The Old Testament Lesson for last Sunday gave us an account of a visit to Abraham by three angels.  There is a Fifteenth Century Russian icon which gives a visual depiction of that visit.  It is called the Icon of the Holy Trinity.  It is called that because Holy Scripture tells us (in Chapter 18 of the Book of Genesis); Holy Scripture tells us that when the three angels visited Abraham, “the Lord” spoke to him.  . . . Now, if “the Lord” was speaking to Abraham in the person of three angels, . . . the iconographer must have reasoned; . . . if “the Lord” was speaking to Abraham in the person of three angels, then each angel must have been representing a Person of the Triune God:  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

    And now, today, we discover the purpose of God’s visit to Abraham.  The Lord God Almighty is on His way to determine both the verity of “the outcry against Sodom and Gomorah” and the gravity of “their sin”.  So, as this morning’s Old Testament Lesson begins, we find that God the Son and God the Holy Spirit are proceeding toward Sodom on Their mission of judgement, . . . while Abraham is standing before the Godhead; . . . Abraham is standing before God the Father, and he prays to the Father with fear and trembling; . . . Abraham prays before God the Father because Abraham has to know; . . . Abraham has to know just how terrible are God’s judgements; . . . and so, Abraham prays to God the Father:

“Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked?” [we hear Abraham ask].  “Wilt thou indeed destroy the righteous with the wicked?  Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city; wilt thou then destroy the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it?  Far be it from thee to do such a thing, to slay the righteous with the wicked, so that the righteous fare as the wicked!  Far be that from thee!  Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?”

The biblical commentator Gerhard von Rad tells us that the outcome of Abraham’s prayer is that he discovers that “a very small number of innocent men . . . is sufficient to stem . . . judgement.  So predominant is God’s will to save over his will to punish!” von Rad writes (von Rad, Genesis; “The Old Testament Library”, 1961, Westminster Press, p. 209).  . . . Chapter 19 of the Book of Genesis goes on to tell us that so disordered were the affections of the citizenry of Sodom that the Lord God Almighty discovered not even ten innocents among the wicked of Sodom, but only three.  Three innocents are not enough for God to withhold judgement against the sin Sodom and Gomorah represent.  But even as fire and burning sulfur consume both places, . . . the three angels take the three innocents God has found, and they lead them from the city.  . . . Exceeding His promise to Abraham, the Lord God Almighty saves the man Lot and his two daughters from damnation and death.

    In this way the Old Testament prepares us to receive and understand the Truth of the New.  For, in Christ Jesus, what does God the Father do?  . . . The Lord God Almighty makes the Cross to be the means by which only a few, perhaps twenty-four souls; . . . the Cross becomes the means by which only a few escape death to receive the divine Life in order to live among men and women as angels . . . so that by their righteousness all of humanity, like moths, might be attracted to the Light of God’s mercy.

    And we, . . . all of us; . . . we, the Church; we are inheritors of that angelic life revealed to us by that original band of some twenty-four saints.  We have been baptized into Christ’s death so that

in him the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fulness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.  . . . and you were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the working of God, who raised him from the dead.

By our baptism we have been buried with the Crucified Christ, and the divine Life has been breathed into us, so that, if we live at all, it is the Life of the Father that is in us . . . . and we live among men and women as angels!  . . . And so that this angelic life might be preserved among us, . . . Jesus teaches us, this morning, to pray.  And what we learn about prayer from Jesus this morning is that there are three fundamental Conditions to prayer, and three fundamental Petitions; . . . there are three things that make a prayer . . . and there are three things to pray for.  . . . The first thing that makes a prayer is to pray as Abraham prayed; . . . to be before God with our entire being -- heart and soul and mind and strength -- as a child before its Father.  God is Father.  But He’s not Father in an abstract sense.  Jesus doesn’t simply give us a cozy term for something cold and distant.  God is too almighty to merely create and not love, . . . and He is too holy to love generally and not particularly.  So, Jesus teaches us that God is Abba -- God is our Daddy -- and that when you pray . . . you are before the One Who is Daddy; Who loves you particularly, uniquely, and specifically.  Therefore, since you are in the presence of your personal Father Who breathed life into you and loves you, . . . you owe to Him the love of a child; . . . you owe such complete confidence and trust as to utterly respect and obey your heavenly Father.

