Saturday, July 26, 2025

'Lord, Teach Us to Pray': Reflections for the 7th Sunday after Pentecost

 

RCL Proper 17C [i]

27 July 2025

 

Church of the Epiphany

Surrey BC

 

Introduction

            About the year 150, a Christian scribe in Alexandria found himself in possession of two older Christian documents.  One was a catechism or a collection of teachings about how a person should live their life.  This collection of teachings probably began its life as a Jewish document that a later Christian edited to suit a Christian audience.  The second part was longer and was a guidebook to how the Christian community should conduct its communal affairs:  baptism, eucharist, church organization and prayer.  This second part likely began its life in the rural areas of western Syria.  Our Christian friend in Alexandria put the two documents together and called it, “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles”. [ii]

            

            In the second part the original writer responds to a question from their community:  “How and how often shall we pray?’  The writer’s answer is wonderfully simple:  Pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day – when you rise, when you are in the middle of your working day, when you bring the day to an end. [iii]  Pray as our Lord taught us in the Gospels according to Matthew and Luke.

 

“Father, . . . “ [iv]

            With this one word the evangelist Luke reminds us that prayer is a conversation that is based on our relationship with a living and personal God – not a set of rules, not an abstract philosophy – but a relationship with the One who created all that is, seen and unseen, the One who knows the hairs on our heads and the needs of our life.

 

            Now, it is no secret that calling God ‘Father’ is not easy for everyone.  Because this is about a relationship with God, how we talk about God is important.  For some, ‘Father’ conjures up memories of safety, nurture and compassion.  For others, ‘Father’ brings up past traumas, disappointments and pain.  For more than thirty years I have been involved in our church’s efforts to find language that is faithful and fair, life-giving and hope-creating, so that we can all join in prayer and thanksgiving.  This is a task that will never cease.

 

            But I will say this.  As important as it is to find words that help us talk to the One who made us, who redeems us, who sanctifies and sustains us, there is something that is even more important.  What is more important is that we do talk to God.  If we are uncertain about what words to use, then pray with the words we have.  God, who knows the secrets of our hearts, will sort things out.

 

“ . . . may your name be revered as holy . . . “ [v]

            One of the words used frequently these days is ‘whatever’.  When my children were younger and I was trying to make a point about something, one or other of them would dismiss the point I was trying to make by saying, ‘whatever’.  I quickly and firmly banished that word from their conversations with me.  ‘Whatever’ means ‘I don’t care’ or ‘Your words don’t matter’ or ‘It’s all irrelevant’ or something to this effect.

 

            Just as words matter, names matter as well.  A name brings a host of associations that we make when we hear it.  Speak the name of a national or provincial politician and watch the reactions around us.  Speak the name of a loved one who has died, whether recently or in the past, and we can quickly be overwhelmed with memories of what they looked like, what they loved to do, what they said to us at important moments in our lives.

 

            When we speak about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of Moses and Jesus, the God of Peter and Paul, we are releasing into this moment all the stories, all the memories, all the hopes that are bound up in this name.  To speak of God as ‘creator’ is to remember that all that exists is holy and loved by the One who created it.  To speak of God as ‘saviour’ is to remember that we have ‘erred and strayed’ from the paths of life and that the One who saves us brings us back on track.  To speak of God as ‘Spirit’ is to remember that in every moment of every day the One who breathed life into Adam is breathing life and new possibilities into the world.

 

“Give us each day our daily bread.” [vi]

            We live in a world filled with anxiety.  For many people in this world, it is an anxiety about food and shelter and safety from violence, oppression and conflict.  For those of us who live in place of relative safety and prosperity, we worry about whether we will have adequate retirement income, about whether the traditions and communities we have loved for so long have a future, about whether our children and grandchildren will enjoy good lives.

 

            God knows the depth of our anxiety as well as how some of it is generated by the choices we make or do not make.  To pray for ‘our daily bread’ is a prayer that we grow in trust and in confidence.  It is only when we have trust in God and confidence in the gifts God has given us that we are able to transform anxiety into hope and hope into action.

 

“And forgive us our sins, as we forgive everyone indebted to us.” [vii]

            When I look at the world around us, I see people and societies that are unable to forgive.  It is as if the only treasure some people and some societies hold is the wrongs that have been done to them.  By holding on to these ancient wrongs, they are actually preventing genuine healing and reconciliation.  They are caught in a web spun by the spider of resentment and revenge.  In that web they shall soon be consumed from within.

