Lessons in Surrender--July 28, 2025

Lessons in Surrender--July 28, 2025

Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” So he said to them, “When you pray, say:

 Father, may your name be revered as holy.

  May your kingdom come.... (Luke 11:1-2)

I have a sneaking suspicion that we've been largely missing the point when it comes to prayer.  Maybe not completely, maybe not all of us, and may be not all the time, but enough that "Christian" publishers have marketed plenty of books about how to pray that all boil down to techniques for getting God to give you what you ask for, when maybe Jesus has been trying to teach us how to change what we desire to align with God.

This, I think, is the colossal mistake we have fallen for by and large in popular religion, especially here in our country's culture of one-click ordering and drive-through convenience.  We have convinced ourselves that learning to pray is about how we get our wish-lists fulfilled by God more effectively, when Jesus has instead been trying to instruct us in how to align our wants to match up with God's priorities.  We keep looking for experts to teach us strategies for persuasion, and Jesus is only offering lessons in surrender.  

This passage from Luke's Gospel, which many of us heard this Sunday in worship, is a case in point.  Some of Jesus' disciples have been watching and listening to him pray, and one finally works up the nerve to ask Rabbi Jesus to teach them to pray, much as they had heard that John the Baptizer had his own perspective on prayer.  What follows are words that many of us were taught to memorize and call "the Lord's Prayer," and over the centuries, we have often treated these words as a sort of quasi-magical talisman or spell--recite these words, and you're "doing it right," we say.  We take Jesus' response as a formula, a recipe, or a script.  And so, it is not surprising that over the centuries, some Christians have come to believe that if they repeat the Lord's Prayer so many times, it will take on special significance or become effective.  Or others come to believe they haven't "properly" worshipped God or adequately prayed enough for it to "count." Or still others think that if only we could force teachers in public schools to recite these words or post them on their classroom walls, then we would be adequately pious enough as a society and God would show divine favor on us against all our adversaries.  If all of that isn't pop religion's take on prayer, I'll eat my hat.

But of course, that is not only a sloppy form of magical thinking dressed up as piety, it is also completely backwards as far as how Jesus really intends us to hear his words.  Jesus isn't offering us a rote formula or script to recite when we pray, and neither is he interested in how we can "persuade" God to give us what we want, as though prayers are like dollar bills inserted into a celestial vending machine and Jesus is here to help us get the wrinkles out of them so the scanner will accept them.  Jesus doesn't see prayer as a means of demanding things from God as though we are customers (who, in a consumer culture, have been told they "are always right"), but rather as a means of learning to want what God wants, to seek what God seeks, and to long for God's ordering of the world rather than our own.  Or better yet, it is about allowing God to shape our desires until God's dream for the world becomes our own dream for the world.

Jesus doesn't start from the presumption that your and my personal want lists are already aligned with God's vision--so Jesus doesn't start with any techniques for pleading, persuading, or cajoling God to give us things.  We don't get any form of the kinds of strategies that deal-makers and schemers use--no "If you give me what I want, Lord, I'll make it worth your while," no attempts at divine flattery heaping up grandiloquent-sounding flourishes, "O Divine Majesty, thou who art all-powerful and all-knowing..."  and none of the standard pious praise-band cliches, like, "Lord, we just want to come and praise your name, and we just want to love on you, Lord, and, Lord, we just want to lift you up high..." Jesus doesn't offer us a style of speech, a form of address, or a set of techniques to get God to listen.  After all, Jesus starts from the presumption that God already knows what we need before we speak it, better than we ourselves know what we truly need.  So if we come to Jesus looking for guidance on "how to pray," we should be clear that he is not going to respond with a set of helpful hints for getting God on board with our agendas.  Jesus instead sets us up for having our agendas reoriented to point in the direction of God's reign.

That's why Jesus begins his model (not a recipe, but an example, mind you) with the reminder that we are children coming to a Parent rather than customers placing an order (or for that matter, employees speaking to a Celestial Boss or negotiators putting together a trade deal).  The same way a parent already truly knows what the children need, even when what the children think they need is more toys, more junk food, or designer clothes, God knows what we really need even if that's quite different from what we thought we wanted.  By teaching us to address God like a good parent, Jesus invites us simultaneously to trust that God knows what we need, and also that ultimately God is in charge rather than us.  Like a good parent, God is generous and provides for us beyond our earning, achieving, or buying--and yet at the same time, God is not like a vending machine or a genie who is obligated to give us what we ask for because we put our dollar in or rubbed the lamp.  Praying for God's name to be holy acknowledges all the ways we cheapen it by using it to puff ourselves up and put others down, using our piety as a pretense.  And Jesus simply calls us away from that bad habit.

The second thing that Jesus teaches us to seek in this passage is for God's Reign to come to fullness, which automatically dethrones our impulses, agendas, and programs.  Jesus offers no secret formula for getting divine backing for your political party, your candidate, your church group, or your platform to come into power.  Jesus reminds us that God's Reign cannot be reducible to ever aligning with any candidate, party, or policy list, and that also means Jesus is never interested in anything that looks like "taking back your country for God." Every country, people group, territory, and town is already within God's jurisdiction anyway. God is just not interested in using partisan politics to enforce a particular platform on everybody by coercion.  The prayer Jesus gives us asks that God shape our hearts and our lives so that God's Reign directs us, rather than us trying to make ourselves rulers of our lives and our world.  But it's not a plea for God to give us more power to dominate anybody else. To let Jesus' way of praying shape us is to invite God to pry our fingers off of the tight grip we have been exerting on our own lives, so that instead we can surrender to God's priorities--which turn out to be all about things like bread for the day and forgiveness to begin again, all around.  In other words, as Jesus teaches us to surrender to God's will, it's not going to mean that we suffer or starve--it is about stepping into God's ordering of things where everybody gets to eat, and everybody's debts get cancelled.  That, Jesus will insist, is how God runs the universe. That's what God's kingdom looks like.

For now, though, the central thing for us to get in our heads is that prayer is not about us placing orders to God, but rather God shaping our hearts, minds, desires, and thoughts in light of God's character.  We remain disciples when we pray--seeking for Jesus to direct us to what we really need and to see the world through his eyes, not trying to tame God to serve our purposes.

Taking that seriously will change not just how we pray but how we see everything else.  So let's go--let's step out into the world with new eyes, shaped by surrender to the vision of Jesus.  Let's see how things look different now.

Father, let your name be holy, and let your reign come among us.