July 20th Sermon on Prayer
I preached this last week, the 29th in Duluth. I hope you like it, it created a lot of questions and conversation about prayer and was quite enlightening. I did not finish it, so someday hope to conclude it in a way that is more final and even more clear. Enjoy. Preaching about, much less talking about prayer is a difficult thing. Because what about those unanswered prayers, what about those times when we feel God never got up out of bed to answer the door. Or worse, what about those times when we feel God gave us a snake or a scorpion instead of food and sustenance? Prayer can be a difficult thing, some of us must be more holy than others to have had our prayers answered, while others clearly were not holy enough, and that is why their prayers were not answered. Today’s Gospel is the story of how we came to have the Lord’s Prayer as our central Christian prayer. It is the giving, the teaching of Jesus to his disciples who desired to know how they should pray when they needed a...