A sermon based upon Luke 11: 1-13
Charles J. Tomlin
Flat Rock-Zion Partnership
July 25, 2010
A mother sent her 5th grade son to bed. A few minutes later she went in his room to make sure he was in bed. When she stuck her head into his room, she saw that he was kneeling beside his bed in prayer. Pausing to listen, she heard her son praying over and over again. "Let it be Tokyo. Please dear Lord, let it be Tokyo." When he finished his prayer, his mother said to him, "What did you mean when you said, "Let it be Tokyo." "Oh," the boy said, "We had our geography test today and I was praying that God would make Tokyo the capitol of France." ( Dorothea Belt Stroman from Sermon “Jesus’ Teaching On Prayer, from Goodpreacher.com, 2010.)
Prayer is useless when reduced to a method of getting God to give us what we want. This is the classic mistake Huck Finn has when writer Mark Twain has him saying: … “Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn't so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn't any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn't make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn't make it out no way.”
Consider how the discussion continues with the same tone: “I set down one time back in the woods, and had a long think about it. I says to myself, if a body can get anything they pray for, why don't Deacon Winn get back the money he lost on pork? Why can't the widow get back her silver snuffbox that was stole? Why can't Miss Watson fat up? No, says I to myself, there ain't nothing in it. I went and told the widow about it, and she said the thing a body could get by praying for it was "spiritual gifts." This was too much for me, but she told me what she meant -- I must help other people, and do everything I could for other people, and look out for them all the time, and never think about myself. This was including Miss Watson, as I took it. I went out in the woods and turned it over in my mind a long time, but I couldn't see no advantage about it -- except for the other people; so at last I reckoned I wouldn't worry about it anymore, but just let it go. http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/mtwain/bl-mtwain-huck-3.htm
Huck Finn says he “let go” thinking about prayer, but I hope we won’t. I especially like the last line when he speaks of going “out in the woods” to turn it “over in my mind a long time” and he decides: “I couldn’t see no advantage about it---except for the other people...” Could this be Twain’s “unexpected” and perhaps “unwanted” insight into true prayer? Could this be why the Lord’s Prayer in our text begins “our Father”, not “my Father”? Huck’s discovery is that prayer is not much use if you are selfish. True prayer can never be reduced to getting. If prayer is anything, it is about taming our “wants” in light of other needs.
Understanding “what a body could get by praying” is something neither Huck Finn nor a disciple of Jesus can take for granted. Prayer is about learning our greater needs and it can take us beyond being obsessed by our wants. Just as a baby cries for what they need and want and doesn’t yet know the difference between the two, if a child is going to grow up, stay alive, be healthy, show love and live full and free, they must come to “learn” to tell the difference between their “wants” and their “needs.
It is not hard to contemplate how learning prayer is learning life. Not only can our wants end up prematurely “killing us” but our “wants” can keep “others” from getting from they need and our wants can keep us from getting what we really need too. This “spiritual” side of prayer is just “too much” of a discovery for Huck Finn. He is unable to rise above his “wants.” Because he can’t see beyond his wants, he only sees prayer as “unanswered” and “useless” because it doesn’t give him what he wants. He is never able to see any “advantage” in prayer since he is stuck on what he wants.
In today’s Bible text from Luke, the disciples have seen Jesus as a man is possessed by the needs of the world around him and is unattached to his own wants. The motivation for their asking Jesus about prayers was not as much what he had been teaching, but who he was as a man of prayer. This reminds us that before prayer can be taught, it must be caught. Jesus’ example of praying sparked their desire to pray.
Two other things stand out about the disciple’s request. It should be a curiosity for us that though Jesus a master teacher, a preacher of great authority, and charismatic healer, we have no record of the disciples ever asking Jesus to teach them to teach, to preach, or to heal. Their only request was: “Lord, teach us to pray…” (11:1). This could be significant. Notice also, that the disciples aren’t asking to learn “about” prayer, to learn a “theory” of prayer, nor are they asking for the “words” to say in prayer. Even though Jesus gives them a brilliant “model” of prayer, learning “to pray” is ultimately not about learning the right words, memorizing or even habitually repeating words. The disciple wants to pray like Jesus. The Greek is literally: ‘Teach us prayer’. Learning prayer comes by doing. The disciples are asking for the desire, the will, the urgency of praying like Jesus. To put it in the simplest of terms: the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray so they can want and need what Jesus has.
