Today’s passage is about prayer. Ironically although prayer is so central to faith and to worship it ties us in knots sometimes. If we really understand how prayer works, we would understand the problem of free will, and also the problem of evil. Because how much is our effort and how much is God’s. Should we be passive and let God do it all, or take things into our own hands. If we have prayed about something does that make the decision right. We will all have experienced deep disappointment in prayer. As well as the suspicion that we are asking the wrong questions, that we are subtly misunderstanding. We wonder do our doubts about prayer invalidate them? 
We wonder why when we pray so hard there seems to be so little to show for our prayers in the world. 

So I don’t have any answers, just a few thoughts. I want to begin with a recent opinion piece in the Washington Post. An older  Jewish woman called Kim had developed a rare sarcoma, and had opted for palliative care. She said:
The first telehealth meeting began with a standard discussion about my current health and a confirmation that I was not in physical pain. And then the doctor moved on to explore how my mental health was holding up.
It was the Friday before Election Day, and I said that, although my prognosis was lousy, I was just as worried about the state of the nation as about myself. As the child of Holocaust survivors, I was especially unsettled. “I’ve spent my life doing social justice work, and I am not okay with fascism taking over the country,” I said.
My doctor’s face froze. And that, in turn, jolted me. “We don’t have to discuss that,” my physician said. “We’ll keep that separate from caring for you.”
But I did feel a need to discuss it. The values of fairness and human rights for all, which had been guideposts for my life’s work, were under threat. To me, the historic moment in which we find ourselves seemed intimately connected to how I would process my impending death.
And then I surprised myself by asking what really mattered to her. More remarkable was her clear and candid response. “You know, I’m a medical doctor,” she told me. “But we are trained to help elicit how someone is doing, mentally, emotionally, spiritually. I am happy to share with you that I’m a Christian, and that’s a really big part of my life. I’m not here to be a pastor or a chaplain, per se, but we do try to support people with how they’re coping and navigating their illness and other things that are weighing on them.”

The woman’s friends suggested she find another doctor, but that didn’t sit well with her. Kim  wrote a piece for the Washington post but she thought she had run it past her physician first. They had a candid and deep conversation about their respective beliefs. They grew closer even though their understanding of faith and life and death were so different. In the end the doctor said:

Though I grieve and lament the brokenness around us and some of the actions of an imperfect government (sincerely, I do), I don’t fear or worry about the outcome of an election or what follows,” “God will execute perfect justice, his perfect judgment, and he is perfectly in control. He gets the final say and every single person will give an account for their actions taken in this life, myself included. The real thing to fear is whether you’ll stand on your own merit before a perfectly holy and just God or you’ll stand fully forgiven in the sinless righteousness of another, Jesus Christ.”

Now there is a lot we could discuss in this powerful exchange. And it isn’t about prayer on the surface. But really it is.  The doctor’s faith believed that once they had prayed about an election it somehow or other validated the result. The exchange then really elucidates how we struggle with prayer. For many Christians because God is absolutely sovereign everything that happens is God’s will in some way, even a person as disruptive as Trump. And if people have been praying about something like an election and Trump wins that makes it even more the case that this was meant to be. 

While the survivor of a family that were victims of the holocaust would see the hand of history in a quite different way. 

Let’s get back to Jesus’ simple words. For the disciples, too, were wrestling over this in different ways.
He starts, Our Father and the word  is abba, or beloved father. Immediately we know that God might in some sense be all powerful, but in other ways relates to us a beloved father.
Hallowed be your name, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

This is an important framing of the prayer. Yes God might be sovereign, but God’s will is not yet done on earth. And however much we pray God’s will remains not done. The part not done seems to grow larger and more urgent all the time. But then we remember the parable of the wheat and the tares. We were never told things would get better and better.  But this should be our primary orientation in praying. That the will of a beloved father should come through the cracks in our lives. 

Immediately we know we can’t just use God as a Father Christmas figure, or like a vending machine—prayer in, result out. The prayer must be to the greater end of the will of the loving God. 

Give us this day our daily bread. There it is. We are allowed and encouraged and even commanded to pray for our own individual and family and community needs. We should not hold back. A few weeks ago we went to a lecture by a Jewish psychiatrist who had done prayer studies. One of the things he said was that people tended to pray they would cope. They tended not to pray for healing. Why do we hold back?  Probably because we don’t want to be disappointed. Or because we think the provision of food and medicine is our role, our province and not God’s. 

Then immediately though. Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.  And lead us not into temptation. Deliver us from evil.(Matthew 6)  We are allowed and commanded to pray for our own needs, for our daily bread, but then we are brought face to face with the context which is the moral community. We don’t pray in isolation. We pray as moral beings, accountable to others. We can’t pray that we flourish while ignoring forgiveness, without ignoring that larger forces and powers of evil are at large.
Our doubts and equivocations and weaknesses don’t invalidate our prayer. But perhaps a lack of forgiveness might. 

We can understand Life on earth, for us and for Jesus as a dynamic flow, a relationship. We are not just puppets. Our agency matters. God is entering into a relationship with us. 

Prayer is an integral essential part of that relationship. IT is hardest to do alone and that’s one reason we meet together to pray. That’s one reason the rhythms of the liturgy are comforting. We pray not only for ourselves, but with others and with the church, the church historic, the church present and the church to come.

But to pray is to accept our need to take responsibility in the moral community as well.
The doctor above. She did that by taking on the mantel of healing and comforting the dying.
But Kim, the Jewish woman, was doing it too, by treating her doctor as an important moral interlocutor, as someone worth entering into dialogue with. She was forgiving her and receiving a blessing from her at the same time.  The doctor too, asked for forgiveness for her abrupt initial response.
They continued their conversation, finding much common ground. Kim had been taught to seek justice without necessarily expecting a reward. The doctor said, if you don’t expect a judgment why not just live as you want.
They continued the dialogue.
Kim ended by saying:
if we are to dig ourselves out of the harsh standoff in which we find ourselves, I have to continue to believe that people can change their minds, that the moral arc of our universe is indeed long (maybe very long) but bends toward justice, that we can expand our self-interest to embrace one another and the world. I’d like to die with that hope intact. 

IT is amazing really how complicated and potentially dividing faith can be.
But it is only divisive and confusing because it is so personal and so important.
We have been walking in England, and every day we wandered into one small church after another. Always open, and always steeped in prayer and the signs and symbols of generations past. Some were obviously in good heart. In fact there are some signs that faith in England is gently coursing upwards again. But it was the certainty that these had been places of prayer that was so powerful. 

But just one last thing. There is this strange mention of evil. Deliver us from evil No time to discuss that in detail but the Bible is full of the language of powers and principalities, Mentioned in today’s reading Colossians 2. or what Walter Wink calls the Domination System. As Christians we are tasked with discerning where evil lies and calling on the gifts of the Spirit, to counter these powers. 

These powers lurk and inhabit our civic and church life. They inhabit governments and institutions including churches. A part of praying is so that we might inhabit the mind of the Father, and be better at discernment. Ironically in the exchange above, it is the secular Jewish woman who is discerning the power of evil and wanting to be assured that people will be resisting and overcoming this evil.  While if we listen to Paul and to Luke it is exactly the role of the Christian. Prayer helps us to discern these things and to act. Prayer should not be seen as just a way of sitting back and letting god be sovereign. It is an active way of resisting evil. As Christians, if we do believe in prayer, it should not just be for our daily bread. It should also be we that are discerning and active in public and civic life, as Kim, the secular Jewish woman was. If appropriate we too should be disturbed by some election results because as active moral agents it is up to us to act to counter and resist evil wherever it is.