 

            Forgiveness is not forgetting.  Forgiveness is choosing to create a future that is not defined only by our past.  Forgiveness means acknowledging both our sins and the sins of others, but then taking the risk to build new relationships that are not simply repeating old patterns.  Forgiveness means that we will not allow ourselves to be held hostage by what has gone on before.

 

“And do not bring us to the time to trial.” [viii]

            It is not always easy to believe in a living God who is actively at work in the world to bring about a new heaven and a new earth.  I do not doubt for a moment that almost every Christian, if not every Christian, has had a moment of trial, a moment of doubt, perhaps even a moment of despair.  But those moments come, and we must face them with hope and in the confidence that God is at work in us, through us and even despite us.

 

Conclusion

            Almost fifty years ago, my teacher, Bishop Michael Ramsey, spent a whole day pondering two words:  “Our Father”.  He knew what the writer of “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” knew:  In these few words we find all we need to nurture our relationship with the Creator, with the Christ, with the Spirit.  So pray them three times a day.  Pray them slowly, phrase by phrase.  In the silence after each phrase let our hearts, our minds, our souls reach out to talk with the One to whom we are praying.  And we will find the faith, the hope and the love we all seek.

 



[i] Hosea 1.2-10; Psalm 85; Colossians 2.6-15; Luke 11.1-13.

 

[ii] “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, Commonly Called the Didache”, edited and translated by Cyril C. Richardson in Early Christian Fathers, The Library of Christian Classics, vol. 1 (Philadelphia, PA:  The Westminster Press, 1953), 161-179.

 

[iii] Didache 8.2-3.

 

[iv] Luke 11.2b (NRSVue).

 

[v] Luke 11.2c (NRSVue).

 

[vi] Luke 11.3 (NRSVue).

 

[vii] Luke 11.4a (NRSVue).

 

[viii] Luke 11.4b (NRSVue).

 

Saturday, July 12, 2025

Measuring Up in the Mean Time: Reflections for the 5th Sunday after Pentecost

 

 

RCL Proper 15C [i]

13 July 2025

 

Saint Anselm’s Anglican Church

University Endowment Lands

 

         Throughout my career as a pastor, priest and teacher, I have always been interested in what words have meant in the past and what they mean in the present.  Just recently I finished reading a short book re-visiting the question of whether Christians in the first three hundred years of our history owned or modified or built buildings for worship and prayer. [ii]  One of the ways the author re-visited the evidence was by tracing how the word ekklēsia or ‘the assembly’ changed from referring to the Christian people gathered for worship to meaning the building in which Christians worshipped.  I remember well teaching David, our oldest, who first worshipped in this building, to say ‘We are going to where the church worships’ rather than ‘we’re going to church.’

 

            Over the past few years I’ve been pondering the different ways we can interpret the word ‘meantime’.  Most if not all of us hear this word and think, ‘the time in between’ or ‘a time of waiting’.  But lately I’ve been hearing this word differently.  I’ve taken to putting an intentional pause between the first and second syllables – ‘in the mean-time’.

 

            I don’t think that it’s very difficult to explain why I’ve been doing this lately.  All any of us need to do is to read whatever news source we tend to read, and what will jump out at us is how ‘mean’ our times seem to be.  Whether we understand ourselves to be on the left or on the right or caught in the middle of contemporary partisanship and social issues, it’s very hard to find people speaking well of those with whom they disagree.  We seem very skilled these days at finding scapegoats for all our ills – political leaders, scientists, radicals of one form or another, immigrants, refugees – the list goes on and on.  So it’s quite apt to hear this familiar parable from the Gospel according to Luke during this ‘mean-time’.

 

            For example, we can quickly criticize the expert in the law.  He should have stopped asking questions after Jesus praised him for knowing the right answer to his own question:  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbour as yourself.” [iii]  Then he asks that fateful question:  “And who is my neighbour?’ [iv]  Yet, how often do we want to know the precise meaning of a commitment we’re making?  Perhaps the legal expert would have fared better if he’d asked, ‘How shall I love my neighbour?’.

