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Honest to God, "Prayer is the responsibility to meet others with all I have, to be ready to encounter the unconditional in the conditional, to expect to meet God in the way, not to turn aside from the way. All else is exercise towards that or reflection in depth upon it." Clearly, "prayer" is being used in all these cases in so broad a sense that it covers the whole of our Christian existence as an existence in faith working through love and love see!dng justice, and is thus merely another word for our proper worship, or service, of God. But, as we most commonly use the term, "prayer" has the much narrower meaning illustrated paradigmatically by what goes on, or should go on, in the corporate worship of the gathered church. Far from referring to the whole of our existence and activity as Christians, it refers to one activity alongside others, the significance of which -– as of all such special "religious" activities (which, of course, are the "all else" of which Bishop Robinson speaks) --– is in some way to re-present the ultimate reality understood and responded to in different ways through Christian faith and witness. In that sense, prayer is the re-presentation through appropriate concepts and symbols of the understanding of God, our neighbors, and ourselves to which we are brought insofar as we understand them in the light of God's decisive word to us through Jesus Christ. Prayer in this sense, in other words, is our response or "Amen" to the truth disclosed to us through God's decisive revelation through Christ as mediated through the visible church and all of its other secondary means of salvation. Prayer is our acknowledgment in an outward visible \..yay of the reality of God, our neighbors, and ourselves as this ultimate threefold reality is decisively re-presented to us through Christ and the church.

Thus our prayers of adoration primarily re-present our understanding of God, l..yhile while our prayers of confession primarily re-present our understanding of ourselves before God, in face of God's liberating judgment against our sin. On the other hand, our prayers of thanksgiving explicitly express both -– both our understanding of God as the primal source a1}{and final end of all that we are and have and our understanding of ourselves as the grateful recipients of all God's gifts -– while our prayers of petition further re-present our understanding of ourselves, and our prayers of intercession re-present our understanding of our neighbors. In the second of the two evangelical commandments, you'll

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remember, we're charged with loving our neighbors as ourselves. Well, I hold that petitionary prayer, in the usual sense, is one of the ways we go about fulfilling the commandment to love ourselves, even as intercessory prayer which is really only petitionary prayer for others -– is one of the ways we go about loving our neighbors. But how so? Why do we pray for ourselves and our neighbors? To what end do we pray? Here is where I always remember one of my favorite theologians, Martin Luther, who was the first to help me answer these questions, although I have since learned that essentially the same teaching is to be found already in Augustine (from whom Luther may very well have learned it) as well as in the sermons of the chief teacher of my own church tradition as a Methodist -- John Wesley. In his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, and specifically on Mt 6:7-13, Luther writes (and I quote him at length):

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