March 9, 2025
First Sunday of Lent

“Daring Questions:

1. Prayer”

Luke 4:1-13

Our worship themes in these weeks before Easter grow out of the questions you sent me last month. Here are this week’s questions:

• Why are some prayers unanswered?
• Is there such thing as a proper way to pray - the hows? When? Where?
• Can we just talk to God just like a child to a parent, or like a friend to friend?
• What is the sign of the cross in praying for? 

We sometimes imagine that prayer is like going into the Boss’s office. We screw up our courage, put on our best game face, and gird ourselves up to ask for a raise, or a vacation, or job change. If we say the right words, and the Boss is feeling generous, we might come out of the office with at least some of what we hope for. But if the Boss is grumpy or capricious, there’s always the danger of being ejected like the President of Ukraine, with nothing but bad feelings to show for it.

Is that what God is like?

Is that why we pray?

Is “going up to the holy mountain” similar to going into the doors of the White House, cap in hand, hoping for a fix that we can’t effect on our own? If that’s all that prayer is about, it doesn’t seem very effective. Faithful people have been praying for healing, for peace, for fairness, for freedom for countless generations, and still our world is rife with disease, conflict, injustice and captivity. If that’s all prayer is about, either we’re not doing it right, or God isn’t very interested in what we have to say!

When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he gave them the words we’ve come to call “the Lord’s Prayer.” Think about the words to that prayer. Replay them in your mind before you read on. This is not a prayer for prosperity; it’s not about getting a comfortable afterlife; it’s not even a prayer about Jesus; Jesus isn’t mentioned in it! It’s a prayer asking God’s help to repair this world:

• Make our Earth more like the perfection of Heaven
• Ensure that everyone gets food every day
• Stop debts from controlling us
• Free us from the things that degrade and destroy and limit

Those are core activities that Jesus also taught about in his parables, and enacted through signs and miracles. It’s what his ministry was about! Praying Jesus’ prayer isn’t about asking God do things FOR us; it’s about aligning ourselves with all Jesus did, and all Jesus stood for, and all Jesus urged us to do and to be. In those parables, signs, and miracles, there was never any sense that we should sit by passively and expect God to do all the heavy lifting. Jesus’ ministry was about enlisting partners to work together with God and repair the evils we experience. Praying this prayer, then, is re-committing ourselves to all the “mending the world” that Jesus taught about; all the hope that Jesus inspired.

For me, personally, prayer is a time to step back from the cut and thrust of daily living to reconnect with what truly gives my life value. I strive to step back from anxiety and frustration and fear to re-ground myself in what I want my life to mean: what values I want to live out, instead of just give lip-service to. I need time to remember why I walk this Earth, and what legacy I want to leave behind. I need time to breathe, and to reach for joy, and to see Truth more clearly than I can picture it when too many demands press chaotically against my brain. And I need space to ensure that my decisions reflect my values, that my values are steeped in our traditions, and that I’m responding to life with love rather than reacting out of fear.

I wonder if that’s part of what Jesus wrestled with in the desert, after his baptism. The story portrays him as tempted by the Devil – it’s the traditional reading for the first Sunday of Lent. But as I read the story, I also hear him wrestling with his calling, and his values, and how the strategies he chooses have to be consistent with the ends he proclaims. He rejects the Devil’s temptations because they offer a shortcut to impose the Kingdom’s Rule, rather than the harder strategy of persuading people to embrace it. He uses that time in the desert to discern a faithful strategy to achieve God’s goals, in much the same way as I wrestle in prayer to find faithful strategies for my life too. For all that the story describes conversations with the Devil, surely God is in the wrestling too! When Jesus returns from the desert, he’s ready to pick up his ministry and the healing begins.

When I take time away to discern like that, I come back to ordinary life changed: calmer, more focused, more committed, more certain of the path forward. When I build that kind of time into my routine, it changes my hoping, my dreaming, my habits, even my reactions to unpleasant surprises. I don’t always need words for that; I don’t always bring requests; sometimes it feels like answers are a long way away. But the discipline of connecting with all that gives meaning to my life leaves me ready to engage again with renewed strength and determination for the tasks ahead.

We worship online and in person, Sundays at 11am ET