Connected to the Future, with Prayer

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost - July 29, 2007

When Dick and I are working at selecting hymns for use in worship, we are always looking to find the ones that will most clearly express our faith and proclaim a message that complements the lessons for the day.

We have been developing a good repertoire of hymns here at St. Mark's, and it is a joyous work that we all do together.

Some of the hymns we use are well-known, and others we're still working at learning;

some are old and others are relatively new;

some are rather easy to learn and others take considerable effort.

If scripture is right in saying that our chief job in the fullness of heaven is to be praising God, then we can consider our work in singing hymns now as an appropriate warm-up.

Sometimes when we decide to use one of those hymn with many stanzas, dismay is voiced: “Why did the hymn-writer go on and on.? Is he or she trying to cover the whole of Christian theology in a single hymn?”

Maybe.

Perhaps the writer is telling a story or exploring a subject that simply needs more room.

Some will be relieved that our Hymn of the Day today only has 3 stanzas,

and within those stanzas it has some wonderful things to say about prayer.

It recalls Paul's idea that the Spirit helps us when we do not know how to pray;

that prayer is conversation with God;

that prayer is to be the continuing state of things in our lives,

that prayer readies us for tackling the problems of the world around us,

and finally that prayer connects us with the future, with the fulfillment of all creation.

But since it is only three stanzas, there is more that could and should be said or sung, most prominently, that prayer is not only requests; it is also thanksgiving to the Father for all that he has already done with and for us.

Without that perspective, our understanding is one-sided.

We begin to think of prayer as a sort of Band-Aid – you know how we do it – we get ourselves into trouble and slap on a little prayer to fix it up.

This is a way to try to manipulate God for our own benefit, or to use our customary Lutheran slogan, we fall into “justification by works”, that is, to try to make things right by what we do ourselves.

This is not the right function of prayer at all.

Prayer is Part II of a conversation that begins with what God says to us when he proclaims:

“I choose YOU as one of mine. I make you my own and I will be with you in good times and bad, and at the right time I will open up all these things so that you can see and understand.”

I remember a number of years ago one of my pastor friends compared our usual lopsided prayers that are mostly requests with very little thanksgiving to a person asking the mechanic to tinker with the carburetor adjustments when what is needed is a whole engine replacement.

Our little Band-Aid, patch-me-up prayers don't really get to the root of the problems when what we need is a completely overhauled engine for living.

And that engine for living is the promise of God to us, the hope of the outcome of the resurrected life of Jesus that is in front of us, the fullness of heaven.

This promise of God's future changes how we live today.

The future is sure,

as sure as Jesus' resurrection.

This is the word that moves us along through life.

Therefore, at its best and fullest, our prayers are one side of the conversation in which we say:

“Lord God our Father, go ahead and do it... make that future happen, even now. Make it be heaven.

“Get rid of my aches and pains,

and straighten out a world that is torn apart by war and hatred.”

“What we need, Lord, is not a little patch or adjustment, but a transformation.”

“Turn things that are into what they shall finally become.”

We pray for the future.

We pray for heaven come to earth.

There is an old line:

Watch out for the thing for which you pray, you just might get it.

That's not quite right.

Much better would be:

“Name clearly that for which you pray, since you will get it in God's good time.

That is another way of naming God's future promised to us when Jesus says:

“the Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask.”

We can notice that Luke's version of this saying is a bit more specific than is Matthew's, quoted on the bulletin cover today.

Matthew says “...how much more will the Father give good thingsto those who ask.” while Luke says “...how much more will the Father give the Holy Spiritto those who ask.”

Luke's version makes it clear that we are not approaching God in prayer with a divine shopping list on our lips, but with the confidence that God will reveal himself to us in Word and Sacrament by means of the Holy Spirit:

The Holy Spirit, God's future active now!

And our prayers, then, urge God to do what he will do,

they urge God to make us over,

to prepare us to receive that future,

his Son the resurrected Lord Jesus,

by way of the Spirit.

Now we have come to know that prayer is not something tacked onto life, a little frill for the especially pious few;

it is the activity that is of the essence of life.

Prayer is the way of exercising the connections between Now and Not Yet, the connections between us and God.

If we need to be convinced a bit more that prayer is not about patches over the past but much more about the engine of new life for the future, all that we need to do is to look at the pattern for prayer that the Lord Jesus Christ himself gave us in the Gospel lesson today.

Holy be your name...

Martin Luther in the Small Catechism reminds us that God's name is holy in itself, but we ask in this prayer that it may become holy in and among us.

So when will we get the Sanctus, the “Holy holy, holy” sung right?

The first answer is of course...when we join the hosts at the heavenly throne to sing.

But also we're practicing whenever we sing it today, even a bit off-key and with faltering voice, as we gather at the Table of the Lord.

Your kingdom come

and bam! There it is.

Make it happen, God, even now!

We don't say Your kingdom come...sometime.

We only say Your kingdom come.

Give us today our daily bread.

The adjective that we usually translate “daily” has several other possible meanings:

--bread for the morrow

--the final bread

In other words, give us today what we reallyneed, the bread that will keep us going forever, Jesus Christ, the bread of life.

Forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.

And when are we going to do that?

By ourselves, it won't be happening anytime soon, because we are very good at keeping score and telling each other

“You oweme!”

But by the gift of God, we will stop grabbing all we can and give ourselves, and at the same time know that we are forgiven by God.

And one more line:

Do not bring us to the time of trial.

In other words, do not make us suffer the consequences of our past with all of our errors, misdeeds, broken relationships and problems.

Don't give us what we deserve, O Lord, but instead give us what you intend.

There it is, the Lord's Prayer:

--every petition pointed to opening the future instead of patching up the past.

--every petition opening up major issues in life and not dwelling on peccadilloes.

--every petition opening up the Good News of God's future for us.

--every petition suffused with a spirit of thanksgiving.

--every petition determined to be God's Word to change us.

It is time now for the Hymn of the Day.

In it we will say some of these things again to each other, and the Prayer of the Church and the Prayer of Thanksgiving will help us fill it out even more.

We sing and pray with confidence and joy: our conversation with the Father is well underway. Amen

Please note: The preceding sermon is provided as a resource for the thought, prayer, and meditation of the members and friends of St. Mark's. It is the residue of a verbal event, and thus it does not have academic footnotes and other details that would be expected in a written document. The writer gladly acknowledges the prior thought and work of many Christians before him.