“Being Persistent”

(Luke 11:1-13)

Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, 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.  And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.  And do not bring us to the time of trial.”

And he said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’  And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’  I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.  For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.  Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish?  Of if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion?  If you then, who are evil, 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!”

            I ran across an article in my files from a few years ago that jumped out at me as I prepared to preach on today’s text.  Remember when the Beacon Journal had a religion page?  That’s where the article came from.  Ah….  The good old days when there was a religion page and columns and articles on religion….

            …Anyway, its title was “Prayer Begins at Zero.”  The author recalled a time when he was a seminarian years before.  At that point he knew that he needed to find a spiritual guide for himself.  He did that and, then, asked that person to teach him how to pray (just like our guy in today’s lesson).  His guide told him to read Psalm 139 which begins, “Lord, you have searched me and known me.”  Our friend spent time with this text but seemed to get nowhere.

He tried spending time in chapel; he tried to “be spiritual;” he tried taking long walks in an attempt to commune with God.  He read books, he studied, he took up causes, but he just wasn’t finding it or feeling it.

            He wrote that “real prayer didn’t happen until he exhausted his own resources.”  He, eventually, had to face wounds that he couldn’t heal by himself.  He says, “Only then, in an emptiness I hadn’t chosen, did prayer from my heart ascend to God.”

            So, for him, he had to hit some sort of bottom when he could recognize that there are wounds in life that we, on our own, cannot heal; there are situations that we cannot manage ourselves; there is pain for which we cannot buy the medicine.

            Prayer is being open—open because we are empty and in need and open because we are desperate to survive the pain that life sometimes brings.  Praying is when we surrender everything to God.   Sometimes we don’t persist in prayer because we think we have everything we need.  We think we can manage it all ourselves, that we have it all together.

            When the disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, what he did, really, was teach them how to live.  Listen again to Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer:

            Father, hallowed be your name (give all the praise to God).

Your kingdom come (we wish for the time when our world is as it should be),

Give us each day our daily bread (a trusting request to God).

And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us (we ask God for something, and, in turn, we know we need to give this gift of forgiveness to all the people in our lives).

And do not bring us to the time of trial (another wish and hope).

            We who intend to live our lives with mercy and righteousness have to be persistent in prayer, persistent in forgiveness and in humility.  We pray because we want the best for ourselves, but, more importantly, we want the best for all God’s people.  So, as Jesus tells us to ask and to seek persistently, it is so that we can feel God’s presence. 

But if our seeking is just a determination to accomplish something by or for ourselves, our seeking is just our demanding that God will give us what we want, that God will be our sugar daddy.  If our seeking is only because we’re afraid of being punished by God or thought to be “not Christian enough,” then our discontent will continue to fester, and we will come away from our prayer and from the table of life still hungry.  Hungry for God, hungry for the gift of faith that we cannot provide for ourselves, hungry for the way of life spoken of in the Lord’s Prayer.

            Then, when we are hungry enough, we will begin to know that we cannot make our own spiritual food.  THAT is when we will be able to pray.  Being able to pray is not just another exercise in reading enough or doing enough research or gaining enough knowledge or saying enough prescribed prayers or going through enough of the motions or by taking the right stance on social issues or condemning those who disagree with us. 

We are able to pray, in the language of the Gospel of Luke, when we recognize that WE, too, are the poor, the blind, the sick and the oppressed—that is—we begin to know how hungry and in need we really are.

            That is when we find what the author of the newspaper article was looking for when he asked his spiritual guide (as the disciples had asked Jesus), “Teach me to pray.”

 This, of course, is a process, but it is not helped by those who would try to manipulate people’s deep needs for God for their own ends (I’m thinking of pastors who are simply feathering their own nests.  I’m thinking of politicians couching their own agendas in religious terms.  I’m thinking of those who define their whole faith journey by demanding that we think of our wonderful Biblical stories as some sort of scientific treatise.)

