Sermon preached by Rev. Margie Quinn on Sunday, July 27, 2025
Prayer by Marie Howe: Every day I want to speak with you, and every day something more important calls for my attention—the drugstore, the beauty products, the luggage that I need to buy for this trip. Even now, I can hardly sit here among the falling piles of paper and clothing, the garbage trucks outside already screeching and banging.
The mystics say that you are as close as my own breath. Why do I flee from you? My days and nights pour through me like complaints and become a story I forgot to tell. Help me. Even as I write these words, I'm planning to rise from the chair as soon as I finish this sentence.
Prayer is complicated. It's intimidating. It's fleeting. It's inconsistent. And it may be something that you or me mostly do alone—in our car or before we go to sleep. Maybe your prayers are hurried or even transactional: “God, if you help me find my car keys, I promise to go to church this Sunday.” I've done that one before.
And maybe your prayers are sung or shouted. Maybe they are desperate: “God, let her live. I will do anything for you if you let her live.” Maybe your prayers are sighs too deep for words to express.
When we think of the word prayer—or at least when I think of it—many of us go immediately to that spiritual conversation with God, this personal posture of begging and giving thanks and admitting our wrongs. Our prayers are sprinkled with “I”s and “me.” And I really don't think there's anything wrong with that.
If prayer is, as one pastor says, being exactly who you are before God, that includes me and God. But what does it mean this morning that the disciples don't ask, “Teach me to pray?” They say, “Teach us to pray.” Teach us to pray.
It is as if they understand that this whole prayer thing is not just personal—it's communal. They've seen Jesus praying quite a bit in the Gospel of Luke. He prays before his baptism in Luke 3. He prays after cleansing a leper in Luke 5. He prays before he calls his disciples in Luke 6, going up to a mountain. And he prays before his transfiguration in Luke 9.
So it's not surprising that after watching their rabbi pray and pray and pray, they notice this rhythm and they ask Jesus, “Teach us how to pray. We don't get it.”
Jesus offers them a pretty simple instruction manual:
“When you pray, say,
‘Father, may your name be revered as holy.
May your kingdom come.
Give us each our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.’”
Pastor and professor Jennifer Wyatt notes that in his answer, Jesus offers four requests: a request for the kingdom to come, a request for daily bread, a request for forgiveness, and a request for deliverance.
In other words, in this prayer, Jesus summarizes all of the things that we need most when we come to God together: God’s presence, our needs met, forgiveness, and mercy.
God's presence, our needs met, forgiveness, and mercy.
And so in my mind, for me, it boils down to: presence, bread, forgiveness, and mercy. Say it with me: presence, bread, forgiveness, and mercy.
This is more than a prayer, though. Jesus is not only teaching them what to say. He is teaching them a life—how to live before our God.
And how does Jesus address God in this prayer? Not as someone far away, but as a father.
And if that doesn't resonate with you as a parent, isn't that so nice—that Jesus invites the disciples as a group to remember that their relationship with the one who listens is personal? That the God in scripture is one who is intimate and sacred and a trusted authority—and personal. Personal. Not a relationship centered on fear, but on love.
What I resonate most with is that the Lord's Prayer does not contain the word “I” anywhere in it.
In other words, this is not a prayer that we are meant to pray alone. We've got other prayers that we can pray that way. Meaning that where two or more are gathered, we are encouraged to remember our life together.
Presence, bread, forgiveness, and mercy.
We pray the Lord's Prayer every Sunday—whether we use trespasses or sins or debts, or kingdom or kin-dom, or Father or Creator—not as this mindless recitation, but as a collective pleading to a sacred God.
It is no coincidence that we pray this every week. In Luke's gospel, the Lord's Prayer says “us” four times and “me” zero times.
What matters is that this isn't a “me” prayer—it's an “us” prayer.
It's a promise to each other and to God that we want God's kingdom to come. We want our bread—not just for us in this room—but for every person on earth, from Gaza to Green Hills down the street.
We want God's will—not our will—to be done. We want forgiveness for the ways that we as a community have failed to show up and bring the kingdom of heaven here on earth. We want God's mercy and deliverance. We want to forgive others too—together, as a community.
