By Rev. Charles J. Tomlin, BA, MDiv, DMin.
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership,
October 13th, 2019
One of my favorite songs is Carol King’s ‘You’ve got a friend’. James Taylor’s recording first made it popular in the 1970’s. Most of you probably know it:
When you're down and troubled. And you need some love and care
And nothing, nothing is going right. Close your eyes and think of me
And soon I will be there, To brighten up even your darkest night
You just call out my name. And you know wherever I am
I'll come running, to see you again. Winter, spring, summer or fall
All you have to do is call. And I'll be there. You've got a friend.”
Jesus says that prayer is a friend like this. But with a friend who does not always seem to answer, especially when we are in desperate need ‘at midnight’, prayer can also be a friend who is frustrating, even causing unexpected hurt and unwanted misunderstanding. As one lady once asked me: “Why are we told to ask anything, when we know we won’t get it?’
The frustration of prayer can be the same kind of feeling once expressed in the comic strip Frank and Ernest, when one of them has a conversation with God:
"Is it true, God, that a thousand years is but a second to you?"
"Yes."
"And is it true that a million dollars is but a penny to you?"
"Yes."
"Uh, can I have a penny?"
"Certainly...wait a second."
How do we pray? How does God answer prayer? Why does God sometimes seem to ignore my prayers? Questions like these lie just beneath the surface of Luke’s unique version of Jesus discourse on prayer.
TEACH US TO PRAY
More than any other gospel, Luke stresses the importance of prayer in Jesus' life (see 3:21, 5:16, 6:12, 9:18, 9:28, 10:21-22, 11:1, 22:41-4, 23:46). For Luke, prayer was such a daily priority for Jesus that his disciples felt the need to ask him to teach them about prayer. What is most noticeable, however, is that the disciples did not so much ask Jesus how to pray, but they wanted Jesus to teach them to pray --to take the practice of prayer as seriously as he took it. They wanted Jesus to help them make prayer a priority in their daily lives.
Why and how should we make prayer a priority in our lives too? One of my favorite episodes in the cartoon strip “Peanuts” pictures the piano-loving Schroeder and his constant admirer, Lucy. Lucy interrupts Schroeder half-way through one of his many concerts. She says, “Do you know what love is?” He quickly stops, stands, and speaks: “Love (luv), noun, to be fond of: a strong affection for or attachment or devotion to a person or persons.” Abruptly he sits down and resumes playing.
Stunned and puzzled, Lucy turns away and murmurs, “On paper, he’s great.”
Like Linus, ‘on paper’, we may know that we need to pray, but it’s not as easy as it sounds, especially in a world where we have so much to do, and such a short time to do it. Of course, when a time of crisis occurs, people may call out a brief prayer most naturally. Who did not cry out or say to yourself ‘Oh my God!’ or ‘My goodness!’ when you watched the Twin Towers fall on 9/11, or when you saw Notre Dame in flames? When bad, or good things happen, even unbelieving people echo a most natural, primitive form of prayer. Because we are religious creatures we pray. Because we are people in need, we pray.
Anne Lamott writes in Traveling Mercies that our two best prayers are: ‘help me, help me, help me" and "thank you, thank you, thank you" (p. 82). My late aunt’s common expression of surprise was “Goodness gracious sakes alive”. That’s a great southern expression that derived from an old expression of prayer, but is this really praying? Or was this just cultural ways of expressing feelings, fears, hopes, or joy?
My favorite expression of surprise is simply, ‘Great day in the morning!’ And I often say this in the evening too. When I was teaching English in Germany, a student ask me about sayings like this: ‘Do you know what that means?’ I answered ‘No, but I know how it feels.’ So much of our language, and our praying too, is not as much about the actual words we use, but the words express feelings we can and sometimes can’t express.
Prayer, at it’s core, is about expressing our deepest needs and feelings to God. Prayer isn’t just talking to ourselves, but it’s about making a daily priority to keep our hearts open to God. The focus of prayer is to express our true heart, being honest with ourselves because we are being honest to God.
Taking time to pray is, then, as the Psalmist says, to stop, to be still and quiet, so that we will ‘know that the Lord is God.’ In true prayer we recognize who God is as we also recognize who we are not. In prayer we face this constant, most basic truth of life: as limited and dependent human beings we constantly stand in the need. Like the spiritual says: ‘It’s me, it’s me, O Lord, standing in the need of prayer.’ We are people who need God, who need others, and who need to face the truth about who we are and who we aren’t.
