The Reverend Richard Greenleaf, Sunday July 27th 2025
A Sermon
The Reverend Richard E. Greenleaf
St. George’s Chapel
Long Cove Road
Tenant's Harbor, ME 04860
27 July 2025
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost /Proper 12-2
HE IIA
Genesis 18:20-32
Psalm 138
Colossians 2:6-15
Luke 11:1-13
Collect of the Day
O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy:
Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so
pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our
Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord,
my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord
my soul to take. Amen.
I don’t know how many of you
know that prayer,
but that was the first prayer
I ever learned,
taught to me
by my mother (of blessed memory)
when I was a little boy
and prayed at bedtime
--with both my parents--
for several years.
When you stop and think about it,
it’s a morbid kind of prayer,
especially for a child,
and especially as an introduction to prayer.
But my introduction to prayer this prayer was,
and it came from a noble pedigree,
having first appeared in the New England Primer
in the late 1780s
and passed down through numerous generations
ever since.
2
I am sure that my mother
learned it from her mother
and that my father was familiar enough with it
to join in its bedtime recitation.
Of course, it was followed
by more specific prayers
for Mommy and Daddy,
and grandparents,
and aunts and uncles,
and cousins,
and on and on.
I even remember praying for the birth
of a new brother or sister,
who actually arrived
when I was three and a half.
All of which leads me to a question:
How did you learn to pray?
You might have learned, like me,
from one or both of your parents.
Or perhaps from a special grandparent
or family member.
Maybe you learned in Sunday School.
Or from the formal prayers said in church,
or even the formal prayers said in public schools
up through the early 1960s.
Or maybe no one taught you,
prayer being something that one just does because . . .
and this would be supported by religious historians
who tell us that prayer,
in one form or another,
is one of the oldest and most universal
of human activities,
having been with us
from the year dot,
as it were.
There’s an old saying
that there are no atheists
in the foxholes of war,
3
just as I know
there are no atheists
in hospital waiting rooms.
Even when we don’t
--or can’t—
believe,
we can and do
hope.
And that hoping is
at its heart
prayer.
I’ve always been struck
by Dylan Thomas’s closing lines
in his book
A Child’s Christmas in Wales.
After walking his readers
through the magic of a Christmas day
from his childhood in Wales,
Thomas writes,
“. . . and then I went to bed. Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight
and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other
houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I
turned the gas down, I got into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then
I slept.”
“I said some words to the close and holy darkness . . .”
Some words . . .
We all grope for “some words,”
whatever words,
the right words,
as if there ever could be
“right words”
to speak to “the close and holy darkness,”
to speak to God,
in our childhood bedrooms
and in the foxholes and waiting rooms of life.
I think it is with this spirit
that one of Jesus’s disciples,
after coming upon him praying,
asked him,
“Lord, teach us to pray . . . ”
4
Then Jesus says to them,
“When you pray, say . . . “
and he goes on to teach them
what has come to be known
as The Lord’s Prayer,
or at least the shorter version of it,
the longer one appearing
in the gospel of Matthew
and used most frequently
in our prayer book.
And while Jesus does teach his disciples
the “right words,”
he does not do this
as if through recitation and repetition of the “right words”
we could make our prayers come true.
Rather, Jesus does this because
he knows that we are ritual creatures.
That when it comes to the highest and deepest experiences of life
we humans reach for ceremony and symbol,
and the repetition of these
is not mere rote recitation
but an entrance into words and worlds
that an old mentor of mine, the late Tom Howard,
wrote,
furnish us “with the very capacity our own imaginations lack
to say what we would like to say. . . They help us to say what we cannot,
left to our own spontaneous devices.”
So in the recitation and repetition
of these words,
we learn not only a formal prayer
but how to pray.
And in this prayer,
the Lord’s Prayer,
we, first of all, learn who God is
and who we are born
and meant
to be.
5
We learn that we are not addressing a “close and holy darkness,”
an anonymous “It,”
but a person who is more than a person,
a relative,
a Father,
one to whom we are related as if by blood,
if that were possible.
One whom we address not with the formal pronoun “you”
but with the now lost familiar if not intimate pronoun
“thy” and “thou.”
One whose life we share!
We learn in praying “Our Father”
that we are not an “I”
but truly a “we,”
a group of individuals who in the Father
become more than neighbors
but a family.
We cannot pray this prayer
without reconnecting not only with God
but with the world!
We learn that this Father “who art in heaven,”
whose kingdom we pray to come
and whose will we pray to be done
“on earth as it is in heaven,”
is not remote,
not in a heaven at an Olympian remove from us.
As the 4th century bishop Hilary of Poitiers wrote:
“There is no space where God is not. He is in heaven, in hell,
beyond the seas; dwelling in all things and enveloping all. Thus
He embraces, and is embraced by, the universe, confined to no
part of it but pervading all.”
We learn that prayer is to be an act of realism;
that because of God’s unspeakable nearness,
our very real needs and concerns
are not little,
not small,
but essential and continuous;
“daily”
like the Israelites’ need
for the “daily bread”
of the manna in the wilderness.
6
And that our relationships,
as individual and quirky,
and prone to aggression, conflict, and dominance as they can be,
are rather to be ones of loving reciprocity
that need the regular maintenance
of self examination and mutual forgiveness.
Finally, we learn that even though the world
and our very selves are “soaked with God,”
that evil and temptation to it
lie close at hand,
and we need help
spotting them
and resisting them.
Now Luke ends the prayer here,
with “deliver us from evil,”
but Matthew goes on to bookend the prayer
with the more familiar
“for Thine is the Kingdom, and the power, and glory
now and forever. Amen”
which functions here as a kind of refrain,
paraphrasing the words at the beginning of the prayer:
“. . . Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven. . . “
creating between the beginning and the end
a kind of horizon of hope,
an assurance
that despite all,
God’s will
will be done
“on earth as it is in heaven,”
and in each
and all
of us!
My father was a member of the family’s church choir
for over 60 years
and was fond of singing the line from the psalms,
“I will lift mine eyes unto the hills,”
and I have become convinced
that it was this horizon of hope
of which he sang.
7
In our gospel reading today,
Luke creates the a similar effect
concluding the prayer
with his parables contrasting
the begrudging response
of the human friend
with that of the heavenly Father.
We too often pray
with the idea of God as the human friend,
--the begrudging and withholding human friend--
rather than that of the heavenly Father,
--the Father whose name is hallowed
because he is
not begrudging and withholding
but bountifully generous,
and this prayer moves us
from the one
to the other.
So, we pray this prayer
but do we take its lesson?
The lesson that takes us beyond recitation and repetition,
from word to spirit;
the lesson that this is not a prayer we “have to” pray
but a prayer we “get to” pray;
the lesson that relocates our lives
on the horizon of hope?
This is the Lord’s prayer,
Jesus’s gift to his disciples,
and today it is Jesus’s gift to us
as well.
Amen.