Prayer makes us uncomfortable, and that's why we need it.

Luke 11:2-4

Do not bring us to the time of trial

            Deliver us not into temptation… do not bring us into the time of trial… I don’t know about you but to me those sound like very different things. Before this week I’m not sure I ever thought about the difference between those two versions of the Lord’s Prayer and I never really even considered the reasons why they exist. I mean, sometimes we assume that new things in the church—like, for example, versions of the Lord’s Prayer—are for cultural reasons when, in fact, it has everything to do with debates around what the Bible says. I’m guessing most of you probably prefer the temptation version because it is the version we pray here every Sunday, but rest assured that you could also say “save us from the time of trial” without feeling as though you are selling Jesus short, because both translations are grasping at the meaning of one Greek word.

But before we get to that I want to quickly talk about the “time of trial.” For me, when I hear that phrase the religious sphere of my brain kicks in and I think, “Oh, Jesus must be talking about judgment and eternal salvation—those kinds of things.” But, here, that’s not the case, because the Greek word Jesus speaks is πειρασμός (peirasmós), which means “to put to proof by experiment” (in other words, to “try” as in “trial”) and it also means “temptation.” Again, those seem like two different things—trials and temptations. So, in order to understand this word you might have to imagine a temptation as a test between two things—one right and one wrong—and the trial is the decision of which one to choose.

            But here’s where this gets interesting, because the trial and temptation language highlights something about what it is that Jesus is having us pray; namely, Jesus is telling us to pray to take choices away from us. The prayer is not “lead us through temptation” or “keep us from giving in to temptation” but instead “do not lead us into temptation” at all, which is subtly, but importantly, different. Jesus implies that we need prayer not to summon enough self-control to overcome something but instead we need prayer to keep us away from that situation completely. We need to pray that Jesus removes temptation, because we are not as strong as we think we are. The things that truly tempt us function like depression or anxiety or PTSD to a person with mental health problems. These are things that seem on the surface like they can be controlled if only a person can internally muster enough courage and willpower to overcome them, but the truth is that none of those, or anything that truly tempts us, can be defeated by strength or willpower. We aren’t strong enough; we just pretend we are. We triumph over things that didn’t actually tempt us very much. It’s like the man who is alone on a desert island for years and proudly proclaims, upon being saved, that he didn’t cheat or steal or commit adultery once in those years. For some, that’s what it takes.

So, we are told to pray for total removal from those situations—for a safe space from ourselves.

            And how important is this prayer? Jesus orders it of the disciples in the garden of Gethsemane following the Last Supper. He says twice “Pray that you may not enter into temptation (the time of trial)” (Luke 22:40 and 22:46).

            So, frankly, there isn’t much more important than this prayer. This Lord’s Prayer is urgent, which contrasts with the way we so often use it. Too often, prayer feels like throwing well wishes out to the universe, but this is not the way Jesus prays. For Jesus, prayer takes intense focus, time, and energy. So much so that we, frankly, would rather not do it. It’s easier to just trust in some assurance of a plan for your life than to pray earnestly, urgently, and with passion to discern what that plan might be.

            There’s this great quote attributed to Martin Luther about prayer that I love and, when I’m at my very best, I even half-believe it when he says, “I have so much to do that if I didn't spend at least three hours a day in prayer I would never get it all done.” That sounds like foolishness but it is wisdom for exactly this world that we live in right now—a world obsessed with public displays of prayer that nevertheless doesn’t give the time of day for silent, reflective prayer away from the lights. In this world we rush through our days accomplishing less than we’d like and blaming it on our incessant busy-ness; in this world the farthest thing from our minds is prayer—the last thing we would consider is taking a moment, a minute, an hour to stop and reflect, to give thanks, to take stock and rest. We don’t prioritize this. I know because I look in people’s eyes and can tell it. Then we wonder why we are disconnected from our families and our friends and ourselves! We wonder why the busy-ness seems as if it will have no end. All the while Jesus calls us first to prayer, and it is urgent and it is all-encompassing. To be like Jesus is to live as if nothing in your day is as important as prayer because prayer is the only thing that will connect you to God, and through God to your fellow people. Our lives are an endless series of disconnections and the only thing that reconnects us to one another and to God is prayer.

            And I think we have plenty of time for this. I think we are bursting with time for this; it’s just that Netflix or dishes or CNN or mowing the lawn make us feel like we can’t. We like chatting about nothing too much to engage one another in prayer. We are comfortable, entitled, privileged—you pick the verb. And so we gloss over prayer and then cannot understand why we keep finding ourselves in the same rut again and again. We imagine we will make different choices all on our own; we imagine that God has great plans for my life because of how nice a person I am. We take grace, which is passive, and apply it to our prayer lives, then wait for God to do magic when the true wonder if prayer is accomplished in relationship.

            This will not stand, and you can see it. You can see it in church attendance; you can see it in the way Christianity so often becomes about talking heads yelling about issues; you can see it in all the ways we are not confident talking about faith. A lack of prayer inevitably leads us to the place where God exists only to make me feel good about life in all its terrors and where my relationship with God is predicated on being comfortable. This is fake and it’s the great golden cow of 21^st century America. Not wealth, not prosperity; it’s the cow of comfort that we worship and we go about finding it in all sorts of backward ways, rarely listening, never challenging ourselves to hear God speaking to us.

            When prayer becomes a ritual we do to appease God rather than the means by which we enter into a relationship with God we have confused faith with obedience and joy with responsibility. There are things we do out of obedience; prayer is not one of them. Prayer is life. Prayer is the one and only response to grace. Prayer is relationship and relationship is the ground on which everything else rests. You can say “by grace I have been saved and it is not my doing but the will of God” (Eph 2:8) but that won’t actually mean anything to you if you don’t have a relationship with that God you say you trust.

             Prayer is also bigger than we think of it. Some of my best prayer happens riding a bike or walking in the woods. I know people who pray intently in the car or even in the midst of people. Prayer is merely times when we are attentive to God’s presence. This is why Jesus gives us such a simple prayer to pray—this Lord’s Prayer takes all of thirty seconds to say—because most of our prayer lives are not spent saying anything; they are spent in quiet reflection, meditation, even in activity, but always listening, thinking we might be wrong, and looking for new direction. You can’t do this from a place of defensiveness or hoping to attain anything in particular of your own. God calls us to the kind of urgent prayer we see in Gethsemane. Stay awake! Pray now! Because God lives and moves in the right now. Not the future, not the past. Right now. Be in relationship now. Pray now. Pray always. Pray because prayer is all we got and it’s our only hope for a life that is a fitting response to grace. Pray—stay awake!—because being awake is the ticket to meaning and the path to joy.