This need to pray is a religious need because it is a most basic human need. As Shakespeare himself understood when one of his characters said, “to thine own self be true” , we all must constantly fight with our own delusions of life. Only in a spirit of prayerfulness, are we able to separate reality from illusion; truth from fiction, and the greatest good, from what can become the most descriptive lie. In other words, it is through the daily kneeling of the human hearts before God that we become most fully human. Prayer not only keeps not only from losing our hearts, but it also keeps us from losing our heads as well. Only when we acknowledge God as truly God, will we discover our true and best self. There was a violin teacher, though not a very successful one, who had a good deal of wisdom that was refreshing. A friend called on him one day and said, “Well, what’s the good news today?” The old music teacher went over to a tuning fork suspended by a cord and struck it with a mallet. “There is the good news for today,” he said. “That, my friend, is A. It was A all day yesterday. It will be A all day tomorrow, next week, and for a thousand years. The soprano upstairs warbles off-key, the tenor next door flats his high ones, and the piano across the hall is out of tune. Noise all around me, noise; but that, my friend, is A.”
Doesn’t this story remind us why prayer is so necessary and needed today? Without being honest and open to God’s perspective—what is always true and absolute, humans can quickly lose their own? When those movie stars and other privileged people thought they could ‘buy’ success for their children by bribing their way into elite schools, they lost their way. When people think it is the end of the world because they don’t get what they want, they also lose all sense of reality. Some end up either taking their own lives or taking the lives of others. When a young man saw the pretty young girl Jayme Closs, he killed her parents and kidnapped her. Later when authorities asked why, his only answer was, ‘When he saw her, he knew she was the one.’ What was he thinking? What kind of explanation is that for killing her parents and kidnapping a young girl? Was he insane or was he lost in his own mind?
Humans can become all kinds of ‘lost’ when we lose perspective. The disciples lived in a world had lost its perspective, and we still live in that kind of world. The world has it’s own mind, and giving into it can be destructive. What the disciples saw in Jesus was a way back. They witness something hopeful in Jesus’ perspective. Jesus way of prayer and prayerfulness gave them hope. Later, the apostle Paul saw prayer as the supreme spiritual weapon negative spiritual powers.
WHENEVER YOU PRAY….
We should pray, but what are we to prayer about? Even the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans: “We do not know how to pray as we ought”(8:26).
The late conservative commentator Paul Harvey told about a 3-year-old boy who went to the grocery store with his mother. Before they entered she had certain instructions for the little tike: "Now you’re not going to get any chocolate chip cookies, so don’t even ask."
She put him in the child's seat and off they went up and down the aisles. He was doing just fine until they came to the cookie section. Seeing the chocolate chip cookies he said, “Mom, can I have some chocolate chip cookies?” She said, “I told you not even to ask. You’re not going to get any at all.”
They continued down the aisles, but in their search for certain items she had to back track and they ended up in the cookie aisle again. “Mom, can I please have some chocolate chip cookies?” She said, “I told you that you can ’t have any. Now sit down and be quiet.”
Finally, they arrived at the checkout. The little boy sensed that the end was in sight, that this might be his last chance. He stood up on the seat and shouted in his loudest voice, “In the name of Jesus, may I have some chocolate chip cookies?” Everyone in the checkout lanes laughed and applauded. Do you think the little boy got his cookies? You bet! The other shoppers moved by his daring pooled their resources. The little boy and his mother left with 23 boxes of chocolate chip cookies.
When are told to pray about everything, but prayer still has a special agenda. When the disciples asked Jesus to ‘teach them to pray’ Jesus gave a pattern for true prayer. The response, which Both Luke and Matthew describe, is what we call the Lord's Prayer, but it might more accurately be named ‘the disciple’s prayer’. Jesus was giving this prayer not so much as words to recite and say, but as a pattern or way for a disciples to live.
While Luke’s version shares the same basic elements of Matthew’s rendering, Luke’s emphasis sounds more down-to-earth, placing emphasis on daily concerns of securing "bread for tomorrow" and living in a spiritual community of faith. At the core of this prayer, however, there is only one major concern. Each of the seven petitions made ‘flesh out’ what it means for God’s name be kept holy. In other words, when God’s name is hallowed and respected, the kingdom comes near. God’s kingdom comes near when God’s will is done. God’s will is done when there is daily bread for everyone. When everyone has what they need, people don’t have to have everything they want, so people desire to live in a spiritual community of forgiveness and peace. When such a forgiving spirit prevails, people are delivered from all kinds of temptations, trials, and evils.
