Seventh Sunday after Pentecost

Photo by Chris Liverani on Unsplash

Luke 11:1-13, Colossians 2:6-13

Grace and peace to you in the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

I remember learning the Lord’s Prayer from my grandmother. I was probably 5 or 6 and my grandparents stayed over taking care of me and my two siblings because my parents were out of town.

Every night, we would do our bath time, brush our teeth, comb our hair (yes, you’ll be surprised to know I had hair!) and then all of us kids would gather around one of our beds and my grandmother would have us recite, line-by-line, the Lord’s prayer and the bedtime prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

This became a ritual that week when my parents were out of town. To take a few minutes each night, calm down from the day and be in conversation with God.

Think about that amazing statement theologically…  We be in conversation with God! God, the Almighty, Creator of the universe! The beginning and the end: The Alpha and the Omega!

There I was at 5 or 6 years old at 8pm in my random suburb of Minneapolis, MN in my spiderman PJs, striking up a conversation WITH GOD? Isn’t that stunning? The audacity of my grandma teaching us to talk to God!

Let’s think about this tendency that we have to speak to God theologically for a moment. God is indeed a speaking God. God created all things by speaking them into existence. Remember, in the Genesis creation stories it says, “God said let there be light…” etc.  So, God does work in the world by speaking to it and through it. There does seem to be a dialogue taking place from time immemorial.

Our Scriptures, the Bible is the place where we are promised to hear the very Word of God’s voice with us today.

There is a saying that you can read the same text from scripture over and over again and yet you hear, learn or take away something different each time you encounter it. That’s because we know that it’s God’s voice is at work with you, encountering you at the different moments in your life. God speaks to you in your encounter with the scriptures!

Has God been in dialogue with us the whole time? Is, perhaps, our invitation to speak back? To be a conversation partner with God? Is this why my grandma taught us to strike up a conversation with God using Jesus’s prayer that he taught us?

The Exodus story that we read today shows a dialogue with God and it’s one of my favorite stories in all of scripture because of the way a college professor of mine taught the text to me. Prof Bernerd Levinson was an extraordinarily faithful Jewish man who was teaching Biblical literature to a bunch of secularists at the University of Minnesota. He opened my eyes and eventually my heart to the story about Moses and the Burning Bush in Exodus chapter 3.

One day in class, we were asked to open our texts to this story and begin reading around the table. We read from verse 1-11 which as you heard this morning shares that Moses was keeping watch of his family’s flock when he hears a voice suddenly calling out to him from a burning bush. The voice says, “I am the God of your faith, The God of Abraham…” and it goes on giving a long list of impressive credentials confirming that the voice is God’s and then God says, “Moses, I will send you to Pharoah to bring my people the Israelites, out of Egypt.” It’s God’s command to Moses to do this important job.

At that moment in the story, Prof. Levinson slammed his hands down on the table, jumped out of his chair, raises his hands above his head and says, “STOP! PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT MOSES SAYS TO GOD NEXT?!?”

Verse 11 reads: “But Moses, said, “Who am I that I should go to Pharoah, and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?”

Prof. Levinson very theatrically gasped and said, “HE SPOKE BACK TO GOD?!? He’s arguing with God?!? He’s negotiating terms with God?!? CAN HE EVEN DO THAT?!? Won’t God smite him for not doing what he’s told?!?”

Prof. Levinson said read on… quickly read on… and the next student read in verse 12, “God said, “I will be with you…”

And Prof. Levinson, let out a sigh of relief and slumped back into his chair and said shaking his head: “Moses got away with it. He got away with arguing with God. He argued new terms and God accepted them! There was no smiting, no thunderbolt and lighting taking him out. We learned something very important today about who God is: That God listens to us.” Prof. Levinson almost whispered. “God hears our back-talk. God can apparently handle our doubts and our complaints. God indeed promises to be with us in those doubts and complaints to get us through them.”

Professor Levinson continued saying, “This is a major transformation in the understanding of the Divine in the ancient near east and you all need time to consider this brand new perspective and it’s impacts on scripture as literature and indeed on all human history. So, class is dismissed early, go ponder this text. Have a good afternoon.”

I’ll never forget that class.

Prof. Levinson highlighted that Moses had a conversation with God who listened and who responded. They shared a dialogue as partners in ministry for the world and for God’s people. It shows that God, the almighty, Alpha and Omega, is a God who is in fact nearby; who speaks and desires to be spoken to; who is ready and willing to be a conversation partner with us and who will actually change course because of it!

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We may not ever have a moment like Moses did where God so viscerally invites us into conversation by vocally calling to us. Our moments of invitation may look more like the disciples in our Gospel message today. They have an encounter with Jesus and his prayer life, and it inspires them to want to learn more. So too, we encounter Jesus in our scriptures which may be our burning bush. The scriptures are the place where we hear God’s Word today and like the disciples, we yearn for a way to have conversation with God about what we hear from God and so we may too ask “Teach us to pray!”

Personal prayer time is often romanticized as peaceful, meditative, solitary, and quiet. But remember, Moses was out doing his daily job. He was in a field, probably dirty and hot tending his sheep. He was in the middle of his regular workday and that’s where he spoke with God.

Prof Levinson’s lesson reminds us that we don’t have to be meek, quiet and small as we pray to God – as we converse with God. We can be like Moses in our prayers with God and tell God like it is, being raw and human in front of God. We can praise God when we see how good God can be in our lives. And we can lament to God when we experience the absence of God in our lives in times of deep sorrow, grief, loss and pain.

Prayer is our way to accept the invitation that God has made to us to be conversation partners.

In our Gospel text today, Jesus gives us a prayer – the most famous of them all: The Lord’s Prayer. It’s a starting point for our dialogue and a little lesson in expectations as well. The Lord’s prayer reminds us that we pray to God with our needs and our hopes and God responds most often with what God knows we need: our daily bread. And not really with the Bugatti we’ve been dreaming about...

Moses, in his dialogue with God implied that he was the wrong person to do the job of going to Pharoah and demanding freedom for his people. Moses said, “Who am I to do this?” Well, God didn’t let Moses off the hook for the job. Instead, God said, “I’ll be with you.” Giving Moses what he needed for the job.

God listens to us and our prayers. We can be audacious, like my grandma, in our praying and upfront in our dialogue with God. God can handle it. We can be loud with our requests to God and our praises of God. We can air our deepest sorrows and our biggest joys to God. And then, we listen to how the Spirit moves in those moments of prayer in our hearts and around us. We turn again to scripture and listen for how God’s Word is encountering us through these stories we read. We’ll hear much from God as our dialogue partner. I hope that the one constant thing we hear in our prayers is God saying what he said to Moses: “I’ll be with you.”

Amen.

The Rev. Ryan Heckman | July 27, 2025