Luke 3: 15-17, 21-22

January 7, 2007

Rev. Elizabeth Macaulay

Throughout the gospel accounts of the life of Jesus and the disciples, the disciples are heard to want many things from Jesus - they want answers to questions: what will we eat, what will we wear, how will we know?

But after walking with Jesus. After sleeping by his side and after listening to him teach and after sharing jokes and pain and life with him, there is only one thing the scriptures record that they ask him to teach them:

They want to know how to pray.

Of all the many things they could have asked to be taught, it is prayer their souls feel a hunger to know.

Maybe because Jesus is so intentional about making time for prayer in his so-full life of teaching and tending. Maybe because they saw so much coming at him - demands and threats and challenges and heartaches and yet he remained sure of the love of the God who spoke words of love to him on his baptism. Maybe because Jesus had a shine to him that the rubbing of the world could not take away. They saw in him a ground and a way of being they knew to be born of the Holy.

Whatever it was that prompted them to ask, the disciples ask it directly. Teach us how to pray.

And we know their hunger to know, do we not?

Because we too are battened about by life and overwhelmed by demands of heart aches or compulsions or despair and we want to know:

Jesus, how is it you find your God in such times? Teach us to pray.

Terry Tempest Williams is a Mormon writer who is poetic in her ways,and she says this about the lonely and glorious stretching it is for us to be spiritual people:

“Spirituality is solitary. Its’ companion is conflict, a gnawing at the soul that cannot be ignored. We are engaged. There are no rules. There are no maps. We live with the discomfort and ambiguity of our own authority. At times, it is lonely, often informed by pain. On other occasions, it is the body submerged in a phosphorescent tide, every movement sparking a trail of illumination. Afterwards, we sit on the shore in moonlight. No candles are necessary. Spirituality exists when we are present, buoyed up by the waters of attention. We learn the courage of faith. It is a peace that is earned. We take solace in the heat of doubt knowing this is the pulse of poetry. (Leap, pg 212).

So what hold us in the conflict of our lives, the gnawing of our lives, the shine of our lives and the celebration of our lives?

Prayer, my friends. Prayer.

Luke is the only gospel writer who leaves John the Baptizer out of the baptism account. John just isn’t a big deal to Luke in the scheme of recounting what it is Baptism was to Jesus and to those of us who follow.

What is unique to Luke is his observation that the Holy Spirit comes upon Jesus while he is in prayer following his baptism. It is during his time of prayer that the spirit comes upon him in the form of a dove and tells him the news his and every one of our hearts longs to hear:

You are my son, the beloved. With you I am well pleased.

When we open ourselves to the gift of our baptism - the claiming of our selves that God sings in our ear and heart - we know that never are we without the presence of the Holy. Never.

Eugene Peterson is a Presbyterian pastor. He is also the one who transposed the scriptures into the Message.

He tells of how it came to be at one point in his ministry that he was done. He was tired. He was tired of feeling like he was having to constantly spin plates to keep his church going. He was tired of the anger and frustrations in people’s lives that sometimes got put on him. He was tired of trying to breathe life into the gospel week after week and he was tired of never seeing his family because he was gone so often on important church business.

So he went to his Staff Parish Relations Committee and told them he was done. He was exhausted. He was wrung dry. He was tired of doing all the things people expected him to do.

And one of the members of the committee, after hearing him out, asked him: so what would you do if you had the time to do it?

Peterson replied that he would be home more, he would read more, and he would pray more.

The committee member said: so why don’t you do it? Do the things you love to do and trust us to do the other things?

Well, Peterson was a bit shaken. Let go of spinning those plates? Step back from having his hands on all the controls? Live his stated conviction that God was in the midst of the church and that the Holy Spirit had power greater than our imagining and live a Christ centered life instead of a results centered life?

He decided to try it. And it drove him nuts for a time. He would sit at home reading while he knew an important finance committee meeting was going on. He would hear about things going on in the church that he didn’t know about.

He became instead what he was called to be in that place: the spiritual leader. A person so grounded in prayer and his heart talk with God that when storms arose and challenges hit, he was able to remind them of God’s presence in the midst of it all.

As God’s beloved, he gave himself permission to live as a beloved of God. He surrendered to the need in his heart to be a person of prayer and a spiritual leader.

We all are Eugene Peterson. We all have many claims on our time and we all have so many impossible things we believe we have to be or we’ll disappoint the world - or ourselves.

What we need to do is remember the key lesson of Jesus - the lesson of being a person of prayer. A person who sorts out our lives and opens our lives and surrenders our lives to the keeping of our God.

Whether we simply sit quietly and breathe in words of grace, some mantra or scripture verse of our choosing. Or whether we immerse ourselves in the prayer that is taking a walk outside. Or whether we sit in the company of others and feel the shared hum of holy communion.

We are remembering the gift of our baptism. The song of love God has sung to us. The assurance that we are uniquely and profoundly loved and we are pleasing to God and we have lives and gifts that are uniquely ours to live.

May we open ourselves, you and I. The song of love invites our heart.

Amen