Right Asking (Proper 20B)

 

Right Asking

23 September 2012

Proper 20B

Homily preached at Trinity Episcopal Church

Ashland, Oregon

8:00 a.m. spoken Mass, 10:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Wisdom of Solomon 1:16-2:1, 12-22; Psalm 54 ; James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a; Mark 9:30-37

“If anyone claims to be wise and understanding among you, let them show it by good conduct and the gentle behavior that comes from wisdom.  If instead they have bitter self-seeking and partisanship in their hearts, may they not be self-promoters and liars against truth.  Such ‘wisdom’ as that does not come down from above, but is earthly, unspiritual, devilish. For where there is self-seeking and partisanship, there will also be disorder and wickedness of every kind. But the wisdom from above is first pure, then peaceable, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy. And a harvest of righteousness is sown in peace for those who make peace.

“Where do the wars and disputes among you come from?  Isn’t it from your craving for what pleases you, things that are at battle with each other in the different parts of yourself?  You lust for something beyond your reach, so you commit murders.  You are self-seeking, and cannot obtain what you want, so you engage in disputes and wars.  You do not have what you want, because you just don’t pray for it.  And when you do pray for it, you do not receive, because you pray thinking that it’s a payment for getting what pleases you.

“Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you.”   (James 3:13-4:3, translation AAH)

 

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

In the Sir Gawain and the Loathsome Lady, King Arthur and Gawain, one of the knights of the Round Table, come upon a damsel in distress.  To free her, Arthur fights a knight in black armor who beats Arthur through dark magic.  The Knight spares Arthur’s life at the last moment on orders from the witch he serves.  She makes a bargain with Arthur:  “If you can answer my riddle in one year you may live, otherwise, you die.”  The riddle is this:  “What do women want most?” 

 

What do women want most? Arthur and Gawain return to Camelot and for a year puzzle over this question.  They ask all the ladies of the court, the serving girls, the nuns in the convent, the farmwomen:  what do you want most?  They consult wise men and women.  Everyone has a different answer: love, wealth, security, beauty, youth, power, health, servants, children, wisdom, sexual fulfillment, a handsome and faithful lover. 

At the end of the year, they have no idea and are sure Arthur will be killed.  On the way back, they run into a repulsive old woman, a hag, alongside the road.  This loathsome lady is named Ragnell. She says she has the answer to riddle, but only for a price.  Arthur replies, “I’ll pay anything if your answer is true and saves my life.” 

The answer she gives, the true answer, is this:  “What women want most, is to have their own way.”

Today’s epistle reading tells us that it is not just women who want, above all else, to have their own way—this is what men want most too.

James says that many evils stem from self-seeking and self-will:  “Where do the wars and disputes among you come from?  Isn’t it your craving for what pleases you, things that are at battle with each other in the different parts of yourself?  You lust for something beyond your reach, so you commit murders.  You are self-seeking, and cannot obtain what you want, so you engage in disputes and wars.”

James thinks that we desire contradictory things at odds with each other, struggling between the different parts of ourselves.  You want health, but you follow an unhealthy lifestyle. You want security and wealth, but you are a spendthrift.   You want to have a happy family and a good marriage, but you are tempted to infidelity at times.

James says that self-will, even if trained to be not so self-contradictory, is still the basic problem.  “You would have what you wanted if only you prayed, but you pray wrong,” he says. “You pray thinking of if as a payment for what pleases you.”   The King James Version here captures a bit of the starkness of James’ image:  “you pray only to consume it upon your lusts.”    James is saying that if we pray because we think that by so doing we will have our own way,  because we think of prayer as a payment for our pleasure, we are making God a whore in our minds. 

Clearly, “what pleases you” here is something that we want with our broken self-will, rather than what we would want if our wills and feelings weren’t broken.

There are many scriptures that say that if we ask God in faith, he will give us what we ask.  There are also scenes in the Bible where a righteous person argues or bargains with God, and gets his or her own way. 

But these are metaphors, imperfect ones, a way of saying that God is on our side and will always give us what we need, not that we will always get what we want. 

Paul says pray always, and “make your desires known to God.”  But 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 for the 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 is 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.  Or like some overworked divine bureaucrat with an overloaded inbox of prayer requests.  Flag them right, and they go 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’s will is not what prayer is about.  Asking God for what pleases us is, as James says, “asking wrong.”  The point is not convincing God to let us have our own way, not telling him something he doesn’t know, not getting him on board with what we want.

The point is how such asking affects us.  Prayer changes us and makes our will closer to God’s.   Jesus’ own prayer in Gethsemane, “Please let this cup of suffering pass from me,” was not granted.  But he added, “thy will, not mine, be done.”   

