Sunday Sermon

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Sermon # 1001
Luke 11:1-13
Dr. Ed Pettus

“Prayer”

One of my rules for preaching is to stick close to the text. That is, I seek each week to be true to a particular passage in scripture, to preach one text at a time and not wonder off into stories that have nothing to do with Luke 11 or Psalm 85 or whatever the text is for the day.

I plan to bend that rule a little bit today, still hanging in there with Luke 11, but focusing more on a topic than the particular text for the day. Prayer. Prayer is the topic of the day. Jesus prayed! Moses prayed! The Psalmist prayed! The Bible is filled with people of prayer. Prayer is a basic fundamental practice of the Christian faithful. But we also struggle with our basic fundamental practices. Prayer is sometimes simple, sometimes complicated, sometime embraced and sometimes ignored. We question how to pray, what to pray, when and where. We feel bad about not praying and sometimes later we might even feel bad about feeling good about prayer.

Today I want to focus on prayer struggles. I assume the disciples struggled with prayer or they would not have requested Jesus to teach them. When I think about struggling to pray, I think of the metaphor of Jacob wrestling with the man or the angel – or was it God? Prayer is something like wrestling (Genesis 32). When I played high school football one of our offseason drills was to wrestle one another to get into shape and build toughness. I hated it! Painful, exhausting exercise, and too often I would get paired up with a football player who was also on the wrestling team. He would tie me up in a knot. Prayer can be like that sometimes. We avoid it for some reason, maybe it seems to hard, maybe we feel inadequate or perhaps the feeling is unworthiness. People ask me from time to time to help them with a prayer they will have to offer at a meeting or a social gathering where a meal will be served. We don’t know what to pray and we feel like it can be a chore. Prayer seems too hard so we avoid it.

Other times prayer is frustrating. We have no answers; we have no words. We don’t know how to listen for God. We seldom take the time to listen, but we don’t take the time because we don’t think we will hear anything. I know this because I experience it in my own life of prayer. I have had people ask me about prayer or share something about their prayer life and they will often ask: “Am I the only one who feels this way?” Another rule I trust is that if something is true for one of us, it is probably true for most of us. Prayer can isolate us because we don’t really talk about prayer, not really. We talk about prayer requests, but not the deepest desires of our prayers, if we even know what those are. We don’t talk about prayer because we think we should all know all about prayer. We assume we each know something about prayer and so we are afraid to ask or to open ourselves up to one another, let alone opening ourselves up to God.

I imagine it took a lot of courage for the disciples to say to Jesus: “Teach us to pray.” The request reveals their ignorance about prayer. They have seen Jesus praying and it is different from what they know or think they know.

I have been reading a book about prayer by Abraham Heschel, Jewish scholar, who writes that “prayer is our attachment to the utmost. Without God in sight, we are like the scattered rungs of a broken ladder” (Man’s Quest for God, p. 7). The Psalms, our great prayers to God, speak of the connection we have with God. Psalm 16:8 “I keep the Lord always before me.” Psalm 42:1 “As a deer longs for flowing streams so my soul longs for you, O God.” Psalm 62:1 “For God alone my soul waits in silence.” The prayers of the Psalms express our deepest desire for being attached to the utmost, to God, to our Lord and Creator.

Today’s gospel lesson begins with the scene of Jesus at prayer. The disciples probably observed Jesus at prayer many times and this time they ask him to teach them to pray. When I imagine this scene, one question that comes to mind is what the disciples may have seen when Jesus prayed? What was it about his prayer that led them to request teaching? Was it something they saw? Was it something they heard? Was it a sense of attachment or longing, patience or depth? Was it just that they struggled with prayer?

We often understand prayer as the words we say, the requests we make, a one-way conversation wherein we address God. But if Heschel is correct, and I believe he is, then prayer is so much more than the words we might say. Prayer is our attachment to God. But this troubles us in some way. Heschel also says: “We dwell on the edge of mystery and ignore it, wasting our souls, risking our stake in God” (p.4). Why do we do this? Why do we ignore the mystery that is God, wasting our souls? Is it too difficult to comprehend? Are we fearful of what we might find? Is it that we are so seduced by the ways of the world that we dare not enter into the mystery of God’s grace and mercy and presence? Yes, it is all that! Prayer is counter to the world, for it is unmeasurable, unseen, without substantive proof. The world likes what is seen, provable, and measurable. It is a struggle for us to practice something counter to the very world in which we live.

