#PrayerforEveryone: Jesus’ Advice on How to Pray

“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. 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.” 

Matthew 5:5-6

This week the United Nations is adopting a new set of global initiatives to be achieved by 2030. They have identified 17 Global Goals that read like the combined prayer list of Mother Teresa, Pope Francis, and Nelson Mandela. Here’s a sampling of what’s on the list: ending poverty and hunger, achieving gender equality, access to clean water and sanitation, economic growth, education and action on climate change. The One Campaign, Bono’s anti-poverty organization, has issued an intriguing call for the people of the world to act and pray together to achieve these goals. No matter your religion, you are invited to be part of Prayer for Everyone and engage with your community for a “week of prayer and action” from September 25 to October 1.

Of course Prayer for Everyone shouldn’t be just a one off event. Paul advised us to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) and Jesus commanded us to pray much more difficult prayers, for the well-being of those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44-45). So praying for the least and the last such as the poor, the sick, the disadvantaged and our environment is a no-brainer. It’s what good people do. The Global Goals are so noble and good, who wouldn’t want to pray for them?

Hypocrites Get Their Reward

Unfortunately, good people are not immune to hypocrisy! When we pray, we are often praying like the hypocrites in Matthew’s Gospel. All too often our Sunday morning public prayers do more to enhance our reputations than help those we are praying for. Because Prayer for Everyone is such an obviously good thing to do that we may indeed “get our reward”, as Jesus says in the famous rebuke to public prayer. Our “reward” is the approval of those in our community for praying such admirable prayers.

We all crave the respect and approval of our peers, so what’s wrong with a little positive feedback now and then? Because as Jesus says, if we “get our reward” from others we may not realize there’s much more we could be receiving from God “who sees in secret”. If we are satisfied with the reward of approval from our peers, we may stop seeking for God’s reward and if we stop seeking it, we will never discover what it is!

Praying Our Worst Selves

For these global goals to have any chance of succeeding, Christian communities need to pray differently. We need to drop any pretense of being good and noble people and pray our fear, anger, resentment and hate instead. These sorts of feelings embarrass us. We know all too well that we are called to welcome the stranger, feed the hungry, minister to the poor and liberate captives. But immigrants, war refugees, criminals, the mentally ill, and the chronically sick evoke all manner of unseemly emotions in us. We all know better than to act on these feelings, right? So we pretend before ourselves, each other, and God that we don’t feel them.

I know that praying our unseemly emotions will be humiliating. But our Father who knows everything in secret knows it all anyway. Unless we can admit it to ourselves and pray our deepest, worst selves God will never be able to transform us, and through us the world. The only way to transform our fear, anger and resentment is to turn it over to God. And the only way to turn it over to God is to give it full expression, to stop pretending we are better and more noble than we are.

Seeking God’s Reward

This approach to prayer may sound risky, but keeping it bottled up is worse by far. Otherwise we run the risk that our noble prayers land on God’s ears a bit differently than we intended! We may sound more like the good and noble Pharisee in Luke 18:9-14 who offers earnest prayers of gratitude that he is “not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.” Of course, the tax collector was praying for mercy. He was not hiding his sinfulness from God, himself, or the community. If your church decides to work for the fulfillment of any of the Global Goals, my guess is that you’d rather have the humble tax collector on your committee than the upstanding Pharisee.

If we hide our need for mercy behind noble prayers, Bono and his Prayer for Everyone campaign could easily be nothing more than a self-congratulatory moment in churches across America. The week of prayer will not mobilize communities for action. Because the good opinion of others works like a sedative on our spiritual lives, satisfying our desires so that we stop seeking the reward that God has waiting for us. I believe that with God’s help we can achieve all 17 Global Goals by 2030 and that Jesus believed it, too. He gave us good advice on how to pray the world to a better place. Let’s give it a go!