Dear God, My Turtle Died
David C. Myers
March 8, 2009
Prayer Sunday and Lent 2
Matthew 6:5 - 14
Luke 18:1 - 8
Text: "Pray then, like this: . . . " . . . Matthew 6:9a
Some years ago, more than I care to remember, when I was a pastor in Lowell, Massachusetts, I answered the telephone early one morning. A strange, very young voice asked, "Is this Rev. Myers?" When I assured him it was, he said, "My name is Ronald. I'm seven years old. I have a big police dog. He is eleven years old. He has to have a very serious operation today. Will you say a prayer for him?"
I don't know Ted, a third-grader. I only read a letter he wrote that was published in a periodical. "Dear God, Morgan, my turtle died. I got another one." And then Ted, with third grade logic adds this line to show God who is boss, "You better not let it happen again."
What about God and pets. What about God and the many details of our lives? And while we're at it, why not ask the big question - what about God and prayer? How does God operate? How much does God care about us; about the details of our lives?
This is a timeless question, one that plagued even the disciples. Within Christendom there are varieties of beliefs and opinions concerning the nature and degrees of Divine activity. Some see God as the Lord of all details. I have some problems here with this line of thinking and believing.
Some years ago I had to be at an early meeting about 45 minutes from home on a very foggy morning. It was difficult to even read the street signs, and I had missed one particularly important turn. I arrived about 10 minutes late, missing devotions, but not the introductions. As one woman introduced herself she said, "I could not see where to turn, but when I got to the intersection the Lord opened up the fog and I could see clearly." I had recently passed that same intersection - the one where I missed the turn - but apparently with less help from the Lord. I suspect some of you know why - I could have been left wondering why God didn't lift the fog for me.
I know many of you are avid Redskin fans. And since your passion for them runs as deep as Boston fans' passion for the Red Sox, I am sure that if you are old enough you will remember this story. In 1972 you may recall that the "Skins" played the Dallas Cowboys for the championship of the National Football Conference. If they won they would go to the Super Bowl. The Redskins, as you may recall, won a decisive victory. Following the game, on national TV, they showed the team gathered for a prayer. It went like this, "We thank you, Lord, for helping make us the champions we are." Two weeks later the same "'Skins" team played the Miami Dolphins for the Super Bowl and were beaten just as decisively as they had beaten the Cowboys. Following their earlier prayer logic, did God either not hear their prayer that day, or did God simply deem the Dolphins to be the champions?
What about God and dogs and turtles and fog and football teams? What about our prayer lives? Does our sense of worth or the depth of our faith depend on how God answers our prayers?
Today is Prayer Sunday - the day we focus on one of the four pledges we made last November 23 (or thereabouts) as we filled out our pledge cards. Prayer and Holy conversation with God has long been on the minds of people of faith. Many of the Psalms are prayers, prayers of many different types:
• Confession, like David's great confession in Psalm 51;
•Thanksgiving, like Psalm 100;
•Prayers of comfort, like Psalm 23;
•And prayers that question and doubt, and then give thanks, like Psalm 121.
How do we converse with the Almighty? Those closest to Jesus, the disciples, wondered how to pray. They were following a wandering Rabbi named Jesus. The nearest contemporary to Jesus' was John the Baptist; and apparently John had given a very detailed pattern of how to pray. And maybe this is why Jesus, when the disciples asked Him how they should pray, said, "Pray then like this . . ."
Those very words reveal that the Lord's Prayer, as we have come to call it, is not a creedal or doctrinal statement. Jesus did not say, "Pray this . . ." but rather, "pray then like this." Jesus purpose was not to teach us a doctrinal statement about our faith, but Jesus gave us an example of what true prayer is like. In fact, biblical scholars generally agree that the Prayer of Jesus is really an expanding by way of example the verses immediately preceding it that are instructions about prayer.
And we should note that it is not a singular prayer. The very first word is the inclusive word "our". By saying the Lord's Prayer and beginning with the word "our", you cannot pray it alone. You are including everyone who joins in that prayer. It has been translated into over 100 hundred different tongues across the ages and the globe. The petitions often begin in the plural: "Give us", "Forgive us", "Lead us not" and "Deliver us".
But also by beginning with the word "Our" we are praying the same way Jesus prayed. Jesus, Who was crucified and resurrected. And as our "our" joins with the "our" that Jesus spoke, our life and death joins with His as well. This anticipates the possibility for transformation and new life for us all.
Then Jesus prayed, "Who is in Heaven."
Heaven in Jesus' time was term rich in meaning, and very practical. Heaven was not so much a place, because "even the heavens cannot contain God" (II Chronicles 32:20), but more of a qualitative description where God transcends the physical realm to touch our souls with truth.
Reflect with me, if you will. The person or persons who you have been most intimate with are those who awe you with beauty and a special sense of the unknown - and yet that unknown is transcended (broken through) with love. We don't feel distance from them, but instead we sense a welcoming, forgiving, and graceful closeness that invites us in to their presence and being. So when we pray, "Who is in Heaven" it is intended to be an expression of intimacy and closeness, and not of distance. Perhaps, we might even translate it to be "Our God, Who reveals Heaven to us in our daily living."
