God Already Knows (Proper 12C)

 

God Already Knows
Homily delivered the Ninth Sunday of Pentecost (Proper 12; Year C RCL)
25 July 2010; 10:00 a.m. Morning Prayer
Congregation of the Good Shepherd  Beijing, China
Readings: Genesis 18:20-32  Psalm 138; Colossians 2:6-15; Luke 10:25-37

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

When I was ten years old, I had my first schoolteacher who was a man.  I was in fifth grade.   Mr. Franklin, an athletic and handsome 20-something, always wore a short-sleeved white dress shirt and tie when he taught.  He had just finished teacher’s college.  He had a sharp wit, demanded a lot of us.  He wore dark sunglasses when he took his turn as playground monitor. My friend Jeff’s mom—in my small conservative town she was the rare Democrat—said that Mr. Franklin was part of the new direction of the whole country, with our young new president John Kennedy and his wife Jackie.  But Mr. Franklin was still unmarried.  Most girls in the class got crushes on him; we boys saw him as the kind of big brother we wish we had, manly but smart and not ashamed of either.  He was a new kind of teacher, one we were just then learning to call “cool.”

One day in November, the principal came into the classroom mid-morning and asked to have a word with him outside.  He returned, pale and visibly shaken.  He asked us to put our books away.  He said, “I have just been told that the President has been shot in Texas.  They have taken him to a hospital, but the radio isn’t saying how badly he is injured.  I think it would be a very good time for us to have a few minutes of silence for him, his family, and our country.”

The minutes that followed were surreal.  All of us students had known each other pretty much from kindergarten, but we knew each other only as roles:  as class brains or dummies, teacher’s pets or bad cases sent to the principal’s office, as playground and cafeteria pals or rivals.  We who went to the same churches together knew each other only in those same roles in a different setting. 

I had learned in Sunday School to pray free form—address God, say what you’re thankful for, and then say what you want God to do.   Remember to use “thee” and “thou” instead of “you” to show reverence.  Close “in the name of Jesus Christ” and say “amen.” 

I silently asked God to keep John F. Kennedy alive and then give him full recovery.  I opened my eyes and looked around me at the strangely silent classroom.

A couple kids looked bored and puzzled.  Some looked stunned.  But most were praying.  One girl fervently held her hands in a little church, looked up with wide eyes at the ceiling as if into heaven itself, and muttered something obviously memorized.  She crossed herself and prayed again.    Mr. Franklin sat at the head of the class, with one hand covering his face, as if to force his eyes shut with fingers and block out the whole evil world.  His lips moved silently.  

After an hour or so, Mr. Franklin left the classroom briefly and came back with word that the President was dead.  That evening, my father said that the President had been killed instantly when shot. 

I had always been taught that God heard and answered prayers.  From Sunday School and home, I thought that if we just had enough faith when we asked for something in prayer, God would give it to us.  

But not only had God not given us what we had prayed for so fervently, all those prayers seemed kind of silly because the President was already dead at the time we offered them.  

I went away from that experience with a very different, if less confident, view of prayer.  I also went away from it with a very changed view of my classmates and my teacher.  In those few minutes I had glimpsed them as people, in all their rich complexity and depth, much more complicated than the various roles they each played.

Today’s Old Testament reading has Abraham praying that the cities of the Dead Sea plain be spared a horrible fate.  He is trying to save his nephew Lot and his family, who live in Sodom.  He bargains with God:  “If I can find 50 good people there you won’t destroy the cities, right?” “So how about 20?”  “How about 10?”  He is a shameless haggler, and repeated uses Asian honorifics to flatter the ego the deity before him ("now don't be angry with this, but ...," "don't think your humble servant here is being presumptuous to say...," etc.)    In the end, not even 10 decent people can be found, but because of Abraham's haggling, God warns Lot and his family to flee before the sulfur and fire starts falling.  In a similar story in the Book of Exodus, Moses engages bargains with God to save the children of Israel from destruction (Exod. 32). 

