discover that the pulsing of God's Presence could establish the rhythms of your living and loving like a metronome on a piano?

When I was a teenager, youth group met it the evenings so sometimes the youth helped out with younger children's classes on Sunday morning. I'll always remember the time the Sunday School lesson was about prayer. The children went around the circle praying some rendition of: "Dear God, please, please, please, give me a bicycle" and when the teacher cleared her throat a child hastily added, "Oh and also give bicycles to those kids who don't have any". Realizing that the children needed help understanding how prayer does and does not work, she told them to imagine crawling onto God's lap and being held there while God reminded them that all people are born with a special blessing, a gift within them that the world and other people need and then assured them that God is always with them and that other people can be messengers from God to remind them of this promise and to help them live it out.

How do children learn to pray? You and I both know that many children have been hungry and instead of an egg or a fish are given snakes and scorpions, things that frighten them, sting them, or poison them—who are neglected instead of nourished, violated instead of valued, and harmed instead of hugged. Most of the world's inhabitants, including millions of children are desperately hungry and are either homeless or living in places we would consider uninhabitable. How does God answer their prayers and give good things to them?

In my counseling work what comes up for people over and over again are not only deep wounds and trauma from childhood but also mystical experiences they have usually never spoken of and fear no-one will believe them: of Jesus coming to them and holding them, of an angel laying her wings across their little body during abuse, or of just a comforting sense that they are not alone, that God is witnessing what is happening and weeping over them, carrying their spirits away from their bodies until it is over. They tell me about a teacher at school who cared about them and encouraged them, a neighbor whose home became a refuge, or someone who honored them with a kind word or an attentive gesture.

Our God is a creative God, who works through whatever is available at the time. I have clients who tell me that God used books borrowed from the library that described to them what loving family and a safe home might look like, where they found stories both true and imaginary that comforted them. And I have had many clients over the years whose pet became a primary attachment figure for them, providing the unconditional love and loyalty that the Holy Spirit was able to use to get through to their crushed spirits.

We may have to be taught the words to our corporate prayers, but all people are born with a built in direct connection to God. My daughter-in-law is a labor and delivery nurse and she told us that if you place a newborn on the mother's stomach, the baby will instinctively crawl up the mother's chest to find the life giving milk. We are all like that; newborns who have been blessed with an inner homing device that pulls us instinctively toward our Source and Sustainer.

The Hebrew passage for today that describes Lot arguing with God not to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah; what does that tell us about prayer? Have you ever found yourself arguing with God? If so be assured that you are in good company! Like Lot, our image of God is constantly being tainted by our humanness, our suffering, our fear, the distortions and misinterpretations of our faith that are inevitable; in order to find our way to the true God, we need to have a conversation, a dialogue, even a debate, with the God image we currently carry in order to peel away the layers of negative and destructive messages and imposter images of God to find our way to the One True God whose character is compassion and whose power is always love.

By the way, do you know what the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was? According to (Ezekiel 16:49-50, Isaiah 1) it is inhospitality; they have been mistreating strangers and foreigners who passed through instead of being faithful to the Jewish faith tradition of offering them bread and a safe place to rest. And Lot argues his way out of his distorted image of a God who punishes with violence to seeing clearly God who preserves life and continues to call people back to their Source. When there is destruction, natural disasters, atrocity, terrible accidents, we do not find God at the control panel pushing buttons to make terrible things happen; instead we will find God in the helpers, in the healing, in the love that encircles tragedy, the tears and the grieving that cleanse and restore balance, and in whatever learning can happen so that future tragedies can be avoided.

One of my favorite authors, Anne Lamott, says that there are two basic prayers, "Help me, Help, me, help me" and "Thank you, thank you, thank you" Ghandi once said that "It is better to have a prayer without words than words without prayer" and "Prayer is the most potent instrument of action". Prayer doesn't replace action; it helps make our action more efficient, because we become aligned with God.s action already at work.