When we think about church—when we think about this service—it’s important to be reminded that our worship is not sprinkled with prayer. It is centered on prayer.
We open worship with prayer. We follow our sermons with prayer for the people. We pray for the offering we give. We pray for the bread that we break. And we pray the Lord’s Prayer.
Not one, two, three, or four—five prayers. That’s a lot of praying. And it’s not a coincidence. And it’s not fluff. We include these prayers because we understand as a church that gathering means praying.
Gathering means praying.
And y’all—we don’t have one person say all the prayers. We have young and old, youth and elders, men and women, pastors and congregants. That’s for a reason.
I’m not good at praying by myself. I need you and you and you to pray with and for me. And if we only pray one day a week, let it be when we are together.
If we only think to lift up each other’s names or ask for forgiveness or remember those who don’t have enough bread in our world, let it be with the sinners and the saints who are sitting to our left and to our right.
Okay, but back to the passage.
So, the story that follows Jesus saying the Lord’s Prayer—which you probably picked up, the Luke version is different from the Mark version—the story that follows is so refreshing and relatable to me.
And I love when Jesus is kind of funny in his stories. And it goes like this:
Let’s say you’ve got a friend. Actually, let’s name him. Somebody give me a name.
Jose.
Jose. You shouldn’t have said yourself—I’m about to call you out.
Jose. Say you’ve got a friend named Jose and you call Jose up at midnight: “Give me some bread. I’ve got a buddy who just got into town and I looked in the fridge and the pantry—I don’t have any food for him.”
Jose is like, “Don’t bother me. My door is locked. My children are asleep. I’m about to hang up the phone on you. I can’t get up and give you anything.”
Jesus says even though Jose is not going to get out of bed, at least because of his persistence, he’s going to get up and get out of bed and give you what you need.
I love that. Because of his persistence—not necessarily because he wants to—but because he is persisting in the life and urgency and habits that God instills in him. He’s going to get up out of the bed. He’s going to unlock the door. And he will give you the bread that you need.
Persistence in prayer.
Professor N.T. Wright says Jesus is kind of encouraging this holy boldness. Holy boldness. A sharp knocking at the door. An insistent asking. A search that refuses to give up. That’s what our prayer should be like.
This isn’t just a routine or a formal prayer going through the motions like daily or weekly tasks. This is a battle—a fight against darkness. And those who have glimpsed the light are called to struggle in prayer.
We don’t have to get it right. We struggle in prayer. We struggle for peace, for reconciliation, for wisdom, for a thousand things in the world—for the church, perhaps a hundred or two for one’s family, friends, neighbors—and perhaps a dozen or two for oneself.
And I know there are too many things to pray about. We become paralyzed by the enormity of “thoughts and prayers.”
Who has seen that on Twitter or heard it again and again these last few years?
We are asked to send out thoughts and prayers at an alarming rate and perhaps become callous to the ways that “thoughts and prayers” has been thrown around amidst senseless violence.
But prayers in church—hate to say it—are not optional. They are vital for our spiritual health.
And he says that they are like the metal shell of a car. To be effective, it needs fuel for its engine. To be effective, prayers need energy, too. In this case, the kind of dogged and even funny determination that you’d use with a sleepy friend like Jose, who you hoped would help you out of a tight spot.
Maybe church—maybe our prayers—are really just us shaking awake a sleeping Jesus, asking, searching, knocking with an annoying persistence because we believe in a loving God who might just be listening—who may not give us the results that we want, but whose door is always open to us.
One friend said to me, when asked, “Why do you pray?”
“Because prayer changes me. It may not change the outcome of what I desire, but prayer changes me.”
And we don’t have to say the right words. And we don’t have to say the same words. We just have to stay in relationship with the one who loves us mutually.
So this morning, as we sing the Lord’s Prayer in a minute, and as we speak the Lord’s Prayer in a few minutes, and as you hear Reverend Wesley and elders Kathy and Larry pray, consider that our role as a church—as a church—is to bang on that door over and over again.
Whether it’s clunky or messy or you’re already thinking about the next thing, we ask for presence, for bread, for forgiveness, for mercy—always. And we do it together.
Always.
Amen.