Matthew 6:5-15
5 “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. 7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
9 “This, then, is how you should pray:
“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
10 your kingdom come,
your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us today our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.'"
Introduction
The next three posts will focus on prayer, and how we can pray creatively and personally and directly. These posts will be based on the teaching of one of the most important theologians, Martin Luther (1483-1546). Martin Luther was probably the most significant figure in the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, which separated the Holy Roman Church from the Protestant churches. So, we all owe a lot to Luther, and his teachings remain valuable for us. I am going to take Luther’s ideas and modernize them, making them my own prayers. The title of the essay by Luther I will be working with is A Simple Way to Pray, which was written for Luther’s barber, one Master Peter Berkendorf, in the Spring of 1535. I don’t think we know much about Peter Berkendorf, except that he was Luther’s barber and wanted to know how to pray. Luther was a top-notch theologian, but, like all theologians worth their salt, he was primarily a church leader who helped people express their faith. So when confronted with the very simple question of how to pray, he gave it some serious thought and wrote an eleven page essay. Luther says that there are three great catalysts for prayer:The Lord’s Prayer
The 10 Commandments, and the
Apostles Creed
Today, I want to look at what Luther says about the Lord’s Prayer.
Martin Luther (For a nice overview of Luther and his accomplishments, see Justo Gonzalez's A History of Christian Thought, vol. III)
Martin Luther was a somewhat moody young man with strong religious inclinations. He enrolled in a Catholic monastery in 1505, at the age of 21, with the goal of becoming a priest. He did not take his vows lightly. He was a dedicated pupil and was ordained as a priest. During the first couple of years of Luther’s studies at the monastery, there is no indication that he found Catholic teachings to be troublesome or that his vows were a burden to him. He was willing and eager and exemplary.
In fact, he enrolled in the monastery for the purpose of making himself right before God, or purifying himself. And so he led a strictly disciplined life, which included excessive fasting. In later years he would say that he thought the fasting he undertook in those days had resulted in some permanent damage to his body, but he found that it did little spiritual good and so he became disillusioned with his spiritual progress. Real concerns began to grow in Luther when he saw how the Catholic Church of his day was abusing the relics and indulgences that were to be used to grant forgiveness of sins. He saw that the Catholic Church’s use of indulgences was insufficient and he began to doubt Catholic doctrine.Following the advice of a friend, Luther gave himself to studying the Bible and found therein a doctrine of justification different from the one he was taught in the monastery. Then, in 1517, Luther composed his ninety-five theses, which challenged the doctrine of indulgences. The ninety-five theses were like the spark that sets off a powder keg and from that point on Luther garnered support from others who were dissatisfied with the Catholic Church and from that point on we talk about the growth of the Protestant Church.
I found Luther’s advice on prayer to be refreshing and personally helpful. Luther advises his barber to pray like a child. He advises that true prayer occurs when the meditations of the heart find authentic expression in the words of our mouth. The Lord’s Prayer, the Ten Commandments, and the Apostles Creed are guides to expressing the concerns of our heart. By basing our prayer life on these classic expression of faith, our meditations are grounded on a foundation that exists beyond ourselves. And, so, our prayer is not completely subject to our whims, our moods, our frustration at being cut off in traffic. Our whims, moods, and frustrations are legitimately an important part of our prayer, because they are an important part of our authentic selves but Luther's way of prayer has a grounding that transcends our own subjectivity before incorporating it in a transformative way.
Prayer is essential to spiritual growth because in true prayer we surrender our wills more and more to God and, so, we come into contact with God’s presence. When our lives are punctuated by moments of contact and formation with God we are changed into reflections of God’s grace and love. We can then live the lives we wish to live, the lives that are the outward expressions of our inward prayers.
It is good to let prayer be the first thing we do in the morning and the last thing we do at night. Whatever you do, do not fall in the trap of saying, “I’ll pray tomorrow, or I will pray in an hour, or I will pray at some later time.” The habit of pushing prayer away until someday less busy, someday less hectic, can be stifling to our spiritual growth. As Creedence Clearwater Revival has told us repeatedly, “Someday Never Comes.” Make prayer the bookend around your day, framing the rest of your activities. Luther wants to be sure that his readers break the inner narrative that always finds a reason to ignore prayer, because that voice can begin to take on more and more power in a person’s life. That inner narrative is changed by replacing it with simple prayer.