Have you ever had the experience of not knowing what to pray? Or of having only your despair, your anger, even your certainty that there is no God to offer? God already knows the secrets of your heart, your pain. When you don't know what to pray, pray that. When you don't have anything but your anguish to offer to God, make an offering of that, and when you feel completely lost and alone, sigh, breathe, and know that God is already at work on your behalf and may show up through a friend, a stranger, or an inner sense of what God is calling you to do next.

I was once taught a prayer that remains the one I use most often; perhaps you know it too? It is quite complicated—ready? (SIGH) Sometimes there are no words and when we sigh out our distress, God breathes into us light and love and Presence to sustain us and bring to us the resources we need. The resources you need, the world needs, are already here; you and I are called to be distributors of the billions of gifts that surround us in what often appears at first to be ordinary. When will we learn how interconnected we are? How the rainforests hold our healing and those who worship God in different ways may have learned something about prayer, about healing, about living and loving that could enrich and transform our lives? Yoga, Ti Chi, acupuncture, healing herbs—used to be considered "unchristian". We are intimately interdependent aren't we? And the Kingdom of God, the Beloved Community, is tangible, touchable, visible, and powerful when we are acting out of this reality.

The most spoken prayer of our tradition is found in today's scripture. When I hear the Lord's Prayer, there are so many memories associated with it—how about you? I hear Malotte's powerful and evocative classical musical version of it being sung at my mother's funeral and feeling disoriented because she was always the one who sang it for funerals and weddings there.

I hear the echoing voices of congregations I have worshipped with as far back as I can remember, in unison repeating this prayer Sunday after Sunday like you do here at St. Thomas, and I can feel the vibrations of centuries of worshippers repeating these words in unison. That gives me goosebumps; how about you?

I can feel the gold star sticker being placed in my hand the summer the entire third grade class memorized it during a hot and humid week of VBS, the smell of paper mache, musty bibles, and Hawaiian Punch lingering in the heavy air of fellowship hall. How about you?

I remember riding the bus to school, the sun slowly unfolding itself across rows of tall and tasseled corn waiting for harvest, settling in to share space with the lingering darkness between the stalks like it too was having trouble waking up to do its job of warming the dew covered landscape. The radio is on and some of the kids are giggling and talking. Then, suddenly, Sister Janet Mead's version of the Lord's Prayer comes belting out of the big speaker tied with wire above the long windshield near our bus driver Lyle's head.

Kids are perking up and starting to sing along, and soon, the sun has pushed the shadows from the fields covering them in school bus yellow as every seat of Kindergarten through High School students is reverberating with energy; we are all singing along to the words of the Lord's Prayer loudly as the countryside speeds by outside their windows. It wasn't about the words, which if required to be said out loud in public schools would dishonor the language and traditions of other faiths; it was about the energy. The spirit that moved through the song to become universal in that moment, united instead of divided us as children of a joy—bringing God who can use even a rock music station to connect with kids.

(teach song)

(Oh and the Dreidel song was also popular on my bus—but that's another season!

Jesus and the disciples too had many memories connected with this prayer; Jesus did not just make it up on the spot. The Jewish Kaddish is at the core of it, and several other Hebrew Scripture references are woven in. To truly understand our scriptures, it is essential that we look at the through Jewish eyes, hear them through the context of their historical setting, and keep them whole, not lifted out of context but interpreted while connected to one another.

We have in this prayer a repetition of Jesus. consistent themes of God's boundaries being wider than ours, reaching out to heal and welcome society's outcasts, and the urgent demand that the hungry must be fed.

So, if your bibles are still open to Luke, look at the beginning; this is the part that would have been familiar to them as the Jewish Kaddish, praising God's name and the coming of God's reign. By the way, Jesus spins this coming of God's reign idea over and over again as a subversive call to resistance against the violently oppressive Roman government of that time. We find here another passage where Jesus gives a veiled warning that God's reign is already overturning the reign of Caesar. The early listeners would have gotten the point and been both encouraged and scared.

