July 27, 2025 ☩ The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

on
Hosea 1:2-10; Ps 85; Colossians 2:6-19; & Luke 11:1-13

“A Relational Prayer of Need”

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Prior to my reading of the lectionary texts appointed for this day, I felt a prayerful desire to pray the Lord’s Prayer in Portuguese.  After I pulled out my Portuguese translation of The Book of Common Prayer, practiced my pronunciation and completed the prayer with sufficient proficiency, I turned to the lectionary readings.  Upon first glance, I come to find the selection in Luke’s Gospel includes the Lord’s Prayer.

We find ourselves today taking a deeper look at the prayer Jesus taught to his followers.  Like the lesson from Hosea, this prayer is undergirded with a deep relationality.  God is identified as “Father,” and though God’s kingdom is beyond our world, a power and deity above and beyond our comprehension (transcendent), the prayer opens with a familiar tone of connecting us with God as a parent.  Inherently, this unites humanity as brothers and sisters.  Still, the sovereignty of God is upheld (‘your kingdom come’).

The Prayer continues with demands to give us, forgive us, and deliver us. [Luke 11:3-4, the third demand reworded]  As a child, it was engrained into me that there are two powerful phrases we should always use for the sake of good manners and most especially when speaking with someone of greater power – ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’  However, this prayer lacks these seemingly expected words.

Jesus strove to be succinct.  He wanted this prayer to be easily memorized and to avoid the wordiness of the dramatic show that false prophets put on when praying in public spaces.  Jesus offers this prayer for our use in a direct way.

Just as the relationality is conveyed by identifying God as a parent (Father) is paired with the otherness[1] and transcendent nature[2] of God, we also find that in the demands of the one in prayer a paired humility.  Biblical commentator Douglas John Hall notes that “Give us” indicates dependency and earnest need; “Forgive us” means we are ‘guilty’; “Deliver us” expresses our sense of being vulnerable and feeling lost.[3]  The greater the desperation, the less there is time for the pleasantries of miscellaneous words like ‘please’ and ‘thank you.’  Imagine someone drowning trying to shout: “Please kind person, would you mind dropping what is in your arms for a moment and coming to me to pull me from the water because I believe I am struggling to stay above the surface.  I’d be most grateful.”  In this kind of desperate situation, we are more likely to hear a simple and firm: “Help!”

In the same way, the Lord’s Prayer shapes us as we pray it.  In the opening words, we find ourselves humbled by the divinity, power, and sovereignty of God the parent who is above and beyond this physical world, and yet who also desires to be in such close relationship with us.  In our earnest prayer, we find the simplicity of the articulated needs an elevated sense of vulnerability and urgency – ‘give us,’ ‘forgive us,’ ‘deliver us.’

Embrace this prayer anew in what it tells us about God and what it indicates about ourselves and our reliance upon God.  For it is in our vulnerability, we find ourselves clinging more intently on our God (our Father) who sent his Son to overcome humanity’s greatest weaknesses – sin and death.  These may very well be considered one in the same.  As Paul’s letter to the Colossians tells us, Jesus put to shame the greatest of earthly powers, the commands of the powerful, who sought control through the silence of death.  Overcoming death, Jesus has perfected our redemption, and as Paul says: “God made you alive together with him.” [Colossians 2:13]

Pray the Lord’s Prayer.  Put your trust in God.  Be vulnerable.  For good measure, be persistent in your prayer, just as the neighbor was persistent in asking for food on behalf of a friend.  For in our weakness, we find our greatest strength in faith and our deepest relationship with our Father in heaven. 

Let His kingdom come.  Amen.

[1] Hall, Douglas John. Feasting on the Word. Year C, Volume 3. 2010. pg 288.

[2] Hall, Douglas John. Feasting on the Word. Year C, Volume 3. 2010. pg 288.

[3] Hall, Douglas John. Feasting on the Word. Year C, Volume 3. 2010. pg 290.