Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19). Luke 11:1-13
We as human beings are distinctive because we have language. Language is the mode of designating the immensity of differences in our world but because language has grammar, syntax, and governing rules of usage which promote order, it becomes an umpire within the world of differences.
When we say, like the ancient Wisdom writer, God is All, that is to assume God is the Superior One of Quality residing within and encompassing the infinity of quantity of all things.
To be God, as the Great One, means that God encompasses the continuous omni-becoming of everything, and this is such complex diversity that God could be conceived as the gravity of One that holds the diversity together.
Human language participates with the relational oneness of all things by reducing the plenitudinous complexity of all into the bite sized manageable ordered information for the pragmatic functions of life.
In the religious sphere, language as prayer is the humble response to live with God as all in recognizing our smallness, but also to live in ways so as to influence the direction of life toward what we have come to regard as the best way to live toward God and each other, namely in the path of love and justice.
Prayer is the acceptance of being in relationship with the Greatness that is more than what we can ever know. No one can avoid prayer; even the atheist inside calls out for help toward the fate of everything happening all at once, If one does not think one is calling out for help from a "religious" God, one still is calling out for help from what might call the great impersonal happenings of all probable occurrences. In language the very notion of impersonal derives from the prior acknowledgment of the "personal" as the normal condition of language users who with the use of language personalizes the universe, including the Great All Inclusive One, God. So, I would submit that we pray whether we think we are praying to a Personal God or the impersonal All of things themselves.
In the tradition of Jesus Christ, we have received a prayer tradition. If prayer is unavoidable because the languaged relationship we have with everything is unavoidable, how then should we pray with insight, wisdom, toward the highest values of life?
The Christ tradition of prayer includes acknowledgment of the Parent aspect of our past. We came from a great Parent of totally existing conditions. We are persons in relationship because we came from a great Person. Our Father, would be the patriarchal way of acknowledging our derivation from Great Personhood. Such a person's name would be hallowed, or so holy, as to be unsayable. Such a name might be the textually represented as the consonants of the Hebrew tetragrammaton for God's holy name. But this is to acknowledge that greatness cannot be limited to a single name uttered in a moment of time.
The Christ prayer tradition involves the belief of living within a total Realm, which in old monarchical language meant using the metaphor "kingdom." We live in a divine realm which had no origin, but has to come into human recognition as the divine recommendations for how to live in this great realm which continually comes to be known. God's will be done on earth as the lure of the invisible realm for love and justice exerts its influence toward us living in our realm of the play of significant freedoms within our visible realm. There is an inward realm of insights which can result in visible words and bodily language actions in the visible world of probable outcomes. Prayer is a mode of living as those who seek the higher insights for living within this free world of probabilities.
One of the most basic insights for living in this visible world is having enough to eat; not just me, but us, all people. Give us, all people, our daily bread. This is a basic insight which should govern not just prayer requests, but also the just distribution of the physical resources of the world so that each could have enough each day.
One of the impossible prayer requests we have been taught to make is, "Forgive us our wrong doings; have mercy upon us. Do not punish us with actions that repay us in the exact ways that we have harmed others." Mercy and forgiveness are needed for maintenance of community because if the "eye for and eye, and tooth for a tooth," transactions were automatic in life, few would survive. Mercy and forgiveness are required, even if they are difficult because they often result in an "offense" to justice. We need not dispense with mercy and forgiveness, even when we have to practice disciplinary punishments and reparations for harm for community order.
And a most common prayer is for what might be called, the "preventive miracle." Save us from the time of trial. "God instead of the miracle of healing, please give me the prior miracle of never being sick in the first place." Don't we all want deliverance even from the risk of some of the probable happenings in life which are common to competing free agents and the effects of aging where all our body parts seem to have varying "shelf life" expire dates.
The words of Jesus stress the need for persistence when praying and he uses the continuous petitioning of a friend for help during an inopportune time for that friend. What probably can happen to us, includes the friend of goodness being one of the outcomes; prayer is about hoping and persistent seeking for goodness even when the trials of life seem to make good outcomes inopportune.
The apparent fickleness of probable good outcomes is seen in how we often seem to get the very opposite of what we desire and ask for. "I wanted an egg but got a scorpion. I wanted a fish but I received a dangerous snake." If we reduce the freedom of God as manifested within the true freedom of the probable conditions of life as a sort of vending machine of getting the treat that we have selected, we are asking for conditions which don't even apply to God. God does not get everything which God desires because of the self-imposed weakness that God assumes because divine great freedom is shared with all the world of probable outcomes without God's inferences. God's interference is the sustaining of all; not overriding the derivative micro-freedoms of all entities which manifest a degree of free agency.
Prayer is not asking to be delivered from the very conditions of freedom which God accepts too. Prayer is learning as a child of our Great Parent God how to live realistically with the conditions of genuine freedom while we seek to be good networking agents with other agents of good to create patches of coherent communities of love and justice within this vast world.
In the writings of the prophet Hosea, the prophet uses the metaphor of marriage and prostitution to illustrate good and bad relationships of a covenant with God. Why do we honor the insights of the law? It is good actuarial training for how to live best in community with the freedom in this world for things to go right and for things to go wrong. By adhering to the guidance insights of law, we can influence the probability for things to go better in human relationships. Hosea's "wife as prostitute" is a metaphor about those who violated the laws of the covenant and experienced more negative results as a result of leaving wise actuarial human relationship living.
The Gospel for us today is for us to embrace good law, as wise and orderly actuarial living within community. And what is the mode of relationship for covenant relationships? It is communication and as it pertains to God, we call such communication our total response of prayer? And why should we pray? Because we share the realm of our divine parent, which is a realm of a field of probable outcomes where both good and bad things can happen. We share God's embrace of weakness to the genuine conditions of freedom, and we seek good actuarial wisdom patterns to live best within the actual conditions of freedom. Prayer is our responding relationship with our live style responses within the field of probability where God is immanent. Our response is to accept our covenant and familial relationship with God as our parent, whose realm and household we live in. We accept the freedom which is abroad in this realm of our divine parent, and with the wisdom of covenantal order with each other we persist in using our freedom to affect good outcomes, because we continually seek the assertion of goodness as the preferred outcome within the field of probable outcomes.
Let us embrace prayer as our total response to God and everything through our words, spoken, and in the oblationary body language deeds of our lives. Let us commit ourselves through prayer to effect just and loving outcomes in our world. Amen.
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