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The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost, 07/28/2019
Sermon on Luke 11:1-13, by Luke Bouman
11:1 He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” 2He said to them, “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. 3Give us each day our daily bread. 4And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.” 5And he said 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; 6for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ 7And 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.’ 8I 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. 9“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. 11Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? 12Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? 13If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Ask… Search… Knock
When he was 7 months old or so, my son was fed frozen yogurt by a family member. Once he had something so sweet and delicious to eat, he began a protracted war with us over what he would allow into his mouth. No more jars of baby food vegetables for him. Oh no! From that time on, he wanted anything that reminded his young taste buds of that sweet goodness. Everything else would be rejected, spit up, forcefully expelled from his mouth. That didn’t stop us from trying, but it became his first battle of wills with his parents. When he was old enough, one of the first words he learned, well almost, was the name of the sugary concoction that had captured his attention. ‘Gurt was the thing he asked for, time and time again. The pediatrician reminded us that there are worse things a kid could eat, and instructed us to make smoothies of yogurt and fruit, something that we did for most of the time that he lived with us. We were typical first-time parents, so we wanted, naturally, to give him food that would help him grow. We knew how to give what he needed, not what he wanted. Well, most of the time we did. At least we pretend that we did.
I think about this story every time I read this lesson. I am reminded that not everything my son asked for was good for him. I am also mindful of the reality that this is also true in my own life. I have wanted many things that in retrospect have not been or would not have been good for me. I suppose that there is nothing wrong with wanting things, except when those things take over my thoughts and actions so completely that there is scarcely room for anything else. I have vague, painful, memories of obsessing over a crush when I was about 13, of thinking about nothing but having a car at 16 (possibly also to impress a crush), or of wanting life to move on too quickly without having learned important things that might help me along the way. I may have even prayed for such things. Ok, I did pray for them. On the rare occasion that I actually got one of my obsessions it was always a disaster. And my prayers probably sounded like an adolescent version of Janis Joplin’s infamous lyric,
“Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
I’ve worked hard my whole life, no help from my friends.
So, Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz.”
Yet in this passage about prayer, Jesus’ words have long been interpreted by many readers to imply that if we can imagine it, it will be ours. 9“So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Out of context, this passage seems to say that if we just ask, search, or knock, what we seek will come to us in some way. There are even televangelists who use this kind of verse to their own advantage by connecting this notion with that of “faith”, saying that if people just have enough faith, then what they will ask for will be theirs. They point to their own extravagant wealth as an example of just that principle.
Of course, discerning people see immediately the flaw in this. We can’t all have what we want. Sometimes what people want is at odds with what others want. Sometimes some people get what they ask for when others don’t. This leads those same televangelists to denounce the faith of those who don’t get what they want as somehow inadequate, which seems at least callous, if not cruel, to the parent of a child with cancer, clinging to faith because they have nothing else to hold on to, as their prayers for healing do not prevent the tragic death of their beloved child.
It also makes the praying about us: about our wants, about our ability to have faith, about our ability to make our own lives somehow better. A closer look at the passage above tells a different story. Jesus is teaching his disciples ancient and modern something different about prayer, and in the process teaching us something different about our relationship with God. It is not new. This understanding has been around for the entire history of God’s relationship with humanity as recorded in the Bible. But we seem always to forget it. So today, let us relearn it as our parents and grandparents did before us.
There are several things here worth noting in our text that help us as we discover these truths anew. First, we have the prayer that Jesus gives the disciples, the one we know as “The Lord’s Prayer.” This version may be a little different from the one in Matthew’s Gospel. Both are different from the one that has become a part of our oral tradition. But essential to all of them is the notion that what we pray for is not our wants or desires. Look at the various petitions or “asks” in this prayer. We are instructed to pray that God’s name be hallowed, that God’s reign come among us. We are instructed to pray for today’s bread every day. We are instructed to pray for the kind of forgiveness that allows us to forgive others. We are instructed to pray to be spared a “time of trial” or persecution.
Note that apart from “daily bread” none of these things are about any physical need. Even the prayer for daily bread is only for that day. It is not about financial security. It is not about wealth. It is about the common and just cause that every person who is hungry today to have food. The rest of the prayer is about God’s mission in the world. It is about God’s mission and reign. It is about settling injustice through restoration rather than retribution. It is about how God intends to restore not only us but a whole world to harmony and peace with justice. This is what Jesus is asking us to pray for.
Second, Jesus follows this prayer with the story of the friend who needs bread. He invites us to be as persistent in our request for God’s mission as the friend who pounds on the door in the middle of the night. The friend is not asking for himself, but rather requesting that he be able to be hospitable to guests who come unforeseen. Hospitality was a holy obligation in ancient Middle Eastern culture. It was to fulfill the call to be hospitable that the friend knocks at all, but especially something that drove his persistence. So, for us, prayer that we align our lives and communities with God’s holy calling for restoration of sinners is inconvenient to the world, but also one that requires our persistent petition.
Third, God answer our prayers, whatever they might be, not always with what we ask for, but always with what we need. Parents know how to give good things (i.e. what children need) to their children even when they clamor for some other kind of stuff. So much more, says Jesus, does God know to give good things to his beloved creation. But note what the good thing is that Jesus says God gives: The Holy Spirit. God gives the Holy Spirit to us when we pray. The Holy Spirit, who alone inspires faith, is given. The Holy Spirit, who is with us through our trials, is given. The Holy Spirit, who gathers us together and makes us one in Christ, is given. It is no surprise that it is the Holy Spirit that the Apostle Paul invokes in Romans 8, when he says we don’t know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit interceded for us with “sighs too deep for words.” This is a reminder that our prayers, however they might be formulated, are met with love and received by God not as asking out of our sinful selfishness, but rather in concert with God’s mission.
Fourth, concerning Jesus’ encouragement to ask, search, and knock, we now realize that he is not saying that we can have anything we want. He is instead saying that when we seek the things of God’s mission, of God’s reign, that these things will indeed come to us. That’s why context matters. That why hearing these words of Jesus in the context of both the prayer he taught and the instruction that follows helps shape how we understand this promise. Certainly, when we pray for things that align with God’s mission God will give them.
There are two more things that need to be said. First that this passage about prayer does not mean that we stop asking God for things like comfort for the bereaved, healing for the sick, or even at time the things we desire in life. Those things that are in our hearts, God already knows. And prayer is, at its core, a conversation with God where we bring our whole lives, concerns, worries, warts and all. We do not share these things with God in order to give God new information, but rather to lay our lives bare before God and give them unconditionally to God’s mission. Second, and this follows from the first, because of God’s unconditional love and acceptance of us, as we then come with our lives open to God, it is not God who is changed in prayer. It is us. We don’t pray in order to manipulate God into doing something for us that God wasn’t planning on. We don’t pray to change God’s mind. Prayer doesn’t work like that. Instead we pray in order to reconnect with God and God’s mission. In the process we discover that WE are the ones transformed. We discover that our wayward wills are realigned with God’s good and gracious will. We discover that through prayer and the gift of the Holy Spirit, we find ourselves wanting God’s mission, God’s reign, to come among us and restore us. And that is something well worth praying for.