There is, I think, a normal experience where you find you are about to hit a tree while driving, or some other catastrophe that sends you into a kind of reflex in which you say, "Oh my God, help me! Get me out of here!". That is a prayer of petition, I guess. I think that an awful lot of praying, at least my praying, ends up that way And I wonder what God does with that stuff. I cannot speak for God with all that much assurance, but I suspect she just sort of says, "Oh Trojcak, grow up" What is wrong with that...precisely as a reflex? And often enough, it is simply a desire for some kind of quick solution to an immediate problem.

Therefore, what we need to do is to attend to what the prayer of petition is supposed to be about. And the easiest way to do that is to go to the kind of archetypal petition that we get from Jesus himself. Which is what? Well, it is the Lord's Prayer: "May your Kingdom come," the very first, within which everything else is supposed to be fitted. And every other prayer of petition gets its weight and density and authenticity only if it takes place within that absolutely foundational petition which is the desire for the Kingdom of God to come.

Again, there is another place in the New Testament where Jesus is depicted as saying, "Seek first the Kingdom and everything else is going to follow from that". And so, these kind of terror or panic-reflex prayers...Are they even prayers? I do not know. I think that they are rather like belching or hiccups, in that they are inevitable, almost physiological phenomena. I am not so sure that they have much weight as prayer at all. So it is really important, therefore, that we know what we are doing when we talk to God and say, "May your Kingdom come".

Also, it is important to keep in mind that all prayer is basically the search for God. God is not like this tape recorder or this book. God is, as Isaiah said, "a hidden god". And so prayer is the attempt to search for this god whose Kingdom we ask for. And, to find out what that god is like, I think that it is useful precisely to look at this notion of the Kingdom. And we get a major clue in this little passage from Luke: "Will not God grant justice for those who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them?" In other words, the god whom we seek in prayer is the god who precisely grants justice, and any other god is a kind of figment of my imagination or some kind of goofy wish-fulfillment. Therefore, to seek God is to seek the god who is the god of everybody, the god who wants us human beings to be fair with each other. And if we do not seek that kind of god then we are doing this kind of hiccuping or belching or panic-reflex in which we say: "Oh God, get me out of here!".

That is extraordinarily important because most of us grew up in a world in which religion was an absolutely private matter. "Religion is something between me and my god," as we say. Well, that undergoes major qualifications if we are talking about the religion of Jesus, because the god of Jesus was the god of everybody. And only that god is the real God, and so to look for the god of Jesus is precisely to look simultaneously for God and for everybody else. You cannot separate them. You absolutely cannot separate them. I mean, we would like to think that "Well, first I will get right with God and then I will go and be nice to everybody". No, it is the sequencing that is wrong: You cannot do one without the other. And probably the easiest way to get hold of that is to look at the healing miracles in the New Testament.

What went on when Jesus picked up, as we saw last Sunday, these ten lepers, or this woman who had non-stop menstrual flow for twelve years who had spent all of her money on doctors, or all of these blind people, or these crippled people? What was Jesus doing with all of those people? We say well, "He is making them better. He is restoring them to health". No, that is not entirely right because all of those people - - diseased people, crippled people, lepers, women with menstrual flow - - were all considered ritually impure and, therefore, they stood outside of the community. You could not deal with them without infecting yourself ritually and, therefore, you had to go quarantine yourself just as they were quarantined - separated off. So what was going on is that these people are not just restored to their own physical integrity, but in that very fact they were restored to each other. So it is not first one then the other, they are simultaneous. So, to pray for the Kingdom of God means that: to pray to come to know this god who is the god of everybody and to pray to know my own interconnectedness with everybody.

And how does that happen? I do not know because I am not there. Every once in awhile I get little glimmers; but I know that that is what it is all about. And this is made very concrete in our world today. The U.N. just put out its annual poverty report. It stated that 1.2-4 billion people, almost 25% of the world's population, live on one U.S. dollar per day. This figure comprises food, clothing, housing...everything. Now as far as I am concerned, in my normal daily routine, those people do not exist. One quarter of the world's population does not exist for me! They do not! They are just not real! To pray for the Kingdom of God means, therefore, to ask God to help you be aware of their reality, however this is to happen. To be aware of God is to be aware, simultaneously, of the reality of that 1.2 billion people, and then the two-thirds of the people in the world who are undernourished, and the 38,OOO babies who die everyday under the age of six, etc., etc. We have to do that, because that is the only god of Jesus. Any other god is some kind of little household toy that I want to keep around like a 7 Eleven..."Oh God, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz"...that kind of god. So, it comes down, I think often enough, to this to pray means to want to be able to want that kind of god, because I do not want that kind of god.

So, we have to kind of back up to where we really are when we pray: "I want to be able to want that". That is prayer. And if that is the basic petition of all of our praying then everything else, even the prayer of, "Oh my God, do not let me hit that tree! Oh God, do not let this cancer be inoperable! Oh God, do not let my kids have crooked teeth," whatever it is that we pray for, will make sense, fall into place, and God will take care of whatever else that we need.