WANTING GOD
Can you understand with Jesus, that the first matter of learning prayer is learning to “want” God? Jesus begins: “when you pray, say, Our Father, hallowed be your name…thy kingdom come….” Jesus begins prayer not by asking, but first by acknowledging God as Father, as Holy and who’s will and purposes should matter the most.
Think about the very “secular” world in which we live---a world that, for the most part has, either killed God off in our thinking or at the very least, has neutered God in public and pushed God to the sidelines of life, making faith in God only an option of personal choice. Such a “real world” makes this opening phrase sound as if Jesus is a long way away from where we live.
Most of the moments of our lives are spent on working, caring for family, taking care of business and these days, trying to survive. Seeking God seems less necessary, is not natural, and must be learned. Since we can easily choose to “live without God” in a free society based more on economic dreams or political will, than having to consider God’s will, can we still take prayer seriously? Can we, who live in such a complex, multi-cultural, religiously plural, variegated world, dare to imagine that we all have the same spiritual “Father”? Can people who have lost their sense of the sacred or of values greater than our own, care about a holy God? Can humans who have made it their goal in life to go after what “I” want, “fathom” that life might be about what God wills rather than what “I” or “we” want?
To “name” God in prayer can’t help but raise this question about God. And when you raise the God question, you can’t help but question everything---everything about what you believe, the way you live your life, what you dream about, and what you actually do with the life you have been given. When Jesus gives God the distinctive name: “Abba, or “Father,” we can see how our lower “wants” might be wonderfully transformed by our higher, and greater needs. Finding “what” matters in life rests upon knowing “who” matters most. This is why the first lesson is prayer is: Do we want God?
In a fascinating book, “The Question of God,” Harvard Professor, Armand M. Nicholi, carries on an imaginary debate between two “dead” geniuses; C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud. The professor put both their writings and biographies side by side letting you see any difference in how they lived, one as a “believer” and the other as an “unbeliever”. As their stories “unfold” and you take note of how two brilliant minds dealt grappled with the major human issues of God, Love, and the Meaning of Life. You get to see what they came to “want” in their lives and you also see who they became, not just in their brilliance of mind but in their own personal character. Freud, an unbeliever, primarily “wanted” God to be an illusion who was imagined to be too harsh to be any kind of “real” loving Father. As a result, you a find Freud as a person who was often a harsh, stern, demanding character, who in the end, as he dies, shows little emotion or spirit. C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, who was an also a brilliant Oxford Scholar allowed himself to be “surprised by joy” and is transformed into a passionate, caring and loving person, who’s heart can be broken and tested by love’s demands. The “desire” for God, of lack of it, made a great “loving” and compassionate difference.
WANTING WHAT WE NEED MOST
Asking ourselves, whether or not we “want” God brings up another issue for prayer in a secular world. When belief in God has become optional, we must also learn to ask: Why do we need God? Are we ready to seek and discover “what” we need from God?
Jesus suggests, in his model prayer, that we all need God’s help in sustaining our lives with the basic essentials (daily bread) and we need God’s help to save our souls from the destructive powers can steal both our lives and our souls. We need God to help us seek what will sustain our bodies and what will save our souls. Prayer helps us seek and want what we “needs” and not just what we want in life.
The other night, Arla and Warren Cutts invited us to their home to watch a TV movie entitled “Amish Grace.” It’s the tragic story of how a small, Amish community had their lives horribly interrupted and their faith tested when a mentally deranged neighbor busted into a one-room school house and killed 5 innocent Amish girls. The movie was a heart-breaking, true and life –changing of how this believing community went beyond the “want” and “desire” to hate the man who killed their children, to seeking and finding the strength to forgive and even show love and mercy to the family of the murderer.
One outstanding, dramatized, character was an Amish mother who lost her very talented daughter in the shooting. She was struggling with the community’s decision to “forgive” the man and came close to leaving her faith. She could not understand the “need” to forgive and she did not have the desire or ability to forgive. Right down, almost to the end of the movie, you expect her to leave her family in protest, until she visits the hospital bed of one of the surviving girls, who describes what happened in the last moment of her own daughter’s life. Bravely, this young child looked into the killer’s cold eyes, prays for him and forgives him for what he was about to do.