A Simple Way to Pray
So this is what Luther advises: When your heart is warmed toward prayer he says a person should kneel or stand with hands folded and eyes toward heaven. I am not so sure if that exact position is so important, but I do know that lounging in the lazy-boy is not the best posture for prayer. Sure, you can pray in your lazy-boy, but I’ve had too many experiences of praying, praying, snoring……… If you are kneeling or standing, you won’t be falling asleep. Sometimes the whole body needs to get into the act of praying, like Luther was suggesting. You could sit on the floor with your legs crossed and your back straight, or you could sit up straight in a sturdy, stiff chair. Pick a position that isn’t so comfortable you will fall asleep, pick a position that says, “now I am getting down to the serious work of letting God align my heart with eternity.”
Then pray or think something simple like this to begin your prayer time:
“Dear God, I don’t have much to bring to you right now. I know you are not at my disposal, but I am coming to you as best I can and I ask that your grace would fill me so that I know how to pray and what to pray. I trust that you are with me and hearing me even now. And so I pray what Jesus taught us to pray, ‘Our Father who is in Heaven, etc, etc,” through the whole Lord’s prayer, word for word.
After praying through the Lord’s prayer, repeat one part of the Lord’s prayer and expound upon it. You can repeat as little or as much of the prayer as you want. Do whatever rises up in you. So you could repeat the first petition of the Lord’s prayer, “Hallowed be thy name” and, then, add your own prayer. Maybe something like this:
“Yes, Lord God, loving and perfect, teach me to revere your name and may my life be an act of devotion to you. When I think about the beauty of the created world, and your gracious accompaniment with me, I am filled with awe. I can’t even comprehend your patient, steadfast love from generation to generation, from eternity to eternity. You have worked wonders in my life and in the lives of so many.
Dear God, overcome all things that are contrary to your will. Where there is violence, sew peace. Where there is hatred, sew love. Where people are persecuted for your name’s sake, bring justice. Where there is suffering bring dignity. Convert the hearts of all those who mistakenly seek to set up self-love and pride where you call for sacrificial-love and mercy. May our politicians, the most powerful of our society, as well as people of every station, including myself, be transformed in spirit and mind so that all people can honor You.”
So you would use the first phrase of the Lord’s prayer as inspiration for your own prayer, making your prayer applicable to your own life and situation.
Then you could move on to the second petition of the Lord’s prayer: “Thy Kingdom come.” You could then expound upon this phrase and say something like:
“Holy God, you alone see the extent to which the pursuit of wealth and power corrupt the human heart. May I be cured of my desire to be admired, may I be healed of the search for status and the false-securities I seek to place around myself. Convert me into an agent of your kingdom, who lives by faith and who counts everything a loss if it is not a foretaste of the world made right.”
In Luther’s essay, he goes through the rest of the Lord’s prayer offering his own exposition as a sample of the types of prayers one might choose to say.
When you are done with your prayer, you can say “Amen” which literally means “Verily, verily” or “truly, truly” and is a statement of faith that God has heard our prayers. When we say “Amen,” we are affirming that God hears the prayers of those who seek God out. Sometimes you might close your prayer with “thank you,” which again affirms that God is with us and listens to us. It is not a demand that God do everything our way, it is a statement of faith that God listens to us.
The examples I have given here are not meant to be prescriptive, but are meant to be springboards for your own prayers. This is a simple way of meditating with God and seeing what rises up as God gives you the words for your prayers. If your heart is warmed to prayer and if your spirit is seeking God, the prayer can be offered in many different ways and can vary from day to day.
It might be that you become so involved in praying the first line of the Lord’s prayer that you never make it through the rest. That’s fine. Be flexible and responsive to what the Spirit is doing in you. As Luther says, do not obstruct the prayer that comes up: “The Holy Spirit himself preaches here, and one word of his sermon is far better than a thousand of our prayers” (4).
It is important that the heart is properly inclined to prayer and that one is prepared to be serious in prayer. If we are constantly distracted by other thoughts and our mind is wandering all over the place, we might not be taking prayer seriously. This does not mean we should not try to pray when we are scattered, just that we should ask God to give us focus. Luther must have had a sense of humor because as an example of this scattered type of prayer he wrote about the priest who prayed,
"Deus in adjutorium meum intende. Farmhand, did you unhitch the horses? Domine ad adjuvandum me festina. Maid, go out and milk the cow. Gloria patti et filio et spiritui sancto. Hurry up, boy, I wish the [fevers] would take you!"
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| The random thoughts in my head! |
Luther’s advice to his barber is to be attentive in prayer and to be attentive in his work. If he is distracted when he is giving a shave he could do a lot of damage. Likewise, if his prayers are distracted by trying to converse with his customers and do his job, they will not be the serious, attentive type of prayer that Luther thinks is valuable. So Luther applies to one’s work and to prayer the proverb: “He who thinks of many things, thinks of nothing and does nothing right.” And then he adds, “How much more does prayer call for concentration and singleness of heart if it is to be a good prayer!”
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