This is a sermon that I preached on Sunday, 7/27/25, at Berkeley Friends Church. The scripture reading for this sermon was: Luke 11:1-13. You can listen to the audio, or keeping scrolling to read my manuscript. (The spoken sermon differs from the written text.)
A Silent Quaker Learns to Pray With Words
When I enrolled at Earlham School of Religion – the Quaker seminary in Richmond, Indiana – I wasn’t quite a Christian yet. I had experienced the love and power of the Holy Spirit. I had started reading the Bible and loved the Jesus that I encountered there. But I had a lot of questions. I wasn’t sure how to make sense of all the theological affirmations that Christianity represented.
But something I discovered during my time at seminary was that the “belief” part of Christianity was only one side of the coin that I had to wrestle with. In some ways, belief was only the tip of the iceberg. Much deeper were the practices of discipleship, truthfulness, compassion and service to others. I discovered that being a Christian involves developing a lot of habits as almost a form of muscle memory. Like learning to play an instrument or run a marathon, becoming a disciple of Jesus means becoming a practitioner of his way, not just a believer.
When I arrived at seminary, I was a member of a Liberal Quaker meeting. It was the type of meeting where almost the whole worship time was in silence. No sermon, no order of worship. We did sing a few songs at the very beginning, but then we just sat in silence for an hour or so. Sometimes there would be messages, other times there weren’t.
For those of you who are familiar with Liberal Quakerism, you won’t be surprised to know that there wasn’t a whole lot of vocal prayer. Most of the time, when there was to be a time of prayer, we simply held silence. When someone was sick or in trouble, we would “hold them in the light.” That was about as close to intercessory prayer as we got.
So imagine my surprise and discomfort when I discovered that, in most Christian churches, it was normal to say prayers with words! I remember there was always a prayer circle outside of the seminary cafeteria before our weekly Common Meal, and one of us would pray out loud. People talked to God in public. They asked God for things directly. As a silent-type Quaker, this was a whole new world for me.
The Mystery of Prayer
Eventually, I tried out this whole spoken prayer thing, too. It was weird; it took some getting used to. I mean, really, what does it mean to say, “God, bless this food”, or, “Holy Spirit, send healing love to our friend who is in the hospital”? What does it mean to tell God about our problems, as if speaking to a friend or a parent, and ask for help? What does it mean to tell God how much we love him, just because?
I wish I could tell you I’ve figured it out, but this whole prayer thing is still a mystery to me. It’s not magic; we don’t automatically get what we want just by saying certain words or making the appropriate sacrifice. So there’s no “science” of prayer, where we can act and observe a reproducible effect. And yet, I would also say that, in my experience, “prayer works.” Prayer changes things. Prayer changes me, and prayer changes the world. God answers prayer in ways large and small, seen and unseen.
Learning to pray has been a journey for me. It’s taken a lot of practice. And I’m still practicing. I’m still learning to trust in God and act like a fool, talking to God in ways that I can’t ever fully comprehend. I feel like a small child asking a parent for help. I don’t know how Mom and Dad are going to deal with the situation, but I trust that they are strong and wise enough to take care of whatever trouble I’m in.
Jesus Teaches Us How To Pray
In our reading this morning from the Gospel of Luke, the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. John the Baptist had taught his disciples how to pray properly, and Jesus’ disciples wanted to know what their brand of prayer was to be.
In response to this question, Jesus gives a very brief, very simple prayer:
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your Kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins, as we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.
That’s it. That’s the whole prayer. It’s very simple, but there’s a lot depth here. Let’s take it line by line.
Father, hallowed be your name
The very first word says so much: “Father.” Jesus teaches us to address God as Father, Abba – the Papa God. After two thousand years of Christianity, we’re used to calling God “Father”, but in Jesus’ first-century, Jewish setting, this intimate way of addressing God was unusual, distinctive, and scandalous. Pious Jews of Jesus’ time – Pharisees or Sadducees – would have referred to God as “Lord” or “God of our fathers” or “King of the universe”; it would have been unusual, perhaps unheard of, to refer to God as “Father.”
If you want to get a sense of how it might have felt for the other Jews of the time to hear Jesus praying to God like this, imagine if I insisted on praying to God as “Daddy.” Maybe you wouldn’t call me a heretic, but you’d probably think I was weird!
This is how Jesus prayed to God, and it’s how he taught us to pray. With the intimacy and vulnerability of a small child asking a parent for help. With the love that says, “hallowed be your name” – you’re the best, Dad. I love you so much. Thank you for listening and responding when I call.
Your kingdom come
What does it mean for God’s kingdom to come? The Gospel of Matthew thought the answer was non-obvious, so he expanded the prayer to add another clause: “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
Matthew isn’t wrong! This is a good summary of what it means for God’s kingdom to come. When God’s kingdom is present – when we are following God as our sovereign authority – things on earth are in harmony, order, and peace, just as they are in the heart and mind of God.
When we pray that God’s kingdom come, we are praying that our lives would be so transformed that the presence of God would shine out from our lives and fill the whole cosmos with light.
It goes back to that Father language, that trustworthy Papa God who loves us so much. We can trust the order that he brings when he shows up. When Dad is here, we know that things are going to be ok, for us and the whole world.