In both stories, it sounds like God is an angry, petulant deity who needs to be argued with, to be reminded to do the right thing, to be merciful and true to his promises.  But this is a misreading. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, says this:

“… [T]he Bible puts before us … not a record of a God who is always triumphantly getting his way by doing miracles . . . , but [of] a God who gets his way by patiently struggling to make himself clear to human beings, to make his love real to them, especially when they seem not to want to know or to want to avoid him and retreat into their own fantasies about him. And typically, the Bible sometimes does this by a very bold method—by telling a certain kind of story from the human point of view, as if God needed to be persuaded to be faithful to his people. Someone like Abraham or Moses, someone who has good reason to know something about what God is really like, is faced with a crisis. Things are going badly; surely God is going to give up and blast people into oblivion. So Abraham and Moses argue with God until they have persuaded him to be merciful. These writers knew exactly what they were doing. They didn’t believe in a bad-tempered, capricious God who needed to be calmed down by sensible human beings. They knew that the most vivid way of expressing what they understood about God was to show Abraham and Moses appealing to the deepest and most true thing about God as they pray to him.” (Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christianity, p. 17)

The parable of the persistent friend at midnight in today’s Gospel reading provokes a similar misunderstanding about the nature of prayer amd of God.  Jesus uses the image of a bothersome friend who just won’t take no for an answer as an encouragement for us to persist in prayer (Luke 11:5-8).   Some think the parable likens God to the householder, and says that God cannot be bothered with us and our concerns.  But here, as in so many other places, we must remember that a parable usually tries to make one point of comparison, and is usually distorted when we try to turn it into an allegory with many points of comparison.   “Go ahead—bother God and keep bothering him,” says Jesus, not because God is like the sleepy householder annoyed at the disturbance, but because we need to persist in prayer, no matter how disappointed we might be with what we see as its “results.” 

Jesus adds another parable as if to correct any misunderstanding we might have from that first one: “If any of you have a child who asks him for a fish, will you give him a snake?  Or if he asks for an egg, you give him a scorpion?  If you, who aren’t all that perfect, know how to give your children what they need, how much more will your Heavenly Father know how to treat you?” (Luke 11:11-13)  God is love, and good, and not like the householder at midnight. 

When prayer doesn’t seem to deliver what we think it’s supposed to, we get disillusioned and maybe stop praying, or only go through the motions of prayer out of a sense of duty, but without any hope or faith that it matters.   But Jesus says persist like that friend at midnight.  And this is because God is good and loving, not grumpy and selfish.

 

There are many scriptures that say that if we ask God in faith, he will give us what we ask.  But this is a metaphor, a way of saying that God is on our side and will give us what we need, not that we will always get what we want..  Let’s remember:  Jesus’ own prayer in Gethsemane, “Let this cup of suffering pass from me,” was not granted.  The point here is that is that we persist in prayer, regardless of how things “turn out.” In the process we are changed and our will becomes closer to God’s.  We are able to say, with Jesus, “thy will, not mine, be done.”    Through prayer we gain acceptance of what we can’t change and strength for the truly intolerable things that we may happen to face. 

When Paul says “make your desires known to God,” he is consciously using an imperfect metaphor.  Paul understands perfectly well that God already knows whatever we might tell him in prayer.  When we pray, we aren’t “letting God know” anything that he doesn’t already know. 

Taking literally the image of asking God things we want in order to convince him to give them to us is really a kind of sick magical thinking.  The Almighty in this view begins to look somewhat like a wacky great uncle who, if we just call long distance at the right time and tell him what’s up, will send us that check we need in the mail.  Prayers in this view are almost like taskings put onto the desk of some overworked divine bureaucrat.  We need to flag them the right way so that our request goes to the top of the pile. 

As St. Augustine points out, God created space and time.  God in some ways is outside of space and time, in other ways inside and behind it all.  So it isn’t like we are going to convince God to behave in a way that he wasn’t going to anyway.  God simply is.  God simply acts.  Past, present, and future are all one from the viewpoint of God.   What appears to us as a cause, effect sequence of events to timeless God is seen all at once.

Changing God or God’s will is not what prayer to the Almighty is about.  The point is not that we let God know something he doesn’t know so this will affect him in the way we want.   The point is that we are the ones doing it, because of how this affects us. 

No matter whether a prayer of petition, of thanksgiving, of adoration, or as intercession for others, our prayers are not about changing God.  They are about changing us.   Our prayers are a way we voluntarily reveal ourselves to God, and participate in a relationship by telling him things he already knows but that we may not yet have realized.  We sometimes find that if we are honest about telling God our desires, that some of them can only be put before him as confessions of sin. 

Persistence in prayer is not just about asking. As we pray, we learn that we need not just prayers of petition, but also ones of thanksgiving, adoration, and intercession for others.

After the death of his wife Joy Davidman, C.S. Lewis was asked whether it was worth it—had any of the prayers offered on her behalf during her cancer changed anything.  He replied, “They changed me.”   I knew as a boy that those prayers that day were not silly, even though the way I understood prayer at the time made them look so.  I sensed, and still believe, that they were exactly what God wanted us to do. 

