Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
July 25, 2004
Matthew 7: 7-11; Luke 11: 1-13
Sam was a tough kid. He was nothing but trouble all through high school but he did, somehow, manage to graduate and got into to college. But drugs and partying got in the way and he dropped out of college. His parents, as they had been most of his life, were in despair. Then he met a young woman, they got married and along the way they started attending a little United Methodist church – his parents had always been Methodists. The young couple attended church and got involved and much to his shock and surprise, Sam began feeling this tug on his heart… “Maybe,” he thought, “I am called to ministry.” He shared this with his wife and felt like he should go back to college and get his degree. He really felt called to seminary and ministry. She said, “Well, you’d better tell your parents, they’ll be so happy.”
So he called them. His mother answered the phone and Sam told her the news. Her first response was “I am so ashamed, Sam I am so sorry.”
“I’m telling you I am going into the ministry and you are ashamed?”
“Well, there is something I never told you. You don’t know this, but before you were born, I had three miscarriages. When I found out I was pregnant with you, I prayed to God, and I said ‘Just let me carry this baby to full term and I will name him Samuel after the Old Testament prophet and we will dedicate him to your service.’”
Sam said, “Now you tell me this! After all these years? Think of the grief this could have saved us!”
She answered, “Well, I didn’t know, I’m just a Methodist, I’m not some Southern Baptist. How did I know my prayers were going to work?”
How do you know?
Another story about prayer, a story told by Barbara Brown Taylor that I actually shared with you last summer, a story about her seven-year-old granddaughter, Madeline. “Last May Madeline came to celebrate her birthday party with her mother, grandfather, and me. Dressed in her favorite blue bell-bottoms, Madeline watched the candles on her cake burn down as we sang to her. Then she leaned over to blow them out without making a wish.
“’Aren’t you going to make a wish?’ her mother asked.
“’You have to make a wish,’ her grandfather said. Madeline looked as if someone had just run over her cat.
“’I don’t know why I keep doing this,’ she said to no one in particular.
“’Doing what?’ I asked.
“’This wishing thing,’ she said, looking at the empty chair at the table. 'Last year I wished my best friend wouldn’t move away, but she did. This year I wish that my mommy and daddy would get back together…’
“’That’s not going to happen,’ her mother said, ‘so don’t waste your wish on that.’
“’I know it’s not going to happen,’ Madeline said, ‘so why do I keep doing this?’
Says Taylor, “No one answered her. It would have been insulting, under the circumstances, since her question was better than any response we could have given her. Why do any of us keep wishing for things we know won’t happen? Why do we keep tossing the coins of our hearts’ desires into pools of still water that swallow them up without a sound?” Why indeed?
“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” Is that true? How can it possibly be true? I suspect each of us can think of times when we have beaten on the door of prayer until our knuckles were broken and bloodied, but that door never opened. We asked and asked and asked, and were never given what we asked for. With Madeline, we might very well have wondered...”Why do I keep doing this?” Why do we lift up prayer concerns Sunday after Sunday? Is there any efficacy to our prayer?
In the parable this morning the friend at midnight continues to beat on his neighbor’s door asking for those three loaves of bread. He persists even though he has been told that hell will have to freeze over before his neighbor is going to get out of bed to give him the bread. Jesus says: Be persistent. Don’t give up. Keep hammering away at the door even if it seems it will never open….even when it seems God couldn’t care less about our prayers and intercessions. Remain persistent. But again, why?
A few weeks ago I talked about the magical mystery tour that Betty and I have taken through the health care system in recent months. I expressed our thanksgiving and amazement that cancerous cells in her uterus were found and removed in time, all because she received an MRI for a back injury. It continues to amaze us. Also in that sermon I expressed my firm conviction that God had not chosen to bless us while ignoring the prayers of others whose cancer was not found in time. I insisted that the God I worship simply does not work that way, that God is with all of us whatever path we may walk. And I want to affirm that again. Prayer is about an ongoing relationship.
Barbara Brown Taylor, speaking again about Madeline, says this: “What I want Madeline to know is that the best thing about prayer is the relationship itself. Whether or not she gets what she asks for, I want her to keep asking. I want her to pester God the same way she pesters her mother, thinking of 12 different ways to plead her case. I want her to long for God the same way she longs for her father, holding fast to him even when the chair is empty…Persistent prayer keeps our hearts chasing after God’s heart. It’s how we bother God and how God bothers us back. There’s nothing that works any better than that.”
A parable: A man and a woman were married. They promised, as people do in marriage, to live together and care for each other forever, no matter what. Shortly after their honeymoon, the man went on a long trip. Actually, he left town and left no forwarding address. His new wife did not hear from him again. That is, not until ten years later when he showed up back in town. He went to her with the intention of resuming a “normal” married life. And yet, much to his shock and surprise, she hardly recognized him. He was also shocked to learn that she had had their marriage annulled and was now in fact married to another man.
“Why don’t you love me anymore?” he protested. “Why have you forsaken me? What about our marriage promises?” He hadn’t been there for ten years, but he couldn’t understand why she had become so distant, seemingly so disinterested in his life. Was it because of her or him? “Ask – Search – Knock” – persistence – work at, keep at it, it is the only way to maintain a relationship…any relationship. And that is true of our relationship with God.
As one author says: “God is totally available to us. But we, due to our sin, our distractions, the numerous other cares of the world, are not totally available to God. Therefore we must keep at it. We must keep focusing, listening, tuning our souls to God.” Persistence.
