Sermon for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity
“Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is”
What is prayer really all about? Is it about bartering and badgering, bargaining and begging God to get something we want? What does it mean to pray?
It means quite simply to want God’s will to be done in our lives. It is what we pray in the prayer which shapes and governs all prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. In a way, the whole attitude and approach to prayer and to our lives in faith is captured in the words “thy will be done.”
These words reverberate throughout the Scriptures, especially in the New Testament where they take on a new kind of intensity of expression. They are there in Mary’s great ‘yes,’ her wonderful and active acquiescence of her whole being to the divine will. “Be it unto me according to thy word;” in short, she prays that the divine will be done. Her words are the prologue to the most intense expression of this concept and idea voiced by Christ in the agony of the Garden of Gethsemane; “not my will, but thine be done” and then, captured on the Cross in the last word of the Crucified; “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit.”
In other words, our prayers are grounded in the Son’s prayer to the Father in the bond of the Spirit. “When you pray,” Jesus tells us, “say, ‘Our Father’,” which is itself an amazing thing. His Father becomes our Father to whom we have access through the Son and in the Spirit.