This posting on July 26 is especially appropriate for our Praying Daily Blog inasmuch as it shares with you a fine sermon on what prayer is and is not, how we pray in our everyday lives, and what we can expect from God in prayer.
Yesterday, July 25, 2010, was the Nineth Sunday after Pentecost. Next Sunday, August 1, 2010, will be the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost. To prepare for hearing and responding to the appointed lectionary readings, visit
Journey with Jesus.
A sermon for the Nineth Sunday after Pentecost, July 25, 2010, by Pastor Ron Luckey, Faith Lutheran Church, Lexington, KY. This sermon is based on the appointed Gospel reading for yesterday, St. Luke 11:1-13:
One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say:
‘Father, hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins, for we also forgive everyone who sins against us.
And lead us not into temptation.
Then he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and he goes to him at midnight and says, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, because a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have nothing to set before him.’
“Then the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children are with me in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, though he will not get up and give him the bread because he is his friend, yet because of the man’s boldness, he will get up and give him as much as he needs.
“So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.
“Which of you fathers, if your son asks for a fish, will give him a snake instead? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (New International Version)
My first experience with praying didn’t go all that well. I was six or seven years old. One Sunday morning, in one of the very few times my family went to church when I was a kid, my parents took me to Columbia Drive Baptist church, a mile or so from our house on Kirk Road. The preacher, Brother Charles Aderholt, was preaching that day on the subject of prayer. He quoted the same words that we read this morning from St. Luke’s gospel.
Jesus is teaching his disciples about prayer. “So, I say to you: ‘Ask, and it will be given to you.’” I was a six-year old little pagan who seldom went to church. So I had no idea that verse was in the Bible. It was the first I’d ever heard of it. Just ask, and God will pony up. My experience up to that point was, when I asked my mama or my daddy for something, it was all up for grabs. I might get a “yes, but often as not, I’d get a “no.” Or a “You got to be kidding.” Brother Aderholt was talking about something entirely different. An automatic “yes!”
I was certain I had hit the mother lode that Sunday. Just ask, Jesus said, and “bingo,” it’s all yours. When you’re six years old, it doesn’t get much better than that. I sat there in my little suit and bow tie and shiny shoes thinking to myself: “No wonder my parents haven’t been taking me to church. They don’t want a house full of everything under the sun I’d be asking for.”
Anyway, I remember it as clear as a bell what I did that afternoon. Right after we had the meal that northerners call lunch and southerners call dinner, I went out back to where our 1949 Plymouth was parked in the driveway and slipped into the front seat and rolled up the windows to be alone with God. And sitting on the bench seat of that old car, I bowed my head and furrowed my brow and devoutly asked God for a horse. Not just any horse. I swung for the fence. I prayed for a golden palomino horse with a white mane like Roy Roger’s horse, Trigger who was so smart he could untie a rope with his teeth and count by pawing the earth when Roy gave him a math problem.
I didn’t beat around the bush either. No, polite preliminaries. I got to the point right away. I said I wanted a horse that looked like Trigger. And if he could do math, so much the better. I even told God I would be patient. I’d be willing to wait until the end of the week. I got out of that old Plymouth convinced that somehow—I didn’t know how—but somehow a golden palomino horse would show up in a few days tied to the big oak tree in my front yard.
After all, Brother Aderholt had quoted Jesus. “Ask and it will be given you.” Sounded like a promise to me. I figured if you can’t trust Jesus, who CAN you trust? Well, it’s a short and sad story. I didn’t get the horse. And I never believed anything Brother Aderholt ever said again.
It was a few years before I realized that when Jesus said: “Ask and it will be given you,” he meant that God gets to decide what “it” is. In other words, God never promises to give us what we want. God promises only to give us what we need. He gets to decide. Which is just another way of saying that God is God and we are not.
