Psalm 85 I knew two prayers growing up, which wasn’t bad for a kid who never went to church. Though I grew up outside the church, these two prayers were engraved on my heart at a very early age. I learned these prayers at a place that no longer physically exists, having been bulldozed many years ago in an effort of urban renewal. But it lives on in my memory, and in my heart, as having been a place that helped shape me.

We didn’t go to church. Neither were we involved with any of the groups or activities that occupied young families of the 1950s and 1960s. My family’s main social connection was Alcoholics Anonymous. AA, as you no doubt know, is a fellowship of those who meet to share their stories with each other and to support each other in staying sober.

My parents were long-time members of AA. During much of my childhood I remember evening after evening sitting in the rather cavernous structure of the Hub of the Plains Group in Lubbock, Texas. The Hub of the Plains Group still exists, but in another building across town. This original building was at 5th Street and Avenue N.

It was an odd building. It was really a basement for an office tower that was never built so the building itself, as you would see it from the street, was about one-half story tall, as most of it was underground. You would go down into the building, down a long steep staircase.

Down in that building there were people from all walks of life, though this group skewed toward the more common people, perhaps. In fact, I knew what the term “skid row” meant before I started school because I had heard so many stories from so many alcoholics about their escape from “skid row.”

It was a very spiritual group. Not religious, for the 12-step approach of AA avoids anything that looked like church, but the program does encourage a relationship with, as they say, the God of your understanding. And it was a praying community, for every meeting began with a prayer and ended with a prayer, those two prayers I learned so early.

At the beginning of each meeting, after a brief reading of the group’s purpose, everyone recited the Serenity Prayer:

And so very early in my childhood I knew this prayer by heart. And another one, the one that ended each meeting, as people would stand, heads bowed, hands clasped, when another familiar prayer was recited:
Our Father, who art in heaven,
Hallowed be thy name...

So I grew up amid a tattered group of recovering alcoholics who had found solace in coming together to talk and pray, with most in the room praying for the grace to not take a drink for that one day, with most in the room praying for the serenity, courage and wisdom to be able to discern God’s will for that one day.

They knew that sobriety was possible; they had seen it happen in others. They knew that through a relationship with God, through moving from their human addiction to coming closer to the heart of God, that they might get their lives together. So early in my life I was exposed to a type of prayer that made a difference in people’s lives. It was a type of prayer that was based on changing yourself to better match the will of God. It was a type of prayer based on living from the inside out. It was prayer that changed people from the inside out.

So often we want God to line up with our will. We want, if truth be told, God to do what we want. But prayer isn’t asking God to do things for us. Prayer is aligning ourselves with God’s will, aligning our human will with the divine will. Prayer is shaping us from the inside, so that we can conform our outer lives to God’s intentions, so we can be the people God wants us to be.

Those old alcoholics at 5th and N weren’t asking that God remove their alcohol addiction. They expected their addiction would be with them forever. They weren’t demanding that God give them things, be it more money or more love or more of whatever they lacked, whatever was missing in their lives that they were trying to compensate with drink. They weren’t asking for any miracle. They were simply praying for the grace, one day at a time, that God help them be the people they should be.

The prayer we call the Lord’s Prayer, the prayer Jesus taught his disciples, is a model of this kind of praying, of praying from the inside out.

In this morning’s gospel lesson, Jesus gives us a version of what we call the Lord’s Prayer. This version from Luke is abbreviated from that found in Matthew. Of all the gospels, Luke has the most extensive material on prayer. In Luke, Jesus prays regularly and at critical moments in his ministry, even while he is on the cross, so he models prayer as a mark of true discipleship.

Jesus begins the prayer by addressing God as Father. Our English translation, however, does not catch the fullness of the term. In the original Aramaic which Jesus would have used, he uses the term abba for father which is more properly translated as “daddy,” a term of affection and intimacy. So God, Jesus indicates, is close and attentive and knows us intimately.

Then, Jesus suggests we acknowledge that God’s name is hallowed, or sacred, reflecting the all-ness and totality and holiness of God. So the prayer begins not with our needs, but in the recognition of God’s sacredness, of the divinity in which we exist.

Then, with our basic relationship to God and God’s basic nature established, there are a brief series of four petitions:” Thy kingdom come” expresses the disciples’ desire that the transforming reign of God they were proclaiming would be fully realized. So this first petition speaks to God’s nature and power. The next three ask God for basic human needs: food – our daily bread – forgiveness and freedom. That is, for basic sustenance, a grace-filled relationship with God and with each other, and freedom from evil.

