Rev. Eugene N. Nelson, Jr.
The Community Church of Sebastopol
July 25, 2010
Luke 11:1-13
I once heard it said that prayer is for those who are willing to stake their lives on the belief that God will open the door when they knock. Do you believe that? Staking your life on the belief that God will open the door. Is that true? I confess to you that even as a Christian pastor there are many times, too many times, when in my own life I’m unable to muster the kind of confidence in prayer expressed here by Jesus Knock and keep on knocking, he says. The promise is that eventually we will receive. But is that true? How can that be true? What does your own experience tell you about that?
I think of some stories concerning children and prayer: When asked if she had said her prayers, the little girl assured her mother that she had. Then she added, “When I got on my knees, I began thinking that God hears the same stuff every night. So I told him the story of the three bears instead.”
A boy, hoping in vain for a new pair of boots, declared that he refused to pray any more. When asked why, he said, “It’s no use. Art doesn’t listen.” “Art who?” he was asked. “Art in heaven,” he sadly explained.
A five-year-old girl said, “It must get monotonous for God to hear the same prayers every night. By the time he gets to my house, God must think, ‘Now here’s where Laurel lives, and I know just what she is going to say.’”
Ah yes, from the lips of children…Ever feel that way about prayer? I suspect that 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 that for which we were asking. Who has not prayed that someone be cured of the cancer that saps her life, only to stand at a grave a week later commending her soul to God and committing her body to the earth? Who has not prayed for that family member to be able to walk in the light, only to have him wander into trouble with drugs or alcohol or violence or irresponsible relationships? There are those who have prayed to keep their jobs, only to come to work a few days later and receive a lay-off notice neatly tucked in with a final pay check. There are those who pray fervently for peace, only to awaken at first light to hear from the radio that some new conflict has begun or an old one has taken even more precious lives. We faithfully seek, we knock and knock and knock, and are still left wondering – does it really make any difference at all – is old “Art in heaven” really listening?
You may recall this story told by Barbara Brown Taylor. I have shared it before. “I have a seven-year-old granddaughter by marriage named Madeline. She’s blond, skinny and tall for her age…Last May she came to celebrate her birthday. Dressed in her favorite blue bell-bottoms, Madeline watched the candles on her cake burn down while we sang to her. She then 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 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.
“’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 want to 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 we keep tossing the coins of our hearts’ desires into pools of still water that swallow them up without a sound?”
I think of the refrain from the academy award winning song from the film Crazy Heart:
This ain’t no place for the weary kind,
This ain’t no place to loose your mind,
This ain’t no place to fall behind,
Pick up your crazy heart, give it one more try.
But again, why? After so many disappointments, so many unanswered prayers, so many times when God seems silent, why give it one more try? Why keep tossing those coins of our hearts’ desires? Why pay any attention to what Jesus says? Why persist in this?
The disciples come to Jesus and ask him to teach them to pray. In response he tells a parable about a very insistent intruder who shows up at a friend’s door at midnight. Jesus calls him a friend, but anyone, friend or not, who comes banging at my door at mid-night feels more like an intruder to me. The man says he’s in desperate need. But it’s the middle of the night, and the one roused from sleep says there is nothing he can do to help. And besides, can he really trust the knock at the door? So he basically says, “I don’t know who you are, friend or foe, get lost.”
But the man is not so easily put off. He keeps banging on the door, calling him, leaving messages on the answering machine, essentially making a complete nuisance of himself. Finally the man inside the house, through clenched teeth, says to himself, “Although I care nothing for this man’s predicament, and though he’s nothing but a pain in the neck – or fill in your favorite body part here – I will give him what he wants so that he will quit bothering me and go away and I can get back to sleep!” And says, Jesus that is exactly how we ought to be when it comes to prayer…that persistent.
That to me is just a bit troubling. Are we to view God as some kind of a sulky, sleepy friend at midnight who would really rather not be bothered with our trivial requests? Does God really require constant banging on the door in order for us to get God’s grudging attention? Maybe.
Or could it be that the seeking, the knocking, the persistence works on us, not God. I mean we are talking about nothing less than the development of a relationship between ourselves and the Holy One, a deepening of our life with God, and like any relationship it takes work. One pastor says, “I have found in friendship with other people that one of the reasons we have so few friends is that friendship takes time. There must be hours, years, of being with one another, hanging out together, conversing with one another, hearing stories about life, and exploring the richness of another human being. You can’t really have a good friend overnight. It requires time. It requires persistence and the same is true in our friendship with God. God is totally available to us. But we, due to our sin, our many 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 toward God.” Now that sounds like a pretty tall order for a society that demands and expects instant gratification. Why can’t Jesus be like the rest of the world and promise us an easy, quick payoff when it comes to our relationship with God?
A woman quite unexpectedly lost her job. It threw her into economic distress and terrible emotional turmoil. She suffered depression and eventually sought professional help. A friend, after visiting her, said, “Poor thing. When it came time for her to let down her bucket, to dig deep down, she found out that she had no water in the well.” Now that may sound like harsh judgment from a friend, but can you see the truth of it? For all of us, there are those inevitable moments in life that are going to require us to let down our bucket, to go deep into the wellspring of hope and courage and faith. But when those times come, will there be anything there – any emotional and spiritual resources for us to draw from. Well, I think that is precisely where Jesus is taking us… deep into the well. He is inviting us to consider just what we are staking our lives on? When we look deep inside, what do we find? I think he is saying, that it just might be our stubborn persistence, our constant knocking at the door, that’s going to keep water in the well.
Madeline says to her grandmother, “I don’t know why I keep doing this?” And you may go home today and ask the very same thing. And all I can say, out of the heart of my own experience, is keep at it, keep knocking. Because it just may be that the very best thing about prayer is not the answer, but the promise of that ever deepening relationship with the sacred, the Holy. Be persistent, trust the process, regardless what comes of it, because the process itself can give you life. It works on us, changes us, deepens us, fills the well, it really does.
Now, even as I’m preaching this sermon today, no way do I want to present myself as some expert on prayer, some great spiritual warrior. Believe it or not, I occasionally get a little uptight and anxious about things. And I’ve certainly known those times, especially in times of great loss, when the bucket seems to come back empty. So the idea of persistence in prayer, no matter what, is as great a challenge for me as it is for you. But I keep going back to Jesus’ words of persistence because I truly believe that as we stay in this conversation, God is at work bringing the fullness of God’s reign to fruition in each of our hearts. I truly believe that in the process of storming heaven, of bothering God, knocking and chasing after God’s heart, we are changed and somewhere deep in our souls, the well is filled. In the words of Stephanie Frey, a parish minister, “I can think of no one other than Jesus who actually encourages us to be annoying with God. Jesus invites, even commands, us to be as shameless and irritating in our prayers as that noisy neighbor at midnight. We should persist until prayer becomes the ongoing conversation between us and the Creator. Then we will never come away empty-handed from prayer, because even if we wind up with none of the things we thought we needed, we will always wind up with God listening, attending and answering our prayer in ways we hadn’t imagined…In such holy conversation we learn to pray for any and all, to receive and recognize the generous gifts from God’s hand that provide what we need day to day. What more could we want?”
I know, at times it’s crazy, it makes no sense, but, but when it comes to prayer – to working on and deepening this ongoing relationship with the Holy – I hope we never tire of picking up our crazy hearts, and giving it one more try.