ONFIDENCE IN CHRIST is confidence that prayer makes the world go round. Without Christ, we know very little of the unknowable God. With Christ, we have seen the face of God, seen something of his nature, and know how to pray.

How do you pray? You will remember that Jesus' answer to this question is the Lord's Prayer. Not only that, St Luke sets the Lord's Prayer in the context of Jesus' own praying. The disciples see Jesus praying and they request their Rabbi to 'teach us to pray'. Much, as at a much lower level, you have come here today and said to me - your bishop, your teacher - 'teach us to pray'.

It would be blasphemous for me to try to add to the teaching of Jesus on prayer but I hope I can expound it a little. I want to divide my talk into two parts: the longer part is about the Lord's Prayer; the shorter, second part is about living a life of prayer.

Ringing in my ears is St Augustine's warning:

If we are praying in the right way, we say nothing that has not already a place in the Lord's prayer. But whoever says anything that cannot be related to this prayer of the Gospel, even though he is not praying unlawfully, he is praying in a fleshly, unspiritual manner: and I do not know how that should not be called unlawful, since people reborn of the Spirit Ought not to pray otherwise than spiritually. (Letter to Proba, OR, Tuesday Wk 29)

Much of Jesus' teaching on prayer is contained in the Sermon on the Mount, where Matthew gives us the Lord's Prayer.

Jesus says:

And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you. And when you pray, do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray then like this:
Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our debts,
As we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil. Matthew 6:5-13 (ESV)

The prayer is essentially the same as in Luke, though in Luke the 'debts' - as in 'forgive us our debts', much beloved by Scottish Christians - become 'sins' - 'forgive us our sins'. But there is no real difference of meaning because, after the Lord's Prayer, Jesus in St Matthew's Gospel goes on to say this:

For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you, but if you do not forgive others their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. Matthew 6:14-15 (ESV)

Tradition has embroidered this nicely. For instance, St Ambrose warns us that though

'our Saviour says: "Go into your room", you must not think that he means by this a room with four walls separating you physically from others, but the room that is within you, where your thoughts are shut up, the place that contains your feelings. This room of prayer is with you at all times, wherever you go it is a secret place and what happens there is witnessed by God alone.' (Treatise On Cain and Abel, OR, Monday Wk 27)

I am not sure I quite agree with Ambrose: I think Jesus was contrasting the public piety of the scribes and pharisees with the true praying in secret of the devout disciple. But Ambrose's point is that, since Paul tells us to pray everywhere, Jesus mustn't have meant that we can only pray in the privacy of our own homes.

St Ambrose has much to say that is very helpful. He reminds us that Jesus tells us to pray 'urgently and frequently: not that our prayers should be tedious and endless but that they should be persevering and frequent' (ibid). He also says that 'generally speaking, long prayers are full of meaningless phrases, while on the other hand total lack of interest is the result if prayers are given up altogether'.

When I was a curate, I remember preaching in a series on Prayer. There were several of us in the preaching cycle, one of whom was a non-stipendiary, a New Testament specialist, then a teacher at Nottingham University and nowadays in Oxford. In my sermon I reminded everybody that there is much more to prayer than asking. I reminded them of the acronym A-C-T-S.

A-doration. C-onfession. T-hanksgiving. S-upplication.

I had been brought up on this and no doubt many of you have been too. I told them, with all the authority of a new curate, that Supplication - Asking God - was at most only one of the four aspects of prayer. More than that, it was probably the least important of the four.

The university tutor was in the pulpit the following week. It was an Evensong series of sermons. 'Much as I don't like disagreeing with Fr Andrew's sermon last week', he said, 'in the teaching of Jesus about prayer, asking is absolutely central. The most important aspect'. And he went on to quote

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Matthew 6:7-9(ESV)

And it is true that a great deal about prayer, in the teaching about Jesus, is about 'asking', approaching God not as a distant potentate but as a Father who loves his children. That is the force of many of the parables. But if we apply St Augustine's criteria to the Lord's Prayer - that therein is everything about true prayer - we cannot help noticing that 'asking' is put into true context. Let me read the Lord's Prayer again and let us notice the place of asking:

Our Father in heaven,
Hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come,
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread,
And forgive us our debts,
As we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
But deliver us from evil.

If we put the traditional doxology on the end - 'For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours…' - we find that the prayer begins and ends with praise. The first two petitions - 'your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven' - flow out of our praise of God's holiness. We in effect pray that his glory will fill the whole of the universe. Only then do we make the other petitions:

- 'Give us this day our daily bread'
- 'Forgive us our trespasses'
- 'Lead us not into temptation'
- 'Deliver us from evil'.

