2004-07-25 All In the Family.doc
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C:\Documents and Settings\darndt\Desktop\pz\2004-07-25 All In the Family.doc
And in today’s reading Jesus continues his conversation about the meaning of disciples.
His disciples have heard him teach others and they’ve heard about what he said to Martha and
Mary. Now they want Jesus to teach them to pray.
And here’s something interesting. Our English translation says, “When you pray, say. . .”
but if we go back to the original text, we find that this verse could be translated, “When you
pray, you are saying. . .” Which might tell us something.
Let’s remember that Jesus is talking to his own family, the Jewish people of the 1st
century. The “Lord’s Prayer” isn’t an exclusively Christian prayer. (And certainly not a “me-
and-Jesus” prayer.)
Any devout Jew—in our day and in Jesus’ day, would have prayed exactly that way in
Jesus’ time. Jesus is reminding his listeners that they already know how to pray—they’d been
praying that way all they’re lives—and maybe the prayer was too familiar.
And then he tells them a story about how prayer can affect us.
The mistake we might make here is to turn the story of the neighbor and the bread into an
allegory in which God is the neighbor and we are the person who needs some food in the middle
of the night. That’s not the point—God’s not the great cosmic bellhop ready to give us what we
want when we want it.
It’s more that being part of God’s family makes us bound to act in a certain way. What is
that way? Well, it says, “Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find,”—which sounds
good, but doesn’t say who to ask and what and where to seek and where to knock. And if we say,
“God is the answer,” we risk going back to the me-and-Jesus vertical line.
So, maybe the answer is to pray this prayer as members of God’s family, knowing that, as
family members we are the ones who are going to be asked and we are the ones who will be
sought out and we are the ones who have to open our doors; and that when we open our hearts
and doors, it’s to people in need outside the church and it’s to each other, inside the church, our
immediate family, the place where we can give and receive the same kind of love Jesus modeled
for us.
Which, as much as anything, is a way of working out what this Gospel means for us as
people of God who happen to be Christians, who happen to be Presbyterians, part of this part of
God’s family and God’s kingdom right here in Montclair.
And then this gospel may do for us what it did for Jesus’ disciples: a reminder that yes,
we pray because we are in God’s family; and that God is the holy One; that God does provide for
us—all of us—and that we need to reach out to others and mirror God to them; that we need to
forgive and be forgiven because, no matter how good we are, we are still sinners saved each day
by grace,and so we need to forgive each other—and that when we do we will come to be known
as a family that welcomes the stranger and the sinner.
It’s pretty exciting being in this family. There’s all kinds of us—sometimes we’re the
good Samaritan, sometimes Martha, sometimes Mary, sometimes priests and Levites, and even
sometimes the person in the ditch. And above all, we’re God’s family, a family that prays and
listens to God’s Word together, a family that lives in God’s kingdom.
Family living can be difficult—which is why we need Jesus—as Paul says in Colossians,
“As you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built
up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.”
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