Teach us to pray

Sermon delivered Sunday, July 24, 2016 (The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost, Proper 12, Year C (Track 2)), at St. Cuthbert's Episcopal Church, Oakland, CA. 

Sermon Text: Luke 11:1-13

 

“Lord, teach us to pray,” the disciples ask. “Teach us to pray.”

Jesus responds by giving them an outline of the kinds of things they should pray for and then tells them a parable about the efficacy of prayer. The fact that he tells this parable in response to their question about how to pray leads me to believe that maybe the disciples were asking out of a sense that they weren’t doing things right, that Jesus might know a different way to pray that would get them better results. “How can we get our prayers answered” seems to be the underlying question, not just “teach us to pray.”

Jesus’s answer to them is: just keep asking. He says to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”

Although the friend initially turns down the request, he ultimately gives in because the person knocking at his door just won’t give up. Jesus’s message seems to be: if you know that persistence and constant asking can be effective in finally getting what you want from other broken and sinful human beings, who do not always have your best interests at heart, how much more should you be certain that God, who loves you and does have your best interests at heart, will give you what you want if you are persistent in asking?

This parable is unique to Luke, but Luke links it with a saying of Jesus that appears in some form or another in all four Gospels: “ask, and it will be given to you.” The same exact words appear in Matthew in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 7:7-8). Mark and John do not have this exact passage, but the same theme appears in those Gospels as well. “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours,” Jesus says in chapter 11 of the Gospel of Mark (Mark 11:24). And in John 14, Jesus promises the disciples, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” (John 14:14)

These passages seem to suggest that all we have to do is ask, and God will give us whatever we want. They can easily lend themselves to a “vending machine” view of God, where all we need to do is insert prayer, press D4, and whatever we have prayed for will promptly be deposited into the receptacle at the bottom of the machine. But I expect that most of us have found that prayer does not always work that way. It does not seem to be as easy as “ask, and you shall receive,” as “select your desired outcome and it will be delivered to you, no questions asked.” Although sometimes our prayers do seem to be answered exactly as we have asked, most of us have plenty of examples of times when we asked for something from God and did not receive it.

This is not a new problem for the “modern believer;” the earliest Christian communities already recognized that they did not always get everything they asked for from God. The author of the letter of James deals with this issue by arguing that the people are not receiving what they ask for because they are asking wrongly, because their desires are not in line with the will of God. James 4, verses 2-3, says this: “You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” James’s answer for why some prayers go unanswered is that people are asking for the wrong things for the wrong reasons. That can be a helpful interpretation when we know deep down that our motives in asking for the things we are asking for are probably not the most godly, that they may be motivated by selfish desires. In those cases, we can accept that our prayers are not answered because we were not asking for the right things. But what about the cases in which we ask for something that we believe to be in line with the will of God, when we ask for the very things God has promised us, like life and health and justice and mercy and resurrection and peace, and we do not receive them?

One need only turn on the news in the past few weeks to find plenty of examples of unanswered prayer. “Oh, please, Jesus, don’t tell me he’s dead,” Philando Castile’s girlfriend prayed on the video she took after he was shot by a police officer at a routine traffic stop. And that prayer cut right to the heart of so many of us because we too have prayed that prayer. “Please, Jesus, no.” We know the pain of crying out to God, “NO,” of praying earnestly that whatever horrific thing that is happening in front of us would somehow be undone, and yet the situation remains unchanged. God seems to be silent.

Jesus tells the disciples that they will be able to heal in his name, and in the Gospels and the Book of Acts we have stories of the disciples healing the sick and raising the dead, but I have never known a Christian who was able to literally raise the dead. The prophets constantly tell us that God has promised to “restore the fortunes of Zion,” and yet the conflict in Jerusalem and the surrounding areas continues unabated. The prophets tell us that God wants “justice to roll down like waters,” but we see oppression and injustice continuing in our own society and around the world. So how are we to reconcile these unanswered prayers with Jesus’s words that “if in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it”? That “everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened”?

Again, this is not a new question. The biblical authors also struggled with unanswered prayers. The psalmists asked, “How long, O Lord?” How long will you hide your face from us, how long will you not respond to our prayers, to our cries for help? As we survey the violence that has wracked our country and the world in recent weeks and months, the biblical prophets give voice to our collective weariness and grief. The prophet Habakkuk asks, “O Lord, how long shall I cry for help, and you will not listen? Or cry to you ‘Violence!’ and you will not save?” (Habakkuk 1:2) Job cries out to God, “Even when I cry out, ‘Violence!’ I am not answered; I call aloud, but there is no justice” (Job 19:7). In Psalm 22, the psalm Jesus quotes while dying on the cross, the psalmist says, “O my God, I cry in the daytime, but you do not answer. By night as well, but I find no rest” (Psalm 22:2).

In figuring out how to deal with the agony of unanswered prayer, the biblical prophets are a good place to turn, because they know that pain themselves, deeply, intimately, as evidenced in these and many other passages. And what do they do? They express their anguish about unanswered prayer to God, not only to other people. Significantly, they never take the step that so many people do today, to assume that the fact of unanswered prayer must mean that God does not exist. The biblical writers “keep the faith” even in the midst of unanswered prayer, even when God does not turn out to be their own personal divine vending machine. They stay in relationship to God and express their anguish to God, even if no answers are forthcoming.

They also remember the times God has answered prayer and how many blessings they have received from God. In the same chapter as Job cries out that there is no justice and his prayers are not answered, he goes on to say that “I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth” (Job 19:25). Immediately after the verse in Psalm 22 about crying to God but receiving no answer, the psalmist goes on to say, “Yet you are the Holy One… our forefathers put their trust in you; they trusted, and you delivered them… you are he who took me out of the womb, and kept me safe upon my mother’s breast” (Psalm 22:3-4, 9). In the midst of laments about unanswered prayer in the Bible, there is almost always a recall of times that prayer has been answered, when we asked and it was given to us, when we sought and did find, when we knocked and the door was opened to us.

A priest mentor of mine once told me that when people come to her and say, “I’ve lost my faith,” she asks them, “When did you last see it?” – the same kind of question you’d ask someone if they were looking for a lost wallet. You had it with you at some point, so where did you last see it? When did you last know, without a shadow of a doubt, that God was with you? That God loves you? That God has your best interests at heart? Because just like that lost wallet, if you retrace your steps, you can find it again.

Jesus never promised us a life free from pain and suffering. But he did promise “to be with us always, even until the end of the age.” We may never have a satisfactory answer for why God leaves some prayers unanswered, even those prayers that are for the very things we believe God himself wants for us and for the world. But that need not stop us from affirming those times that God has answered prayer, that we have felt God’s presence, that we have seen God’s hand at work guiding our lives. We can hold the two in tension with one another and, with the biblical prophets, continue to cry out in our grief, confident that God is still there.