Buddhism teaches that desire is the root of all suffering and that by extinguishing desire, we achieve bliss.  James here agrees that self-seeking and wanting to have our own way is the root of most of the evils in the world and a great deal of suffering, and of turmoil within ourselves. 

But we Christians do not believe that extinguishing desire brings happiness. Happiness comes from accepting our desires, recognizing them, entering into a dialogue with God about them, and having God heal them and set them right.    We call this petitionary prayer, prayer where we ask for stuff. 

Petitionary prayer must be in the context of a broader prayer life: thanksgiving, intercession (prayer for others), praise and contemplation of God’s beauty.    As we pray our wants and desires in this broader context, we give up our insistence on having our own way. This is one of the great gifts God has in store for us as we pray.  

Through prayer we gain acceptance of what we can’t change, for the truly intolerable things that we may happen to face but over which we have no control. 

Our prayers are not about changing God.  They are about changing us.   Our prayers are a way we voluntarily reveal ourselves intimately to God and build a close relationship with him.  We tell him things he already knows but that we may not yet have realized.  We sometimes find that some of our desires can only be put before him as confessions of sin, yet another kind of prayer.  

Today’s Gospel also teaches this. The disciples argue about who is the greatest, has the most power, gets his own way the most.  Jesus takes this and turns it on its head.  He sets before them a child, the most vulnerable person in that society, the person who could least expect to get his own way.  “Be like this child,” Jesus says, “then you’ll be the greatest.”  Give up hope of having your own way in order to find true joy.  Let your will be molded by others’, most particularly God’s, in order to find your true will.  Lose your life to find it.  Surrender to win.    

This does not mean giving up on your hopes and dreams, and it most definitely does not mean becoming the willing doormat of some self-willed abuser of others.  That would be extinguishing our desire rather than praying it.  It does mean being open to change in our desires, and in being more interested in listening to God and others than in telling them what we think and what we want. 
   

Much of what passes for prayer is a show of strength, an eloquent and theatrical effort to coerce God into giving us what we want, get him on our side, have him accomplish what we desire. Meditation, on the other hand, is to be weak and powerless, often quiet, in the secure confidence of God’s care and love for us.  Listening prayer and centering prayer thus give us the joy of accepting our own weakness and of not having to pretend to be people other then who we actually are.  This is what James would call “right asking.”  

 

The ending of the story of the Loathsome Lady hints about this great process of change and trust.  The loathsome Lady Ragnell’s price for the riddle’s answer is that one of Arthur’s Knights marry her.  Sir Gawain volunteers out of love for Arthur.  The whole court pities him, since Ragnell is so horrid and foul.  On the wedding night, he goes to the wedding chamber to consummate this marriage from Hell, shuddering to even touch, let alone make love to this monster.  As he enters the chamber, she hisses, “Embrace me, husband.”  As he takes her into his arms, he sees her transformed into a beautiful young woman. It turns out this is her true form, but that she has been enchanted to be the Loathsome Lady until she could find a true knight in marriage. 
 
But part of the magic remains.  She says, “You can have me in my true form either by night or by day, but I must return to my cursed hag form at the other time. Do you want me as I am at night, when I am in your arms? Or do you choose me to be beautiful by day, when I will be seen by your friends?”

Gawain thinks for a long time. At last he replies, “This is your life. You must decide.”

And in that moment the spell is broken forever.  His gift of choice grants her complete freedom from the curse and the return of her natural beauty at all times.

Though what women want most is to have their own way, this is also what men want most.  Gawain is a true knight.  He surrenders to the Lady Ragnell three times.  But she is a true Lady, who lets him choose as well three times: when he volunteers to marry her, accepts her embrace, and gives her the choice on days and nights.  In giving up having their own way, they both are changed and find their true heart’s desire. 

 

After the death of his wife Joy Davidman, C.S. Lewis was asked whether any of the prayers offered for curing her cancer had changed anything.  He replied, “They changed me.”  

Sisters and brothers, I know that God hears our prayers and sometimes gives us what we ask.  Many of us have been touched by miracles.  And God bids us all to persist in prayer and in asking for what our hearts desire.  But prayer is not a magic trick.   Petitionary prayer is part of a larger life of the spirit, a broader prayer life, where our desires and will are shaped and changed by God, and where we learn again and again acceptance.  

This week, in our daily prayers, let us listen more and ask less.  Let us phrase our petitions not so much as trying to convince God of giving us what we want, but of telling God about our the sad state of our hearts.  And may we always add, “your will, not mine, be done.” 

In the name of God, Amen