Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
July 25, 2010

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I have to admit that I have always had a lot of trouble with prayer, and I still do. I don’t know if any of you have problems with prayer like I do, but I wouldn’t be surprised if you do. Our passage from Luke this morning got me thinking anew about prayer and about why I had such an immediately negative reaction to that passage. I’m not sure I have an answer to that question yet, but this morning I want to use Luke’s stories about prayer that we just heard to do some reflecting on prayer and on why I have so much trouble with it. I hope that my doing so may give you some help in understanding prayer and in wrestling with whatever difficulties with it you may have yourself—and maybe even give me some help too.

Our passage begins with Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, a fuller version of which appears in Matthew. There are many sermons that need to be preached on the Lord’s Prayer, but I’m not going to preach any of them this morning. I’ll just mention in passing that I once heard a wise person warn Christians against committing grave sins, like reciting the Lord’s Prayer and not meaning it. The part of the passage that comes next is that part that bothers me, so it’s the part I want to focus on.

Right after Jesus gives the disciples a version of the Lord’s Prayer he tells them a parable. A man goes to his friend’s house at midnight and asks to borrow some bread because he has unexpected visitors to whom he must extend hospitality. The friend refuses because of the late hour. Jesus concludes the parable: “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.” The moral seems to be: Keep pestering people you want to do something for you until they do it, if only to get rid of you. And do the same thing with God, I guess. An odd moral for one of Jesus’ parables at best.

Then come some famous lines about prayer that seem intended to make the same point as the parable. “Ask, and it will be given 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.” And this is where I start to have a real problem. It looks like this passage is saying that God will give you whatever you ask for in prayer. God will do for you whatever you ask God to do in prayer. I know that there are a lot of Christians who read these lines that way and who believe, or at least say that they believe, that that is true.

This belief sometimes takes a very trivial form, but at times it becomes downright destructive. One trivial example: One of our members has a friend who swears that whenever she prays for God to find her a parking place, she finds a parking place. That notion is so trivializes prayer—and God—that it isn’t worth taking seriously. The ways in which this belief becomes destructive are a lot more important. Many Christians qualify the notion that God will give you whatever you ask for in prayer by adding that for that to happen you must have strong enough faith, pray with sufficient fervor and for a long enough period of time. Then they say that if God didn’t “answer” your prayer by giving you what you wanted it must be because your faith wasn’t strong enough, or you didn’t pray long and hard enough. One example of how this belief becomes destructive: A loved one is ill, and you pray for recovery. But your loved one doesn’t recover. She gets sicker, and then she dies. And your friend with this simplistic, mechanistic view of prayer says: Well, I guess your faith just wasn’t strong enough, and you didn’t pray hard enough. I can think of nothing more hurtful in that painful situation that I, and so many of you, have been in. In a sermon I preached here back in 2002 shortly before my wife Francie died I called that idea a Satanic lie, and I am convinced that that is what it is. It is a Satanic lie because it can destroy a person’s faith, drive can a person away from God not closer to God. It can make a person feel responsible for a tragedy for which that person is in no way responsible. But that’s what I think of when I hear Luke’s Jesus say “Ask, and it will be given to you.” Understood in this simplistic but very widely held way it just isn’t true, and it can be very destructive.

So does that mean that there is no truth in this passage for us? No. It doesn’t mean that. These verses actually contain a very powerful truth for us, but we don’t see what that truth is until the very last line of Jesus words on prayer. In that line Luke’s Jesus says “If 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.” The key to understanding what prayer is, how it works and how it doesn’t work, is in that line.

Notice first of all that Jesus’ examples of what humans know how to do with requests from children refer to very material, physical things. They refer to food, echoing the line in the Lord’s Prayer which in this translation of Luke reads “Give us each day our daily bread.” Jesus uses as examples children asking for fish or for an egg. When our child asks for food, we give food and not something harmful, at least when we are able to do so. But Jesus doesn’t say that God will give us food when we ask for it. He doesn’t actually say that God will give us anything material when we ask for it. He says that when we ask God will surely “give the Holy Spirit.” There is no promise here of a parking place. There is no promise here of food. There is no promise here of good health or recovery from illness. There is only one promise here, the promise of the Holy Spirit.

Prayer then is about us receiving the Holy Spirit. How are we to understand that promise? Luke’s Jesus says God will send the Holy Spirit. I have a little trouble with that way of putting it, actually. God sending the Holy Spirit implies that the Holy Spirit wasn’t there until we prayed, but I am convinced that the Holy Spirit is always there. God doesn’t literally send the Holy Spirit because the Holy Spirit was never away and needing to be sent in the first place. Rather what prayer does is open us up to that divine presence, the presence of the Holy Spirit, the presence of God. The function of prayer, indeed the function of religion generally, is to connect us with God. The function of prayer is to make our connection with God real in our lives. The function of prayer is to make us aware of the divine presence that is always a reality all around us and deep within us but of which we are so often so unaware.

I saw a saying on a church reader board here in town a while back that said it well. It was the reader board of the Foursquare Church out Main Street, a church with which I don’t usually think of us has having that much in common. But they got it right with this one. Their sign once read “Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us.” Indeed prayer does not change God. Prayer doesn’t cause God to do anything that God isn’t already doing. God doesn’t need us to tell God what our needs are or what other people’s needs are. God isn’t sitting up in heaven somewhere waiting for us mortals to ask for something before God acts. That just isn’t how it works. God is God, after all, and God doesn’t depend on us for anything.

Rather, we depend on God. And in prayer we acknowledge our dependence on God and open ourselves to what God is already doing in our lives and in the world. In prayer we go to meet the God who is always already coming to meet us. In prayer we remind ourselves of the presence of God and of our need for God. In prayer the presence of the Holy Spirit becomes real for us, our faith is strengthened, and we are renewed by an infusion of God’s sustaining and redeeming Spirit.

So let us pray. Let us pray, as Paul says, without ceasing. Let us pray in all things. In all things, not for all things. God isn’t Santa Claus. God isn’t waiting to get our letter with our wish list, and I don’t think we should hear Jesus’ words in our passage from Luke that way. “Ask, and it will be given you” isn’t some simplistic promise that I can pray for a parking place and always find one. Rather, we must hear it together with Jesus promise that God will send the Holy Spirit when we ask, or, as I have interpreted that line, that when we pray we open ourselves to the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives. We wake up to God.

In a moment we will offer our prayers of the people. We will pray for those who are ill, those who are grieving, those with special needs in their lives. It is right and proper that we do so, but it is not right and proper because we think our prayer will get God to do something God wouldn’t otherwise do. Rather, in offering those prayers we open ourselves to the Spirit. We enter into the Spirit that is present in the gathered community. We express and strengthen our love for those for whom we pray. We strengthen our commitment to be community for them and for each other. As we pray for God’s presence with them and with us we open ourselves to that presence and resolve to embody that presence for others. So let us pray. Let us wake up to God. Let us pray long and well. It was Jesus’ way. It is the way of the Christian. It is the way of all people of faith. May it be our way too. Amen .