And so, perhaps the question of prayer is not…does it work? But rather, is it opening me to God’s presence in my life?
Kathy Meyhew, who attends church here from time to time, has been working with her husband Frank on some humanitarian projects in Uganda. She recently went there and was met at the airport by some women, some friends she has made in Uganda. She found it interesting that they took her right to the hospital. A friend of theirs was at the hospital and she was in labor. But this was the saddest of labors, for they knew the child was already dead. This would be a stillbirth, but she still had to go through the labor pains and deliver this child. Kathy says, “So we got there and gathered around the bed and the woman asked us for prayer. It was amazing, all these women gathered around the bed, praying. It went on for several minutes. The woman, in the midst of this tragic labor, just closed her eyes and seemed to go into another space.” The baby was already dead – she was not asking for anything, she was not praying for a healthy baby – but sill she wanted prayer.
As I have been thinking about that story, it seems to me that she wasn’t looking for an answer, she was looking for a relationship, a deepening of a relationship with God even in that painful, painful time. There’s power in that kind of prayer. Persistent prayer. Jesus says, “Hang in there. Keep knocking.” The relationship is worth it.
And yet, even as I focus on prayer as relationship more than answer to requests, it feels like that is still not quite enough to say. And so I find myself turning to one of my favorite theological writings, The Lord of the Rings. Early in the first book of the trilogy, Frodo, the young hobbit, has managed to carry the ring of power to the elf sanctuary at Rivendell. A Council is held to discuss what is to be done with the Ring. They all soon realize that it must be destroyed. And the only way to destroy it is to cast it into the fires of Mount Doom in the evil land of Mordor where it was first fashioned. Who will undertake such a perilous journey, a journey that will, no doubt, be a one-way journey? Tolken writes, “A great dread fell on Frodo, as if he was awaiting the pronouncement of some doom that he had long foreseen and vainly hoped might after all never be spoken. An overwhelming longing to rest and remain at peace in Rivendell filled all his heart. At last with an effort he spoke, and wondered to hear his own words as if some other will was using his small voice. ‘I will take the Ring,’ he said, ‘although I do not know the way.’” “As if some other will were using his small voice….” Some other will – a higher will: The Lord of the Ring is filled with hints like this. There is something else at work besides the will and desires of Frodo and the others.
Might that also be true of prayer? I am reminded of these words of Annie Dillard. In commenting on worship and prayer in her local church she writes, “Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute…Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear lady’s straw hats and velvet hats to church. We should be wearing crash helmets! Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares. They should lash us to our pews!”
Anyone in our worship service lately feel the need to be lashed down? We’re pretty comfortable…
William Willimon, who I heard just a couple of weeks ago, insists that we remain persistent in prayer, not only to maintain and deepen a relationship with God, but also so we can be attentive and be aware of what he calls ”incursions of God into our lives.” Ready for an incursion? Need a crash helmet?
I think back to Frodo “…as if some other will were using his small voice.” It could be that prayer opens us to a God who doesn’t only want a relationship with us, but who in fact wants to commandeer our lives and do something with us.
“Who thought it would work?” she said. “I’m sorry I prayed, forgive me!”
Confession time: I fear that sometimes, maybe most of the time, with my rational explanations and my orderly theology, that I have protected you and me. Protected us from the assaults of the living Christ. There are Sunday afternoons when I go home, the sermon has gone okay, people seemed to like it and yet there is this nagging voice saying something like this: “Who told you that you were hired to protect these people from me? Where is that in your call to ministry? Get out of the way and let me work with them!”
Episcopalian author and teacher, Fleming Rutledge, wonders if perhaps we have lost confidence in the power of God. We would rather preach about a gentle, loving God who really doesn’t do a darn thing and whom we don’t expect to do anything. And of course some people with power and money don’t really want changes anyway.
I once heard someone say, “For years I tried to put a leash on Jesus only to discover that Jesus has a leash on me. It very well may be that prayer isn’t as much about me getting God, as it is God getting me.”
There is another power is this world, a power over which I have no control. A transforming intrusive power, that does not need to be affirmed or credentialed by me. God is loose out there -- and be careful – because through prayer God just might get loose in each of our hearts.
Fred Craddock, one of my favorite preachers, tells about a time he was flying west. This was a number of years ago when they had smoking and non-smoking sections on airplanes. He was in the non-smoking section when the guy right across the isle from him lit up, not a cigarette, but a cigar. “The smoke was filling the air so I called over the flight attendant and asked, ‘Did I make a mistake? I asked to be in the non-smoking section.’ ‘Oh yes, you are in the non-smoking section.’ ‘Well, look’ and I pointed out the man with the cigar.’
The flight attendant informed the man he was in the non-smoking section and to please extinguish his cigar but he didn’t listen to her. The flight went on and the smoke got worse and worse, so Craddock called the attendant again and asked her, ‘Could you do something?’ ‘Sir, would you please extinguish that cigar?’ The man continued to ignore her. Says Craddock, “So we got over the Rockies and you know, things can be a little rough over the mountains sometimes and we hit an air pocket or something just as she was going down the isle with a tray of drinks. As she tried to steady herself, she spilled the tray of drinks right into this man’s lap, soaking him and extinguishing the cigar. As she tried to right herself, she fell back into my lap. Now, don’t tell me there is no God!”
A silly story, but I hope you get the point. Who knew it would work? You never know might happen. So, yes, be persistent. Keep praying. Work on the relationship and don’t forget your crash helmet.