January 16, 2005

All You Have to Do Is Ask !

1 Samuel 1:9-18
Romans 8:26-27
Luke 11:1-13

Little Beth had been naughty and her mother sent her to her room to "think things over." A while later she came out all smiles. "I thought and I prayed," she said to her mother. "Fine," her mother replied, "that will help you to be good." "Oh, I didn't ask God to help me to be good. I asked God to help you to put up with me."

We're going to talk this morning about prayer, specifically the kind we pray the most, prayers of petition, those prayers where we ask God for something on behalf of ourselves. There are, of course, other kinds of prayer: adoration, sometimes called praise, when we express to God our love and devotion; confession, when we tell God we're sorry for things we've done or not done; thanksgiving, when we say thank you to God for blessings; and intercession, when we pray on behalf of others. I think Beth's prayer was a prayer of intercession, asking God to give her mother patience.

Being self-centered creatures, most of us allot most of our personal prayer time to prayers of petition for ourselves. Jesus was well aware of this, so when his disciples asked him to teach them to pray, he taught them what we call the Lord's Prayer, which includes three petitions, three asking prayers: "give us this day our daily bread," "lead us not into temptation," and "deliver us from evil." In the parable immediately following this prayer in Luke, Jesus explains the importance of being persistent in praying, and that God always answers prayer. We'll come back to the parable shortly.

In our lesson from 1st Samuel we hear a great story of unselfish, petitionary prayer, where Hannah, unable to bear children, surrenders herself humbly before God, pours out her troubles, and prays for a son. The priest, Eli, who observes her silently moving her lips in prayer, thinks she's drunk, and starts rebuking her. When she expresses her sincerity (and soberness), Eli assures her that God will grant her petition. Hannah's prayer is a legitimate asking prayer, in contrast to some people's that might be in the category of "gimme" prayers, "gimme this, gimme that."

Some people look upon God as a kind of divine Santa Claus to whom prayers of petition are sent like childlike letters at Christmas time. And if we think that our Santa Claus God has not answered our prayers, we assume one of three negative conclusions. First, perhaps I was a bad child, and this implies that answers to prayers are something earned by good behavior or super piety, rather than because of God's free, unmerited goodness and grace. Or second, perhaps my letter was lost, implying that God does not hear and know everything. Or third, perhaps there is no Santa Claus God at all. (i)

Others conceive of God as the "Great Magician" or the "Heavenly Insurance Agent" who "like a good neighbor" is always there at our beck and call. Prayer is like heaven's toll free 800 number, or like Aladdin's lamp to be rubbed whenever we want a new wardrobe, a new yacht, a new toy, or even a parking space. If the right person, translate that a member of the clergy, uses the right formula, then of course the Almighty has to respond, right? Not necessarily. We often close our prayers, "in Jesus' name," or "through Christ our Lord," and some folks think this is part of the magic formula, but there's no magic; God can't be manipulated.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., whose memory we celebrate this weekend, also addressed this issue in one of his sermons. His concern was our over-reliance on God to fix all our ills. I've adapted his words slightly to reflect the more inclusive language of the 21st century. He said: "The idea that [one] must wait on God to do everything has led to a tragic misuse of prayer. ... Some people see God as little more than 'a cosmic bellhop' that they will call on for every trivial need. Others see God as so omnipotent and [humans] as so powerless that they end up making prayer a substitute for work and intelligence. ... Prayer is a marvelous and necessary supplement of our feeble efforts, but it is a dangerous and callous substitute." (ii)

Two final abuses of petitionary prayer are flippant and begging prayers. Flippant prayers are caricatured in a cartoon that has a pajama-clad tot kneeling beside his bed, shouting to his parents, "I'm going to say my prayers now. Anyone want anything?" Flippant praying is entirely devoid of any relationship between a person and God, the Lord being thought of as like a celestial supermarket. Begging prayers are also a distorted form of petitionary prayer. A student who drifts through a semester without studying, and then prays for help the night before the exam, is begging rather than asking, sort of like "putting all your begs in one ask-it." (iii)

Prayers of petition, when offered in the right spirit of legitimate asking, are not flippant, begging, or thinking of God as a spiritual Santa Claus or magician. Hannah's prayer was a genuine asking prayer, and eventually her prayer was answered. The anthem the choir sang would be another example of a genuine prayer of petition, "Lord, make me an instrument of your peace."

Persistence is essential in prayer as Jesus' parable illustrates. Picture the scene. A traveler arrives at midnight and his host is out of bread. Since the mid-Eastern rules of hospitality insist that a guest must be fed, the host goes next door to borrow a couple of loaves from his neighbor. He pounds on the door, and the man of the house grunts, hoping it's just a bad dream. The knocking gets louder, and by now he's fully awake and angry. "Who could that be at such an ungodly hour?" he mumbles to himself under his breath. He doesn't want to call out for fear of waking the baby; so he tiptoes around his sleeping children, stumbles over the animals, and before he reaches the door he hears the voice of the pleading neighbor asking for bread. In a gruff voice he tells his neighbor in so many words to "Get lost!" and stumbles back to bed, muttering to his wife, "Can you believe it? Knocking on our door at this hour? Give him bread? No way!" Not to be deterred, the neighbor persists. The baby starts crying, a chicken squawks (animals were often kept in the house at night), and his wife says, "Give him what he wants! Get rid of him!"