Can you see the pattern and the process of faithful prayer? Daily prayer shapes daily life and invites God’s presence into our lives so that life’s priorities and human relationships are transformed. The spiritual teacher, Brother Lawrence’s, called this daily practice “practicing the presence of God.” But like all practice, it must be regular. A concert pianist who said, “If I miss practice for one day, I know it. If I miss two days, the critics know it. If I miss a week, everyone knows it.” Practice. Discipline. That’s essential to prayer. Prayer is practicing a daily, constant, continual awareness of God.
In his spiritual writings, Brother Lawrence also told how he finally, "…gave up all devotions and prayers that were not required and I devoted himself exclusively to remaining always in his holy presence… The holiest, most ordinary and most necessary practice of the spiritual life is that of the presence of God. It is to take delight in and become accustomed to his divine company, speaking humbly and conversing lovingly with him at all times, in every moment, without rule or measure, especially in times of temptation, suffering, aridity, weariness, even infidelity and sin."
Brother Lawrence spoke of doing everything as an act of worship--even picking up a straw off the floor--as something done for God. "I possess God as peacefully," he said, "in the commotion of my kitchen, where, often enough, several people are asking me for different things at the same time, as I do when kneeling before the (altar)." He said if we can learn to do everything we do as a conscious act for God, in the presence of God and for God's sake, perhaps it will become easier for us to cultivate an ongoing conversation, "speaking humbly and conversing lovingly with him at all times." Don’t you think this is precisely what Paul meant when he said, "Pray without ceasing."
When we don’t live in this constant awareness of God’s presence and the kingdom’s nearness, God’s peaceable kingdom remains far away, people go hungry, community remains broken, and life becomes one difficult trial after another. Sound familiar? What Jesus pictures here is not a community of people saying words and doing nothing, but Jesus’ prayer, the Lord’s prayer, which should also become a disciple’s prayer, maintains a perspective of God which gives shape to how they live their daily lives in this world.
Life can and will be shaped and transformed by living for God’s purposes and toward God’s promise. This prayer calls us to literally to pray, ‘will’, and to live God’s presence into this world. God has created us for himself, but he also created us with the freedom to invite or reject God’s loving presence. This very resistance toward God’s love and God’s purposes is what now shows up in Jesus’ parable about prayer, known as ‘The Friend at Midnight’. In a world that resists God’s will, through this story that imitates life, Jesus is calling his disciples to be bold and persistent in both praying and living God’s world into reality.
BECAUSE OF HIS….BOLDNESS
To illustrate how disciples should boldly approach God in their prayers, and why God can be trusted to respond, Jesus gave this parable of the surprising need that arose in the night.
What stood behind this prayer was of paramount importance in the biblical world. When a guest arrived -- even unexpectedly at midnight -- there was no question that hospitality must be extended. So as the host finds himself without bread for his guest, he goes to his friend and asks to borrow bread, even though he must wake up his friend’s entire household.
“Do not bother me,” the friend answers from within. “The door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed. I cannot get up and give you anything” (11:7).
We might empathize with the woken-up friend and think that the midnight caller is pushing the limits of friendship. But in that culture, it is the woken-up friend who is behaving badly. The ability of his friend to provide hospitality, and thus to save his honor, is at stake.
Jesus says that the man will eventually respond to his friend’s request, not because he is a friend, but because of his friend’s shamelessness (11:8). The Greek word is anaideia, is better translated "shamelessness" than "persistence (NRSV),". This implies a boldness that comes from familiarity and out of friendship. It doesn’t imply that God needs convincing or manipulating by persistence, because the host only asks once. This host is bold and "shameless," counting on his friend's duty to be a friend, even at midnight.
Tom Long, professor of preaching at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology, tells a wonderful story along these lines. A friend of Long’s, who is a pastor, received a disturbing telephone call one day in his church office. A part-time staff member in the church, who had been out in his neighborhood walking his dog, had been mugged, stabbed in the heart and rushed to the hospital. He was now in intensive care with virtually no prospect for survival. When the word spread among the church staff, his friend said, they gathered spontaneously to pray. Standing around the communion table, each person prayed. They prayed sincere prayers, but these prayers were mostly polite and mild petitions, prayers that spoke of comfort and hope and changed hearts, but prayers that had already faced the hard facts of almost certain death.
Then the custodian prayed. His friend reported that it was the most athletic prayer he had ever witnessed. The custodian wrestled with God, shouted at God, anguished with God. His finger jabbed the air and his body shook. “You’ve got to save him! You just can’t let him die!” this custodian practically screamed at God. “You’ve done it many times, Lord! You’ve done it for others, you’ve done it for me, now I am begging you to do it again! Do it for him! Save him, Lord!”
