A sermon preached at Luther Seminary Chapel on 7/24/2013.
A pastor friend of mine has a toy
called an “Answer Me Jesus.” Also
informally known as a “Jesus Magic Eight Ball.”
It is a pink, velvet Jesus, about a foot tall, that when turned upside
down, will issue an answer to your question, just like the magic eight ball toy
of the mid-nineties. With such answers
as, “Yes, my child”, “Wait for a Sign”, and “pray harder”, it is clearly a
joke. Yet, these on-demand answers to
questions asked of the velvet Jesus are not too much different from the way
that we often find ourselves in prayer. From
the anxious prayers before important job interviews and classroom exams in an
attempt to harness the powers of God for our own success, to the desperate
pleas to avoid heartbreak, to the painful questions asked at the time of
sickness or death. “Why is the cancer
back?” “Why did you take my loved one so
soon?” “Why me?” We want answers to our prayers and we want
them now.
In today’s Gospel text we hear Jesus
instructing the disciples on how to pray.
Jesus returns from his own time in prayer and one of the disciples asks,
“How are we to pray?” Jesus instructs
them in the familiar words that we know as the Lord’s Prayer, encouraging them
to ask for what they need, to beg for forgiveness from their sins, and ask for
help in times of trouble. To encourage
perseverance in prayer, Jesus uses a parable of a man knocking on the door of a
neighbor asking for bread in the middle of the night. Finally, Jesus continues with the most
difficult part of this passage, “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. For
everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone
who knocks, the door will be opened.”
Except for
when we don’t receive what we ask for.
When we don’t find what we are looking for despite relentless
searching. When the door is slammed
closed AND bolted shut. Decidedly not
opened. These perceived unanswered
prayers are really painful. We have all
been on the brink of this despair. We
have all watched loved ones suffering the ravages of illness and age. We hear
about tornadoes and wildfires and earthquakes that ravage creation. We pray that God would make the violence stop
on our city streets when we hear about another shooting.
There are
no simple answers, although simple answers are often given. And we’ve all heard these nice answers given
before, “God answers prayers according to God’s will”, “God will give me what I
need even if is not what I am actually asking for”, and “The more we get to know God, the more
our desires will be in line with God’s” and so on. There is something very powerful in naming
the grief of feeling like our prayers are not heard, that the world can be a
very cruel and unjust place, and that we wish more than anything that God would
respond to our prayers in a way that is equal to the effort that we put into
them. A friend of mine remarked this
week, “If Jesus knew the world was a seriously messed up place
where good prayers might seem to go unheard, where desperately-needed justice
was slow in coming, and where he was about to be crucified, why did he still
say this so confidently to so many people? What do we pray for that is good? And
when will God give it?”
The answer…well…there isn’t one that is
singularly satisfying. Nor should there
be.
Prayer is
when we bring our whole selves to God.
The broken, messy, desperate parts as well as the parts that we want to
show the rest of the world. We hear in
the Gospel text today that we are to pray with persistence and God will
listen. God wants to hear our prayers,
and there is much freedom in the asking and we are to turn to God again and
again in prayer. Except sometimes, we think if persistence is good, then
talking nicely and asking for the right things is better and going to make God
even MORE likely to listen to our prayers.
The problem
with approaching prayer in this way is that it makes the answering of our
prayers a value judgment on our worthiness.
If our prayers are not answered in the way that we wish for them to be,
it must be because we are not good enough or should have prayed longer or
harder or better. We put ourselves in charge.
This
passage is far too often preached as a command to pray more fervently, and as
you pray more often, you will know what God wants from you and soon, your
prayers will be more in line with what God will have them be. Except we are not
Jesus, our prayers will never be like Jesus, and at the end of the day, we are all
selfish enough to ask only for what we want, no matter the consequences for
anyone else.
We
sometimes view our prayers as a vending machine. Like the cash that I put into a soda machine
to get an ice cold Coke, I should be able to put in my effort in prayer to God,
and get what I want in return. The
problem is that we are applying the logic of the world to our prayers, and it
just doesn’t work that way. God simply doesn’t
play by human standards of what appears to be fair and just. We like to think that if we work hard enough
or do enough good things or pray in just the right way, our prayers will be
answered in the way that we want because we DESERVE it.
Or, perhaps
we do not ask for what we need because we are afraid of unmet expectations. If we pray as we are commanded and yet we
still do not hear an answer, are we going to lose our faith in a God who is
listening to us? Or what if we do not
like the answer to our question? When we
approach prayer in this way we are making prayer a one-way transaction with
some far-off God and we put ourselves squarely in charge of orchestrating the
outcome.
In the last
part of today’s Gospel reading we hear Jesus asking the disciples how they
respond to the requests of their children.
He asks, “if you, who are evil” (or another definition of the word evil
used here could be “broken or weighed down by the weariness of human affairs”) “
if you know how to provide good gifts to your children, how much more will the
heavenly father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?!”
This
comment about the Holy Spirit, I think this is the turning point of this Gospel
text. Jesus does not say that God will
answer every prayer in the way that we think it should be answered because we
asked nicely. Or because we deserve
it. Or refuse to listen because we
didn’t do what we were supposed to do.
No, Jesus makes the bold statement of, “God is going to give the Holy
Spirit!” But what does this mean? It’s certainly not a nice little thing that
you can box up and bring home with you and put it on a shelf. The Holy Spirit is wild and unpredictable and
is more likely to break you wide open and transform your heart than she is to
give you comforting answers and easy solutions.
This indwelling of God’s presence by the Spirit provides for a new
reality, a new creation, a new healing that we could have never imagined.
When we
read today’s text in the larger context of Luke’s Gospel, we hear about a God
that so deeply and passionately loves the world, the entire world, no
exceptions, that he sent his only Son to be salvation and good news for ALL the
people. This Holy Spirit will stir up
new life in the midst of death, creation in the midst of destruction, and hope
in the midst of despair. So bring your prayers and your whole self to
God. Bring your tears. Bring your disappointment. Bring your anger. Bring your joy. When you cannot think of words to pray on
your own, be swept along in the prayers of others. When we come to God in prayer we are making a
radical confession, whether we know it or not, that we are utterly dependent on
God for the things that bring us life, daily bread, forgiveness, hope and the
kingdom.
When we pray the words that Jesus taught us,
and say, “your kingdom come” this is the new reality to which we are
testifying. It’s scary. Because it means that we cannot control
it. We cannot do anything to earn
it. And we cannot stop it. God
wants to hear our prayers. God wants to
provide for our needs. But above all,
know this, God wants to transform us through the Holy Spirit. God is relentlessly for us and for our
salvation. This is the answer to the
question that we did not know that we were asking. Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment