He (Jesus) was praying in a certain place, and when he ceased, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples." And he said to them, "When you pray, say:

"Father, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread; and forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive every one who is indebted to us; and lead us not into temptation."

And he said to them, "Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him;’ and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything’? I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him whatever he needs. And I tell you, Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened. What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will he give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (Luke 11:1-13)

They had heard and seen Jesus pray on numerous occasions in that first missionary journey, but one of the disciples realized all of a sudden that Jesus had not taught them how to pray. Hence the request, "Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples." And Jesus complied, immediately and directly, with a prayer that neither they nor the church could forget: "When you pray, say: 'Father ...' " They learned the prayer, but they don’t seem to have comprehended what prayer is all about because, when Jesus said to them, as he was about to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane - after they had shared that last meal together before his death - "Pray that you don’t enter into temptation" - they fell asleep, and very shortly they fell away from Christ.

One type of prayer, what Wendell Frerichs calls "desperate praying," doesn’t really need to be learned, if we have any faith at all in God. When events in life overcome us, it is natural for us to cry out to God, "Lord, hear me and help me!" Just recently a story appeared in the newspapers about an eighty-five-year-old woman, Signe Anderson, who "turned to prayer to see (a) housing miracle in (her) ... neighborhood." She told a reporter that she got down on her knees "to ask God to provide a solution to the fifty empty lots that plagued her neighborhood." And "she believes that’s why an answer came to her." The reporter, who told how this woman at her advanced age had been appointed co-chairman of the Philips Neighborhood Improvement Association, a group that had been awarded a two-million-dollar grant for upgrading the neighborhood, wrote that "Her story could go down in the annals of ‘if faith could move a mountain’ history." Signe Anderson said, "I happen to be a person who believes very definitely and very practically in prayer. So I threw my arms in the air and I said, ‘Lord, this is the biggest problem I’ve run into in my living days.’ " She lifted her prayer to God shortly after she discovered that the two-million dollars had to be used for rehabilitation, not new housing; the problem would remain. When she learned that Augustana Lutheran Church had to move seven Victorian homes to make room for two new high-rise buildings for senior citizens, she was given a solution. She bought these houses for $1 each, moved them - and others later - to the empty lots where they were rehabilitated and sold. She believes that she got her miracle through prayer, and she might call it "desperate praying." Most of us know how to do that kind of praying, don’t we?

We have also learned - with the disciples - something about "obedient praying," as Frerichs terms it, the repetition of those prayers, and especially the Lord’s Prayer, that Christ and his church have taught us. We know - as did the unknown disciple who made the request to Jesus that day - that, as Christians we should pray regularly to God, pouring out our gratitude for life and all of its gifts, beseeching him to forgive our sins, to give us the strength to resist temptation, and to support us in body and spirit as long as we live. And even when we pray freely, we often model our prayers after the model prayer that he taught long ago. But for most of us, this sort of disciplined prayer is like the tide that comes and goes; we pray - in obedience - in an "on again - off again" - and a "now-and-then" manner. With the disciples, we "go to sleep" when we ought to be praying obediently. It isn’t that we don’t want to pray regularly, as he taught us to, but the flesh and the spirit grow weary more often than we care to admit. We know how to pray and what to say,when we pray, but ... We may even begin, "Our Father in heaven," but soon, for one reason or another, our prayer fades out and we drift away from God whether we are awake or asleep.