            This process of learning to pray is one which will take us a lifetime.  One important piece for us is to work diligently at being humble, realizing that what we need is something we cannot supply for ourselves.  But we can open ourselves to the way of life that Jesus offered to us: “Forgive our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us….”  We can be open to God’s forgiveness because we’re needy; open to others because we cannot do this alone; open to a life of prayer….

            My title “Being Persistent” comes because this word is used in the little parable that Jesus tells.   He immediately includes us in the story, making it very personal.  Jesus said, “You go to your friend at midnight and ask for 3 loaves of bread.”  Interestingly, I think we always identify with the guy who, with his family, has already gone to bed and locked the door.  We are totally sympathetic with him.  When he answers, “Don’t bother me,” we get it. 

As a result, we do not want to hear about the guy we are supposed to be identifying with, that is, the petitioner.  “I don’t get this story,” we may think, but, Jesus says, “Though that friend, the sleeper, won’t get up because he’s your friend, he will give you what you need because you persisted.” 

We are the ones who are bringing the case of our need to our friend.  We are the ones who are asking, WE are the petitioners.  We have a guest, and we have no way to show hospitality.  “Please,” we say, “may I have some bread?”  And because we persisted in expressing our need, our friend got up and gave us that bread so that we could be hospitable.  He didn’t do it because we were friends.  He did it because it was the right thing to do, …and because his friend (that’s us) persisted…. 

            “Nevertheless, she persisted,” has become a rallying cry for women whose voices have been suppressed about all kinds of things: gender pay inequities; sexual harassment finally brought to our attention and openly discussed by the MeToo movement; the U.S. Senate’s refusal to allow Senator Elizabeth Warren to read before that body a quote from Coretta Scott King that had already been read into the Senate’s minutes years ago.  She was making a case against Jeff Session’s nomination for Attorney General back in 2017 because he had been shown to be capable of racist positions on matters before courts and the Senate.  It was said of Sen. Warren, once she was asked to stop: “And yet she persisted.”  Other examples of persistent people are refugees who have taken long journeys and then, they do the hard work of starting a new life in a new country, they build their lives from the ground up.  Another example is our own David Shankland who has been inspired to sculpt 8 life-size figures of a woman who is on “The Journey” which is the title of his work.  It is about her persistence in escaping a bad situation, and it’s about his persistence in finding a way to do this important work.  These are examples of being persistent.

            Our petitioner, our persister kept pestering the guy who did not want to get up.  He did not want to get up and do this for his friend, but he did it when the friend persisted, reminding him that it was the just and right thing to do.  It is the lead-in to the famous saying about prayer that you heard as the last part of today’s lesson: Ask and it will be given you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.

            Friends, this is not a lesson about God being like a sugar daddy or an ATM.  It is about persistence in prayer regarding matters of love and justice.

            It’s not about getting whatever we dream up that we want just because we ask.  Our grandson, Calvin, is obsessed with action figures.  These are larger than you might be picturing, and there is a guy who makes You Tube videos about them, and Calvin can’t think about anything else.  So, he’s been begging Papa Rick for jobs that he can do that will make him enough money to buy these things.  He is, to say the least, very persistent, annoyingly persistent.  This is NOT what we’re talking about here. 

Instead, ask and knock is a third lesson about prayer in this text.  The first is about the way we live (where Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer appears).  The second is the parable about persistence regarding justice matters.  The third is about our being persistent in matters of love and God’s desire to be present with us whenever we ask for and need God’s presence. 

So folks…nevertheless, we must persist in matters of love, justice, prayer, our desire for the kingdom of God to come and our longing for God’s presence in our lives.  Taken all together, use this as a new approach to prayer in your own prayer life.  Because when it comes to prayer, we must persist, we must continue to ask and we must persist in seeking God’s presence.  God’s nature as our holy parent who loves us and wants to give to those in need is not the same as our requests for everything, even our unselfish requests such as for healing for our loved ones.  Rather, prayer is ultimately our worship of God, acknowledging God’s holiness.  It is where we bring our need to God in love and in faith.