Just how are we supposed to pray? Look at what Jesus tells us to do! The language is vigorous, filled with imperative statements. "Do this!" The Reader's Digest Condensed Version of the Lord's Prayer in Luke is: "Father! Come. Give. Forgive. Save. Deliver." This is not the flowery, passive-sounding prayers I heard in church as a kid. And man! If I had ever talked to either of my earthly parents that way, they would have given me some language lessons. But that's how Jesus tells his disciples to pray.

Then, in case they are unsure that he really means it, Jesus gives his disciples some word-pictures to emphasize his point. The first example is about a friend needing to live up to the demands of Middle Eastern hospitality. This situation is put as a rhetorical question. "Can you imagine," Jesus says "can you imagine someone turning down a friend's request for something as simple as bread?" The answer to 1st century minds was, "Of course not!" The friend would get out of bed and give his needy friend some bread. The obvious conclusion, then, is that if human friends can meet the modest demands of friendship, how much more so will God.

Jesus makes his point again. Ask, seek, knock, he says. Imperative words again. "Do this! Do this for me." You will be rewarded. Again, to emphasize his point, Jesus says, "If human parents know how to be good, how much more so our heavenly parent knows how to be good." These examples aren't so much about "how" we pray as they are about "who" - to whom we pray. We are talking relationship here. These are insider prayers. These are how family members are supposed to pray. The day of the Beck family reunion, the day we adopt two new people into our family through baptism--we're talking family. How are we family members supposed to pray? Imperatively, actively, as if of course we expect good, because we are in God's family.

A week ago at the presbytery Summer Conference, our keynote speaker was a story-teller. His afternoon story-telling class was "Telling the Truth With Lies." Four of us were so inspired by the class, we wrote stories for each other. The schtick was that the stories had to be based on today's gospel lesson. My story was called, "It Comes With the Room," not coincidentally, the same title as today's sermon.

The story tells about a young woman from a small town in Wisconsin, given the gift of a trip by her aunt. She is to take the Greyhound to Chicago, stay at a European-style hotel in the Loop, and go to the Art Institute to see a show of French Impressionist art. It's the trip of a life-time for Pammy, the furthest south and the furthest east she has ever been in her small town, sheltered life. She arrives in a strange, big city with only an address for her hotel. She has no idea what to expect. Listen to what happens when Pammy finds her hotel.

It wasn't really a "hotel," her aunt had said. It gave Pammy a thrill of pleasure to consider a "European-style hotel," whatever that was. So far in her life she had only stayed one night at a Motel Six in Dubuque, Iowa during her senior class trip to Galena, Illinois to see the birthplace of Ulysses S. Grant. She had stayed in a room with three other girls in her class. There had been two tiny bars of soap in the bathroom, each wrapped in paper with "Motel Six" printed on it. They had decided to open only one of the bars and to draw straws for the other bar of soap to take home as a souvenir. It wasn't really stealing, the chaperone had said. The soap came with the room.

Pammy was wondering whether there would be tiny bars of soap in her room at the European-style hotel when she found the number she was looking for. Just a block off Michigan Avenue. After all the glass and metal doors on Michigan Avenue, the door came as a surprise. It looked just like any door on the front of one of the big houses overlooking the lake at home. Except that this door was painted a glossy black and had a shiny brass handle. There was a brass plate on it too, no bigger than the label on the plastic-wrapped meat packages at the Pic-N-Save where she worked. The plate had letters cut into it, so fancy she couldn't be sure if the letters read "Gafthauf" or "Gasthaus."

Cautiously, tentatively she reached her hand toward the door handle. People kept pushing past her, bumping into her. Instantly, she could see how hesitant she must look to them, as they rushed past her. Pammy jerked her hand back, swung away from the door and nonchalantly looked at her wristwatch, as if time were the reason she didn't grasp the handle, and not her own uncertainty.

She swallowed. She sidestepped away from the door. What if this wasn't her hotel? If it was a hotel, why didn't it look like one? Was she just supposed to open the door and go in? Do hotels have doorbells? Should she knock? Was this like the hotels she saw in movies?'

Pammy walks around downtown Chicago, trying to come to grips with how to get in, but eventually she decides to go back to the hotel. Heart pounding, she marched down the block towards the Gafthauf or Gasthaus or whatever on the opposite side of the street. Forty-five minutes after locating her number, she could step briskly across the busy downtown Chicago street and stand in front of the door, confident she had come to the right place. It was now only a matter of getting in. She debated whether to just stride up there and pull the door open, but it looked like the door to someone's house, and Auntie had said this was a "European" hotel. Maybe their customs were different. She had grown up in a town, where people had manners. She knocked.

After what seemed like a long wait, the door was pushed open by a woman with a quizzical look on her face. "Yes?" Pammy turned up the corners of her mouth and asked, "Is this the Gafthauf?" The quizzical look changed to a look of welcome while the woman reached out to take Pammy's elbow, pulling her gently in. "Of course! Welcome! Have you come as a guest?"'

Pammy checks into the hotel, her aunt having taken care of the costs. Everything is so unfamiliar. She eats supper at a diner a couple of blocks from the hotel, spending an incredible amount of money on just a hamburger. When she gets up the next morning and leaves for the Art Institute, the lady at the front desk invites Pammy into what she calls "the breakfast room," but Pammy is too embarrassed to go in. She eats a granola bar she had taken from her suitcase and rushes off to spend the day at the Art Institute. She ends up spending too much money on souvenirs of the paintings.

She was very happy and very tired, as she started back to the hotel. This was her second day in the Windy City, suppertime was upon her, and she felt gratified to know that she knew how to handle it. Her sense of confidence was premature, she realized, as she dropped her packages in her room. Her Art Institute purchases had depleted her supply of traveler's checks more than she had realized. Her remaining $5.00 had to cover both a supper and a breakfast. Her granola bars and juice boxes were gone. She was hungry after walking and looking at art all day. She was deep in anxious thought as she went through the lobby to find something less pricey than the diner with the $7.50 hamburgers. The hostess, Giesela's, cheerful inquiry into her day received Pammy's disheartened Reader's Digest Condensed Version of what had been the most exciting day of her young life. "You will be joining us for breakfast tomorrow before you check out?" asked the solicitous hostess.

"No," Pammy replied, and then blurted before she could censor the reason, "I'm low on funds."

"Fraulein," Giesela said. "Breakfast is included in your stay."

Pammy thought of the soap in her suitcase. When she had returned to the room this afternoon, not only had the towels been changed in the bathroom, but new little soaps and shampoo had been put in the wicker baskets by the sink. They come with the room, she had reminded herself as she had slipped them into her suitcase. The postcards on the desk, the newspaper outside her door in the morning, the candies on the bedside table: they all came with the room. Now this news.

"It is the European style, Fraulein," Giesela was saying. "All you have to do is ask. It comes with the room."

Recently I read something about prayer that I want to share with you. Anthony Padovano says, "Prayer is successful not in terms of what it logically produces or pragmatically achieves, but in terms of what it forces reality to experience." Jesus is talking to disciples as naive about prayer as a young girl from a small town in Wisconsin, in the big city for the first time. "Just ask!" Jesus tells his friends. "God wants to provide you with the very best. It comes with the room."

Father, come. Give. Forgive. Save. Amen.