Learning to Pray as a Plural You
- Pastor Serena Rice
- Jul 27
- 6 min read
A sermon on Luke 11:1-13 and Genesis 18:20-32.
[for an audio recording of this sermon, click here. Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash.]
As someone who has both travelled and lived internationally, I have had many opportunities to be grateful for the intrinsic advantage of being raised to speak English as my mother tongue.
The reasons that English is the de facto international language, of course, are rooted in the sinful history of violent colonialism, so I do not rejoice in that.
But I am thankful for the ability to function reasonably well in many other countries because the people there can function in English, regardless of the language of that place.
It’s both humbling and convenient.
There is one aspect of being a native English speaker, however, that I deeply regret: the ambiguity of the word “you.”
Of the five other languages that I have studied (at least a little), all five distinguish (with different pronouns and verb tenses) between the singular “you” addressed to just one person and the plural “you” addressed to a group.
But not English. One word. One verb tense.
Of course, in most real-time conversational contexts this isn’t really a problem as it is generally easy to infer who is being addressed.
This very ease has its own hidden danger, however, because it can lead us to trust our assumptions about what “you” means in other contexts… as, for instance, in ancient texts reporting the teachings of Jesus.
And when we combine the ambiguity of the English “you” with the highly individualistic American culture and the ways that this individualism has infiltrated American Christianity, we end up assuming (often without conscious awareness) that Jesus’s “you” is a singular “you”… that Jesus is addressing the individual believer practicing their individualized faith.
We hear him say, “when you pray,” and we apply it to our ideas about our personal prayer lives, our just-me-and-God-time.
We hear him say, “ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you,” and we just automatically assume this assurance is for us as individuals, an invitation to present God with our wish list to be fulfilled.
And it makes sense that we would read the text this way because our language gives us no contrary clues, and our culture teaches us to put ourselves at the center, and even our church experiences have probably conditioned us for individualistic faith.
But the problem is… that reading is linguistically and theologically wrong. In the original Greek, none of these “yous” are individual “yous.”
They are all plural.
Jesus’s teaching, and the reality of prayer into which it is given, is working from the opposite framework, the assumption that faith, and prayer, and life in general is a collective reality.
The prayer that Jesus teaches uses plural pronouns: give us our daily bread… forgive us our sins…do not bring us to the time of trial. Because Jesus and his followers start from the assumption that faith is lived in community.
And this contrast is more than a matter of grammar or semantics. It shifts the entire framework of what we do when we pray.
If we are truly praying for our daily bread, that means we cannot pray for our own needs to be met while ignoring the children who are starving to death in Gaza.
If we are praying for the forgiveness of our sins, then our prayer must include collective sins like injustice, and abuse of power, and campaigns of misinformation, and systemic violence, and we have to recognize that, even when we abhor these sins, we are part of the society that commits them, so they are our shared sins for which we need forgiveness.
When the “you” is plural, none of us can separate the world into “me” vs “them” as though that division could somehow offer inoculation against the brokenness of the world.
I think our first reading today actually makes a connected point, although from the opposite direction.
The reading comes from the middle of the story about the two Canaanite towns of Sodom and Gomorrah. Now, that story has historically been appropriated in inaccurate and confusing ways, so I need to take a quick sidebar to clarify what actually happens in this narrative.
In the larger story, God hears “cries of injustice” (that’s the key accusation against Sodom and Gomorrah: injustice), so God sends two messengers to investigate the severity of the evil there. These two messengers are taken in by Abraham’s nephew Lot, but then the entire population of men in the city surround the house with threats of sexual violence in a confrontation that further reveals how completely both foreigners and women are dehumanized in the culture of this place.
God’s messengers protect Lot’s household and ensure that he and his wife and daughters escape from the town, but then God’s judgment is visited on the region because the injustice there (again, that’s the key word), the injustice there has been found to be so serious that nothing else can cleanse it.
It’s a disturbing story, although not for the reasons that have come to be associated with the name Sodom, and it definitely reinforces the understanding that sin can happen on the collective level, with collective consequences.
What’s interesting about the piece of the story that we read today, however, is the argument that righteousness works the same way.
In his petitions to God on behalf of the city, Abraham challenges God not to “sweep away the righteous with the wicked.”
The mathematical argument about what ratio of righteous to wicked is sufficient to win mercy is, I think, meant to be a sort of gallows humor, but the underlying assumption is what really matters: the assumption that not only judgment, but also mercy are collective matters.
If Abraham was only worried for his nephew, Abraham could have just asked for what happens in the end – for Lot and his family to be taken out of the city before its destruction.
But instead, Abraham advocates for the city as a whole… he doesn’t look for the individual salvation that would spare only the righteous, he works to argue God into extravagant mercy for the whole.
I think Abraham engages in this argument because HIS automatic assumption is that an ambiguous “you” is always plural.
He understands human connection, even when that means connection to people who think and behave in evil, unjust ways.
If he is going to beg “the Judge of all the earth to do what is just,” that is not going to look like dividing people into good and bad… it is going to look like forgiveness for the whole.
Because we cannot just seek our own safety when things look bad.
In her commentary on the Genesis reading, Old Testament scholar Kyong-Jin Lee connects Abraham’s refusal to withdraw from the fate of his neighbors with the calling of the Christian church. She argues:
“This refusal to detach is critical for understanding the church’s role after Pentecost. The Spirit does not empower believers to escape the world’s pain, but to stand within it, in solidarity with the broken, and to speak on their behalf. The church’s mission is not to pronounce judgment from afar, but to become a presence of advocacy, compassion, and hopeful intercession, even where hope seems least warranted.”[1]
That’s why when Jesus teaches us to pray, he teaches the plural “you,” and he teaches us to pray for “our” daily bread, and forgiveness, and protection.
It’s a really hard teaching.
It’s hard because it pushes against the ingrained individualism of our culture that we have been taught to assume.
It feels inherently un-just that we might be grouped in with the sins of people or movements that we personally reject.
It’s also hard because there is so much collective injustice in the world right now.
After my “weekly wisdom” e-mail this past Friday about prayer, I heard from one member of this community expressing painful anger at God about all the evil they see in the world, and their frustration that prayer feels like wasted breath.
It was a brave and honest response, and it generated a good conversation about what prayer does and does not do, and also what God does and does not do when it comes to intervening in human history.
It was also a conversation that held space for grief, because we need that space. We need to grieve so that we do NOT withdraw and detach. So that we don’t try to escape the world’s pain, but rather stay committed to standing within it.
And I think that’s what Jesus teaches us to do when he teaches us to pray as the plural “you.”
He teaches us to look at the need of the world and to see ourselves inside that need.
He teaches us to see the sin of the world and to ask for forgiveness for all of it, as we do the work of forgiveness to try to heal the hurt that we are part of.
He teaches us to ask for help not as a personal escape from the coming judgment, but as those who ask, seek, and knock in solidarity with the world’s pain.
Trusting that when we pray like this, we are praying for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done.
Thanks be to God.
