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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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In sum: we pray because we are human beings who, as Paul says (Rom 8:26), do not know how to pray as we ought. We pray because in this way, through the means of salvation that prayer is, we may be saved from the unbelief -- – or, if you will, the unfaith, the lack of obedient trust in God and loyalty to God and to all to whom God is loyal -- – to which we are continually tempted by our life in this world.

But here I would remind you that the primary emphasis in the classical Protestant doctrine of the priesthood of all believers is not that we are each our own priest before God, but that we are each to be priests of God to and for one another. Therefore, '!\Then I say -folloV\ri..ng – following Luther and Wesley -– that we pray to instruct ourselves, I mean also, and primarily: we pray to instruct one anotherwherein, incidentally, the reason is to be sought for le~.Ining how to pray in the church's school of prayer, through her treasury of prayers and her prayer book. In tpis this sense, zoe we pray to bear witness -– to re-present to one another and to all the truth decisively disclosed to us through God's word in Jesus, so that, again and again, we can each make tpjs truth our own through faith. We pray for ourselves

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and our neighbors to bear witness -– to re-present to one another the truth about our existence disclosed to us through Jesus Christ. God gives us both ourselves and our neighbors to love in and through God's love, and, in God's decisive word to us through Jesus, God discloses both ourselves and our neighbors in the light of God's all-encompasing love, under its gift and demand. By means of our prayers of petition and intercession, we re-present our reception of God's gift of ourselves and our neighbors, so as to make it really ours, so as to take full responsibility for it, so as also to obey God's demand.

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