Luke 11:1-13

072022.Blog

   You’re in my prayers. Please pray for me. Let us pray. These words trip easily off our tongues in the church. Praying is what we do. Prayer and Scripture are the pillars of our worship and much of our life together. And yet, I’ve probably heard more questions about prayer than any other spiritual issue. Behind these questions lie our beliefs about what prayer is. Most people think of prayer as asking God for something. The Luke passage supports this. “Ask and you shall receive.” That doesn’t sound complicated.

   But when we think about prayer as asking for something, it raises loads of questions. Doesn’t God already know what we need? Doesn’t it turn God into something like the Wizard of Oz, or some kind of divine jukebox: plug in your prayer instead of a quarter, and get your wish? What about all those people praying their hearts out who don’t get the job, don’t get cured of cancer, don’t avoid foreclosure, don’t manage to keep their kids off drugs? What about all the people whose lives are scarred by terrorism, wildfire, earthquake, warfare? Did they just not pray hard enough? As a philosophy professor once put it, “If God can influence the course of events, then a God who is willing to cure colds and provide parking spaces but is not willing to prevent Auschwitz and Hiroshima is morally repugnant.”

   Prayer isn’t simplistic. Prayer plumbs the very depths and mysteries of the nature of God. But Scripture provides us with some clues. For starters, it’s important to me that Jesus himself prayed. In Luke’s gospel, Jesus prays a lot, and it was after he’d finished praying that the disciples approach him with their request, “Teach us to pray.” He responds with Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, then he follows with a parable. An annoyingly persistent neighbor pounds on the door in the middle of the night, looking for food to give an unexpected guest. The neighbor is so desperate that his sleepy friend next door relents. Jesus implies that God has at least that much generosity and compassion in hearing our anguish.     

   Jesus tells the disciples to keep asking, seeking, knocking with the same shameless desperation. But what can he mean? Most of us have prayed for many things, good things, and not just for ourselves. We’ve prayed desperately, in fact, and still not received what we were seeking: a child’s safety, a parent’s health, justice for terrorized people, peace in a land under siege.  

   There’s a book that was on the best seller list a few years back about the prayer of Jabez, a prayer found at First Chronicles. It’s embedded in a several-chapters-long genealogy, so it’s amazing anyone noticed this prayer, but someone found it and published this little book. Now, the good thing is it apparently inspired millions of people to pray. But what makes me nervous about this book is that some people understand the prayer as sort of a magical incantation. They believe that if you pray the prayer exactly the way it’s written, which makes me want to ask, “In what translation? King James? NRSV? In Hebrew?” But in any event, if you pray it just the way it was written, wonderful doors will open to you. You’ll get rich, get a new job, and get everything you ever wanted.

   The thing is, Jesus never promised that. Jesus never said, “Ask, and exactly what you prayed for will be given to you.” Jesus is saying that what you will be given is a good gift. What’s the good gift? Well, one gift we can count on is the presence of the Spirit of God. That’s what we get when we pray. We get God. And in bringing all the desires of our hearts to God, we get God as our companion, accompanying us, in all that we care about.

   Prayer is a theological puzzle, and we shouldn’t pretend we’ve solved it. John Buchanan, former editor of The Christian Century, wrote some years ago about his hip replacement surgery.  People told him they were praying for him. He wrote, “I still can’t believe that my new hip is mending more quickly because hundreds of people prayed for me, while my buddy across the hall is proceeding with more difficulty because just two people are praying for him. But I do know this, in a new and profound way: strength and courage and hope and wholeness are imparted in the knowledge that others are holding you up to God in prayer. And I do know that God’s healing love somehow uses the love and concern and prayers of others in the work of restoring, comforting, and creating wholeness. And I am ready, once again,” said Buchanan “simply to be silent in the face of the mysterious goodness of God, and to resume my own pastoral ministry of praying for those whose needs are real and urgent.” 

   So I plan to keep on praying.