Discipline and persistence in prayer is key, but not because they work a fix with God.  It is because prayer changes us.  

I was raised in a tradition that used almost exclusively free-form prayers, and looked down on set or written prayers.  I found that if I tried to persist in prayer over time, I ended up using repeated phrases of my own, and these often were not particularly uplifting or insightful.  In the long haul, I have found that I need both free-form prayers from the heart, but also a good percentage of written prayers handed down us from those who have gone before, the “Our Father” foremost among them.  The Psalter and the other poetic passages of the Bible we know as the Canticles form a major part of my prayer life. 

I try to recite the liturgy of Morning and Evening Prayer every day, and have found that this creates a rhythm in my life that helps me grow closer to God and better serve those around me.   It makes me part of a great dialogue of prayer of the Christian Church that has been going on centuries.  But it takes time, at least 20 minutes in the morning and 10 in the evening.  In prayer, as in so many other human endeavors, you get what you put into it. 

I challenge all of us this week to pray daily, and to put some effort and thought into it.  All of us can revitalize our prayer life in some way, by following our own tradition or by learning from other Christians.  The important thing is to set the time aside, and go ahead and bother God, just like that annoying guy in the middle of the night bothered his friend.  Let us persist in prayer. 

In the name of God,  Amen. 

---

At the request of a parishioner after this homliy was delivered, I am here including  Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families from the U.S. 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church.  It  provides a shortened form of liturgical prayer for private devotions.   They follow the basic structure of the Daily Office of the Church (the Liturgy of the Hours, or Evening and Morning Prayer.)  --Fr. T.

In the Morning

From Psalm 51

Open my lips, O Lord, *
    and my mouth shall proclaim your praise.
Create in me a clean heart, O God, *
    and renew a right spirit within me.
Cast me not away from your presence *
    and take not your holy Spirit from me.
Give me the joy of your saving help again *
    and sustain me with your bountiful Spirit.
Glory to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit: *
    as it was in the beginning, is now, and will be for ever. Amen.
 
A Reading

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!
By his great mercy we have been born anew to a living hope
through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.
1 Peter 1:3

A period of silence my follow.

A hymn or canticle may be used; the Apostles' Creed may be said.

Prayers may be offered for ourselves and others.

The Lord's Prayer

The Collect
Lord God, almighty and everlasting Father, you have brought
us in safety to this new day:  Preserve us with your mighty
power, that we may not fall into sin, nor be overcome by
adversity; and in all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your
purpose; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.
 

At Noon

From Psalm 113

Give praise, you servants of the LORD; *
    praise the Name of the LORD.
Let the Name of the LORD be blessed, *
    from this time forth for evermore.
From the rising of the sun to its going down *
    let the Name of the LORD be praised.
The LORD is high above all nations, *
    and his glory above the heavens.

A Reading

O God, you will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are
fixed on you; for in returning and rest we shall be saved; in
quietness and trust shall be our strength.  Isaiah 26:3; 30:15

Prayers may be offered for ourselves and others.

The Lord's Prayer

The Collect
Blessed Savior, at this hour you hung upon the cross,
stretching out your loving arms:  Grant that all the peoples of
the earth may look to you and be saved; for your mercies'
sake.  Amen.

or this

Lord Jesus Christ, you said to your apostles, "Peace I give to
you; my own peace I leave with you:"  Regard not our sins,
but the faith of your Church, and give to us the peace and
unity of that heavenly City, where with the Father and the
Holy Spirit you live and reign, now and for ever.  Amen.
 
In the Early Evening

This devotion my be used before or after the evening meal.

O gracious light,
pure brightness of the everliving Father in heaven,
O Jesus Christ, holy and blessed!

Now as we come to the setting of the sun,
and our eyes behold the vesper light,
we sing your praised, O God:  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

You are worthy at all times to be praised by happy voices,
O Son of God, O Giver of Life,
and to be glorified through all the worlds.

A Reading
It is not ourselves that we proclaim; we proclaim Christ
Jesus as Lord, and ourselves as your servants, for Jesus' sake.
For the same God who said, "Out of darkness let light
shine," has caused his light to shine within us, to give the
light of revelation -- the revelation of the glory of God in the
face of Jesus Christ.  2 Corinthians 4:5-6

Prayers may be offered for ourselves and others.

The Lord's Prayer

The Collect
Lord Jesus, stay with us, for evening is at hand and the day is
past; be our companion in the way, kindle our hearts, and
awaken hope, that we may know you as you are revealed in
Scripture and the breaking of bread.  Grant this for the sake
of your love.  Amen.