In this prayer we hear echoes of Jesus. pronouncements about God.s reign of peace and justice being already at work defeating the tyranny and violence that pervaded his day. When people tell me that the world is caught in a downward spiral, getting worse and worse over time, I remind them to reread their history books and remind them what it was like in Jesus' day. Men, women, even children, babies, being crucified along the roadways, the proliferation of slavery, poverty, and diseases which were blamed on the victims. sinfulness. Humanity has a long way to go, but there is every reason to hold on to hope that God is turning the world upside down, healing the human soul and continuing to bring the Kingdom of God into being!

So, what does this prayer have to say about any human made system, religious or secular that puts profits over people, rules through fear instead of fairness (how many work environments do both of these?!) and implies that God's generosity is measured in material wealth instead of spiritual depth? Jesus has something to say about the predatory lending that brought about the economic downturn we.ve been in.

Then Jesus adds the Jewish themes of hospitality, of sharing bread, of making sure that everyone has enough. But he goes beyond hospitality then, by insisting that when God's ways are lived out, debts will be forgiven and as we forgive we will find forgiveness. The over-arching theme of this prayer is the theme of Jubilee.

The Jewish year of Jubilee was to be celebrated every 50 years. During the year of Jubilee all financial debts are forgiven, all slaves are freed, there are no longer divisions of poor and rich, clean and unclean, accepted and rejected: God's reign of peace and justice will, for a moment, have created the Beloved Community.

Back in Luke chapter 4, Jesus quotes Isaiah, "The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to release the oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favour:. (Isaiah 61: 1, 2) which is a call to Jubillee, and here, in chapter 11, is the defining prayer, the theme song, for those who walk The Way of Jesus.

Darn. I prefer the concept of that best-selling book THE SECRET, or those preachers who reassure us that God wants us to have the house and the car and the boat all the other stuff we want, cool. But darn it if we read this scripture more closely, it doesn't really say that does it? Jesus just doesn't seem to be a materialistic sort of spiritual leader. He says here that when we Seek, Ask, and Knock, what will be given to us is the Holy Spirit, the Presence of God. What? No stuff, just Spirit? Not property but Presence?

And did you notice the collective pronoun "OUR bread" not MY bread and that the person knocking is seeking help in offering hospitality to someone else. He is not knocking for a midnight snack for himself, but for an unexpected guest.

The person knocking didn't sit down and pray that God would give him bread, he went out and asked a friend, and he persisted even when his friend said no and became annoyed. How often have our friends called out to us to share our gifts when we are tired and don't want to? (and by the way, don't you think that Jesus has a sense of humor? Surely he is not saying that God is like a sleepy and annoyed neighbor reluctant to help—but is using hyperbole—exaggeration—that hey if even in our laziness we share, then how much more so does God!)

Let's go back to how this passage begins, a disciple asks Jesus "Teach us how to pray like John does for his followers". They aren't really asking to be taught how to pray—and the early listeners would have know this. All Jews knew how to pray, including special prayers for different occasions and daily prayers that were simply part of their lives. The reference to John teaching his followers confirms that what they seem to be asking for is a prayer that defines them as followers of Jesus, providing them with that identity, that cohesion, and that oneness with Jesus and one another that might bring security and solidarity during difficult days and frightening future.

I think it is kind of like when kids go your national youth gatherings and learn a theme song that they sing each night, and it unites them and defines them and its sound and its words will forever after become a path back to that special place and time, and also help them remember one another.

Ok, and perhaps it is also like the song that people wearing cream and crimson sing at sports events here in town...

The way we pray shapes the way we live; the ultimate prayer is the prayer we pray with our lives, with our choices, with our relationships, and with our love. May your spirit be like that sleepy school bus rocking with the joy of the gospel message of Jubilee! Amen.