SEVENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Prayer of the Day: Almighty and ever-living God, you are always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and you gladly give more than we either desire or deserve. Pour upon us your abundant mercy. Forgive us those things that weigh on our conscience, and give us those good things that come only through your Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Lord.
“Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” Luke 11:1.
Prayer does not come naturally. It is a practice that is learned through participation in a faith community. I learned to pray the way my mother learned to pray. One of my earliest memories is of my mother sitting with me beside my bed and praying, “Come dearest Jesus, take my heart and let me never from thee depart.” That is also the first prayer my own children learned to pray. Of course, my prayer life (and that of my children) has deepened through regularly singing the liturgy, reciting the creeds and praying the psalms as they apply to ever new contexts within growing life experience. These practices have given me a rich prayer language with which to express what Saint Paul calls, groanings too deep for words.” Romans 8:26. I am still learning to pray and expect I will continue learning until the day I die. Prayer is a never ending discipline. So it is not surprising that Jesus’ disciples should ask him to teach them this sacred discipline of prayer.
Prayer, according to Jesus, is less about us, our needs, our concerns and our aspirations as it is about the reign of God and the working out of God’s will on our planet. God’s reign is never defined in terms of political, social or economic theory. Instead, it finds expression in prophetic preaching and apocalyptic visions. What we know of God’s reign is that it comes when the powers that be are cast down from their thrones and the lowly exalted. Luke 1:52. Under that reign all have enough to live and thrive without fear of violence. “…they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” Micah 4:4. The reign of God erases all artificial barriers based on race, class, gender and dissolves all distinctions of nation, ethnicity, blood and soil. “…there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands.” Revelation 7:9. Many who are now deemed first in the hierarchy of greatness will be last under the reign of God and those deemed “the least” will be first. Matthew 19:30.
While, as I said, the reign of God is not the deification or implementation of any particular political agenda, it cannot help but have profound political ramifications. All nations, of whatever age, ethnic makeup, political organization, social order or economic system will be judged by one and only one criterion, namely, by how well or poorly they treated the least and most vulnerable among them. Matthew 25:31-46. To be a disciple of Jesus, therefore, is to live today under the promised reign of God, the fulfilment of which lies in God’s future. It is to identify with “the least” and advocate, suffer, sacrifice and pray for their wellbeing. It is to speak the truth of God’s will for this planet to all who would exploit it, oppress its peoples and practice violence against its ecosystems.
Jesus instructs his disciples to pray for daily bread. It is the only physical item sought in his prayer. Enough for today and no more. Those of us who make up a fraction of the fraction of the world’s population, who have known only privilege and plenty, find it hard to relate to this request. Though I have lived through times when my financial resources were stretched, I have never been poor. I cannot say that I have ever been hungry. To be sure, I have had a ferocious appetite that I have wrongly described as “hunger,” even to the point of the all too common hyperbolic assertion, “Man, I’m starved.” That, of course, is an insulting trivialization of the suffering experienced by millions on our planet who truly are starving to death. So far from seeking daily bread, we strive, with the help of our financial advisors, to achieve that nirvana known as “financial security.” We celebrate our wealth as “blessings,” while remaining blind to the costs our financial security and the lifestyle it allows us to enjoy inflict upon the world’s poor, its non-human creatures and the ecosystems sustaining us all. “Give us this day or daily bread” has become little more than a pious nod to the deity we credit with bestowing so many blessings of wealth and abundance upon us and our country.
Mary the mother of our Lord sings of the day when the hungry are filled with good things while the rich are sent away empty. Luke 1:53. I do not believe this means the rich are condemned to starvation. I do believe that the rich (privileged folks like us) might find it hard to accept a world where we receive only what we need so that all might finally have what they need. What is just and merciful to the vast majority of the world’s people might at first leave us feeling a bit empty. Those of us who have confused privileges with rights will no doubt feel that we are being deprived. If there is an eternal hell, it might consist of those of us who cannot get over our feeling of resentment at the loss of privilege to which we have become accustomed. Hell might be our inability to adjust to a world in which our great accomplishments, the letters after our names and the honorary titles of which we are so proud no longer matter. Hell might be our inability to let go of our empty symbols of wealth, power and status in order that we might take hold of the truly abundant life offered to us under God’s reign. Until we learn to love the reign of God, heaven is going to be one hell of a place!