I could say more about these petitions - this asking - but I want to make just three or four points before moving on beyond the Lord's Prayer. Most obviously - relying on St Augustine again - I would say that our 'daily bread' means more than one thing:

'We are asking either for sufficiency, by expressing its principal part, signifying the whole by the name 'bread'; or for the sacrament of believers, which is necessary at the present time in order to obtain the happiness not of this present time but of eternity'. (Letter to Proba, OR, Tuesday Wk 29)

The importance of this remark is not least that it reminds us that all our praying - which boils down to what is contained in the 'Our Father' - must be shot through with a longing for the Holy Eucharist. 'Give us this day our daily bread'. Or to put that in some words of Pope John XXIII,

'Make Mass the centre of your day, so that everything is related to it as preparation or thanksgiving'.

The next petition - 'Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us' - is, in my view, the very central point of the teaching of the New Testament. The parable of the Unforgiving Servant (Matthew 18:21ff) begins with Peter asking Jesus 'Lord, how often will my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? As many as seven times?' The answer, as you will remember, is 'seventy times seven', a Semitic phrase meaning 'indefinitely'. But the parable has the king forgiving his servant a debt which is ludicrously big - a billion pounds, perhaps. The servant then goes out to find a fellow servant who owes him the equivalent of £5,000.

The large debt gets forgiven but the small debt is not and the hapless fellow servant is thrown into the debtor's prison.

The king finds this out - for the king gets to know everything - and the unforgiving servant is put in prison until he can find a billion pounds - which, of course, he will never be able to do. The contract of forgiveness, at the heart of Christian prayer, is that we are brought into fellowship with God - an enormous distance is bridged - provided we keep fellowship with our fellow human beings, which requires the bridging of much smaller, and manageable distances.

And then 'Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil'. A great deal of scholarly ink has been spilt on 'the time of trial' and 'the Evil One'. But our prayer finishes, by any reckoning, with the request that God will finally be our Saviour and our rescuer.

In short, our prayer - true prayer - must begin with giving glory to God and pray for the coming of his kingdom. It can then move on to ask for our own needs to be fulfilled, including our role in the ministry of God in Christ reconciling the world (2 Corinthians 5:19) and our prayer not to be tempted beyond endurance.


Moving on to the second, shorter, part of my talk, I want to speak about 'Keeping our confidence in Christ', living a life of prayer. As I have said elsewhere, bishop I may be but, when it comes to the ascent towards God, I am still messing about in the foothills. But one of the secrets of being a teacher is to be a fellow-learner, one who struggles with the subject. I remember from my school days that the best mathematics teacher in the school could only be understood by the finest mathematicians. In that sense he was not really a good teacher.

Here, then, as a struggler in the school of prayer, I pass on the good practice I have myself picked up.

The first thing is silence. Whenever I imagine the Lord praying to his Father, as he frequently does in the Gospel, I imagine a conversation mainly without words. Like the old married couple who sit together and have no need to speak. Like the child that happily plays, fully absorbed, secure in the knowledge that mum is in the room, whether peeling the potatoes or doing her Open University degree reading.

Silence is the beginning of prayer and its most intense state. That is what we learn from the mystics. Finding room for silence - having a definite rule about silence - is as hard as anything.

To encourage us, we have the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacles of our churches. Here is the place to pray silently. 'Just to have one more Church where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved is a great deal', said St Teresa. There is the famous story of the Curé d'Ars and the peasant who sat, hour after hour, in Church, in front of the tabernacle. 'What are you doing?' said the Curé. 'I look at him and he looks at me', came the reply. Roman Catholics in this country are discovering the joys of perpetual adoration. A chapel of adoration is created - perhaps a small, self-sufficient space, with a combination lock on the door. What amounts to the Maundy Thursday Vigil is then turned into what the Americans call a 24/7 activity. People come and go all night and all day and make that hour of prayer the climax of their week. I wish we could do it but we probably cannot: few of our churches have 168 people available for the exercise, 80 of them available for the unsocial hours of night. Perhaps we all need to work harder at setting up occasional bursts of this. Days and vigils. Weeks even, from time to time. At any rate, we need to learn to have a greater mindfulness, greater recollection in the presence of Jesus, sacramentally present in the tabernacle.

Once we move on to words - not something to do very quickly - I think we move on to simple repetitive phrases: not vain repetition. My favourite one - and it can easily be combined with keeping watch before the Blessed Sacrament or sitting quietly at home or even sitting quietly, amidst the noise of others, on the 'bus - is the Jesus Prayer.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

This is very much the prayer of the Orthodox tradition and it can be combined with breathing in and breathing out. You breathe in to the words 'Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God'.

You breathe out to the words 'have mercy on me a sinner'. It is as if the breathing in of divine life expels the carbon dioxide of sin from your body. The words vary slightly and so does the method. Many people use an Eastern prayer rope. A bit like a rosary.

