"Learning to Pray" Third Sunday of Easter May 8, 2011 1Peter 1:17-25
We need to restore a proper understanding of fear. We could use a healthy dose of fear in the sense we normally think of it as. When we come into God’s House we’re not thinking, I want to stand before God and be terrified. And certainly our God does not invite us into His House to terrify us. But should we have no fear? Should there be no sense of terror? Peter says in the Epistle reading that we should conduct ourselves with fear. Does this mean that we should constantly be looking over our shoulder for fear God will strike us down if we do not live according to His will? Should we be in constant dread in this lifetime of the threat of punishment in hell for eternity? While there is more to the fear that Peter is talking about there is something of that fear behind it. We shouldn’t look so blithely at our sin as to think that God just overlooks it. At the same time, as Peter talks about, we do call God, Father. Jesus taught us to pray to God as our Father. We are His children. Children shouldn’t live in fear of their father. But there is fear. This is what we need to restore. We need to understand fear properly so that we can conduct ourselves in a way pleasing to our Heavenly Father. The way we will do this is by learning to pray. You and I are Christians. It’s stating the obvious that as Christians we live as Christians. What may not be obvious is that living as Christians isn’t about doing. At least, not doing in the sense we usually think of in terms of doing. Our lives are all about doing. We do this and we do that. We work, we play, we eat. Even resting and sleeping are doing. We’re always doing something. We’re being productive or we’re wasting time. We’re doing something for ourselves or for someone else. We’re driving or sitting in the car talking with the person driving. When we think of living we think of doing. And that’s right, of course. It’s the same with the Christian life. But the problem is that God doesn’t just give us new life and then tell us to do a bunch of things. He gives us new life and then we have life. He brings us into new life and then we live. It’s the same when we’re born. When you’re born you have life. And you live. Those first few years of your life you do a lot. You eat, you sleep, you get rid of the waste in your body (in your parents’ eyes, this is one of the things you do a lot of), you cry, you laugh, you learn to talk, you learn to move around. You do a lot of things but you’re not conscious of any of it. You’re learning and growing at an exponential rate but you don’t have the rational capacity to understand any of it. You’re doing a lot, and yet, the main thing about your life in the first few years of your life is that you are a recipient. Someone is feeding you. Someone is talking to you. Someone is jiggling your fingers and toes. Someone is making silly faces and laughing with you. Someone is bundling you up and changing your diaper. All of these things are done to you or for you. You are not doing anything to accomplish any of these things. You are receiving. Of course, as an adult or an older child you see that your life is very different from that. When you’re done with dinner your mom tells you to clear your dishes. As an adult you recognize that if you don’t clear you’re dishes you will soon be living in an unsafe environment. You readily see that you have to do a lot of stuff in order for you to live. You become more mature and understand that for your quality of life you must do and not just sit around and wait for people to wait on you. However, as you grow even more you come full circle. Even if you don’t consciously think it, you intuitively recognize that your life as an adult isn’t all that different from that of when you were a baby. You’re doing a lot but there is a vastness to what is your life in which you do nothing. You don’t work hard to ensure you have enough air. You just breathe. Even breathing you recognize is more not doing than doing. You’re breathing all the time and rarely thinking about it. Certainly not actively making it happen. You just do it. Or perhaps it’s better said, it just happens. It’s true that you have to do things like cook food and set the table. But those are minor things compared to the vastness of God’s creation and blessings in food being provided for you—there’s crops, farmers, trucks that ship it, stores that sell it. So much of our lives we give no thought to. We just live. So much is provided for us, we simply receive. When Peter says that we are born again we need to be thinking about our lives as Christians in this way. When you’re born mom and dad don’t start telling you what to do and giving you chores. They give. They love. They coddle. They impart to you the things you need to live. You are living, you have full life, but it is also receiving. That’s what new life in Christ is. That’s what you have when you’re born again. So when the baby gets older and older and the child and the adult realizes more and more of this a healthy fear develops. Who am I to understand myself as the center of my universe when I am the recipient of so much that I have not worked for or deserve? And that healthy fear has added to it a respect and honor and reverence. If we see our lives as Christians in this way we will concentrate less on what we must do and more on receiving. This is thought of in another way, as learning to pray. When we concentrate on learning to pray what we do will take care of itself. This doesn’t mean that as Christians we shouldn’t do anything. More than anyone we Christians see all there is to do! But we shouldn’t view what we do in the way the world and our sinful flesh sees it. What we do flows out of what we have received. In learning to pray we learn also that what we do isn’t really what we do at all but what God has given us, what He accomplishes in us, and what can only be done in Him. The way God teaches us to pray is not in the way many of us learned to pray as Christians. As children we learned to pray by closing our eyes and folding our hands. We learned to pray for certain things and maybe with some structured prayers. Maybe Dad would say the prayers or everyone