St Mary’s Parish Church Pinchbeck

Prayer

Sunday 29 July 2007

I want to begin by thanking you so much for inviting me to preach this morning and also for the warm welcome you have given to our family as we settle down as permanent residents of Pinchbeck.

And what a more wonderful thing to preach about than prayer, the very centre of Christian life and the expression of our relationship with God. The expression of our faith and it is only in that faith that any healing can occur either spiritually or physically.

Today in the Gospel reading we are given the great prayer of Jesus - the Lord’s Prayer - the Our Father. It is a prayer for all times and for every occasion. It embraces in its short and simple phrases every relation ???? between us and our Heavenly Father.

It is the most simple of prayers but also the most profound.

If we take it apart we see each element expanded upon in our service:

Our Father, hallowed be your name - we praise God in the Gloria.

Your kingdom come - the creed.

Give us each day our daily bread - the intercessions.

Forgive us our sins - prayers of penitence and the absolution.

The Our Father is the beginning and end of all prayers but so often it becomes a prayer that we say simply by rote and when it is said like this the value of doing so is in question.

Real prayer is when we place ourselves in the presence of God and when we do this then our thoughts become prayers so the words are often superfluous.

Let us look again at some of the things Jesus said we should pray for:

For our daily bread - for what we need today and not tomorrow

That we may be able to forgive and therefore we may be forgiven ourselves

That we might be able to overcome our temptations and that we might be delivered from evil.

If we were able to put each of these phrases into practice in daily life then we would be perfect as our Heavenly Father dearly wishes us to be.

We, however, are unable to come up to scratch and it is interesting to look at the Old Testament reading and compare it with the message of the New Testament.

Abraham pleaded with God to save Sodom and Gomorrah provided he could find in them a handful of just people.

Jesus, however, died for us, to save us even though there was not one person without sin.

Let us look at the Old Testament reading for a moment. The idea is that just people will not be punished even for the sake of punishing many wicked people. But in our world today this does happen. There are many examples where we are prepared to punish innocent people as long as there are guilty people among them.

The obvious examples are Iraq and Afghanistan.

But I am guilty as well. I can think of times when I have punished the whole House of 180 children in my last job at Kingswood School by making them stay in at lunch time and collect their school bags, put them neatly on the rack etc - not all the pupils were untidy.

I am sure the same thing happens at home. Something valuable gets broken, no-one owns up so all the children are punished - no television for the rest of the evening, early to bed. It happens so often but it is so very wrong. God will never resort to it. He will not pull up a bunch of weeds because in doing so he may pull up a stalk of wheat. It is terrible to be punished for something you did not do. It leaves you with a dreadful feeling of bitterness.

Yet so often we resort to something like this as the most natural and just way of solving our problem. This way the guilty person is sure to be punished.

But God’s ways are not our ways. He will do the opposite. He will not punish 100 people, even if 99 are guilty and one is innocent.

This prayer of Abraham on behalf of the people of Sodom and Gomorrah is the prayer of petition - praying on behalf of others. We do this in the intercessions.

In the Gospel reading Christ gives us the climate in which we should pray. This climate is one of love and trust. When we pray we are praying to our Heavenly Father who loves us and cares about us. We may think we know what is good for us but God alone knows what is truly good for us.

Let us now look at the second part of the Gospel reading.

‘Ask and you will receive.

Seek and you will find,

Knock and the door will be opened to you’.

When it comes to asking God for help we need to keep two things in mind.

The first is perseverance in asking

The second is trust that God wants to help is and will help us.

Perseverance - it isn’t that God needs to be persuaded to help us. God knows what we need even before we ask. Perseverance is, however, a sign of trust that God can and will help us and it is also a sign of how seriously we want God’s help.

The second point is trust - we must really trust that God wants to help us.

Mark Link retells this story by Arthur Tonne.

A wealthy man had a 12 year old son. The boy had everything he could want for except a brother. More than anything else the boy wanted a brother to be with, to talk to and to share his father’s gifts with. He often told his father about his wish. Then one day without telling his son he contacted an adoption agency and adopted an eleven year old boy. The boys got along well from the start and were as happy as they could be. The son by birth because he had a brother and the adopted son because he had a family.

One day the two boys were outside tossing a football. The adopted boy said to his brother that he wished his old friend Kenny had a football but his father could not afford to buy one. He told his brother what a wonderful friend Kenny had been. After a while his brother said. ’Why don’t you ask Dad to get him one?’

The adopted boy said, ’But I could not do that. I couldn’t impose on your father like that. He’s given me so much already. I couldn’t ask for still more. Then his brother said , ‘Don’t forget. My Dad is now your Dad too. He gives me whatever I need. He wants me to communicate with him and let him know how I feel and what I think I need. If he thinks something isn’t good for me he tells me and sometimes he gives me even more than I ask for. Dad wants you to do the same thing. He wants you to communicate with him. You’re his only son now, just as I am. He wants you to let him know how you feel and what you think you need.’

Jesus urges us never to grow weary but to keep on praying.

Prayer sustains our faith. It will help us persevere in our struggles.

Prayer also directs our attention to the needs of others and of course there are times when the only help we can give a situation is to pray.

I am going to finish with one last story about a young boy who came over from Hong Kong to a school in which John and I taught some twenty years ago. Simon had not been in England very long when he was found to have Leukaemia. He was sent to the Royal Berkshire Hospital and his mother was sent for. He went back to Hong Kong where he was treated but he died in the following school holiday. All the time he had been supported by our prayers at school and at church. God did not answer our prayers in the way we expected but before he died both he and his family were baptised and confirmed Christians. They had been touched by the care and concern shown to Simon.