Then, of course, there is the rosary itself, a great aid to contemplative prayer. I have no time at present to describe in detail how the Our Father-s, Hail Mary-s and Glory be-s pile up. Nor have I time to go through the Mysteries - Joyful, Sorrowful and Glorious. Most of this is well-known to many of you, though the rosary is not everybody's 'cup-of-tea'.

The present Pope is a great fan of the Rosary and says that the revival of the Rosary in Christian families 'will be an effective aid to countering the devastating effects…of our age.' Why not try the Rosary as a family devotion? Even the very young can join in and, if you are short of beads, fingers and thumbs will do for counting!

In October this year, the Pope initiated 'the Year of the Rosary' and added another chaplet - five more mysteries. 'The Mysteries of Light', otherwise known as 'the Luminous Mysteries', are:

(1) The Baptism of the Lord
(2) The Marriage at Cana
(3) The Proclamation of the Kingdom
(4) The Transfiguration
(5) The Institution of the Eucharist.

The inspiration for this innovation may well have been the Maltese priest, Blessed George Preca, beatified in 2001. He had suggested a list of 'Mysteries of Light' and his list is not dissimilar to that of the Pope. The suggestion, for those who pray the Rosary daily, is that the Joyful Mysteries are now prayed on Mondays and Saturdays, the Sorrowful on Tuesdays and Fridays, the Glorious on Wednesdays and Sundays and the Luminous on Thursdays.

The next rule of thumb - after the importance of silence and contemplative prayer - is the importance of time. Not by accident are the services of the Divine Office called the 'Hours'. Perhaps we cannot keep to rigid schedules, but we do know - from our bathing and from our eating, from our shopping and from our income tax returns and road tax - that things, pleasant and unpleasant, only happen if we do them at the right time.

There have been many attempts to link the prayer of the laity with the Office of the Church. It was Cranmer was trying to do in BCP Matins and Evensong. It was what the 1970 liturgical reforms were trying to do with the Roman Divine Office. It was what Common Worship has been trying to do with Daily Prayer. The life of prayer in the parish - in church and in the homes - should be a seamless robe of ceaseless prayer. One of the tasks of the parish priest is to help people share in the Prayer of the Church.

It is easy enough to come out with pious principles: what about practical help? For one thing, people need to be encouraged to read the daily readings. A bible and set of references or Weekday Missal with appropriate calendar information is all that is needed. For another, people need to be encouraged to use the Lord's Prayer morning and evening and, indeed, appropriate portions of the Office. I say 'appropriate' not because there are bits of the Office which are inappropriate for the laity but because the Lord warns us about the scribes and pharisees tying up 'heavy burdens, hard to bear, and' laying 'them on people's shoulders' (Matthew 23:4).

If what I have said about silence, contemplation and the Office is mainly about Adoration and Thanksgiving, I need to complement it with words about Confession and Supplication. I do not want for now to say very much about either of these. Confession includes the daily examination of conscience, the confession of sins in the form of the General Confession at Mass and the regular - if occasional - use of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. It is a topic all of its own, which I shall return to some other time.

Supplication - Intercession - Petition - Rogation - is, as I said earlier, very much at the heart of the New Testament teaching on prayer. Each of us needs a folder in which we can keep bits and pieces to inform the prayer of asking. 'How you ask' is very simple. As Jesus himself said, you must ask as a child speaking to his father. There are great philosophical problems with intercessory prayer. The obvious one is, if I ask God for that - and 'that' is a good thing - what do I make of it when the prayer is not granted? Another question is the 'what about Auschwitz question?'

There are, I think, two answers to these philosophical questions - answers which will not quieten down the philosophers and the theologians but have a great deal to say to us in our prayer life. The first answer is there for instance in the discussion between Jesus and his disciples about the Galileans put to death by Pilate and the eighteen on whom the tower of Siloam fell (Luke 13:1-5). Jesus makes it clear that none of these unfortunates is a worse offender than others. There are disasters and tragedies, in other words, but it does not stop Jesus telling his disciples to pray, to ask, to knock and to seek. In fact, we must be persistent in our prayers. George Herbert called prayer 'engine 'gainst th'Almighty' - a battering ram. The other answer is, quite simply, the cross of Jesus Christ. We must be ever more urgent in our asking - in our intercessory prayer - and almost as keen on petition (praying for ourselves) as intercession (praying for others). After all the Lord's Prayer, the model of Prayer has all this.

I hope, finally, that this talk encourages each one of us - I include myself - in our confidence in Christ. Most of you will be familiar with most of what I have said but things gain something in the telling. More than that, there will be those here who have not heard all these things. If we can approach again the Lord's Prayer, as the Lord's lesson in prayer, if we can rediscover silence and devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, if we can rediscover the Office and Bible Reading and the value of intercession - as well as adoration, contrition and thanksgiving - then we shall have done a great deal to recover our confidence in Christ.

+Andrew Ebbsfleet
Weston-super-Mare, November 9th 2002

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