Pastor Joe Skogmo
St. Paul’s Lutheran Church, Lowry, MN
Pentecost 7 | 07.28.2019 | Luke 11:1-13
With our text today, it is time again to dwell in and wrestle with the subject of prayer. And as some of you know, I can’t help but be uncomfortable with a common understanding of prayer—that if we ask enough if we pray enough and in a certain way, God will provide us what we want. Of course there are the crackpot televangelists all over TV promising that if you pray enough you can receive new luxury cars, jewelry, and other vanities (as if that is why Jesus came to the world), but that’s too easy of a target.
Not just luxuries, I struggle with even saying that the power of prayer results in the things we need. I am not saying it doesn’t happen; I’m saying I struggle with that understanding of prayer. I do not mean to scoff at, ridicule, or disregard any of your experiences with the power of prayer. In fact, I have my own experiences. I am just saying that I’ve got questions…
To be sure, daily, I pray for all of you, this church, this community, and I hope that those hopes are realized, but I struggle to believe that God is waiting to be asked and will not help unless asked properly. Because that would be a strange god. Perhaps even a sadistic god. Bear with me now…for instance, what if we applied that understanding of prayer to parenting? Could you imagine if every time my son Holden fell down on the sidewalk and scraped his knee and I just stared at him, unmoved, waiting and staring because he made no proper supplication, no official and prayerful ask for help!? You’d call CPS on me for neglect!
I struggle to believe that prayer promises God’s action and response. Because if that is what we are supposed to believe about prayer then God has some explaining to do. I was doing some Old Testament research back in college at Augsburg and was interviewing a Rabbi named Simeon Glaser of Temple Israel in Minneapolis and he said something stunning to me about interpreting the Bible. He said, “All biblical interpretation must pass through the gates of Auschwitz.”
What I think he meant by that was things like the Holocaust really ought to challenge how we understand God and the Bible, and in our case…prayer. For instance, let’s apply this to Jesus’ statements today in Luke:
9 “So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. (Luke 10:9-10)
Really?
How are we supposed to interpret this when we think of all those prayers sent up from people during the Holocaust who perished? If there was ever ardent and profound seeking, knocking, and asking going on, I am certain it was happening by those souls enslaved in the internment camps.
But not just in that historical moment, but in any of our life experiences. What about all of those prayers that have been sent up from children’s hospitals and the trenches of war but went unrealized? What about all those children on their knees at night praying voraciously for the bully to stop, or for the domestic abuse to cease, or for the parents to remain together only for none of it to happen and damage to be done? What about prayers by people starving asking for the one basic thing that God and Jesus perform throughout the Bible—provision of food—and yet they starved to death anyway. What about all those prayers!? I could go on and on and on.
If prayer’s only function is to spring God to action then God has a LOT of explaining to do. And don’t offer me that ‘God had a reason’ in all those scenarios for not answering those prayers—because no reason suffices in those instances of innocent suffering, at least no reason that then doesn’t result in having a sociopath for a god.
I struggle to believe that God sits back apathetically until prompted into action by proper asking; I struggle to believe that God is waiting like a divine vending machine to be given the right prayerful payment before God offers us a goodie.
And yet, sisters and brothers, I think prayer in the life of a person of faith is indispensable…because of what Jesus teaches about prayer in today’s gospel.
We are about midway through the Gospel of Luke in this passage and the disciples who have been following Jesus to this point have seen Jesus pray, and pray A LOT (3:21; 6:12; 9:18, 28; 10:21; 11:1; 22:32, 41;),[1] and so they finally ask him, here, in this passage—Hey, Jesus, ‘teach us to pray’ and Jesus taught them one of the most famous prayers in the history of religion: “The Lord’s Prayer.” (For today’s purposes don’t get hung up on how it is not exactly the same as the Lord’s Prayer we pray today—just keep in mind that there is another version of this prayer that Jesus teaches in Matthew (6:9-13), another version is found in an ancient non-scriptural source called the ‘Didache,’ and also we have to factor in its evolution throughout church tradition. Alright? Let’s move on).
With this prayer Jesus teaches his disciples the perfect prayer; Martin Luther wrote in his Large Catechism that in this prayer “everything contained in the Scriptures is comprehended in short, plain, and simple terms.”[2] So Jesus teaches a prayer, but then—more relevant to my earlier words—Jesus teaches something about prayer.
After teaching the prayer, Jesus uses a parable to describe the nature of God. Key word here is ‘parable.’ Right off the bat, then, we must consider that what he says next is not literally the way God functions, but is a story that gives us a glimpse into the character of God. When the disciples asked him to teach them about prayer, Jesus began to describe God…and that move means everything.
When teaching about prayer Jesus wants us to be reminded of who God is—that God is good, that God is like a committed friend (v. 5), and therefore maybe that is the function and purpose of prayer—that prayer is about more than pushing buttons on the vending machine; it is simply but profoundly about turning to our divine parent who loves us.
And notice here that Jesus says to ask, seek, and knock and simply that a door will be opened—not, you will get something specific in return or get what you want or even need—but simply that a connection will be made. Notice also, he doesn’t say, ask and receive what you want; he doesn’t specify; he simply says something is received in the act of prayer. In fact, the only thing Jesus specifies is that we will receive his Holy Spirit (v. 13); in other words, God’s presence. Prayer is about existing intentionally in God’s presence. God answers prayers not necessarily by granting wishes or delivering something specific, but always by granting God’s self.[3]
When teaching about prayer, Jesus doesn’t give a strategy or a materialistic guarantee or paint God as a sicko puppet master who needs to be begged, but simply stresses that God is good and like a good parent desires that his children simply be in touch, that they knock, that they ask, that they seek, and that they remember that their parent loves them (Luke 11:5-13) and prayer is a practice that immerses one’s self in that. Prayer becomes so much more than about asking. It is about relationship.
Just like talking on the phone with our parents, friends, or grandparents, prayer is so much more than about asking and receiving. I think this is what Jesus is getting at in this lesson. Prayer is a gift to us, an opportunity to actively exist in relationship, to experience presence in a time of trial, to exist in relationship as our true selves in honesty, vulnerability, in hope, fear, grief, gratitude, anxiety, or celebration with the One who loves us. I don’t know for sure what specifically or generally comes from prayer, but one thing we do get for sure, is the presence of the Son of Man.
Prayer is not merely asking for, but being with. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer has written, “Where a people prays…there is never loneliness.”[4]
So brothers and sisters, the ‘indispensability of prayer’ is not about treating prayer as this regimen to complete in order to receive what we want or need, but at the end of the day, Jesus is teaching that prayer serves to remind us that God is with us.[5] Amen.
[1] Charles B. Cousar, Beverly R. Gaventa, J. Clinton McCann, Jr., James D. Newsome, Texts for Preaching: A Lectionary Commentary Based on the NRSV—Year C (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994), 446 .
[2] LC: Preface 18-19, in BC, 385.
[3] Matthew Skinner, “Podcast #493 – Tenth Sunday after Pentecost,” Sermon Brainwave, Workingpreacher.org, https://www.workingpreacher.org/brainwave.aspx?podcast_id=782.
[4] Dietrich Bonhoeffer quoted in—Eric Metaxas, Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2010), 69.
[5] Skinner, “Podcast #493”, https://www.workingpreacher.org/brainwave.aspx?podcast_id=782.
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