Sermon Seeds: Teach Us

Sunday, July 27, 2025
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost| Year C
(Liturgical Color: Green)

Lectionary Citations
Hosea 1:2-10 and Psalm 85 • Genesis 18:20-32 and Psalm 138 • Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19) • Luke 11:1-13
https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/texts/?z=p&d=66&y=384

Focus Scripture: Luke 11:1-13
Focus Theme: Teach Us
Series: Raise Her Voice: Into the Deep (Click here for the series overview.)

Reflection
By Cheryl A. Lindsay

Teachers hold particular significance in our lives. There are those formerly trained as educators who go through rigorous study and meet continuing education requirements so that they maintain competency in their specialty, age group, or teaching techniques. These teachers are employed by schools and systems with standards and accountability. A good teacher may impact us beyond their subject or the grade they taught as role models, encouragers, and wise sages whose lessons reverberate throughout our lives.

Then there are those who teach within their profession who take that role and responsibility with great sincerity. Physicians at teaching hospitals train the next generation for lifelong practice through medical school, residency, and even fellowships. In higher education, many professors also work vocationally in the respective field. In the United Church of Christ, ordination authorizes the individual as pastor and teacher.

Then there are those who teach without a pedigree. It may be the family friend who shares a hobby with a child or the bus driver who imparts lessons in socialization and public conduct. The grandfather may teach the youth how to bake bread, and the auntie may teach them how to fix a flat tire. If life is full of teaching moments, then the world is full of those who teach us.

In the gospel account, we encounter a teaching moment. The disciples observe Jesus in prayer. Interestingly, the text does not record the words of that prayer. The disciples may have heard it or simply recognized Jesus’ posture. Presumably, Jesus prayed before them regularly. While in another gospel account, Jesus instructs that private prayer is most appropriate, there are other instances when Jesus clearly prays in public or at least within the community he forged with the first disciples. The disciples do not ask for a singular prayer to be used all the time, they want to know how to pray.

Part of the learning process develops the student into a proficiency that adapts to changing circumstances. If you only learn how to make focaccia, you probably would not call yourself a bread maker. On the other hand, when you learn the fundamentals of breadmaking that are transferable to a number of different types of bread and you become less dependent on a particular recipe, then you have demonstrated competency and perhaps acumen with the lesson or skill.

Jesus instructs them to pray using an example. Some consider it the only way to pray, others use it as a formula for prayer. Still others make it a guide or model. In the Lukan account, however, Jesus does not stop with the words of what has become known as the Lord’s Prayer. The lesson on prayer continues.

The prayer includes five petitions, the first two affirming divine honor and power and the last three asking for the divine provision of food, mercy, and protection from integrity-threatening ordeal. The basis for trusting petition is the character of God, whose powerful rule, experienced as gracious care and provision, evokes human response of allegiance and acclamation. The second petition, “May your reign come,” moves from the divine world to the human world, from reverence for God to the shaping of life in the world.
John T. Carroll

For Jesus, prayer shapes life, and life shapes prayer. In this form, prayer includes tangible needs of daily survival as well as aspirational hopes with eternal consequences. The prayer rests upon a divine-human relationship of intimacy and partnership. To pray as Jesus prays addresses One who is known and assumes that one is also known. Aligning with the example, Jesus continues the lesson plan expounding on prayer as an act of friendship.

Jesus follows the model prayer with a parable that features pivotal values and practices of his social world. The language and imagery of friendship (vv. 5, 6, 8), hospitality (the dilemma of a man cast unexpectedly in the role of host), and honor and shame (v. 8) pervade this parable. Jesus presents the parable in the form of a rhetorical question: “Who among you will have a friend [who would act in the fashion narrated]?” (vv. 5–7). His comment on the imagined exchange between neighbors (signaled by “I tell you” in v. 8) exposes its absurdity. Given the importance of friendship among neighbors, and of honor and public reputation in the village, it is inconceivable that one would act in such a way. Jesus leaves the point of the parable unstated but reinforces it with a series of aphoristic sayings (vv. 9–13) that bring the unit back to its starting point, prayer—which is to say, trust in divine care and provision.
John T. Carroll

