“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you;
search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. (Luke 11:9)
Yup.
All you have to do is ask. But here’s where the Bible gives us grief:
What happens when you ask and you don’t, receive, seek and don’t
find, knock and the person on the other side of the door tells you to get lost?
The Gospel lesson for Pentecost 7, Year C (Luke 11: 1-13) is potentially a
faith-annihilating scripture for anyone who has been praying their butt off when
God doesn’t seem to be listening.
The
lesson starts with the disciples asking Jesus to teach them to pray. After all,
John the Baptist taught his disciples. Now, you’d think the act of
prayer wouldn’t require an instruction manual, but I guess in the world of this
text folks were so used to formal prayers led by priests or rabbis that they were
afraid they’d mess it up if they just tried to do it on their own. Jesus gives
them some pretty good advice about what to pray for. Unfortunately, if you
think about it too hard, even these simple supplications don’t look like
anything God’s in a big hurry to grant.
Check
it out: We’re told to ask God to make his name holy to us, but we’re seldom
open to observing or remembering the sacred. We ask God to send God’s kingdom—God’s
rule of righteousness, peace, and love—but we’re still living in a kingdom of
our own making (which pretty much sucks!). We ask for our daily bread, but
folks are still going hungry. We ask to have our sins[i] forgiven just as we
forgive those indebted to us[ii]. We might be in real
trouble with this one. Finally, we ask not to be put to the test when we live
in a world of violence, inflation, climate change, sickness, political
polarization, and a bunch of dumbasses who get on our last nerves. If God
answers prayer, shouldn’t we get a break from all of this?
The
clever fellows who cooked up the Revised Common Lectionary decided to stick
this lesson Jesus gives us about praying for stuff we don’t seem to be getting
with a continuation of last week’s story from Genesis (Genesis 18:20-32). Here
Abraham is bargaining with God like a gringo tourist dickering with a Tijuana
street vendor. God’s told Abraham he’s going to Sodom to open a giant can of
holy wrath on the godless miscreants who live there—who, by the way, really
deserve to get their asses kicked. This is an issue for Abraham since his
nephew Lot and Lot’s family are residents of Sodom. He doesn’t want God to wipe
out family members, so he enters into this negotiation—careful to be respectful
and not piss God off—in order to save Lot. Abrahm essentially slaps God with one
of the most challenging of all moral conundrums: which is the bigger sin—letting
the guilty get away with their evil or punishing the innocent?
(We
know which choice the Israeli government is making today. They’d happily drop
bombs and kill 99 innocent Gazan civilians if it meant killing one Hamas
terrorist. I think the Bible suggests just the opposite. But I digress.)
Spoiler
alert: Abraham’s prayer for mercy goes unanswered. God can’t seem to find ten righteous
people in all of Sodom, so he lets Lot and family escape and then nukes the
whole town.[iii] I think Abraham showed
himself to be a pretty good guy here, praying for mercy for people who didn’t
deserve it. Nevertheless, this was an unanswered prayer. Perhaps the effect the
prayer had on the people of Sodom was less important in God’s eyes than the
effect it had on Abraham for praying it. Maybe the crucial thing was the very
act of prayer, the attempt to connect with God and the compassion needed to
reach out for others. Perhaps this is what God really wanted. This makes me
wonder if, perhaps, God really did answer Abraham’s prayer, just not in
the way Abraham expected it.
All
of this gets me thinking about my own prayer life. Yeah, I do all the
liturgical prayers on Sunday, and I pray at church council meetings and when I make
pastoral care calls. Still, I find I might be neglecting my own personal prayer
time. When I do pray, it’s usually because I need to ask God for a personal
favor or I need to make intercession for somebody. Sometimes I ask for
guidance, wisdom, and advice which doesn’t look like it’s forthcoming. I don’t
often stop and thank God for being God or ask that I might be open to seeing
the holy around me.
There’s
this one intercessory prayer I shoot up almost every day on my drive to work. I
drive past the Sacred Heart Cemetery in Mt. Holly, New Jersey where, some years
ago, I laid to rest two sisters who were brutally murdered. When I spoke with their
parents before their funeral and felt the overwhelming, crushing nature of
their grief, I knew there was absolutely nothing I would ever say that
would ease their pain or take away the torment of their loss. I pray for those
two bereaved people every time I pass that cemetery. I pray God will grant them
peace—a peace I know they may never feel. Yet I pray for it anyway. I keep
wondering if these prayers of mine are changing me even if they’re not changing
circumstances.
The
only thing Jesus tells us the Father will give is the Holy Spirit, and maybe that’s
what we really need after all. The world will not change unless we change. So,
we keep on praying and asking in faith believing—in the immortal words of Mick
Jagger—you can’t always get what you want, but if you try some time, you might
find you get what you need.
Want
to feel the Holy Spirit? Keep praying.
I
will send up a few prayers for YOU, Dear Reader, and I hope you come and visit
me again.
[i]
The Greek here is hamartias emon which means our “missing the mark” or “falling
short.” It doesn’t necessarily mean our willful disobedience to God’s law. It
means our nature of being total screw-ups.
[ii]
The Greek here is panti opheilanti hemin. It is translated literally in
the New Revised Standard Version as “everyone indebted to us.” This means those
who owe us money are to have their debts forgiven just as we are to forgive
those who may have wronged us. Trough ask, don’t you think?
[iii]
See Genesis 19: 24. Actually, things didn’t work out that well for Lot and
Company either. His wife was turned to a pillar of salt. As for the rest of the
story (Genesis 19:30-37) you really don’t want to know. Trust me.