Through the prayer, Jesus teaches the disciples what their real needs are and to whom they need to go to have those needs satisfied. And Jesus suggests that these needs will be satisfied by God. He then tells a little parable, and then the sayings about prayer, to underscore that God listens and that God provides.

No, we don’t always get what we ask for, but perhaps we get what we need. So often we pray for health, for prosperity, for happiness, for love, even for peace. Perhaps our prayers ought to be for us to be aware of the spirit of God with us to give us the strength, the courage, the tenacity, the flexibility, the grace, the humor, to be children of God as we travail the chaos of earthly life. Perhaps our more true prayer might be to be changed inwardly into what God wants, and not so concerned with divine manipulation of outer conditions.

* * *

Ron Weber is pastor of Grace Community United Methodist Church in Shreveport, Louisiana, and he narrates the video portion of a curriculum called “Beginnings.” We’ll be offering this adult education curriculum in the fall, so watch for more information about it. Each small group session is geared around a particular topic and participants watch a short video introduction. In the chapter on prayer – called “How Do I Speak to God?”– Ron Weber tells a story of a Christmas gift exchange.

Someone unwrapped a gift and it was a beautiful red glass Christmas ornament. The ornament was hand painted and indeed the detail and the intricate design were a beauty to behold. But that wasn’t the most interesting thing about this red glass ornament. According to a little card that described how it was produced, it was hand painted, from the inside. There was a very small hole in the top of the glass ornament and the artist had taken the time and energy to work with very small brushes, working through this tiny little hole in the glass, and painted this intricate and detailed design, from the inside.

We are like this ornament. There are things – so many things in this world– that try to coat us from the outside. But if we remain open, if we have what Ron Weber calls an “active openness,” God will be able to reach inside of us to “paint us from the inside out and create us into who we were meant to be.” The beauty of this ornament showed on the outside, but it was internally crafted. True beauty comes from the inside, glows from the heart and the soul to the outer flesh. True beauty is from a divine source, from God. It strikes me that true prayer likewise works from the inside out. The prayer that Jesus taught his disciples and teaches us today, is a prayer of the inward life, that works progressively outward. It is a prayer of orientation; that orients us back to our lives as children of God.

The Serenity Prayer likewise asks nothing of the world, asks nothing of God except that God grant us have the serenity, courage and wisdom to navigate this world.

So prayer is not manipulating God or manipulating the events of the world. Prayer is not telling God how it ought to be. Prayer is really, asking very little of God except that God help us orient our lives to the Divine Life. Prayer shapes us, from the inside out. Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard says, “Prayer does not change God, but it changes whoever prays.”

Now, this does not mean that we should only pray for ourselves. For if we are only praying for our own self-improvement, then our prayer and our religious life is nothing but our own selfish ego projected onto God. As Christians it is our duty to pray for the concerns of others and for the world. Especially in these days of serious global issues, we need to remind ourselves that God is at work everywhere, not just in our little corner of the world, and to put our own needs in perspective against the relief of the world’s needs.

We should always consider the needs of the world and the needs of others in our prayers, and yet remain rooted in God. The passage from Colossians reminds us what although a lot of external forces will try to claim our time and energy, our relationship with God in Christ must always come first. “As therefore you received Christ … so live in him, rooted and built up in him…” The writer of that letter suggests a new circumcision, a circumcision of the flesh. This could mean not denying the pleasures of the world or of the flesh, but having them in their proper perspective, knowing that we are more than our body, and that our growth is spiritual, from God.

The Psalmist was making supplication and came to the realization that “the Lord will give what is good.” For God “will speak peace to the people, to the saints, to those who turn to him in their hearts.”

God does speak to the people, to all kinds of people. I have been privileged to know many kinds in my life, from struggling alcoholics huddled in the basement of an incomplete building, holding hands, praying the Lord’s prayer, asking for the strength to not drink, to our congregation here – people who have formed a community of Christ in a locally gathered church, who gather to talk, to listen, to pray, to say that old Lord’s Prayer and consider the conditions of our world community as within the household of God.

The idea of praying from the inside out – and living from the inside out – is found in another portion of the Serenity Prayer, a portion not often heard.

The author of the Serenity Prayer is largely unknown. It is frequently attributed to the 20th century theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. Niebuhr said once he thought that he wrote it as a conclusion to a pastoral prayer, but that it could have been – as he said – “spooking around,” so he wasn’t sure it was original with him. What was original with him was a longer conclusion to the Serenity Prayer he gave once, and it follows the familiar line, “and the courage to know the difference.”

So may it be. Amen.