The transcendence of God revealing the mysterious unknown of grace and accepting love can also be illustrated by this story of the great Greek statue of Apollo. Many people stare and study that statue, but I knew a person who said, "I visit the statue and spend half my time studying Apollo in all his beauty and the other half studying people as they study Apollo. As they study Apollo they change, their posture improves, they become brighter and more beautiful as the transcendent nature of God is revealed through Apollo."
The Prayer of Jesus is a prayer of seven petitions. That's right, petitions - they are demands made of God. Did you ever notice the way this is written? All of this prayer that Jesus taught is telling people to demand things of God. And we might rightly ask, what right do we, the children of God, have to demand things of God?
Jesus set the context when He said begin by saying "Abba". That is the word from Jesus' own tongue. Notice how much it sounds - in any language - like a baby's cry for its parent. So, like a baby demanding that its parents feed them, change their diapers, give them something to drink, or protect them, we pray as a young child looking to God our parent to provide those necessities of life for us.
The first three of the seven petitions are directed to God:
•"Hallowed be Thy name" God, make your name holy, show us that you are God.
•"Thy Kingdom come" God, show us the way to live, teach us how to play together.
•"Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" God, don't make us wait forever, let it happen now.
The next four petitions are about how we are to live our lives in community:
•"Give us this day the bread we need" God, provide us with only those things we really need.
•"Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us" God, your nature is love; forgive us as we forgive others.
•"Lead us not into temptation" God, keep us from all the temptations of the world - wealth, power, dishonesty.
•"Deliver us from evil" - and God, when evil is all around give us the strength to say "No!"
This prayer reminds us that all things of life are interconnected. Did you ever stop to think about the thoughts God must have had while God was deciding what the world would be like. It may be a major fault of mine, but sometimes my mind wanders and wonders about what it must have been like for God to decide just how to construct this world. I think that God - you know, God in three persons, blessed Trinity - hmmmmmm, three - must have thought of creating the world as a triangle. But then God realized that there would be too many different triangle shapes to choose from. Then perhaps God thought of a square; but realized there would be too many sharp corners. Then God thought about shaping the world like a pentagon - but not for long! Then God decided on a circle because a circle has many unique properties. Think about it. As a circle or a globe people and things can only appear to be perfectly straight, but because of the curvature, they are not perfect. Or, that everybody standing on the globe has to face somebody else - if the globe was transparent (I got this idea from the Mapatorium at the Mother Church of Christian Science in Boston - they have a globe about 25 feet in diameter that you walk through). And if somebody should be so snobbish as to try to get away from others by turning upward, that person would be staring face to face with God, the only other being in the whole universe (as near as we can tell).
The interconnectedness of all life can be best illustrated by a hive of bees. As you probably know, in a beehive, bees have specialized functions. And in the heat of summer, there are special bees that wet their wings with water and return to the hive and while inside flap their wings to provide a natural air-conditioning system. And when it gets too cold in the winter, the food available stored in the honeycombs is shared by all the bees as long as it lasts. When it runs out, the entire hive dies the same day.
Our interconnectedness comes from the Creation stories in Genesis. We are given "dominion" to be "Lord-like" over all living creatures of the world. And yet as we destroy our environment and our resources we only begin to learn this lesson over and over again because we are not "Lord-like". Perhaps instead of exercising our power to do as we please, we need to exercise the power of love that God has graciously and abundantly given us. In this way will all have the simple things we need. This thought is in the Lord's Prayer petition that says, "give us this day the food we need" or as we commonly translate it, "our daily bread." Notice that we are not praying for excesses, or more than anyone else has - just what we need.
We pray that we might be delivered from both evil and temptation. And in this culture we know that evil and temptation are all around us. We are tempted by so much that is superfluous to a quality of life. We are tempted by power, by wealth, and by many things.
And so we go back to the beginning. As we pray "Your Kingdom come," in many ways, it is a lament - it is a lament for the gap between God's realm of peace and justice and the world reality that we experience every day. This is a cry, a cry from people who want to be better and to live in a better world - a cry for a different kind of world. It reflects the deepest longings of our heart that says that all of God's children can live together in peace with justice for all. In so many ways the Prayer of Jesus is an example of prayer, but also an example of how to live.
Praying "Thy Kingdom come," helps us to remember that "it isn't all about us", but rather our world, our interconnectedness with others, that our lives are about God's plan for us. This reminds us to center our lives not around ourselves, but rather toward God's will. It helps us pledge allegiance to God and not the seductive powers of power, economics, and culture that lure us into selfish ways, and to the kind of corporate living that God wants from us. So praying, "Thy Kingdom come" is a way of praying for God's wisdom and the courage we need to make it happen.
Or, as one of the slogans goes for a hunger relief agency - "live simply so that others may simply live." When we pray, "give us this day the bread we need" we need to pause to consider how the word "us" can mean all of God's created sons and daughters of the whole world, as well as those close by us.
There are so many prayers that we have. It is our way of talking to God - not that God needs us to talk, but that it helps us focus on the essential, on what really is important. Some are prayers asking for healing. Some ask for peace and justice. Some are prayers for things local, others for things global. And remember Jesus said, "Pray then like this . . ." and then told us to demand these requests of God. When you pray, don't be shy with God. God can take your demands and can even take your anger. God's feelings won't be hurt.