    Nor is the Father to Whom we pray our Father in a generic sense.  God is our Father in an absolute sense.  He is the model to which every parent ought to conform.  Our Father to Whom we pray is not an earthly Father but a heavenly Father.  The very idea of Him -- His very Name -- brings us into the presence of all that is sacred and pure -- all that is holy.  And because God is Father and is holy, our identity is the same.  And so, the second Condition of prayer is that we be before our Father as children of Heaven, . . . with pure and sacred and holy intention, even as His attentions toward us are perfect, and, therefore, pure and sacred and holy.

    But no matter what the state of our intentions before our Holy Father may, in fact, be at the time we are praying, . . . the third thing that makes a prayer is that we invite the holiness of the Father to enter us and conform us to Him.  And so, Jesus teaches us to pray, “Thy kingdom come.”  . . . Now, Jesus means exactly what He says:  that we pray God to infuse us with His holiness here . . . as we pray, so that we are an angelic community, . . . and so that we don’t wander off into giving God instructions so that He might be conformed to us, . . . but with awe and reverence and trust, receive the holiness and purity and governance of our kingly Father into our heart and soul and mind . . . so that we might be conformed to Him.

    These, then, are the three Conditions of prayer, or it is no prayer at all:  to be before God, our Father, with a child’s love, trusting and obedient; . . . to be before God with pure intention; . . . and to be before God, our holy Father, with a will to be conformed to Him.

    Now, Jesus says, . . . at this point we may turn our attention to the cause of our prayer; . . . we may turn our attention to our Petitions, which are also three in number.  The first Petition, Jesus says, is that which is the object of our prayer:  what we need for ourselves, and the intercessions we make for others.  And the object of our prayer must not be to lecture God; . . . to tell Him what He must do for us and how.  . . . Our first petition must be a prayer for what is necessary . . . what is necessary for ourselves; what is necessary for the person for Whom we pray.  And we do not know what that is.  But God does.  And so we pray for what is necessary, . . . for our daily bread, Jesus calls it.

    The second Petition Jesus teaches us to make when we pray is linked to prayer’s second Condition.  While it is our intention to be pure and holy before our Holy Father, . . . we know that we are not.  And so, we ask our heavenly Father for His forgiveness of our offenses to His holiness:  our perverseness, our willfulness, our ingratitude, and so on.  But . . . because we are the sanctified children of the Father, we honor His holiness by asking to receive forgiveness only in proportion to the forgiveness we extend to everyone else for the debts which they may owe to us by reason of their perverseness, or ingratitude, or however else they may have grieved us.  We extend this forgiveness for the sake of our Father’s holiness, and in emulation of it, and in deference to His privilege as King and Judge of all His children.  . . . And if you cannot forgive as you desire the Father to forgive, . . . here is bread for which you must pray.

    Because our Father is King of all Creation, His holiness and purity and governance are the meaning and means of our lives.  Without Him we cannot endure.  And so, Jesus teaches us that our final Petition is to pray that we be delivered from the temptation to go it alone -- to think we can endure without the governance of our Father and our God.  Christ urges us to cling to God . . . and beg Him never to let go . . . so that we might not be allowed to know temptation.

    This is the angelic life into which you have been baptized:  to be before the Lord God Almighty with love, with pure intention, and with a will to be conformed to Him, . . . and to ask for what is necessary, with penitence in proportion to a willingness to forgive, . . . all the while clinging to God and begging Him not to let go.

    Because the Book of Genesis shows us that “a very small number of innocent men . . . is sufficient to stem . . . [God’s] judgement,” it falls to all of us; … it falls to you and it falls to me to pray as Jesus taught us.  Because the Book of Genesis shows us that “a very small number of innocent men . . . is sufficient to stem . . . [God’s] judgement,” it falls to all of us to do as Saint Paul counsels and “see to it that no one makes a prey of you by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ” (Colossians 2:8).  Because the Book of Genesis shows us that “a very small number of innocent men . . . is sufficient to stem . . . [God’s] judgement,” it falls to all of us to be the righteous few through whom all the world might be drawn to the Light of God’s mercy.