 

We can also quickly condemn the priest and the Levite.  That’s what Luke, a non-Jewish believer in Jesus, wants us to do.  But it becomes a little more difficult to be critical when we realize that they’re doing what all of us do from time to time – they don’t want to get involved.  Robbers along the Jerusalem to Jericho road often had one of their members play ‘possum’ at the side of the road to lure travellers into an ambush.  Why should either man take the risk? Both men have religious duties to perform that require them to avoid any contact with blood or with the dead.  If they stop to take care of this man, will they be abandoning their traditional obligations to God?

 

            Then comes the Samaritan.  It is very hard for contemporary Christians to understand the visceral dislike, even hatred, that existed between Samaritans and Judeans.  Both are descendants of the tribes that God brought into the land of promise.  Both suffered at the hands of the Assyrians and Babylonians and the destruction of their holy sanctuaries at Bethel and Jerusalem.  Both accused the other of failing to be faithful to the law that God gave them through Moses at Mount Sinai.  To Judeans the Samaritans were non-Jews pretending to be Jews.  To the Samaritans the Judeans were Roman collaborators willing to bend the knee to non-Jewish rulers.  Yet Jesus dares to tell a predominantly Judean audience a story with a Samaritan hero.

 

            Knowing something about the context in which this parable was originally told can help us understand what it may be saying to us – non-Jewish followers of Jesus who live at a time when the ekklēsia, the people called to follow Jesus, are an institution more than a movement, a cultural phenomenon more than a revolutionary challenge to the status quo.  We are living in the ‘mean-time’.

 

            When we are living in the ‘mean-time’, do we dare to take risks?  When we are living in the ‘mean-time’, do we dare to lay aside our long-standing traditions to respond to an unexpected need?  When we are living the ‘mean-time’, do we dare stop demonizing the ‘other’, whomever the ‘other’ might be, and see only a neighbour?  These are the questions that confront us and trouble us, but that cannot be ignored.

 

            We cannot ignore them because God expects us to measure up to the challenges of our times and places.  That’s what’s behind the enigmatic reading from the prophet Amos this morning.  We use plumb lines to make a straight, vertical line, essential information if you want to make sure your walls and foundations are properly built.  God is telling the people of the northern kingdom of Israel that they need to measure up; otherwise they are doomed to destruction at the hands of the Assyrians.  We have to be ready and willing for transformation.

 

            During my second year in theological college, I went through a very ‘mean-time’.  Most of my friends and all of the faculty either did not see the crisis or crossed to the other side of the road.  The only two people who didn’t were two women who were studying at the college.  My theological college was not a friendly-place for women; Barbara and Anne faced subtle discrimination within the college and not so subtle hostility from some of the alumni.  They both knew that I had more than ambivalent feelings about the ordination of women.  But they stopped.  They bound up my wounds.  They stayed with me, both in times of silence and in times of conversation.  My ‘mean-time’ was turned into a season of grace in which the loving compassion of these two ‘Samaritans’ transformed me and set me on a path that I could not have imagined.

 

            This is a ‘mean-time’ for Christians such as we who are committed to doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with God.  In such a time as this we find ourselves playing many roles – a legal expert seeking precision, a priest or a Levite focused on our traditional roles and duties, a Samaritan travelling on the road – sometimes we are even the traveller on the side of the road, fallen among thieves and ruffians, wounded by the times in which we live and dependent upon the care of others to recover.

 

            But the good news is this – we are not imprisoned by this ‘mean-time’.  As the writer to the Christians in Colossae says, “God has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.” [v]  We have hope in a world that is coming into being through us, in us and even despite us, a world for which we wait with endurance and patience and even joy. [vi]  We live in both the ‘mean-time’ and in the ‘meantime’, the ‘meantime’ between the world as it is and the world as God is loving into existence.

 

Glory to God,

whose power, working in us,

can do infinitely more

than we can ask or imagine.

Glory to God from generation to generation,

in the Church and in Christ Jesus,

for ever and ever.  Amen. [vii]



[i] Amos 7.7-17; Psalm 82; Colossians 1.1-14; Luke 10.25-37.

 

[ii] Alexander Turpin, Did the Early Christians Build Churches?  Revisiting the Evidence, Joint Liturgical Studies 100 (Norwich, England:  Hymns Ancient and Modern, 2025).

 

[iii] Luke 10.27 (NRSVue).

 

[iv] Luke 10.28b (NRSVue).

 

[v] Colossians 1.13-14 (NRSVue).

 

[vi] Colossians 1.5, 11 (NRSVue).

 

[vii] The Book of Alternative Services (1985), p. 214.