Sermon: Teach us to pray for forgiveness (July 24, 2016)

Pentecost 10C

July 24, 2016

Luke 11:1-13

            It is a hot time to be an American – and I’m not talking about the July weather! How many of you watched or followed some part of the Republican National Convention this week? I tried to follow it enough to know what is going on, but not so much as to drive myself crazy. I plan to follow the same method this week for the Democratic National Convention. One can only take so much, right?

            But I have to admit, there was one part of the RNC that really stirred up my heart this week – and not in a good way. That was the prayer, the benediction, on opening night of the convention, offered by televangelist Mark Burns of South Carolina. [Read about it here or here, for two responses from both conservative and liberal news outlets.] Maybe I was paying extra attention because this week’s texts are all about prayer, including the most famous prayer, that Jesus teaches his disciples. So I’ve had prayer on the brain this week, thinking about the ways we should pray, and the ways we do pray, and the ways God answers or doesn’t seem to answer our prayers.

            So, back to the RNC benediction: I found it to be very discouraging. Despite the several times he invokes the name of Jesus, the prayer had very little in common with how Jesus instructs his disciples to pray, either in today’s passage from Luke or elsewhere in the New Testament. Pastor Burns called other Americans enemies from whom we need to separate ourselves, and lifted up the power and authority of people rather than the power and authority of God. Even as it claimed a call for unity, the prayer promoted division by drawing lines in the sand and demonizing other Americans,

and focused more on us than on God, whose help he sought only briefly at the end. Political parties aside, the prayer troubled me as an American, but even more, as a follower of Jesus.

            Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on him. After all, I think we often fall into the same trap – that is, asking God, in our prayers, to do what we want, to punish the people we hate and help the people we love, to assume God agrees with us on who belongs in which category, to be so driven by our own values and agenda that we forget about the more humble aspect of prayer in which we admit our own faulty humanity and ask God’s help and forgiveness.

            How, then, ought we to pray? Well, Pastor Burns’ prayer did inspire me to look at Jesus’ instructive prayer in a different way, to notice some new things about it, and to understand in a deeper way why prayer can at once be so rewarding, and so difficult for us. 

            A lot can be learned by looking at the structure of Jesus’ prayer. It’s pretty simple. Jesus’ model for prayer includes: reverence for God (Father, hallowed be your name), a request for God’s presence among us (your kingdom come), a petition for sustenance (daily bread), a plea for reconciliation between neighbors (forgive us our sins as we forgive those indebted to us), and finally, an intercession for safety (do not bring us to the time of trial). It’s got everything you could need in a prayer, and in that way, it helps keep our pray life on track.

The gift and the problem with the Lord’s Prayer is that we all have it memorized – so while it is good to have something so close to your heart, what I find often happens to me is that when it comes time to say it, I go on autopilot. I can say those words while I think about what I’m going to have for lunch – which, being the frequently hungry pregnant woman I currently am, I often do! Does that ever happen to you, that your mind wanders a bit when we start saying the Lord’s Prayer together? Though it is written on our hearts, this causes it to lose some of its punch in our prayer lives.

Martin Luther has a solution for this: in his Small Catechism, he broke the prayer down into each of its separate petitions, and commented on each one and what it means for us. He put this

together as a tool for us to use, but that tool also encourages us to do the same for ourselves: to organize our personal prayers according to the things Jesus suggests we pray for.

I suggest you try that in your personal prayer life. This morning we don’t have time to do them all, so we will focus only on the one I think is the hardest part of Jesus’ prayer, and indeed one of the hardest parts of being a Christian: the petition about forgiveness.

            “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.” Think for a moment: when you say this part, do you find it easy, difficult, or neutral? Have you ever really noticed or thought about it? How much of your prayer life is dedicated to seeking forgiveness, or to finding a way to forgive someone who has hurt you? Personally, I would much rather spend my time praying for the well-being of people I love, or for help and guidance from God on my upcoming challenges, or being grateful for God’s gifts. Honestly, I’d even rather work on praying for my enemies – another of Jesus’ more difficult commands – than I’d like to do the soul-searching required to ask or offer forgiveness.

Forgiveness. Is. Hard. It is hard to ask for because asking for it means you have to admit you did something that needs forgiving – admit it to yourself, to God, and maybe even to another person, who might then hold it over you, judge you, or gloat. It means you have to do the hard work of searching your heart to determine what it is you have contributed to a conflict or misunderstanding, what you could have done better. It means letting down the protective shield of assuming everyone else is more at fault than you are, and that even if you did do something wrong, it was someone else’s mistake that made you do that wrong thing. It’s a lot to let go of. No one wants to do all of that.

It is just as hard to offer forgiveness. Offering forgiveness makes us vulnerable in the future – what if you forgive, but get hurt again? It requires us to take off the protective armor of our self-righteousness, and say, “I accept your apology. Let’s move on,” and actually mean it and do it. It feels like giving in (doesn’t it feel good sometimes to hold onto our anger?), and giving up some of your power, and it can be scary to really believe a person when they say they are sorry. And, what if they don’t even say they are sorry, or admit they have done anything wrong? Then forgiving can seem completely elusive, even impossible.

“Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” I can see why Jesus included this in his model prayer. Just looking at all the emotional baggage that accompanies both asking and offering forgiveness, this one petition could occupy our entire prayer life! Prayers of gratitude are so much more fun, and prayers for those in need feel so much more noble, and prayers for help in our struggles are so much more satisfying than all the digging and facing of difficult realities that go with prayers about forgiveness. It’s very good that Jesus includes it. I think we could all use the reminder.

Forgiveness. Is. Hard. No doubt about it. And it is not to be taken lightly – sometimes premature forgiveness is more harmful than helpful. But vigilant prayer about it is always worthwhile. A friend told me a story about someone she struggled to forgive, a member of her family, someone she didn’t even want to forgive, even after he had died. Her spiritual director asked if she could find a way to pray for “the desire for the desire to forgive.” What a beautiful way to phrase that! Pray that you would want to want to forgive someone. Sure enough, my friend said after about a year of (begrudgingly) praying that, she found one day that she had let go of the person’s action that had so infuriated her. Not condoned it, mind you. But she no longer let it torment her, and in fact, she said, she found she looked forward to a reunion with him in heaven.

What a sense of freedom that offers – to no longer be burdened, either by our own sins, or by the anger we feel toward another. And this is the true reason Jesus includes a petition about forgiveness in his model prayer: because God’s greatest hope and gift for us is that we would experience freedom from sin, freedom from hatred and fear, freedom from burdens and the yoke of slavery, freedom from death. God has shown us that freedom throughout time, and most profoundly in the person of Jesus Christ, who faced the most unforgivable offense as he hung on a cross, but rose again to show us that death is powerless at the hand of our life-giving, freedom-embracing God. “Forgive us our sins, as we forgive,” we pray, and let us live into that freedom.

            Let us pray… Forgiving God, you have told us and shown us how to live lives of faith over and over again through history. We ask you to guide us even now, each day teaching us again to pray in such a way that builds up our faith and the body of Christ, that heals divisions, that seeks reconciliation and love of neighbor, that embraces the freedom we have in Jesus Christ. In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.