“It was as if he grabbed God by the lapels,” said Long’s friend, “and refused to turn God loose until God came with healing wings. When we heard that prayer, we just knew that God would indeed come to heal. In the face of that desperate cry for help, God would have been ashamed not to save the man’s life.” And so, says Tom Long, it happened. The man was healed. (Thomas G. Long, Christian Century, March 21, 2006, Vol. 123, No. 6, p. 18. Cited by The Rev. Charles Booker-Hirsch, http://www.northsidepres.org/worship/sermons/sermon/51).
So, Jesus implies, that we should we take our requests boldly to God, shamelessly insisting, just we would boldly impose on a friend. We can be so bold because God, our Father, will answer, according to his will and his love, no matter how importune the moment. Behind this image we can feel Jesus’s complete trust in abba, his Father. He is teaching that his disciples should also approach God as ‘our’ loving, caring, compassionate Father’ too. When we approach prayer with such boldness, we can rest assured that God’s answer will come, like this friend who gets up at midnight.
GIVE THE HOLY SPIRIT….
However, one lingering question about prayer is simply ‘what’s the hold up? If we are told to pray boldly because God answers, why the delays? Sometimes, at least, when it comes to getting what we pray for, God may seem like a‘friend’ who doesn’t want to get out of bed. There is a story about H.G. Wells, that when he was a young man he prayed hard for something to happen. It didn’t, so he said, “All right for you, Mister God, I won’t bother you again.” And he didn’t. That was the end of his prayer life. The world is full of people who say, “I’ve tried prayer and it didn’t work.”
Jesus’ very different understanding of prayer is that God desires to answer our prayers, perhaps even more than we want to pray: “So I say to you”, Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, 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” (11:9-10). How do we take such encouragement to pray when prayers go unanswered?
Again, Jesus’ encouragement to ‘ask, seek, knock’ is often thought to be another call to persistence, meaning "ask and keep asking" and so forth. It might be more helpful, though, to read Jesus' instruction as inviting us to trust, and to keep on trusting, remaining confident that we will receive God’s answer.
But again, how do we trust, when so much of our human experience contradicts the literal implications of Jesus’ words? So often we have asked and not received; have sought and not found, or have knocked and doors did not open. In spite of our most fervent prayers for the health and safety of loved ones, we have lost them to cancer, or other illnesses and senseless accidents. In spite of the fervent prayers of people around the world, daily we hear of tragedies of violence, hunger, disease, and natural disasters.
There is no simple answer to this, though simple answers are often given. One answer given is that it only seems that God has not answered our prayers; God always answers, but sometimes says no. We do not always ask wisely, and God, to be a truly loving God, must refuse our request. But this explanation cannot account for the many cases in which our requests must surely be in tune with God’s will. Scripture bears witness to God’s will that everyone have enough to eat and that violence and war cease. Jesus tells us to pray for daily bread and for God’s kingdom to come. Yet millions continue to go hungry and wars rage on.
Another explanation often given to the problem of unanswered prayer is that “everything happens for a reason.” This is to affirm that there is some purpose in everything that happens. No matter how bad it may seem, it is all part of God’s plan to bring about some higher good.
This is a troubling explanation, to say the least, as it holds that whatever happens must be God’s will. One would then have to say that all kinds of evil -- such as violence, torture, starvation, and premature death -- are the will of God. We dare not call the tragic results of our own sin and rebellion “God’s will.” Of course we believe that God can bring good out of evil. Indeed, this is our only hope and the heart of our faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection. But that is quite a different thing from saying that whatever evil thing happens is God’s will.
What then, can we say about unanswered prayer? It is wise to be wary of saying more than we can possibly know (This the point the movie Bruce Almighty made). We can, however, affirm what Scripture tells us: that God is all-powerful, yet God is not the only power in the world. There are other powers at work, the powers of Satan and his demons, the powers of evil and death, often manifested in human sin. Although God has won the ultimate victory through the death and resurrection of Jesus, the battle still rages on. Consequently, God’s will can be -- and often is -- thwarted.
Why bother to pray, then, if God’s will can be thwarted? Again, we affirm what Scripture tells us, and particularly what Jesus keeps on telling us in this passage: that we are invited into relationship with a loving God who wants to give us life, and who continues to work tirelessly for our redemption and that of all creation. This is exactly what Jesus means with his outlandish example about who would give a snake or a scorpion to a child. If no one in their right mind would do this, can’t we trust that God, our heavenly, spiritual Father, will give us all that we need, especially the Holy Spirit---with is God giving us himself.
