God’s Good Gifts
Proper 12 Luke 11: 1-13
25 July 2010
Over the months that the disciples were with him, one of the things they noticed about Jesus was his deep relationship with the Father in Heaven. They saw that this relationship was nurtured by his prayer and they wanted to know something of that kind of prayer. So they asked Jesus to teach them. What he gave them, as we know, was the Our Father. Along with it, he gave them some other instructions about their prayer which make up our Gospel for today. These, once again, are familiar sayings. We have heard them many times before. But if we listen carefully, they force us to examine what we are doing when we pray.
I cannot remember anywhere in the New Testament where the practice of prayer is defended. Everyone assumes that we will pray, that it is normal and natural to do so. These days maybe we need to ask the question: why pray? The answer is surely indicated in the familiar name of the Lord’s Prayer: the “Our Father.” That is, “we” are all creatures of the one God, our heavenly Father. None of us has life within oneself as one’s own possession. We live in this world as supplicants: if we are not “given” what we need from our earliest days, we would die. Of course, parents hope their children will learn to take care of themselves, but the time never comes when all of us are not dependent in some way on the communities of which we are a part—and especially on God, who is the Creator and Author of all that is. To pray is to recognize that we are creatures. We are not the lords and masters of the universe. We are fragile creatures whose day to day existence cannot be taken for granted, no matter how proud and independent some of us become.
So if we are not stupid, we will pray. The question is: how shall we pray? Do we believe that God really hears us? That He cares about us and our needs? Can we be confident in a relationship with him? To answer these questions, Jesus tells the parable about the neighbor who needs a loaf of bread in the middle of the night. Then he goes on to teach about asking, seeking, knocking, and talks about even bad parents giving good things to their children. At first I was troubled to read these words again. I thought to myself, I have been asking for things, seeking things, knocking on doors for a long time, and nothing seems to be happening. What is the matter with me? But as I prayed and thought and read other commentators, it began to dawn on me that He is not saying that we shall obtain everything we ask for, but that we shall obtain what we need. A loving Father sometimes says “no” to his children. The point of the story and the teaching is that we can come to know that God our heavenly Father is trustworthy. We can depend on him to care for us, listen to us, and give us what we need when we ask for it. As we live into a relationship with God like that, we come to see that we can trust experience, life, the created world, as a place which is not set against us, but towards us. We can live as confident people, at peace in this world, not constantly fearing that we are threatened by everything around us.
What happens to us, when we get some experience living like this? Thomas Merton said that he wanted to forget completely about his own needs. I am not sure most of us can attain to such a lofty goal. But we will certainly start to live without the fear that we will not get what we need. That will help us to detach from our own possessiveness. It will create a community of people who are open towards each other. Then when someone has a genuine problem and asks for help, we shall be ready to assist as we are able, not worrying about whether there will be enough left over for us. Maybe, in the end, that is actually how God does a lot of his generous work: through those who have learned to trust in him. Since God is taking care of us, we don’t have to worry when others ask help of us. There will be enough to go around.
How can we move ourselves along towards such an attitude? One way that might help us is to look at the Our Father again. I will use Matthew’s version, which is the one we are familiar with. First of all, we begin our prayer with an invocation of God as our Father and pray that his Name will be sanctified. That is to say, the first burden of our prayer is a desire that in our own life and the lives of our communities, God may be taken seriously, obeyed, and glorified. Immediately after this we pray for the coming of his Kingdom, which means that his will may be done here amongst us as it is now in heaven in the creation of a just and loving society which reflects his own character. Jesus placed these petitions first and they encompass a massive reality that is to contextualize everything else we do. Our first and foremost aim is to sanctify God and work for his Kingdom and do his will.
Then, within that context, we come to our own needs. Give us today our daily bread. That’s it. We pray that what we need to live for this day will be given to us. Most of us hope for a lot more than that. It is not necessarily wrong to hope for it, I think. But the promise is that if we ask, God will give us what we need today. I know we have to make plans and think about the next month and the next year. Yet Jesus always seems to imply that we ought to think first of all about today as the day when we live and serve God. “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear?’ For it is the Gentiles who strive for all these things; and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But strive first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.”
The rest of the Our Father is taken up with issues that are both personal and communal. As we struggle to do the Father’s will, to work for the Kingdom, we shall all fail from time to time, so we ask forgiveness for our failures. But we remember that we belong to a community, and so ask only for the forgiveness for ourselves that we are willing to extend to those who offend us. “Lead us not into temptation” the old version said. “Save us from the time of trial” is how our new version puts it. Another translation says: “Do not put us to the test.” They all mean that we are asking God for strength not to give up when our faith is tested, nor to abandon our commitment to his Kingdom and his will. Finally we ask that the Father protect us from the Evil One, that is Satan, or more simply, from every kind of evil.
The Our Father gives us a mission. This is not a prayer for someone who thinks that it might help to ask God for an occasional favor. It is a prayer for those who are on the side of our Lord Jesus in the work he came to do in this world. We are agents of the Kingdom of God, witnesses to his will and purposes. As such, we are promised what we need to live from day to day, a way to deal with the inevitable problems and failures, and a clear identification of our mortal enemies—temptation and evil—from which we are promised deliverance if we ask for it. If this is who we are—members of the priestly kingdom of God, as we mentioned several weeks ago—that will have a profound effect on what we seek and ask for, will it not?
We live as people who know that the Creator God is good and his creation is good and that he stands behind it as our loving Father, who will give us the good things we need for our lives here. But we also know that we are caught up in a conflict, a spiritual battle, which impacts every part of our life. The world is in the process of being taken back from the evil into which it has fallen, and we are on the front lines of the battle.
That means that sometimes we are going to fall into suffering and trouble, no matter if we ask to be delivered from them. Jesus experienced this most profoundly in Gethsemane, when he asked if the cup could be taken away from him. He also said that working for the Kingdom meant a willingness on the part of his followers to take up their own cross and follow him, being willing to sacrifice everything for the sake of being his disciple. Listen to what Paul once said (2 Corinthians 11): “Are they ministers of Christ? I am talking like a madman—I am a better one: with far greater labors, far more imprisonments, with countless floggings, and often near death. Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked. And, besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches. Who is weak, and I am not weak? Who is made to stumble, and I am not indignant?”
So, all of this is a little more complicated than it first seemed. We are to live in confidence and faith that God will take care of us and our needs. We can trust God and trust life. But in following Jesus in his relationship with the Father, we are also thrown into conflict. Primarily it is the basic human conflict between good and evil which characterizes our whole human history. But our particular part in it is a calling to live in such confidence in God that we can remain as open and generous amongst ourselves and towards others as God is towards us. We know that there will come the times of testing and temptation and that the cost of discipleship may sometimes be quite considerable. But almost everyone we know in this life comes into trouble and suffering at one time or another. Many manage to hide their sufferings from others and we might think they have none, but few escape. So it is not only Christians who suffer in this world. But Christians have a special calling: they are to remain trusting and generous and loving even in the midst of their troubles, as a sign to the world, that their heavenly Father is still at work, that Christ is still Lord, and that his will shall be done here on earth as it is in heaven and we shall be a part of it, when the Kingdom comes, if we don’t give up.