— Teach Us to Pray

A knock comes at midnight, and a lamp comes on inside.
Outside, this October, the whole world is knocking.

He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said,
“Lord, teach us to pray.”

Teach us to pray.
After forty years of public prayers, of pastoral prayers and benedictions and graves,
I still sit at three in the morning with the news open beside the Bible,
and I do not know how to pray this week.
Teach me.

“Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.”

Your kingdom come.
Not Caesar’s kingdom, not the empire of the strongest missile.
I pray for a kingdom that comes the way dawn comes to my window, quietly, from below the hills.

Hours after a U.S. envoy sat with Putin in St. Petersburg, ballistic missiles struck Kyiv’s transport and medical buildings in waves through the night.
UN monitors say the first two weeks of October were among the deadliest for Ukraine’s civilians in years.
Days earlier in St. Petersburg, Ukrainian drones set an oil terminal burning, and one person was killed.
The workers on both sides of that smoke have mothers too.

Here it must be said plainly: I pray for the kingdom while empires burn each other’s cities,
and I will not say peace, peace, when there is no peace.

“Give us each day our daily bread.”

Daily bread.
In Afghanistan the food is in the markets, but people cannot afford it.
Nearly one in three face crisis-level hunger, and winter will push millions “one step away from famine.”
In Tawila, a Darfur camp of about 700,000 displaced people, rations have been halved, and the rains in North Darfur were the lowest since 1984.
In Taiz, under siege, the wheat may run out in less than three weeks.

Give us, not give me.
The bread prayer has no private table.
I have broken bread at a thousand altars and kitchen tables, and every loaf was meant to have room at its edges for a stranger’s hands.

“And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.”

Everyone indebted to us.
Luke says debt.
I remember, by way of reflection, the scroll at Nazareth, the year of the Lord’s favor,
the Jubilee, when debts were released and land went back to the families who had lost it.

The poor nations owe the rich ones.
The working poor owe the payday lender.
The student owes the bank for the right to learn.
When I pray this line, I pray for a Jubilee I may not live to see,
the way an old man plants a tree whose shade he will never sit in.

“And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

“Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say,
‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.'”

I have nothing to set before him.
This month the World Food Programme cut food aid and in Gaza by about a third, leaving some half a million without monthly support.
Two million still need shelter, and the winter rains have begun.
Families fill old flour sacks with sand and pile them around their tents to hold back the water.

Flour sacks, emptied of bread, holding back the flood.
“These are flour sacks that we used to retrieve from the jaws of death, so that we could eat,” a young man said.
I grieve for Gaza’s children, and I grieve for the Israeli families still mourning the October morning three years ago.
Grief has no border, and the rain falls on every tent.

“Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed.”

The door is locked.
How often the rich world answers from behind a locked door:
not now, our children are asleep, the budget is closed.
And how often I have answered that way myself, from behind the warm door of a busy week.

“At least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”

His persistence.
The old word means shamelessness.
Teach me to knock without shame for those who cannot reach the door,
to keep knocking the way rain keeps falling on a tin roof, until even a sleeping house wakes.

“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.
How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask!”

The Holy Spirit.
Not only what I ask for, but the Giver.
The wind enters the emptied heart the way breath enters a flute,
and what was hollow in me begins, at last, to sing.

“Every kingdom divided against itself becomes a desert, and house falls on house.”

House falls on house.
This is the verse I keep turning over this week.
In India, 130 million names have been struck from the voter rolls, and some declared dead are still proving they are alive.
In France, after the worst rioting in years over the cost of living, curfews fell on Paris and Lyon.

In my own country, red houses and blue houses are falling on one another.
My own church, and the global church I have loved, are divided too, house on house.
I have sat in conference rooms where brothers and sisters stopped looking at one another,
and I felt the desert spreading under our chairs.

“But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you.”

The finger of God.
I remember, by way of reflection, the magicians of Egypt, unable to copy the gnats, saying to Pharaoh,
“This is the finger of God.”
One finger, and Pharaoh’s power began to crack, like river ice under the first March sun.

A woman in the crowd cried out, “Blessed is the womb that bore you!”
But he said, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and obey it.”

