Past Sermon

Sermon Title: "When Praying Doesn't Always Get What You Ask For "
Date: July 29, 2007
Minister: Rev. Charles E. Ensley, Jr.

Lesson:  Luke 11:1-13

Do you ever read a passage in a novel, or in a scripture passage, and it either reminds you of an experience you’ve had, or raised a question in your mind?  I had two such reactions to today’s lesson from Luke. 

In the first, I’ve never been able to relate much to the story of the man disturbed in middle of the night by the annoying neighbor who comes asking for bread so he can make some midnight snacks for a late-arriving friend.  Luke reports the neighbor was so persistent that the man trying to sleep finally gave up, turned on the lights, went downstairs and gave the neighbor all the bread he needed.

I couldn’t relate, until a week ago Wednesday night, or, shall I say, Thursday morning.  I was sleeping in my cabin at Pilgrim Pines when I felt a persistent tap on my shoulder.  Six-year-old Cody, sleeping in the next bed, stood over me at 2:27 a.m. and told me he couldn’t sleep.  (Cody, incidentally, is the grandson of Laverne Joseph, who preached here two weeks ago.)  I told Cody that I would leave the bathroom light on, I would be awake, and he could go back to sleep.  I did, until a scant three minutes later I awoke to the same persistent tapping on my shoulder.  “I had a bad dream,” he told me, “and the only thing that will help is if you lay down next to me.”

“I’m not allowed to do that,” I replied to a small boy, who I’m sure had no idea why that wasn’t allowed.  “You can either put your sleeping bag down here on the floor next to my bed, or I can come over and pat your back until you fall asleep.”  It took Cody about three seconds to look down at the floor—carpeted, mind you—over at his bed, and say, “You can pat my back.”

And so I did, until 2:43, when I sensed his steady breathing indicated he was asleep.  Gingerly, I raised myself from sitting on his lower bunk and went back to my bed, and quickly fell asleep again.  Until . . . 3:37, when the whole scenario repeated itself again.  Bad dream about a bear, pat the back, he goes to sleep, I go back to bed.  I automatically awoke at 4:30, half anticipating another tap on the shoulder, but it didn’t come.  When I told my co-counselor, Bret Contreras, later that morning of the incident, he told me Cody came over to his bed first, but Bret sent him back to bed.  I wonder if that’s when he came over and tapped my shoulder for the first time?  His persistence paid off.

I guess what has bothered me about the parable of the annoying neighbor knocking on the door to ask for bread at midnight is what we are to take from this?  That God is like that sulky friend at midnight, trying to sleep along with his kids, the man who requires constant banging on his door in order to ever get his attention?

Prayer is more than the words that we say to God.  Prayer is all the things that we do and say in our relationship with God.  In fact, our relationship with God is prayer.  So this is not so much a story about the right technique in prayer, but our side of a right relationship with God. 

God, in Jesus Christ, has already done all that needs to be done to fulfill God’s part in the relationship.  God sent his only son Jesus to us, who taught us, healed, lived among us, suffered for us, and died, then rose again from the dead.  He came back to us and he forgave us.  That is God’s part of the deal.

But what about our part of the deal?  I think this is a parable about that.  Our part of the deal involves persistence.  We are saved by God’s grace, not by our work.  There are a lot of people who say God is distant from them.  They say that when they pray, they feel like they are just talking to themselves.  They hear stories about God impacting people’s lives, but these stories seem to them as mere fairy tales.  God has never said or done anything to them, they say.  They ask in their prayers, but they don’t get what they ask for.

And in my pondering of this lesson for today, here is my second hang-up about it.  I’ve read it before; I’ve preached on it before.  But looking at it afresh this week, this year, I question Jesus’ declaration:  “Ask, and it will be given you…”  What happened to your praying when you don’t always get what you ask for?

I was called to the hospital emergency room once late at night years ago.  A young man, early twenties, was riding an all-terrain vehicle at night without a helmet.  He hit a rock, flew off the vehicle, and his head landed on a metal rod protruding out of the ground. 

There he lay in the emergency room.  They decided to perform an MRI of his brain to ascertain the damage.  As they wheeled the gurney out, his mother, clenching my hand, looked down at the emergency room floor at the same time as I did, and we both saw the same thing:  a small portion of her son’s brain on the floor.  She stood there paralyzed.  Her grip on my hand was so fierce, I had to eventually pry her fingers off, one by one.  What do you ask for in prayer in that situation?

Another time I was in the intensive care unit beside the bed of a teenager who had shot himself through the head.  He was comatose, non-responsive for days.  What do you pray for in those days before the organ procurement team comes in?

Someone is in the hospital after an auto accident.  Their head went through the windshield; their legs are broken.  Is it reasonable to pray that they will wake up and walk out of the hospital tomorrow?

Someone else receives a heartbreaking diagnosis of inoperable and fast-advancing cancer.  The family is in shock.  No one can believe it.  I receive a blue prayer card here in worship asking for their complete remission and cure.

I am troubled by all these situations, for I am asked to pray for them, just as you do.  I am the one standing at the hospital bedside, here in the pulpit, turning to organize words into prayers that I know God hears, but for what do I pray?  How realistic, optimistic, hopeful are my words in front of the patient and family, or this congregation ?  And not only in public prayers, but what are you or I to ask for when we pray our own private and individual prayers?

The answer is we must be persistent in our prayers.  You will notice that in church, despite the variation in our Sunday services—communion, baptisms, new members—that our Sundays here are characterized by ritual, habit, repetition.  This is not simply because Christians are inherently traditionalists, though in many ways we are.  Rather, we are persistent.  Jesus has urged us to keep at it.

We live in a society of instant gratification.  There are people who expect to have the fruits of the Christian life—joy, peace, trust, courage, confidence, and all the rest—without the discipline of the Christian life.  There are people who think once they’ve prayed for it …once… they should get what they ask for.

We need to be both persistent and realistic in our prayers.  Every time I visited Margaret Leake over the weeks she was in the intensive care ward, sedated in a medically-induced coma, I held her hand and prayed for her aloud, even though she may not have been aware of my presence, or even heard my prayers.  But God did.  Now that she has made such miraculous progress—yes, I do believe miracles happen—I’ve told her I prayed for her every day.  But did I ever pray that she’d wake up the next day, be able to breath on her own, and sit up and talk?  No, never once.  I persistently, constantly, continually prayed that God would watch over her, that the Christ who heals and saves us would be active in her life.  I literally placed her future in God’s hands—where it was already—and left it to God to do the rest, without troubling God with what I thought God should do.

Gregory of Nyssa, a fourth century bishop, talked of the wonder that, in the Lord’s Prayer, when one considers all that we need, the only thing we are permitted to ask for is something so basic as bread.  Not herds or silken robes, not a prominent position, monuments or statues.  Only bread.  Bread which sustains us, and gives us the strength to continue in our prayers.

The Lord’s Prayer, which Jesus offered to his disciples as a model for prayer, served as the introduction of this whole section including the annoying but persistent neighbor, and the admonition to keep on asking, confident that you will receive.  Maybe the reason we pray it every week, the reason it is arguably the most repeated piece of Christian literature in history, is that the Lord’s Prayer is a lifelong act of bending our lives toward God in the way that God has offered.  The prayer ends “thy kingdom come, thy will be done.”  Not mine, not yours, but God’s kingdom, God’s will.  We have quite enough teaching in the various modes of achieving our will in this world, and the wreckage is all around us.

Keep praying.  Don’t stop.  Be persistent.  Just realize in your praying, in your asking, God will answer your prayer—perhaps not what you asked for—but what God alone in his infinite mercy and wisdom has the power to do.