Give us each day our daily bread
Jesus teaches us to expect God to provide for us. This resonates with many other parts of Jesus’ ministry, from the Sermon on the Mount to the feeding of the five thousand: Following Jesus means that we can rely on God to take care of us. We’re commanded not to worry and trust God to provide.
This calls us back to the experience of the Hebrews wandering in the wilderness of Sinai, where God provided fresh manna each day. Everyone had as much as they needed, but any extra they gathered was eaten up by worms. The Hebrews learned to trust God for daily bread, realizing both that God was reliable and that storing up for the future was useless.
Here in this prayer, Jesus teaches us to ask God to provide our daily material needs. God will deliver. But that word “daily” is not an accident. As followers of Jesus, we can and should expect to be provided for like the wandering Hebrews in the Book of Exodus, but we also should expect to seek that providence day by day. We have to be persistent. The kingdom of God is one of daily bread, not storehouses of grain.
And forgive us our sins
We’ve all done bad things. Hurt other people. Lied. Cheated. Stolen. This much should be obvious, and it would have been obvious to the people who first heard this prayer from the mouth of Jesus. The religion of Jesus’ day was all a matter of sin – how to know when you had committed it, and how to get it wiped away through good deeds and animal sacrifice.
What is revolutionary in this part of Jesus’ prayer is that there is no mention of animal sacrifice or even a checklist of good deeds to perform. In Jesus’ prayer, there is only one stipulation for receiving forgiveness.
For we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us
Oh boy. So it turns out that there is a catch. Jesus teaches us to ask for and receive forgiveness freely. But while forgiveness is a gift, it comes with conditions. We’re only freed from our sins when we extend the same grace to others.
Just as God forgives us for the ways we’ve missed the mark and done what we know is wrong, he expects us to waive the debt of those who owe us. God is practicing radical generosity with his forgiveness – no rule-following or animal sacrifices necessary! We are to mirror that same radical generosity through our treatment of those who owe us money.
This is critical. It seems that these two issues – God’s forgiveness of sin and our forgiveness of debt – are two sides of the same coin; each one enacts and expresses the other. The practice of economic generosity to those who don’t deserve it is the way that God’s forgiveness of sin breaks into the world in a radical, tangible way. Receiving undeserved forgiveness from God gives us power to do something as radical as giving our money away to those who won’t repay us.
We’re beginning to see that this whole prayer fits together: We can forgive because we have been forgiven. We have been forgiven because God is our Papa. We are safe because he provides for us. We must release the debt of others, because he provides that bread daily. We are not to store up for tomorrow through debt obligations that take food out of the mouths of others. God’s got this.
And do not bring us to the time of trial
But we know that, far too often, it doesn’t seem like God is in control. The sparrow falls. The flowers of the field are here today and gone tomorrow. Surely the people are grass. Suffering and death come for all of us.
But not all suffering is created equal. There’s the school of hard knocks, where we learn things from bad luck and mistreatment. There are even times of suffering where God feels closer to us than before.
In contrast to this, there is the time of trial. These are moments when we truly are pushed to our limits and tested. Jesus instructs us not to seek these kinds of tests, but to ask God to deliver us from them. A loving father may present a child with reasonable challenges – like eating their veggies! – but he would never expose that child to something that would be truly dangerous for them. In the same way, this prayer teaches us to lean on God to guide us through the challenges of life in ways that stretch us, but don’t break us.
How Do We Pray the Lord’s Prayer?
I’m thinking back to how I learned to pray out loud in seminary. I’ve been practicing this kind of conversational prayer ever since. I find that sometimes, simply talking with God is helpful. It’s not the only way, of course. I still often pray in wordless silence.
Sometimes I pray the Lord’s Prayer (as found in the Gospel of Matthew) as part of my personal practice with the Anglican rosary. This prayer is a set spoken prayer that can be prayed aloud at any moment, and I find this very helpful.
But the Lord’s Prayer is not meant to be merely recited. Like all prayer, it is meant to be embodied, to be lived. We can pray the Lord’s prayer in silence as we move through our days. We pray it when we trust in God to provide for us moment by moment, when we turn to God as our loving Papa who has our backs and won’t allow us to be pushed beyond what we can handle.
We pray the Lord’s prayer when we do better than justice, when we release people from debt when they owe us money, or forgive those who “owe” us in other ways. When we live our lives in ways that allow God’s love and mercy to shine through, we make the kingdom of God real when and where we are.
A Pattern of Life
Jesus didn’t give us a rote prayer that we are required to recite as a religious obligation; he gave us a pattern to live by. The words of the Lord’s Prayer are just the tip of the iceberg; the deep growth comes when we develop a life that is shaped by these words.
Who is God calling you to forgive? Who has stolen from you? Who owes you something that you’d like to have back? What would it mean to release them from that debt, regardless of whether they deserve it or not? What would it feel like to go beyond justice, showing mercy to someone else, the same way God has shown you mercy?
What are you afraid of? What are you storing up so that you don’t ever have to be vulnerable? You can release your grip. The Papa God loves you and will take care of you.
Trust the God who sends manna in the wilderness. When you forgive others, you are set free.