Isn’t the way we pray today almost like saying that prayer really makes no difference, really accomplishes little or nothing in our lives and in our world? After all, Christians have been praying to God to change things in this world, but the world is no better off today than it was centuries ago, is it? Some of us have stuffed stomachs and creature comforts that have never been seen before, but ours is a world that is beset with problems that combine to make life look rather hopeless. Is there any future for us - for the human race and all life - on the earth? A few years ago Ellen Goodman wrote a column titled, "Who Can Forget the Bomb?" She began: "It was a story about The Bomb, and who wanted to hear about that? The report came out of Princeton that John Aristotle Phillips, an aerospace-engineering student, had taken to the drawing board and produced The Design - a blueprint for an atomic bomb that could fit right into your car trunk and level a quarter of Manhattan." Phillips wanted to alarm people - and he did - when he insisted that "a college undergraduate with a basic foundation in physics is capable of doing what I did." Goodman said that Phillips touched a "specific nerve ending, and up through thirty years of chronic fear came another flash of acute terror. It was the nerve ending of the 40s and 50s, the doomsday terror of a youth which had a nuclear imprint." She adds, "By now we think we have learned to live with The Bomb. The shelters are gone. The air raid drills are over. The kids in school talk about pollution constantly and nuclear disaster rarely. Atomic bombs are not discussed in the awesome language of good and evil, but in the chilling technical context of a ‘strike force’ ... Occasionally, a group of scientists tells us that we have hit the point of no return." And she concludes this way: "Well, the bomb has been our monster since I was four. On the whole, right now, we deal with it by not talking about it. No matter what T.S. Eliot wrote, it is not the whimper, but the bang, we expect."

Suddenly, all that is changed. Informed people all over the world are concerned - and talking - about The Bomb. It is the most obvious threat - with proliferation of nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia, as well as several other countries - to the future of life on earth. Jacques Cousteau has warned us that the oceans may die in twenty years or less unless we stop

contaminating them. Acid rain is killing life in streams and lakes in too many parts of the world. But now we are told that a nuclear war could destroy the ozone that halts deadly radiation from the sun, let alone what The Bomb could do directly to people and other forms of life on the earth. Everybody is talking about The Bomb, and millions of people are becoming concerned - and some persons are sufficiently alarmed as to call for a nuclear "freeze" and, better yet, for the banning of The Bomb. Madge Micheels-Cyrus, who works for Friends for a Non-Violent World, points out, "It has become a tidal wave. I’m not aware of any area where there is not some movement." People are talking because they are aware of the danger.

Besides hunger, poverty, and injustice, we have been concerned with the problems of the older persons which seem to be on the verge of proliferating, too, in the rest of this century. The headlines read - some time ago - "Theologian, wife carry out suicide pact rather than face old age" - and we were shocked by the story that this couple - Dr. and Mrs. Henry Van Dusen - resolved not "to die in a nursing home." They had led happy and productive lives. He served as president of Union Theological Seminary, New York, from 1945 to 1963, but poor health no longer permitted them to do "what we want to do." So they took sleeping pills and both of them died from the overdose.

Even the young are becoming aware of the threat to their lives and futures. Donna Mayotte, speaking at a meeting of concerned citizens, said: "My older daughter, who is twelve, told me flatly, firmly and with total conviction, ‘I’m not going to see twenty.’ " In a discussion about elections that turned into talk about the possibility of war, Mrs. Mayotte’s daughter spoke up. "That’s when she told me she didn’t expect to grow up. I tried to tell her that people had to make an effort, but she was convinced that there was no point, that no one cared ... It really frightened me. That’s the point at which I got involved in this campaign." She concluded, in a column by Larry Batson (Minneapolis Tribune, March 18, 1982):

The most tragic thing about all this is that we’ve raised a whole generation of young people with no hope for the future. They don’t articulate it because we refuse to talk about it ... so they internalize it as a feeling of hopelessness. I often wonder how much the drug problem has to do with hopelessness.

Batson says that facing the threat of The Bomb "is evidence of maturity as a people. Of accepting at last that the nuclear threat must be faced and discussed."