But it was a long time before I figured that one out. And I needed some help doing it. Miriam McGinnis was my teacher in that. In my first parish, Miriam McGinnis became very sick. And along with everybody else in Stanley, North Carolina, I asked God to heal her. Miriam was a young mother. Active in my little church. Always doing something kind for others in the community. Miriam McGinnis was a saint if there ever was one. When she got sick, it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that God would agree with our requests for Him to heal one of his most faithful servants. But in the end, God didn’t do that. In the last days of her life, I talked with Miriam about it, and she gave me the greatest lesson I’ve ever had about prayer.
She was in the hospital in Charlotte. Weak as water. Not a hair on her head. It was late on a Sunday evening when I got there. We were all alone in her hospital room, she and I. And I told her: “Miriam we’ve all been praying that God would cure you, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to do it. And I got to tell you, it breaks my heart.” She listened sympathetically and then, in that quiet way of hers, she said: “No, God has done something better. I’m not going to get well. I’m going to get God.”
“I’m not going to get well. I’m going to get God.” Miriam was talking scripture. That’s exactly what Jesus meant when he said at the very end of the gospel reading today: “If . . . you know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.”
The Holy Spirit is God’s presence. Miriam understood that. That’s what God promises when we ask him for something. Not that we’ll get what we pray for. But that we will always receive what we need—God’s presence. Which, when you think about it, what more DO we need?
“I’m not going to get well. I’m going to get God.” And that’s what that little church celebrated a few weeks later when we rolled Miriam’s casket out of the church singing: “I’ll Fly Away.” She hadn’t gotten well. She’d gotten something far better. She had gotten the God who gave her the ultimate healing by raising her from the dead.
We make prayer so hard, don’t we? We make it so complicated. When all it is, is talking back to someone who loves us and who has talked to us first. Not just through the Bible. Or through hymns and sermons. God talks to us in our dreams and in something a friend says to us—like what Miriam said to me.
That was God talking. God through a paragraph in a book—doesn’t have to be a “religious” book. Or a thought that comes into our minds. Or a feeling that floods our hearts. God talks through the people we set out to help. God will talk this week to these young people from Wisconsin who stayed at our church last night. And he’ll do it through the words and actions of somebody in need.
God is always talking to us. And it’s only polite to talk back to someone who talks to us. Sometimes when we talk, we ask for stuff. Whether it’s a six-year old asking for a horse or a twenty-six year old asking for the healing of one of his church members. But asking is just a small part of prayer. Sometimes when we talk to God it’s to thank Him for something. And there’s so much to thank him for.
Every time I come back from Haiti, I realize how little I have to complain about and how much I have to thank God for. Sometimes praying doesn’t sound like talking at all. Sometimes praying is sitting silently and simply delighting that God is God.
Sometimes sighing is a prayer. It may not sound like a prayer to us. But, St. Paul is right. God translates our sighs into words. “I’m tired. I need rest.” “I’m disgusted. I need perspective.” “I’ve had it. I need strength.”
Sometimes laughing is a prayer. Singing is a prayer. Dancing is a prayer. Painting is a prayer. Wayne Schedler’s leather making is a prayer. Joe Swanson’s day lilies are a prayer. Trude Ranta’s blueberry pies are a prayer. Anything we say or do that’s offered up to God is a prayer whether we consciously offer it up to God or not.
However we pray God has promised to listen. To listen because he is in love with us. And can’t stop talking to us. And wants us to talk back. It is as simple as that.
So, let us pray.
Almighty and everlasting God, you are always more ready to hear than we are to pray and to give more than we either desire or deserve. Pour out on us the abundance of your mercy, forgiving us those things of which our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask except through the mercy of Jesus Christ, who has taught us by example how to pray.
Next Sunday, August 1, 2010, will be the Tenth Sunday after Pentecost. To prepare for hearing and responding to the appointed lectionary readings, visit Journey with Jesus.
If for next Sunday you have parish preaching or teaching responsibilities, you may want to prepare for your delivery of a sermon or Scripture lesson by consulting CrossMarks Christian Resources, especially Exegetical notes on texts from the Revised Common Lectionary by Brian Stoffregen. Remember: Next Sunday’s Gospel is Luke 12.13-21 (Proper 13, Year C). Going to Crossmarks is well worth the visit.
