Seventh Sunday after Pentecost: July 27, 2025 | The Rev. Nat Johnson

Readings: Hosea 1:2-10 | Psalm 85 | Colossians 2:6-15 | Luke 11:1-13

Lord, teach us to pray.

At the core of our identity as Christians, we are a people called to pray. Luke provides us with this teaching through explicit and implicit means throughout his gospel.

Jesus is one who prays – he prays constantly throughout the narrative Luke gives us: he prays at his baptism, when he’s discerning who to call as his disciples, at his transfiguration, just before his arrest, and as his final act before his death. And, in the passage we read today, we note that his disciples’ request to teach them to pray comes from seeing their teacher praying. Jesus’ actions bid us as his followers to be like him, to immerse ourselves in prayer, to seek out the quiet places and turn our attention to God and to listen, to ask for God’s will to be done, to seek God’s intervention in our lives and in the world.

If you were to judge solely based on the rhetoric of our political and social leaders offered in response to the various tragedies that befall us, you would think we are a nation who prays. Our “thoughts and prayers” are offered to victims of mass shootings and the loved ones left behind. Our “thoughts and prayers” are offered to victims of national disasters. Our “thoughts and prayers” are offered to the families whose members have been killed in battle. Our “thoughts and prayers” are offered to those impacted by tragic accidents. But these words are never offered in a vacuum and so we cannot judge our practices of prayer by rhetoric alone. I suspect that many of us here today hear these words as empty platitudes.

Lord, teach us to pray.

In response to his disciples’ request to teach them to pray, Jesus offers a model prayer, a strange parable, and an assurance of divine answer to prayer. Luke’s is the less well-known version of the Lord’s prayer – it is shorter and less poetic than Matthew’s. When Jesus gives them the model prayer, the first word is “Father.” He instructs the disciples to approach God from a posture of familiarity and trust, addressing God not as some aloof entity out there, but as divine parent who can be trusted to be faithfully caring and loving, attentive to the needs of their children. The hallowing of God’s name is at once a profession and simultaneously a request: we profess the holiness of God but we also ask God to hallow God’s own name – to hear our prayer and respond in ways that align with God’s holiness. Jesus then offers four things for which we should pray: that God’s reign would come, for daily bread, for forgiveness, and for deliverance from the time of trial.

We pray for the coming of God’s kingdom. Throughout his gospel, Luke has defined that coming as a great reversal, an upending of the status quo where the lowly are lifted up, where the mighty are cast down, where the hungry are filled with good things while the rich are sent away empty. The coming of God’s reign is good news to the poor, liberation and restoration of the oppressed. It is, in short, an overthrow of the old order characterized by evil and sin, by violence and coercion, by schemes that protect power rather than the vulnerable. We are told to pray for this coming, to yearn for it, to seek after it, to anticipate it.

We pray for God’s providence: “Give us each day, our daily bread.” In our present moment, most of us who utter these words every Sunday have likely never experienced the threats of hunger and so we do not know this prayer as a prayer of pleading. We domesticate it by generalizing its meaning not so much as a request but as a call to remember our dependence upon God. This is a good thing to remember – and, it is also good to remember that for many in our society, for many in our world, the prayer for daily bread is about the difference between life and death. When peoples in war-torn nations and communities are denied food; when populations of our society are denied assistance to buy food; when the possibility of a meal is dependent upon the generosity of a passer by – this prayer becomes more than a spiritual reminder. It is more akin to a demand, that as God acts in ways that honor God’s name, as the kingdom of God comes near, provision for the hungry would not be forgotten, and so we pray, we plead, that God would provide, day to day, the essential nourishment needed to continue living.

We pray for God’s forgiveness. “Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us,” Matthews version says. “Forgive us our sin, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us,” Luke’s version says. In either case, it is an acknowledgement that the very thing we ask of God implicates us in our interactions with one another. We cannot accept – perhaps even know – God’s mercy and forgiveness unless we too have mercy and offer forgiveness to one another. Forgiveness is a key theme in Luke’s gospel and is translated elsewhere as “release” – in his inaugural sermon, insists that he has come to release the captives and to release the oppressed. Forgiveness, for Luke, is not just a spiritual issue, but is embodied, tied directly to the material world of our existence.

We pray for salvation. Do not bring us to the time of trial or temptation, we plead. This requests flows directly out of Jesus’ life and experience. He spent 40 days in the desert, tempted by the devil. He spends a night in agony in the garden praying that the cup he was about to drink be taken from him. This prayer is about deliverance, about asking God to keep us from the times of trial that can cripple or destroy the soul: “pray that you may not come into temptation” he instructs his disciples in the same garden he prays for deliverance. But, as Jesus’ life and death also suggest to us, “deliverance” does not necessarily mean some kind of magic removal of the circumstances of trial or temptation. It is, rather, a plea that God would strengthen us to endure the time of trial, to empower us to remain faithful against all temptation.

Lord, teach us to pray.

Our gospel reading today invites us to take prayer seriously, to engage in it regularly. We are, after all, a people who are called to pray. This can be difficult for us in today’s world, in our society, where “thoughts and prayers” tend to be empty platitudes and meaningless words divorced from actions that tend to the circumstances in which they are uttered. It can be difficult to hear Jesus’ words about asking, seeking, and knocking, when we know so many requests we make in prayer often seem unanswered. And, for those of us who have left behind versions of the Christian faith that equate answered prayer with the faith of the believer, it can be difficult to see the value in prayer as we deconstruct that utilitarian model.

But Jesus prayed. Jesus prayed often. And Jesus invites us into a way of life that is immersed in prayer. Not because it is a way for God to give us what we want – like some kind of a divine vending machine, but because it is a way of building, nourishing, and sustaining our relationship with the God who cares for us, who seeks to give us good gifts, who desires communion with us. And so, Jesus bids us to pray to abba, to father, to mother, to loving parent, whose parental care far exceeds any earthly version we may have experienced – whether good or ill. God is a God who seeks after us, who desires our liberation and restoration to wholeness, whose love for us knows no bounds, and who wants to be in relationship with us. I wonder how our lives and, perhaps, even our world might change if we accepted Jesus’ invitation today? Let us, then, commit ourselves to prayer – to immersing ourselves in a rhythm of prayer that asks for and anticipates the inbreaking of God’s reign, for a world without hunger, for release from debt and forgiveness of sin, for the strength and perseverance to weather the trials of this life.

Lord, teach us to pray. Amen.