Jesus tells his disciples to pray for forgiveness. But there is an interesting twist here. Unlike Matthew’s gospel where Jesus appears to make God’s forgiveness contingent upon our forgiveness of others, in Luke’s account, Jesus takes forgiveness of others as a foregone conclusion. Forgiveness is humanly possible and the fact that it takes place among us, however incompletely, witnesses to the far greater capacity of God to forgive even the murder of the beloved Son. Forgiveness, it should be understood, is not contingent upon the wrongdoer’s repentance. Neither is it passivity in the face of abuse. To forgive is an act of resistance to evil. Forgiveness deprives the enemy of the power to occupy our minds. It robs our enemy’s barbs of their power to infect us with the venom of resentment and bitterness. Forgiveness is the refusal to be drawn into the vortex of retributive violence that transforms us into the image of what we hate. As such, it sets the community of disciples apart from a world consumed by blood feuds.
Jesus ends the prayer on a sobering note: “Do not bring us to the time of trial.” I believe this is a recognition that there are limits to human capacity for persevering in good against the power of evil. Recall the disciples’ broken vow to stand by Jesus to the end. Throughout most of my lifetime, protests, acts of civil disobedience and principled resistance to unjust laws have been treated with deference by the authorities in this country, given our time honored respect for the freedom of expression. To be sure, there have been instances of brutality and governmental violence, the Kent State shootings being one notable example. Yet, for the most part, arrests have been made using restraint and the defendants treated with a degree of respect. That is not the case anymore. No one, especially those of us who have lived in a culture where the church has always been an honored fixture, can predict how we will respond in the face of real persecution. In view of recent events in our nation’s body politic, we might soon be in a position to find out.
I would like to believe that I will faithfully proclaim Jesus and the reign of God for which he lived, died and continues to live-even when that proclamation puts me in the way of masked thugs seizing people off the street, MAGA gangs assaulting LGBTQ+ folks or whatever other consequences there might be. However, as I watch footage of civil rights leaders on Edmund Pettus Bridge facing the brutality of armed police, I must confess that I am not sure I am made of such stern stuff. Moreover, I have family members who depend on me and for whom I am responsible. How will they manage if I am jailed or otherwise out of the picture? Even if I could muster up the courage to put my own life at risk, could I justify risking their wellbeing? As I cannot answer these questions, I pray God to spare me from the time of trial or sustain me in it.
Most believers pray the Lord’s Prayer with some regularity. But, I wonder, do we really know what we are asking for when we pray that God’s kingdom will come? Do we really want a world where the privilege, wealth and comfort we enjoy must be surrendered so that all might have enough, and no more, to thrive? Are we prepared to let go of our loyalty to nation, race, blood and soil to live under an order where none of these distinctions matter? What are we willing to let go of in order to take hold of the just and gentle reign of God Jesus offers us? Do we possess in sufficient measure the love of God’s reign and the courage to live under it? Do we really want what we are praying for?
Here is a poem by Marjorie Allen Seiffert offering the kind of reflections we ought to be entertaining as we pray the Lord’s Prayer, which is an invitation to “accept the challenge” of love and brave all the consequences it may bring.
All the Bright Courage
Not naked on the mountain were you reared
By wolf and weather, bramble-scratched and lean;
Privation has not made your senses keen
Since hunger is a thing you have always feared.
With fire, food and shelter you have cheered
A pampered body. What does courage mean
To one untried by danger? You have been
Safe and adventureless till love appeared.
Love is a ruthless bandit-may he shatter
The wall that bricks you sungly in content!
And though he would rob you, what shall it matter?
Accept his challenge. Who can circumvent
Death, collecting in person somewhat later
All the bright courage that you never spent!
Source: Poetry, Marjorie Allen Seiffert (1885 –1970) was an American poet and winner of the 1919 Levinson Prize for Poetry. Seiffert used several pseudonyms over the course of her career, including Angela Cypher and Elijah Hay. Seiffert began writing verse around 1915. Over the course of her career, she published dozens of poems in many publications, including The New Yorker, Others: A Magazine of the New Verse and Poetry. By the early 1930s, she began to have trouble getting her work published. It was around this time, she created the pseudonym, ‘Angela Cypher’, under which she wrote a form of light verse. These “Cypher poems” were a hit with the editors of The New Yorker, which published around a dozen of them in the 1930s. You can read more about Marjorie Allen Sieffert and sample more of her poetry at the Poetry Foundation website.
Peter's Outer Cape Portico 