Come and listen, all you who fear God,
     and I will tell you what he has done for me.
I called out to him with my mouth,
    and his praise was on my tongue,
If I had found evil in my heart,
    the Lord would not have heard me;
But in truth God has heard me;
    he has attended to the voice of my prayer.
Blessed be God, who has not rejected my prayer,
    nor withheld his love from me.

             (Psalm 66:14-18)

“He has attended to the voice of my prayer.”

“O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?
My friends all drive Porsches,
   I must make amends.
Worked hard all my life time,
   no help from my friends,
So Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?”

Some of you of a certain age will remember that old song of Janis Joplin’s from the 60s. I thought about singing it to you. You’re fortunate that I had an attack of good sense. “O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?”

What do you pray for? When do you pray? Why do you pray?

A Newsweek survey taken a few years ago showed that 88% of Americans pray regularly and in a variety of ways. The article said that only 26% say they consistently feel God’s presence when they pray, and 21% have never felt any presence at all. That survey confirmed what I’ve longed believed: not many of us are natural-born “pray-ers”, but we keep on praying anyway. From kids to senior citizens, from the brilliant to the baffled, from biblical literalists to biblical illiterates, we pray.

Prayer is as varied as life itself. We pray at a variety of times, using a variety of prayers. Some pray before meals. How many of us began our prayer life with “God is great, God is good?” Some pray in the mornings on the way to work. I think I’ve almost been run over by some of those folks! Some pray while standing in line at the Post Office or at Krogers. Some pray while under the gun: before making a presentation, or before a test, or before a big ballgame, or on their way to jail. Forms of prayer range from random shoot-from-the-hip personal prayers, to corporate prayers here in our Sunday worship. There are times when we are inarticulate in our prayers. We sometimes groan inwardly with prayers beyond words. Prayer assumes different postures: kneeling in contrition, hands lifted in praise, eyes closed in concentration, heads bowed in reverence, standing in affirmation, or sitting in contemplation.

So – we pray a lot. And in a lot of different times and ways. But it isn’t natural for us. We had to be taught to pray. We teach our children, early on, “Now I lay me down to sleep…”; that’s an important teaching. I’ll never forget being in the home of a parishioner who was suffering from a devastating disease. His daughter and her three year old son were visiting. When I administered Holy Unction (anointing with oil and the laying on of hands for healing) we prayed the Lord’s Prayer. And very clearly I heard that three year old child kneeling beside me pray the prayer that Jesus taught us. Praying starts early if Christian parents are doing their job.

If we aren’t natural “pray-ers”, neither were the disciples. They asked Jesus to teach them to pray. And the words he taught them we call his prayer. They are not just a set of words.

If there is anything sad about the way we worship in our beloved Episcopal Church, it is the way we sometimes rattle off the set words without giving any thought to what they mean. I’ve been impressed during my time here with you at St. John’s that you use the contemporary form of the Lord’s Prayer because it forces us to stop and think about what we are saying and praying.

The Lord’s Prayer, the “Our Father”, is more than just a prayer. It is a sort of framework, a skeleton, a pattern for a life of prayer. You can pray the Lord’s Prayer in 30 seconds or pray it all night, or over a weekend, or for a month’s retreat. You can pray with its pattern. It is not just a prayer, it is prayer itself.

Jesus begins by calling God “Father”, in the Aramaic “Abba”: “Daddy”. It is a familiar address to a loving, nurturing, protecting, caring, parent-figure. We know God is neither male nor female. We don’t need to play those gender games as some of our more avant-garde inclusive liturgists would have us. God cares for us like a parent cares for a child. We are the children of a loving parent. That’s what Jesus is teaching us.

And we ask that we may be able to honor God’s holy name. That is, treat it with respect, “hallowed be your name.” How we disrespect God’s holy name. “O. M. G.” has become the common parlance of our day. Young people text it constantly. “Oh My God” is thrown about in all sorts of conversations without ever thinking what is being said.

We also ask that God’s kingdom may come. The Kingdom is coming, but in this prayer we pray that it may come to us. A part of the coming of the Kingdom is to allow the will of God to be done among us and by us. This part of the prayer is risky because when it is answered, look out. Radical changes will be made in our lives. We begin to live in the context of kingdom values not cultural values. We begin to live out our baptismal promises: to worship God, to love God, to give for the spread of his kingdom. We begin to see others as his children also, and begin to seek and serve Christ in them, loving them as ourselves. We begin to resist evil and repent of our sins. We begin to proclaim by word and example the Good News. We begin to strive for justice and peace among all people and respect the dignity of every human being. That’s why this part of the prayer is risky. We risk God taking charge of our lives when his kingdom comes.

And we pray for our daily bread. And we are not praying just for physical bread. In telling us to pray for daily bread Jesus includes all things necessary to make this earthly life meaningful: friends, loving families, food and clothing, shelter and health, work to do , good government. This is especially important at this time in our world when food shortages are being felt even in developed countries; when we now face the specter of famine on a scale previously not known. Already 25,000 person per day are dying from starvation in third world countries. That’s why the Millennium Development Goals which aim to eradicate poverty and hunger are so important. That’s why our Outreach Committee advocates and promotes those goals. We pray for their daily bread as well as our own. And we are not to pray just with our lips but with our works to remedy the situation.

Then comes the part of the prayer which is absolutely central to our life together in the church: forgiveness. As we are forgiven by God’s sweeping and inclusive mercy, so we pray and resolve to forgive one another. This is, for me, the best change in using the contemporary form. We pray that God will forgive us our sins, not trespasses or debts, but sins as we forgive those who sin against us. It’s not so true that, as the old slogan says “prayer changes things”, as that prayer changes us and then we change things. Nowhere is this truer than in the matter of forgiveness. We can’t pray Jesus’ prayer without taking inventory of our sins and our need to forgive those who have sinned against us. Forgiveness is the great healer. As God’s forgiveness is without limit, so too must we forgive without limit.

The concluding petitions take evil seriously and asks that we be protected from all forms of evil that may come to us. We pray that we will always be included in the protection and care of God against all perils, temptations, and evil.

So Jesus gives us a pattern of prayer. A prayer that is above all prayers, that sums up all that we have need of: worship, justice, sustenance, forgiveness, protection; a prayer that reveals the very nature of Abba and his love toward his children. Amen.