When the mother realizes that her own daughter had displayed the courage to forgive, she immediately gained the strength and ability to forgive, to be redemptive instead of being “destroy” by great evil. It is as if her daughter’s act of faith and courage, gave her the ability to realize something thing even worse than forgiving her killer. If she did not forgive like her daughter forgave, she would “kill” her daughter’s memory by holding on to hate in her heart. Forgiving was not what she wanted, but through her daughter’s faith, forgiveness became her greater need, so she could rightly honor her daughter in death as in life. Her need to forgive overcame her not wanting to forgive.
WANTING WHAT GOD WANTS
However we define prayer, prayer is learning to want God and learning find what we need in God, and it is also, learning to want what God wants.
Wanting what God wants is the “final frontier” of prayer where most people seldom have gone before, and seldom learn before they are dying. This final lesson of prayer is unsuspected. Most of us come to consider prayer like Huck Finn does: either we have been disappointed that we didn’t get what we asked for, or we are elated that our prayers have been answered just as we asked. The value of prayer to us or the lack of it, is then based upon the kind of “answer” we get.
Jesus, however, sees the real value of prayer in the asking, the seeking, and the knocking for the answer, not in the answer itself. In his parable about the woman who goes out asking for bread at midnight, he says her need for bread at midnight “gets answered” because she is persistent in her asking, her seeking, and her knocking. Why is persistence the most important lesson in prayer? For two reasons, I believe. Jesus wants us keep asking and praying, because we might give up too soon. Our prayers are always heard by God and surprisingly, God wants to answer our prayers more than most of us want to pray. God must be known as even more than a “friend in Jesus “ who might wake up to help” us, because God is a loving Father who only gives good things to his children when they ask. To want what God wants in prayer means that God wants to answer more than we want to ask. Secondly, Jesus wants us to keep asking because God wants to give us more than know to ask. Through persistence in our prayers, when the answers come and also when they don’t, through our praying and not giving up, God gives us the ability to rise above our wants, and can even teach us to want what God wants.
Wanting what God wants is the lesson we see in Jesus’ own life, isn’t it? Jesus himself, prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, a great prayer he desperately needed to have answered. It was a prayer not just of human want, but also of the greatest human need. In Matthew’s gospel, 26: 39, we read how in prayer, “threw himself on the ground and prayerd, “"MY FATHER, IF IT IS POSSIBLE, LET THIS CUP PASS FROM ME; YET NOT WHAT I WANT BUT WHAT YOU WANT." The persistence of Jesus prayer did not change give Jesus the answer he wanted, but it gave Jesus and the world, the answer we all needed. God’s plans are always bigger than just one life. But one can become part of how God answers the world’s need, when we learn to trust God, not matter what kind of “answer” we get.
Do you realize that the greatest “answer to your prayers” may not be what you ask for, but the greatest answer could be receiving something you don’t even yet know to ask for? While I was chaplain on the cancer floor at Baptist hospital, I came upon a woman who was, like all of us would be in her situation, praying to be healed of her cancer. She told me, even if she didn’t beat her cancer, she at least hoped that she could make it through the next year until she saw her son graduate. Of course, in the moment we prayed, it was altogether uncertain whether these prayers would be answered. But then, she told me about an “unexpected” blessing in the midst of all her pain and disease. It was something she hadn’t prayed for, but had already received as an answer. She and her husband had often had a rocky marriage, but now, through all the sickness, the treatments, the pain and the fears, her husband “proved” his love for her because he did not leave her side. Now, she told me, she will never again “doubt” his love. Her new “marriage” to her husband was the answer to the prayer she had not known how to pray for and it came as an unexpected blessing in the middle of the “midnight” of her life.
Jesus says the one “gift” or “answer” we are always guaranteed in prayer is the “Holy Spirit”. Through the gift of the Spirit, God answers our prayers even might think he hasn’t. The greatest answer to prayer will never be “what” we get, but “who” we, by God’s spirit in us, can become. Everyone who asks and keeps on asking, will receive God’s spirit. This is Jesus’ promise. But Jesus’ promise is not that we always get what we want, nor will we only get what we need. The promise of Jesus is that by wanting God, by coming to understand our greater needs in life, and through the discovery that the greatest answer to prayer is not getting what we want, but wanting what God wants, then, the greatest answer to prayer is no longer what we can get, but “who” we can become when we pray. By learning to pray and to pray persistently, who we become for God, for others, and even for ourselves, is a far greater “gift” than anything else we can get from God. The greatest surprise at midnight?: Who we are in prayer” is both “who” and what God really wants. Amen.
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