Matthew 6:5-12

Rogate

The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with us all. Amen.

Matthew 6:5-12

5 And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.

6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

7 And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words.

8 Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

9 This, then, is how you should pray:
Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.

10 Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

11 Give us this day our daily bread.

12 And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.

13 And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. [For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.]

Dear congregation,

This passage is found in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount. You know this great speech of Jesus, which aims to change the world. It speaks of a life worth living because it is a life in which the evil that troubles us so much is overcome.

Jesus considers many areas of life. These are areas in which we would like to improve the world. Jesus speaks of what makes people blessed. These unexpected possibilities are listed in the Beatitudes.

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says that making peace is more blessed than waging war. The Sermon on the Mount addresses many areas of life: from divorce; from giving to and loving one's enemies.  From worrying unnecessarily about clothing, food, and drink, to swearing oaths and retaliating.

This speech is about our everyday lives. How we live, how we act, how we interact with one another – all of this is part of faith.

And at the heart of all these topics – like a core element –Jesus suddenly speaks of something
completely different: He speaks of prayer.

At the heart of it all, it's not about public life, but about the very personal relationship with God. It's not about the visible, but about the invisible.

It's as if he wanted to say: For everything that becomes outwardly visible in your life, at the center of it lies something else that no one sees. At the center is a hidden relationship. And this hidden relationship then radiates out into the world. To be clear: it's not a secret relationship that no one should know about.

But just as there is a safe space, a private sphere, in every good relationship, so it is in the
relationship with God.  Without the relationship with God, our actions become empty. That's how I understand this passage. That's also how I understand prayer and the relationship with God. This
relationship brings depth and breadth. It brings height and also sets a redeeming limit.

Jesus' words about prayer make me think. It sounds as if Jesus wants to say: You can do many things right—live ethically and morally well—and yet you can be inwardly empty and far removed from the living God.

Prayer is a sanctuary. Because it is demanding to those who try to live well in the sense of being morally and ethically true.  They can easily burn out. For no matter how good we want to be, no matter how hard we try, using our own strength, we don't make this world a better place.

We remain confronted with good and evil. We reach the limits of what is possible and experience a great sense of powerlessness.

That's why Jesus says: When you pray, go into your room. Withdraw. Close the door. It doesn't take much space for an encounter with God.

Withdrawal in prayer is not escapism. The external world and how we live with other people, in small and large ways, remains important. Prayer is a retreat to the origin – it is a source of strength.

Unfortunately, it's increasingly forgotten that we all need such places. These are places where we receive what we need for life. We receive from God all that we truly need to cope in this contradictory world with all its good and evil.  In the depths of prayer. In secret, we encounter God. Not as spectators, but as counterparts.

Jesus describes this relationship we have with God, with the wonderful image of primal trust: the relationship between parent and child.

Here, in this intimate encounter, hypocrisy ends. It has no place here. Here I don't have to perform. Here I don't have to show anything. I can say what's on my heart. I can be silent when I lack the words. I can speak when it helps. I can give thanks and praise. I can lament and doubt. Prayer is not a pious achievement. It is an encounter from heart to heart.  And that's why Jesus says: Don't chatter. No small talk necessary.

For God already knows us – we are intimately connected to him.

The invitation to personal prayer is something very special in our faith. It creates a space of freedom. It is a sacred pause. It is a redeeming renewal.
The hidden God is present in prayer. God is at work.

And now we might wonder why the Lord's Prayer appears at this very point. 
Here, where it's about personal prayer.

For us, the Lord's Prayer is pretty much the most public prayer there is. This wasn't always the case.
The Lord's Prayer was, so to speak, a baptismal gift.

It only appears as a fixed part of the church service in the 4th century. Originally, as in Luke and Matthew, it was the prayer of Jesus' inner circle, and certainly not the prayer of the masses, i.e., those who only listen but don't truly follow him. Only after receiving baptism was the prayer given to the newly baptized, so that they could pray it as the first prayer of their new life. It is the prayer of those who chose baptism in a non-Christian and at times anti-Christian majority society, in which the sanctification of the name also included martyrdom as a concrete possibility.

It is a prayer full of longing, so that we do not break under the evil in the world, but preserve our trust and our hope.

This becomes immediately apparent when we say: “Our Father in heaven.”
It reminds us: I am not alone. I have a connection in heaven. God is there.

“Give us this day our daily bread!” I do not live by myself, and we are not thrown to our own devices. We receive what we need for life and also for survival.

"Thy will be done!" Yes, there is so much that eludes my control—much that I don't understand and can't categorize.

The Lord's Prayer is like a school of trust. I practice it, and it is given to me.

Perhaps this is the most important discovery: In prayer, it is not the world that changes first. In prayer, we are changed.

We learn that there are limits we must accept if we don't want to break or burn out. We learn to trust. We learn that many things are not a given, not even our daily bread, nor reconciliation. Neither the overcoming of evil nor eternal life.

A person who prays does not become detached from the world. A person who prays becomes an awake, free person. A person who prays does not become indifferent, placing everything in God's hands—no, Matthew protects us from this by embedding this passage in the Sermon on the Mount.

But perhaps that is what we are invited to do today: to seek out this little room of prayer. No special place. No special program.

In a wonderful midday hymn by Jochen Klepper in our hymnal, number 457, it says:

The hands that rest in prayer, He makes them strong for action. And what the hands of the one who prays do, happens according to His counsel.

“Father, here I am – nothing more is needed. For what changes our lives begins in secret.”

Especially when we sometimes no longer know what to pray for, we entrust ourselves and our world to God. There we are in good hands.