Brief synopsis of the readings: Our first reading from Genesis describes a dialogue between God and Abraham over the fate of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. God had decided to destroy them because of their sin but Abraham challenged God on why the innocent should perish as well as the guilty. During the dialogue, God promised not to destroy the cities if there were 50 innocent people. Abraham keeps negotiating down and God promises not to destroy the cities if there are 45, or 40, or 30, or 20, or 10 innocent people there. “For the sake of those ten, I will not destroy it.” Luke’s Gospel begins with Jesus praying. One of his disciples asked him to teach them to pray. Jesus instructs them to pray and gives them several lines from what we now call the Lord’s prayer. He then speaks a parable about a man who is asleep when his friend knocks on his door at midnight and asks for food. The man will give the food only to be able to get rid of the person and get back to sleep. Jesus then tells his disciples that God will give them what they need, just as a father will give good gifts to his children. “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?”

Did anyone else notice that our first reading ends before the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? I’ve always been troubled by this event because of the way some Christians cheer at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and have used this to condemn people and events they don’t like in our present day. They turn their guns particularly on homosexuality, and in fairness we get the word “sodomy” from Sodom. Even thinking that they “got what they deserved” may say more about our prejudices than God’s justice.

I think we need to turn our attention away from this and look instead at the dialogue between God and Abraham. Abraham was concerned that if God destroyed these cities then innocent people would also die. Nobody wants to get punished for something someone else did, that’s just basic fairness. And it just seems odd that Abraham is challenging God on a matter of simple fairness.

When I look at this passage I think about prayer. We all recognize prayer as communication between us and God and we give that communication a great deal of thought. Prayer can express gratitude, complaint, or intercession, among other things. But can it also be negotiation? So often we think of our intercessory prayer as a way of convincing God, as a child tries to convince a parent to stop for ice cream on the way home. We think if we live well enough, or give a good enough reason, or are persistent enough we can convince God. I’m thinking of something a friend of mine told me recently. She was talking with a young family member and sharing that she was praying for something. With all the wisdom of youth he asked her if she was praying “hard enough.” Clearly he believed that God’s answer depended on her ability to be convincing.

But what if Abraham isn’t negotiation God down for Sodom and Gomorrah, but instead is trying to better understand God? What if prayer wasn’t to change God so much as it was to change Abraham? That would explain why Abraham kept pushing God: What if there are 40 innocent people? What about 35, etc. He was testing the limits of God’s mercy.

If the purpose of prayer isn’t to persuade God but to better understand God, what does that mean for our prayer life? There’s no way to prove this and I can’t imagine developing an experiment for this, but I think God absolutely loves the prayers of children. Children spend almost all of their time figuring out how the world works, and every adult I know has wearied at times of the seemingly endless questions we get asked by them.

And while a child may ask a parent for ice cream or Santa for a bicycle they seem to pray more broadly when speaking to God. “God bless mommy and daddy, and …” Their simplicity gives their prayer a certain elegance because it recognizes the limits of what we can understand. In my experience they don’t tend to look for clever ways or big words to ask for what they need.

Kind of like…what Jesus tells his disciples. They saw Jesus praying and wanted to learn more about how to pray. This scene is also described in Matthew’s Gospel and there Jesus told his disciples not to pray like the hypocrites who use flowery words as a way of impressing other people and that does not impress God. Instead, recognize that God knows what we need before, and even better, than we do.

The elegance of the Lord’s Prayer lies in the fact that we don’t ask for specifics. We ask that our hunger be satisfied, that our sins be forgiven, that we not be led into temptation and that we be safe from evil. No bump in our portfolio, no adulation from our coworkers, not even protection from suffering. Praying this way recognizes that God knows what we need better than we do. I’ve spoken of this before but I love the singer Garth Brook’s idea of gratitude for unanswered prayers. We can ask God for immediate needs and there’s nothing wrong with that. But we can’t go wrong relying on God’s wisdom and recognizing he always has our back.

I hope Abraham came away from his dialogue with God with a better understanding of God. I hope he came to the discussion concerned that God wouldn’t care about the innocent and came away with a new understanding of God’s mercy. And more to the point I hope we can read these readings and come away with a better understanding of God’s love for us and God’s promise to give us what we need.

When his disciples asked Jesus how to pray I hope we continue to listen.