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Homily for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost 25 July 2010 (Proper 12; Year C)
If it were possible to actually overhear the exchange between Abraham and God in today’s lesson from the Old Testament, you might imagine you’d taken a detour past a public marketplace. The kind of marketplace where merchants and customers haggle, negotiate, and bargain to arrive at a price. Listen again to Abraham’s words: ‘Let me take it upon myself to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes. Suppose five And so on. Abraham is (or appears to be) bargaining with God over the fate of the people of Sodom, negotiating on behalf of however many righteous people may live there, making a pitch for mercy, asking God to spare them by refraining from destroying the city on the plain. Why does Abraham negotiate in this way? Why does he drive the bargain in this seemingly complicated fashion? Why doesn’t Abraham simply cut to the chase and ask God in the first instance if he will spare Sodom for the sake of ten righteous people? Perhaps it makes for a better story if Abraham’s negotiation brings us by stages to understand God will spare an entire sinful community for the sake of a handful of righteous people who live within it. Perhaps Abraham is simply bargaining according to the pattern of the markets he knows and the custom of the society in which he lives. The negotiation makes for an interesting, even amusing scene. Can God really be so patient? Is it Abraham’s strategy that brings him success or the consistency of God’s mercy? I admire Abraham’s “chutzpah” in pressing God to reveal his generosity. God responds to Abraham’s persistence with the assurance the man seeks. In the Gospel lesson from Luke, Jesus reaffirms God’s willingness to respond to human persistence with generous reassurance. He says of the hypothetical man who refuses to rise from his bed “even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.” Jesus assures us God will provide us with what we need: the Holy Spirit. It is no coincidence his reassuring parable follows his gift to the disciples and to us of the petition we call “the Lord’s Prayer.” He tells us there is a way to approach God, a way that makes known our feelings and our desires, our recognition of our frailty and our fears, our understanding of God’s power and our dependence on God’s generous mercy. Jesus offers us a pattern for our prayers, a pattern that begins with adoration for God and a desire for his eternal reign: “Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.” The pattern continues with supplication, a petition for God’s care: “Give us each day our daily bread. Contrition, a desire to make amends follows “And forgive us our sins, as we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.” And this simple prayer concludes with a request for God’s protection: “And do not bring us to the time of trial.” Jesus’ words in this passage from Luke are a little different from the familiar prayer we recite at every service. We rely on an older translation and a blending of the prayer found in Luke with the version found in Matthew, but the essential “ingredients” are the same and provide us as they did the disciples with all the necessary language to conduct our persistent conversation with God. Over time, saints, scholars, clergy, and countless other Christians have continued this conversation with their own prayers: · Prayers that speak powerfully with phrases of intricate complexity or breathtaking simplicity; · Prayers that perfectly and precisely describe specific moments in our relationship with God and · Prayers that sum up our entire relationship with God in a few uncomplicated words.
Over time, on the perfect foundation of the Lord’s Prayer, we have built a library and fortress of language to help us persistently acknowledge our dependence on God by asking for his generous mercy: · We follow the pattern of the Lord’s Prayer or at least incorporate its elements: we offer our praise and thanksgiving, our contrition, and our supplications. · We follow the pattern not because God requires us to check all the boxes, but because God’s love moves us to praise and thank, to ask for forgiveness and pardon, to seek assistance and support. · We pray because Jesus urges us to do so and because prayer is often the most appropriate and sometimes the only way we can respond to life in a world that is at best challenging and at worst terrifying. Prayer is what we need to do; often it’s all we can do in response to bad news, powerful assaults and setbacks, painful situations in which we feel powerless to intervene. We do what Jesus tells us to do: ask, search, and knock. Ask for help, search for comfort, and knock on the door that will open the way to understanding. We pray, ask, search, and knock not because God won’t know what’s going on if we don’t do these things but because it’s not enough to passively allow God to examine our minds and souls. If what we are seeking is help, comfort, and understanding, we need to name our concerns, our sorrows, our burdens, our inadequacies, our desires, and our needs. At times we need to offer them all up to God, be it in the rambling form of a laundry list or the organized poetry of a Prayer Book litany. At other times we need to ask for only one thing, be it the safe birth of a child or God’s forgiveness for angry words hurled at a loved one in an argument. We pray in order to ask, search, and knock. We pray not so much because our prayers help God to know that we mean it, but because our prayers help us to know that we mean it. Our prayers help us to think about what we’re asking and to understand what God wants for us. We pray for discernment: for God to point the way to the next step and for God’s will to be done. We ask, “God, what you would have me do?” When we pray, we need to be honest with ourselves, to ask if we sincerely mean what we pray or if we’re really praying, “God, help me to get what I want.” As we pray, even if our agenda may be competing with God’s plan, God opens our minds to a wide range of possibilities. We come to understand God will guide us to what we need, not necessarily what we want. If we reflect on our experience and trust our faith, we will realize that what we need is what we want, because it is what God wants for us. Through prayer—asking, searching, and knocking—we open our hearts, minds, and souls to the gift of the Holy Spirit that brings us the understanding of what God wants for us and wills for us. This is the understanding that sustains and equips us for life in a difficult world. It is particularly helpful when we think our prayers have not been answered: when we have prayed for an illness to be cured or a job to be found or a war to be ended and none of these things has happened. When it seems our prayers have not been answered, we need to go on praying: to express our pain and frustration and to appeal to God for Christ’s sake for reassurance. We need to pray for the Holy Spirit to show us where God can be found in the midst of suffering and what God would have us do in difficult times. We need to ask, to search, and to knock. We need to: · Ask for an end to pain, suffering, and war; · Search for meaning and understanding; and · Knock, so that door to the kingdom of heaven will be opened for us. We need to pray, using the prayer Jesus taught us to pray—it covers all the essential bases. And we need to be persistent, as Jesus urges us to be. That’s how we’ll get results. AMEN
The Reverend Daniel LaRue Gross Rector Emmanuel Church, Chester Parish
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