Luke 11:5-13; James 5:16-20; Psalm 70:1-5
In the Name of the Father and of the + Son and of the Holy Spirit.
This past Sunday the Church observed Rogate, Latin for “to ask,” or “to pray.” The name comes from the Major Rogation Day, April 25, the Feast of St. Mark, and the three Minor Rogation Days preceding The Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord, which were set apart for fasting and prayer in association with the Spring planting season. Rogation Days have the character of humility, repentance, and thanksgiving. In agrarian communities, freshly tilled soil was brought to church, a humble, earthy confession that the Lord provides the soil, the seed, the sun, the rain, the growth, the harvest, and everything needful. We humbly confess our need for His providence, our unworthiness of it, and our thankfulness for it. That is the posture of Rogate. That is the posture of prayer.
But let us consider what prayer actually is, how we should pray, and why. The question is not whether God answers prayer. He does. The question is: What are we actually doing when we pray? Because there is a deep misunderstanding of prayer that even faithful Christians fall prey to, the notion that prayer is how we get God to do something He wasn’t going to do. That if we pray hard enough, sincerely enough, persistently enough, we can change His mind. This is not Christian prayer, but paganism with a cross on top.
Luther understood this. His explanation of the Lord’s Prayer in the Small Catechism is quietly revolutionary. God’s Name is already holy. His kingdom is already coming. His will is already being done. We do not pray to move God. We pray that we might be moved, that our wills would be realigned with His, that we would confess in the most fundamental sense that He is God and we are not. Prayer is not a lever we use to shift heaven. It is the posture of a creature before his Creator, a child before his Father, a bride before her Bridegroom, open-handed, dependent, and trusting. And that posture is good for us, because being in alignment with God’s will is the only place where creaturely life flourishes. The farmer who brings soil to church knows this instinctively. He does not make the seed grow. He plants, and he prays, and he trusts the One who does.
To understand why God hears that prayer, you must understand what happened when the Word became flesh. When our First Parents sinned, they rebelled against God and could no longer stand in His holy presence. Their guilt created a rupture they felt in the marrow of their being. They hid. They covered themselves. Light and darkness cannot share the same space. And yet the LORD did the unthinkable: He penetrated His fallen creation and became a man, “born from the substance of His mother,” perfect God and perfect man. The Holy One plunged Himself into the muck and mire of flesh and blood, sin and death. No longer is there a wall between God and man. Heaven has come down to earth. Heaven’s King has come.
And He did not stop there. Jesus redeemed us by His death upon the cross, and God raised Him, not merely to walk the earth again, but to be seated, in flesh and blood, as a man, at His own right hand in heaven. In the Ascension, a man sits and reigns at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and fills all things. And through faith we are united to that humanity, one flesh with the One who intercedes for us at the Father’s right hand. This is why prayer works. Not because we are eloquent or righteous or persistent enough, but because God hears and answers us as He hears and answers Jesus His Son, our Bridegroom, the Head of His Body the Church. When we cry “Our Father,” the Father hears us as His Son.
And so, our Lord has already told us what to pray. We pray that God’s Name would be hallowed, not just on our lips, but in our lives, our words, our deeds, our vocations. We pray that His kingdom would come and that we would desire its coming. We pray that His will would be done and not our own, as Sunday’s Collect asked, that we would “think those things that are right” and “by His merciful guiding accomplish them.” We pray for daily bread, for forgiveness and the grace to forgive, for deliverance from temptation and the evil one. Every one of these petitions is, by its very nature, a prayer in Jesus’ Name, not because a formula is attached, but because each one is an act of surrender, a relinquishing of our own agenda and a reaching for His.
The Our Father is not a warm-up before the “real” prayers begin. It is not a child’s prayer we graduate beyond. It is the pattern and substance of all Christian prayer, the prayer of a people who know they are dust, who know their Father stooped down to become dust with them, and who trust that He who rose from the dust will raise them too. Like the farmer kneeling in his tilled field, we come with empty hands. We do not tell God what to do. We ask. We seek. We knock. And He, who is never asleep, never reluctant, never locked away, opens.
He is your Father. Ask Him. Believe His Word and live, for Jesus’ sake.
In the + Name of Jesus. Amen.
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