This, says Jesus, is how we must pray. Keep on asking, keep on knocking, keep on searching. Let's face it, if a cantankerous and contrary man can finally be coerced by a neighbor's persistence into giving him what he needs, how much more will God who is our loving Parent supply to us all we need? (iv) As an aside, Rev. King preached a sermon entitled, "A Knock at Midnight," also based on this text, but with a very different interpretation. He said that it was also midnight in our world, "a darkness so deep that we can hardly see which way to turn." Then he listed places where the world, at least in the 1960's, and perhaps still today, was experiencing midnight - within the social order, in individual's personal lives, in war for those seeking peace, and in the lives of African-Americans desperately seeking "the bread of social justice," when the "so-called white churches" either ignored them or told them to wait until later, when they were greeted by either "a cold indifference or a blatant hypocrisy." He offered a suggestion to the church then, and we could also take it to heart today: "The most inspiring word that the church must speak is that no midnight long remains. The weary traveler by midnight who asks for bread is really seeking the dawn. Our eternal message of hope is that dawn will come." (v)

Back to this sermon on prayer. We often lament, "I just can't seem to find the time to pray." If this is a problem for you, trust me, you're not alone. Mother Teresa once told about how she and her sisters got the strength to endure their long days helping people amid numbing poverty and disease. It was from prayer. She told the other nuns, "Love to pray; feel often during the day the need for prayer, and take the trouble to pray ... that is how God supplies what we need, for ourselves and others." (vi) Good words for us.

Take the trouble to pray - it does take some effort, but prayer is essential to the Christian life. Prayer is not an extra-curricular activity, nor an avocation for those already doing important things in life, nor an extra burden dumped onto our already busy lives, but rather it's a critical part of the business of life itself. (vii) We can be assured that in our praying, as in everything else in life, God is with us helping us, in fact is out in front ahead of us, encouraging us. God knows our wants and needs, in fact, knows us better than we know ourselves.

So, we finally must ask, does God answer our prayers of petition? I'll give a qualified "Yes." If our prayers are legitimate asking prayers, I believe that God does answer them. This is the other point of the prayer passage we heard today. Just as any parent would give good gifts to their children, so does our heavenly Parent respond to persistent prayer. The fact that persistence is required means we may not always get what we first ask for. But God does answer, perhaps not always as we would wish, but with a deeper wisdom than we're capable of having.

As we become more in tune with God's will for us, through continued prayer, through continued listening as God speaks to us in times of silence and in other ways - and yes, God is still speaking, as our UCC ad campaign puts it - as we keep praying and listening, we will learn to ask for what will be spiritually in sync with God's purposes. Mahatma Gandhi, a non-Christian but very spiritual person, who claimed that he never made even a minor decision without prayer, also said that he always tried to ask for the right thing in his prayers. Once, he made a trip to another country to protest the living conditions of one of the minority groups there, but he was warned not to come ashore because some people were threatening to kill him. But he went ashore anyway, was beaten up, but survived. Later he wrote, "I had not prayed for safety, but for courage to face the mob, and that courage came and did not fail me." (viii)

As we mature in our prayer life, we may find that our "give me" prayers grow into deeper prayers, like "make me" prayers - make me strong to face my temptations; make me sensitive to another person's needs; or "help me" prayers - help me cope with the difficulties that lie ahead; help me be a better person. When we stop thinking about God as the One who can fill all our needs, like a pharmacist fills a prescription, and rather as the One who can help us become what we truly want to become for ourselves and for the good of others and the world, then real transformation can happen through our prayers. Let's be aware of what happens to us when we pray. We are changed, we can feel a sense of communion with God, and we can be revitalized by prayer. I believe God does answer our genuine, legitimate prayers, but the answer may sometimes be "No." We remember Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, when his own persistent praying was greeted seemingly with silence. Like Hannah, he poured out his soul, and prayed that he would be spared the ordeal he knew was ahead of him. But it was God's will that he not be spared, because God had a greater plan to be fulfilled. God's "No" to Jesus became a "Yes" to humanity. If we don't get what we pray for in our prayers of petition, it's not because a fickle God is obstructing our desires, but perhaps because God has something better in mind for us. The answer we receive may not be what we expect or hope for, but even God's "No" is because of God's wisdom and love. The real result of prayer, even more important than any positive answer, is that prayer enables us to go forward in our lives with a wholeness, an assurance, a joy, a fresh courage, that we may not even connect with prayer. (ix) Prayer can give us new confidence, new strength, new vitality; new doors may be opened that before were closed. And all this is ours regardless of God's answer. So, heed well the words of Jesus: "Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you." All you have to do is ask! Amen.

The Pilgrim Church of Duxbury
Rev. Kenneth C. Landall

i Allen W. Brown, "The Inner Fire," p. 21.
ii Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted by Anita Gallagher in "King Came Preaching: The Pulpit Power of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
iii Pulpit Resource, 8/3/80.
iv William Barclay, Luke, p. 146.
v Martin Luther King, "A Knock at Midnight," found on internet web site.
vi Coleman McCarthy, "The Suffering of Calcutta," Pulpit Resource, op. cit.
vii Brown, op. cit., p. 37.
viii Gandhi, in "Everyone Can Prove It," in Guideposts, PR, op. cit.
ix Robert L. Eddy, "Minister's Saturday Night," p. 134.