Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Teach Us to Pray
This was the request—teach us to pray. Four simple words! Or are they? The request was not “Pray for us.” Those who accompanied Jesus watched him and observed the relationship that he had with God the Father. They wanted the same for their community. It was always about community for Jesus and it was about community for the disciples. Teach “us” to pray. And Jesus begins his teaching with “Our Father” as the name of God.
I invite you this week to pray the “Our Father” slowly and reflectively. Most of us learned this prayer in our childhood, one we memorized, and often we pray it quickly lest we lose our place and forget the rest of it. Print it out or find it on your phone and read it, stopping after each phrase to reflect on its meaning for you, your life in your family or in your relationship with others, your work, or your neighborhood. At the end of each day, reflect on how you lived it.
As we pray “thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, we are reminded of the work that is ours in building the kingdom of God—the kind of world God seeks for all of God’s creation on earth, as it is in heaven.
In Praying with Jesus and Mary: Our Father, Hail Mary, the theologian Leonardo Boff says:
“We are not sanctifying the name of God when we erect church buildings, when we elaborate mystical treatises, or when we guarantee his official presence in society by means of religious symbols. His holy name is sanctified only to the extent that these expressions are related to a pure heart, a thirst for justice, and a reaching out for perfection. It is in these realities that God dwells; these are his true temple, where there are no idols. Origin said well, in commenting on this supplication of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘They who do not strive to harmonize their conception of God with that which is just take the name of the Lord God in vain.’ Thus ethics constitutes the most reliable criterion for discerning whether the God we claim to sanctify is true or false.
“We sanctify the name of God when by our own life, by our own actions of solidarity, we help to build more pacific and more just human relationships, cutting off access to violence and one person’s exploitation of another. God is always offended when violence is done to a human being, made in his image and likeness. And God is always sanctified when human dignity is restored to the dispossessed and the victims of violence.”
That’s why we come together to pray, like Abraham, with boldness and perseverance. We ask for what we know is God’s intention, God’s purpose for all of humanity and all of God’s earth/creation. In our prayer, let us be courageous, insistent, and persistent!