Dr. Norman Vincent Peale once told a story about a young man named James C. McCormick who was stricken years ago with the terrible disease of polio. This was before the advent of the Salk vaccine. Young James was totally paralyzed, totally helpless, and in great pain. He could not move; he could not swallow; he could not breathe; he had to stay in an iron lung. He wanted to die. He even prayed, “Lord, I’m so helpless that I can’t take my own life. Please take it for me.”
But God chose to ignore that prayer.
Then he prayed, “If I can’t die, please take away this awful pain.”
The doctors gave him drugs to ease the pain, but he was becoming dangerously dependent on them. So he prayed, “Lord, please take away this craving for drugs.”
Gradually, the craving left him.
Then he prayed, “Please let me be able to swallow again. Let them take this tube out of my throat and these needles out of my arms. If I can just drink a little water, I’ll try not to ask for any more favors.” And he became able to swallow, but he was not able to stop asking God for favors.
So he prayed, “Lord, let me be able to breathe a little bit on my own. Let me be able to get out of this iron lung just for a little while.” And this, too, came to pass.
After a while he prayed again, “Heavenly Father, I’m so grateful for all Your favors. Can I ask just one more? Let me be able to leave this bed just for an hour, get into a wheelchair, and see the world that lies outside this hospital room.”
This request, too, was granted. Then James McCormick asked to be given strength enough in his arms to move the wheelchair himself. And after that, he asked for the ability and the stamina to walk on crutches. And finally, after a 20-year struggle, James McCormick could walk with two canes, and he was able to marry and have children and lead a close-to-normal life. James prayers were answered, but not according to his timetable and not in the way he would have chosen. But, in retrospect, he has no doubt that God heard his prayers and God answered. He has no doubt, that God was present with him through his terrible ordeal (Seth L. Leypoldt, http://www.chadronumc.org/assets
/sermons/pent16a08.pdf).
So, now we end, where Jesus’ lesson on prayer, has been going all along. While we tend to fixate on the mechanics of prayer: how, why, when, Jesus' instructions focus on a different question: who. The greatest purpose of prayer is revealed as Jesus invites us to stay on track by reminding ourselves that prayer is about ‘who’. What we must never do is to make prayer only about ‘what’; making it a simple ‘hotline to God’ to get what we want. Prayer, is not primarily about getting things from God, but prayer is rather about the relationship we have with God whom we can and must trust at all times, especially, in the midnight of our lives.
And Jesus practices what he preaches and teaches! Praying again his own ‘midnight’ hour as he was hanging on the cross (23:46). Similarly, we are invited to make all of our needs, wants, hurts, hopes, and desires known to God. Even though God knows our needs without being asked (Mt. 6:8), we are invited to make our needs known, and to share them in the full confidence that whatever may happen, our relationship can bear hearing these things and may actually even depend upon hearing them.
Saint Augustine was a wild and profligate youth. His mother prayed for him constantly. The early chapters of the Confessions of Saint Augustine are filled with references to his mother’s earnest prayers that he might become a Christian. One day he told her he was going to Italy with some companions. She believed that if he went to that sinful city there would be no hope of his reform.
She prayed earnestly that God would not allow him to go to Italy. She did all she could to prevent it, even so far as to follow him on the early part of the journey, until he tricked her and went on with the journey. It appeared that Augustine’s mother’s prayers weren’t answered, but it was in Milan that Augustine came under the influence of Saint Ambrose and put his reluctant feet on the first step of the ladder that led to baptism, to Ordination, and to then to sainthood. His mother’s ultimate prayers for him were answered in the very place she asked God not to allow him to go.
While God may not give us everything we want, as we want it, God will, at least, like a good parent, give us his goodness, and his grace and will answer our prayers, sometimes in ways we never imagined. The following lines might help us keep our prayers in the proper perspective, even when they aren’t answered as we wish:
I asked God for strength that I might achieve;
I was made weak that I might learn humbly to obey.
I asked for health that I might do great things;
I was given infirmity that I might do better things.
I asked for riches that I might be happy;
I was given poverty that I might be wise.
I asked for all things that I might enjoy life;
I was given life that I might enjoy all things.
I got nothing that I asked for but everything I had hoped for;
Despite myself, my prayers were answered. I am, among all people, most richly blessed.
We dare to be shameless in our prayers, to keep bringing our needs and hopes to our heavenly Father, because Jesus tells us to do so, trusting in God’s loving purpose for us. Not everything that happens is God’s will. But we can affirm with St. Paul, “in all things God works for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). Amen
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