would get an opportunity to chime in with particular prayer requests. However the particulars were, we gained a certain sense that this is something special going on. The word reverent comes to mind that we shouldn’t treat this in just any old fashion, but in respect and honor. We learn that prayer is a reverent thing we do. We might even say that there’s a certain amount of fear in which we approach it. This is a blessing to learn this. But it scratches the surface of what prayer is, and even more, in learning to pray. And maybe that’s the way it should be. Just because your baby is going to be eating steak one day doesn’t mean that’s what you feed him. You start with nursing and go to baby food and move up to steak. As adults and even older children, we learn that learning to pray is not something you’re taught and then you do it. It’s something that you’re always learning. For some Christians, learning to pray is going beyond the childhood experience of praying in which you close your eyes and fold your hands. Some pray like this, with their arms stretched out and toward heaven. Their eyes may even be open, looking toward heaven. Some go up to the mountains and take in all the beauty and simply giving thanks for God’s manifold blessings and glory. For some it’s taking a specific time out of each day to pray for particular needs or thanksgivings. For some it’s going to a book of eloquent prayers that give guidance to our often feeble notions of what to pray for. All of these are perfectly appropriate and wonderful ways to pray. Even more, we can pray any time, any place, whether with hands on the wheel and eyes on the road or hands folded and eyes closed. But all of these have at the outset the notion of here’s what you do to pray. True enough, praying is doing. But prayer is so much more than just doing something. Prayer is a lot more like breathing than, say, cooking dinner. When you’re living you’re breathing. You have to make a concerted effort to make dinner, breathing just happens, it’s what you’re always doing. We need to learn to pray. Learning to pray is a little like stepping out in faith. The other day I was driving on a two-lane road. A truck was half-way in a driveway and halfway in my lane. I slowed down to stop and wait for it to move, but a man was next to the truck and looked past the truck to see if anyone was coming the other way. He waved me on. This was hard. It was scary. Intellectually I knew everything was fine because he was telling me it was. But I was trusting a stranger. Part of me was wondering as I drove into the lane for oncoming traffic if I would meet up with any on-coming traffic. I made it through and it was because of reliance on the signal of a stranger. How much more do we have with the word of the God who always keeps His promises. Peter says that the Word of the Lord that endures forever is the Word that was preached to you. Jesus did a little of that in the Gospel reading. He expounded from the Old Testament those things concerning Himself. That’s how you learn to pray. You step out in faith. You look to Jesus and His suffering and death. You see there that your life is so much more about Him giving to you than you doing stuff. It doesn’t minimize what you do but it does put it in perspective. There’s really not a whole lot you can do apart from what Christ has accomplished for you in His suffering, death, and resurrection. What you do really is rather more like what flows out of your being born again, your Baptism. Think daily on this, on your Baptism. New life is what you were given. New life is what you have. For one particular day, today, we set aside a time to express our love to our mothers and we celebrate Mother’s Day. But for Christians it’s so much better. It’s not just about what you do for her or even about thanking her for all that she’s done for you. It’s really mostly about receiving. Think about all you have received from your mom. Give thanks to God for the wonderful blessing you have received in your mom. If God has blessed you with children think about how this is mostly a blessing, what God has granted to you, not simply all the many hours you spent in loving and caring for them. And when you’re thinking about all this think also about how things were when you were born. They were pretty good! Your mom doing everything she did for you out of love in order to take care of you. Not demanding anything of you, just giving. You have been born again. You have been granted new life. Your Heavenly Father has given you all things in His Son Jesus. Your life is a prayer. You don’t do so much as you simply live. You have new life and you live in it. The things you do so often end up being the futile ways Peter was talking about, but Christ has ransomed you from those, not with perishable things such as silver or gold, but with His precious blood. That’s how the life of prayer begins, when you are born into this new life in Baptism. It continues here as you are given more and more blessings in the Gospel and the Lord’s Supper: forgiveness, life, and salvation. It continues daily as you live and serve in the world God has given you and on into eternity in the glory of heaven. Amen. SDG -- Pastor Paul L. Willweber Prince of Peace Lutheran Church [LCMS] 6801 Easton Ct., San Diego, California 92120 619.583.1436 princeofpeacesd.net three-taverns.net It is the spirit and genius of Lutheranism to be liberal in everything except where the marks of the Church are concerned. [Henry Hamann, On Being a Christian] ___________________________________________________________________ 'CAT 41 Sermons & Devotions' consists of works that are, unless otherwise noted, the copyrighted property of the various authors; posting of such gives members of this list implied consent for redistribution _with_attribution_ unless otherwise specified by the author (as long as no charge is made for the work and it is not made part of a compilation), as well as for quoting or use in a congregational setting _with_or_without_attribution_. Note: This list's default reply is to the *poster*, NOT the list. Do *not* reply to the list with your comments, but to the poster. Subscribe? 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