Teach Us How To Pray

Audio is not available this week due to outdoor worship on Sunday.

          I had a friend in seminary who attended the Episcopal Church. And part of being in the Episcopal Church involves using the Book of Common Prayer, which is this compendium of prayers and services that serve as the basis of every prayer in the Episcopal Church. He joked about how in their church, no one had to check the page number for a prayer, because they just had to let the book fall open and the well-worn spine would open it right to the page it needed to be.
          We might not have a Book of Common Prayer in the Lutheran church, but we do have a set of prayers we use regularly. In fact, we’ve got a lot of prayers that we use outside of church that I’m sure we could all say from memory—whether the bedtime prayer of “now I lay me down to sleep,” or the mealtime “come, Lord Jesus, be our guest,” or maybe we even know Luther’s table blessing “bless us, O Lord, and these thy gifts.” Memorized prayers are a big part of our collective prayer life as Christians.

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