And prayed about, with confidence in the heavenly Father. God cares. He is still in charge of the world and its affairs, and he is not at all as powerless as we make him out. He knows how to give us those things that we really need simply because he is a loving Father of - and to - us all. That’s the way that Jesus addressed him - "Abba, Father" in love and complete trust even when he faced death on a cross. That’s when prayer reaches its deepest level, its highest form of "praying in love," as Wendell Frerichs puts it. A couple of years ago, Darrel Sifford wrote a column about his father; it included a photo of both his parents. He recalled all occasions on which his father had been given reason to rebuke or punish him, but hadn’t. Later, he wrote another column, telling how he often went to his father, sat by his feet on the living room floor, and would "drill into the core of life." He asked his father questions like, "What did it feel like when the only son moved 1,000 miles from home, when the grandchildren were rarely seen ... when the only son separated and divorced and wrote a letter asking for understanding and acceptance, when the only son and the father disagreed on what religion was or ought to be and its relevance for daily living? ..."

Sifford writes: "I asked him of his perception of what it would be like to die." His father answered that "he’d feared death until he came to understand that death is not the end but the beginning: ‘When a man believes (and) ... does his best to get right with God, with his fellowman, with his self - well, death is nothing to be afraid of.’ " And when Sifford asked if his birth had not complicated his life for his mother and father, he replied, "Nobody ever loved a son more than I loved you." Sifford said, "Pop and I didn’t leave anything unsaid." And, in his turn, he told his father, "You and Mom are responsible for making possible everything I can achieve in life. There is no other way I can thank you enough for what you have done for me." And his father answered, "Only a father can know how good it feels to hear a son say that ..."

So Jesus teaches us, "When you pray, say, Father, hallowed be thy name" - in love and trust, as he himself prayed to the Father in heaven and bared his soul, "Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me, but thy will, not mine, be done." He loved God so completely that he could trust him, as did Isaac at Moriah when his father Abraham laid him on the altar and raised the knife in his hand to plunge it into his breast, and he could lay down his life in love and obedience. He had confidence that the heavenly Father loved him. After all, on at least two occasions, he had said to Jesus, "You are my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased." And Christ could hold on to that - believe it - when hope was waning and time was running out for him. At the very end, wracked by pain and in the throes of death, he was able to pray, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit" - and died.

That’s the knowledge that must sustain our faith and hope in this time when the whole world’s existence is threatened by all kinds of forces, and especially by the threat of a nuclear holocaust. This is not the time to hang our heads in despair "as those who have no hope." Rather it is the time to face up to, talk about, and do what we can about poverty, hunger, injustice, the problems of the old and the young - and, of course, The Bomb. And we must not forget that it is a time to pray - desperately, perhaps, and obediently, too - but, above all, to pray with confidence and "in love," knowing that God is able to hear and answer our prayers - and will - because he loves us like a father loves his children.

And isn’t it really the Holy Spirit for whom we must pray? For the Spirit is the one who can soften people’s hearts, change their minds, and turn their actions from ways that lead to danger and destruction. And we pray that the Holy Spirit will come to each of us so that we may, filled with the Spirit, live out our days in hope and love - and in the service of God and humanity. The Spirit makes life worth living - even in times of uncertainty. And the Spirit enables us to affirm Robert Muller’s last lines in his Most of All, They Taught Me Happiness (New York: Dutton, 1981, p. 212):

My conclusion, Mueller says, would therefore be:

• decide to be happy
• render others happy
• proclaim your joy
• love passionately your miraculous life
• do not listen to promises
• do not wait for a better world
• be grateful for every moment of life
• switch on and keep on the positive buttons in yourself, those marked optimism, serenity, confidence, positive thinking, love
• pray and thank God every day
• meditate
• smile
• laugh
• whistle
• sing
• dance
• look with fascination at everything
• fill your lungs and hearts with liberty
• be yourself fully and immensely
• act like a king unto Death
• feel God in your body, mind, heart, and soul
• and be convinced of eternal life and resurrection

And learn the lesson well - not just the prayer, "Father, Hallowed by thy name ..." - for God loves us and hears and answers the prayers of those who pray confidently to him. And we can depend on that. Amen.