Blessed rather.
He widened the blessing.
Her worth was more than her womb, and every listening heart may carry the Word.

“Your eye is the lamp of your body.
Therefore consider whether the light in you is not darkness.”

Consider whether the light in you is not darkness.
This country has called darkness light before.
Slavery was blessed from pulpits with chapter and verse.
The Cherokee were marched west out of these Tennessee hills in 1838, while church people called it progress.
I drive past those hills, and the leaves this October are the color of embers.

In my strong years, I was sure of my own light.
Some of it was only my shadow, cast very large against the sanctuary wall.
The mirror of the heart must be wiped clean again and again,
and at seventy-seven I am still wiping.

“You Pharisees clean the outside of the cup and of the dish, but inside you are full of greed.
So give for alms those things that are within.”

The outside of the cup.
In California, Meta made a deal so Mark Zuckerberg would not leave the state over a proposed billionaire tax.
Great fortunes polish the outside of the cup, and the poor wash the dishes.

Give as alms what is within.
Generosity washes the heart from the inside out,
like spring water rising through an old well until it runs clear.

“Woe to you, for you tithe mint and rue and herbs of all kinds, and neglect justice and the love of God.”

Justice and the love of God.
Luke sets them side by side, like two hands folded in prayer.
Love of God without justice is a cup washed only on the outside.
Justice without the love of God is a lamp without oil.
I have tried to hold both all my life, and most days one hand slips.

Here it must be said plainly: these woes were spoken by a Jew to his own teachers, in the long family quarrel of the prophets.
The church turned “Pharisee” into a curse against the Jewish people, and that was our sin.
The Pharisee in this chapter lives most easily in my own heart and my own pew.

“Woe to you, for you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without realizing it.”

Unmarked graves.
Here it must be said plainly: Native children buried behind boarding schools,
the ones who died on the Trail of Tears,
the enslaved, buried in fields now paved for parking lots.
This nation walks over them every day without knowing, and the earth remembers what we forget.

“Woe also to you lawyers, for you load people with burdens hard to bear, and you yourselves do not lift a finger to ease them.”

Not lift a finger.
The finger of God casts out demons, and the powerful will not lift one finger.
I have laid burdens from the pulpit and not lifted a finger to help carry them.
Forgive me.

“I will send them prophets and apostles, some of whom they will kill,
from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah, who perished between the altar and the sanctuary.”

Between the altar and the sanctuary.
Birmingham, 1963, Sixteenth Street Baptist Church: four girls dressed for Sunday.
Charleston, 2015, Emanuel AME: a Wednesday night Bible study that welcomed a stranger to pray with them, and nine died.

They were learning to pray.
Teach us to pray, the disciples said, and those nine had already learned.
Holy Wisdom grieves her children, from Abel to Zechariah,
through Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Rwanda,
to Kyiv, Gaza, Darfur, and Taiz.

“Woe to you lawyers, for you have taken away the key of knowledge;
you did not enter yourselves, and you hindered those who were entering.”

The key of knowledge.
This country once made it a crime to teach the enslaved to read.
Then came literacy tests at the courthouse door, the poll tax, the bridge at Selma.
Today girls in Afghanistan are kept from the classroom, and in India names are struck from the rolls.

I was given a key.
A young man who crossed the sea, and the doors that opened for him:
Drew, Bernard’s long love-song of the soul,
a pulpit for forty years.
Woe to me if I keep that key in my pocket.
A key is only holy when it turns in someone else’s lock.

When he went outside, the scribes and Pharisees began to press him hard,
lying in wait to catch him in something he might say.

The knock comes again at midnight.
I put down the news. I put down the pen. I rise slowly from the chair.
The lamp is still burning, the bread is on the shelf,
and somewhere in the dark the old whisper says,

Begin.

The door is not locked.

Note: God who taught us to ask for bread for all of us, one day at a time, hear the knocking from Kabul, Darfur, Gaza, Taiz, and Kyiv, and do not let the rich world answer from behind a locked door.
Release the debts that crush the poor, and straighten the bent scales of nations and of my own heart.
Show me where my light is darkness, and remember every name in every unmarked grave.
Put the key of knowledge back into the hands of those kept outside, and teach me, still, to pray.