Today’s passage of Luke’s account of Jesus’ last meal might be a great scripture for today, or perhaps it’s even a terrible one for today, given where we are as a community, a state, a nation and a world in dealing with the coronavirus. Perhaps it’s good because it sort of encapsulates the darkness of that night and the unknown future, at least for the disciples. And perhaps it’s not good because Jesus seems to indicate that he knew how things would turn out. But regardless of which it is, it is an important piece of scripture because it is part of what we still practice liturgically in communion as part of worship even today, although there were lots of conversations going on in the wider church this week about whether to serve communion or not and how to serve it because of fears of touch and contamination and the unknown. I truly wish there were some easy answers to these questions, because it would make this job a lot easier, but there are not, and what we are really focusing on for today is not communion itself, or at least not all of it, but the prayer that Jesus gives, as part of our series in traveling the prayer paths of Jesus, and looking at where, when and how Jesus prays.
But before that a quick recap and correction. We began with the idea and need of going off to a quiet place to pray by ourselves, just as Jesus did, in order to reconnect with God and recharge ourselves spiritually and even physically in order to do the ministry in the world that we are called to do. This time can be a short period of time or even days, depending on what’s happening and what we have to dedicate to this time. Then last week we moved onto the prayers that we offer as part of our ordinary life, and it’s here that I want to add a correction. As I was thinking about the message, which was based on Jesus’ healing of a boy with what appears to be epilepsy, and he said that the reason the disciples couldn’t heal the boy was because it could only be done through prayer. And so I talked about the necessity of prayer for the impossible things in our lives. And that could have given the impression to some that bad things in our lives could, or perhaps did happen simply because we didn’t pray, or didn’t say the right words, or that we might not have prayed hard enough. And if only you had done that, then the outcome would have been different. And that was not what I intended at all, or what I meant to say, and so I apologize for that potential misunderstanding. This is a message for a different day, and perhaps as part of next week, but I don’t believe that prayer works that way, or that God works that way. Instead, my point was about the need for prayer in our lives and that we should be praying for others, and that those could be just short burst prayers or arrow prayers, short prayers given to others, like those trapped in endless lines at Smith’s, and especially for the employees. But that we also need to be praying for God’s help in all situations, especially those that we think are impossible. That should be part of our prayer practice.