The request of the disciples indicates that they see something in Jesus that they did not have in their prayer life. Something was missing. We have all felt inadequate in prayer. I sense that all the time especially in a public setting when it is time to ask a blessing or offer some other kind of prayer in public…we feel like we need to ask the “professional” to pray. Where is the minister? But it is not just a public unwillingness or something lacking in our prayer, for it runs much deeper in our soul. We know that the scripture rings true when it says that it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God (Hebrews 10:31). I think we pull that text out of context. The context of that verse is punishment for sin – that is when fear comes into play. Prayer brings us into the hands of the living God, but as an act of prayer it is not the same as that text in Hebrews 10. The context of prayer brings us closer to the living God and his great love for us. There is no need for fear in that context. And yet, deep down we fear getting that close to God. Prayer opens us to God – to risk ourselves before God. We fear opening ourselves up to God and so we think we can hide in plain sight.

We know that kind of fear. It is the fear we had the first time we dared to say to girlfriend or boyfriend: “I love you.” The fear of rejection, the fear of being vulnerable – the fear of opening ourselves up to another and in the case of prayer…opening ourselves up to God himself.

The end of our prayer journey does not come to fear, but to thanksgiving. Gratitude is the result of a life of prayer. That’s how the Psalms end. If we were to consider the Psalms as a pattern for a prayer filled life, the Psalms begin with the desire for obedience and end with Psalms of gratitude and praise.



Jesus was praying in a certain place. It may be comforting to us to know that Jesus was praying. We do not have details to his prayer, but we can be certain that Jesus was as close as anyone could possibly get to God. All of this got me to thinking about Jesus teaching the disciples to pray. His first lesson was simply in his praying. He was praying. He set the example and they knew that when they could not find Jesus it usually meant he was off somewhere in prayer. One thing we hear from Jesus us this familiar triad of ask, seek, and knock. We probably reduce prayer to asking. Seeking is more time consuming for our busy schedules. Knocking is more active than we want to get.

We have the asking part down pat! Perhaps we would ask Jesus more about seeking and knocking. Maybe that is something akin to what Bill Long says: “Prayer is, finally, a process of working the earth of the heart, as the ancient monastic writers might say. In her book The Closter Walk, Protestant author Kathleen Norris writes about the ways that the Catholic monastic tradition provides a rhythm and depth for spirituality that many Protestants have never explored. When she says that the life of prayer works "the earth of the heart," she means that prayer is like the act of cultivation. In order to work the soil, one must break up the hardened dirt clods, water the ground, free it from weeds and then plant a crop. Prayer is the way to "loosen up" the heart. During the natural course of our lives the "earth of our hearts" becomes parched, weed-infested and hard as flint. Unless we take care to break it up to run our fingers again through the rich soil that we know is there, our lives become as destitute and as desiccated as a desert.
Prayer is the means Jesus used to open himself to God, to anchor himself to his Father and to work the earth of his heart. Jesus prayed often and taught his disciples to pray. Prayer was as necessary to him as the air he breathed. I believe it was prayer that gave Jesus his powerful sense of awareness and insight into people and the world. It connected him to God, the source of life, and he began to see things so much from the divine perspective that he had no doubt that his work was God's work” (http://www.drbilllong.com/LectionaryII/Lk11113.html).

This cultivation is seeking and knocking – the action of prayer. Prayer is not just about talking to God. Prayer is a way of living. Praying is asking AND seeking AND knocking. Prayer is asking OR seeking OR knocking. Prayer is in the living of our lives, in the action of our faithfulness. Prayer is the word and the deed that moves us to find and open and receive. Prayer involves our voices and our feet, our head and heart.

Maybe this is one lesson from Luke 11 – prayer is more than talk, but prayer is also in the way we walk, or wrestle, or struggle, or cry, or laugh, or listen, or hope, or dream.


Prayer cannot be reduced to a list of requests of God as if God were simply a dispenser of goods and services. Prayer is relational, not an office memo we send to God. Prayer is revelatory, that is it reveals us to God and God to us. Prayer is revolutionary because it goes against what the world values.

Jesus was praying and Jesus is still teaching. If you are struggling with your life of prayer, believe it or not, this is a good thing – because the struggle means we are in a life of prayer – actively involved in the journey. Let us let Jesus teach us...through praying, through scripture, through opening ourselves to one another in the journey. I’ll conclude this sermon with the three words I normally use at the end of sermons…let us pray.