Yet, even in this prayer, Jesus frames human participation in realizing God’s will as pivotal. Human actions and attitudes matter. The Holy One is not solely and strictly responsible for forgiveness, mercy, and restoration. As a teaching model, rather than as a formula, one may extract that this dual, shared, or delegated responsibility extends beyond forgiveness as Jesus suggests that we have the power to be the answer to one another’s prayers. This reinforces the idea that human beings are created in the image of God and foreshadows the great commissioning that Jesus will institute with their followers. It is not the only portion of the prayer that will be echoed in later events.

The summons to embody in practices of costly mercy a religious commitment that runs counter to prevailing social norms and practices presents challenges to enduring fidelity. Jesus himself, at the outset of his public career, faced … an ordeal of testing, or temptation, that probed his integrity of selfhood and his commitment to a vocation as Son of God (4:1–13). His followers will later face the same test and will need persistent prayer to face it courageously (22:40, 46). So the narrative’s unfolding of this motif shows how the petition that God not “lead us into temptation,” in this narrative world, will, like Jesus’ later petition to be spared the “cup” (22:42), sit tensively alongside the reality of conflict that does test authentic discipleship. Thus the petition cannot finally mean a request for a “free pass,” for exemption from painful struggle and suffering that would test authentic commitment. Rather, it becomes prayer to receive empowerment by God’s Spirit to face inevitable struggles with persevering integrity (12:11–12; cf. 21:15).
John T. Carroll

Jesus prays before his disciples and provides them with a way of praying that responds to the call to a way of living. The prayer embodies the relationship that makes it both possible and necessary. As we consider it anew, let us ponder what do we need to pray in response to this moment and our necessary participation in it.

Teach us, Teacher, how to pray.

Reflection from Voices of People of African Descent
The 33rd General Synod adopted a Resolution to Recognize the United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). As part of its implementation, Sermon and Weekly Seeds offers Reflection from Voices of People of African Descent related to the season or overall theme for additional consideration in sermon preparation and for individual and congregational study.
“Black education”
I asked a variety of people to say the first word that came to mind when presented with the noun “Crisis”
I heard many different responses; “a problem” “a catastrophe” “an unbearable disaster”, and yet, never did I hear the biggest Crisis of all
Education.
E-D-U-C-A-T-I-O-N
Allow me to dissect that word for a second,
The abbreviation for education is made of the first three letters “E-D-U” you find it on website domains somewhere in your textbooks
However the first three letters are the least important.
When you drop that edu you’re left with a word, a word extremely crucial to the English language.
Caution
To access the full poem: https://hellopoetry.com/poem/1881562/black-education/

For Further Reflection
“One child, one teacher, one book, one pen can change the world.” ― Malala Yousafzai
“A teacher who loves learning earns the right and the ability to help others learn.” ― Ruth Beechick
“[Kids] don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.” ― Jim Henson

Works Cited
Carroll, John T. Luke. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012.

Suggested Congregational Response to the Reflection
During this series, Raise Her Voice: Into the Deep, in the season after Pentecost, we invite the local church to listen to Spirit speaking among us by developing the practices of testimony and exhortation. In testimony, one recounts how the Holy One has been present, moved, and guided in the past. In exhortation, one shares discernment based on what Spirit is still speaking to the church today. This may be done during worship as an immediate response to proclamation or in another format (i.e. blog posts, short videos on social media).

Worship Ways Liturgical Resources
https://www.ucc.org/worship-way/after-pentecost-7c-july-27/

The Rev. Dr. Cheryl A. Lindsay, Minister for Worship and Theology (lindsayc@ucc.org), also serves a local church pastor, public theologian, and worship scholar-practitioner with a particular interest in the proclamation of the word in gathered communities. You’re invited to share your reflections on this text in the comments on our Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/SermonSeeds.

A Bible study version of this reflection is at Weekly Seeds.