Sermon on The Lord's Prayer for Sunday, July 27, 2025

July 27, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Luke 11: 1-13


If you were reading this passage in your Bible, you might say, “Ah, a new chapter, a new subject.” But that’s not the way the Gospels were written. Chapter and verse breaks were put in later, for a variety of reasons, but originally, they weren’t there—each Gospel was one long manuscript. The Lord’s Prayer takes on extra nuance if we read it in context of the chunk of text that comes before it, the Good Samaritan text and the story about Mary and Martha.


Both of these are often taught and preached as a stand-alone story. Indeed, we’ve just seen that approach ourselves: 2 weeks ago we had the Good Samaritan as our Gospel reading and last week Mary and Martha.


My New Testament professor was convinced that those two stories, plus the Lord’s Prayer and the teaching on it, were designed to go together, that they speak to each other. The Good Samaritan shows us how we are to love our neighbors, and it stresses that everyone is our neighbor. The Good Samaritan uses his own resources and enlists the help of others, namely the innkeeper.


The story of Martha shows us the dangers that can come from being the Good Samaritan to the larger world. As we discussed last Sunday, Martha is distracted by the kind of work that still has power over us. She is doing the work of diakonia, which can be interpreted as the work of discipleship. Martha’s work is similar to the work that the Good Samaritan does: the work of making people healed and whole. But she’s likely doing this work on a larger scale.


It's important work. But if we approach it the wrong way, we run the risk of becoming like Martha: tired and irritated and exasperated by it all—and much too caught up in the exhaustion to remember why we’re doing this.


It’s a question that has permeated much of Christian teaching through the centuries: how can we stay grounded at the feet of Jesus, like Mary, while doing the work that Jesus calls us to do, like Martha. In today’s Gospel, we get the answer.


We pray.


Jesus knows how hard this simple action can be, and so he gives us the words to use. Many of us have prayed them so often that we might forget how radical they are. We pray to God in the familiar way that we would talk to a parent who loves us. This approach to speaking to any of the gods of ancient times would be unheard of. Indeed, if we look at almost any ancient god, we’d probably want to avoid talking to them if we could. We wouldn’t want them as parents. We certainly wouldn’t seek them out.


When we pray to this Divine power who loves us, we begin by praying for our daily sustenance, our daily bread. We can’t do much else if we’re starving. If we are ever confused about the work that God calls us to do, it begins with sustenance. A starving body can’t focus on much else beyond sustenance. Yet God does call us to so much more, both as individuals and as humans.


Once our daily needs are met, we can focus on larger issues. We pray for forgiveness. We may have been taught that we’re praying that God forgive our individual sins, but Jesus probably had a larger vista in mind. Some translations interpret this passage as a kind of debt relief ("forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors"). Scholar Marcus Borg notes that these two aspects--food and debt--would have spoken to Jesus' followers in the first century, who often found themselves short of bread and currency. Many Jews found themselves in a downwards spiral as they leveraged their land, and eventually lost their land, to pay an increasingly heavy tax burden imposed on them from Rome.

It's not so far away from the lives that many 21st century people lead—many of us face financial uncertainty, where we’re just a few unexpected bills away from hardship or catastrophe. Even if we have a more secure financial foothold, it doesn’t take much to make the stock market wobble, which means our portfolios, too, are precarious.

In addition to financial forgiveness, we pray not to be led astray. I like the language "save us from the time of trial," but all the variations speak to me, and sometimes I include them all, praying not to be led into temptation, to be delivered from evil, and to be saved from the time of trial. We are praying that we can resist all that calls us away from the best selves that Christ calls us to be.


You may be wondering where the rest of the Lord’s Prayer went. It’s in the Gospel of Matthew. In Luke, we get this shorter version. There’s a benefit to brevity. A short prayer means that we can pray whenever we have a minute or two—which means we can pray throughout the day.

Notice that Jesus doesn't tell us we have to be in a certain mood to pray. We don’t have to be ready to forsake our bad behaviors or be in a repentant mood. We don't have to wait for the right time of day. We don't even need to come up with the language for ourselves. Christ provides it.

And then at the end, after the prayer itself, Jesus gives us imagery to teach us how God will listen to us: as a loving neighbor or better yet, a parent. Jesus once again reminds us that our God is a loving God. We are to ask for what we need. We should not be afraid to yearn. God has not abandoned us to our own devices. We have chosen to partner with a powerful force when we pray--and yet, it's not a distant force. God loves us, the way a parent loves a child, offering love and protection and comfort.

It seems so simple. But often, we can find it hard to pray—not hard to find the words—Jesus has given us the words, and if we want to fill in with our own petitions, we’ve got a great template. However, it can be hard to remember to actually do it—to be in conversation with God as we go about the day. Martha may be doing important work, the work of the church—but she has ceased being mindful of why she is doing the work. Perhaps Jesus, witnessing her, begins to formulate the prayer which could keep her grounded as she remembers who has called her to do the work in the first place.


Martha’s sister Mary offers another glimpse of the contemplative life, a life which might seem attractive in its silence and stillness. I’ve looked at monastics and envied them their life that is set up to return them to prayer at set hours during the day. But most of us aren’t living in those kinds of communities. I’ve envied monks like Thomas Merton who have a hermitage made out of gardener’s shed and the command from his superior to meditate on Jesus and to write. Most of us have other commitments that we must attend to. Those commitments can claim so much of our attention that we forget to pray.


Notice the shortness of this prayer that Jesus gives his disciples. It’s a prayer that only takes a minute or two. And yet, that moment or two can recalibrate us, centering us in the work that God calls us to do, reminding us of the One who has called us to do it.


Jesus isn’t just talking the talk. Throughout the Gospel of Luke, we see Jesus praying more than in any of the other Gospels, and he often prays after the most intense miracles. The disciples know that Jesus has tapped into something different than the prayers that they’ve seen modeled by priests and Levites. They’ve seen Jesus do great miracles without burning himself to a crisp. They know that he’s tapped into a powerful force with his prayer life.


We are not called to burn ourselves to a crisp like Martha. We are not called to be silent like Mary. We are called to continue the work of Christ, loving our neighbor the way the Good Samaritan did.


Jesus tells those first disciples to talk to God with both familiarity, like when one talks to a family member, and insistence, as one might talk to a neighbor whom we need to share resources. Jesus assures us that we will not be give scorpions or snakes when we ask for what will sustain us.


What work does the world need us to do? Ask, seek, knock—tap into the same powerful force that propelled Christ and centuries of followers to show the world a new kind of love. What do you need as you do this work? Ask, seek, knock—Jesus assures us that God will answer.


Ask, seek, and knock—and know that God will hear and God will not leave you in the cold night needing help. Ask, seek, knock—the world needs what we will find when we do.