Luke 11:1-13
July 25, 2010
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Some people deserve more admiration than they receive—nurses, foster parents, public school teachers, hotel maids, maintenance workers and janitors. Advisors and chaperones who accompany young people from Norway to San Francisco deserve more admiration than they receive.
The people who deserve more admiration than they receive are people who keep coming to church. In the middle of the summer, society sends a permission message for you to skip church and go on vacation or stay at home for a leisurely and relaxing morning. San Francisco makes it hard for you to come to church when it’s the marathon. But you are here at church.
Some of you got up very early to get going on Sunday morning. Most of you put on your Sunday best. Some of you get children ready. Some of you drive pretty far—over an hour away to be here. We keep at it. Some of you have flown across the Atlantic Ocean and transverse the North American continent to be here this morning. We go to all this trouble and then, much of the time, our reward is hearing what we are doing wrong.
Now you might think that you are the target of what is wrong but we as preachers get especially tired of repeating what Jesus says we ought to be doing too. We wish there were more Sundays when the text is Jesus saying, “You’re fine the way you are. Don’t change a thing. You’re just perfect.”
Instead, we come to church and are told to share the story of Jesus with our neighbors, but we have trouble remembering the neighbor’s names. Is it Lila or Helga? We come and hear that we should care for strangers, but it is hard enough to care for the people we live with. We come to church and God calls us to love the whole world, but the world is not always loveable.
Coming to church is demanding, and yet you keep showing up. How can you not admire that? Following Jesus is hard. Jesus is overwhelming. Nobody is going to be mistaking any of us for Jesus any time soon.
But people like us who try to live for Christ have good reasons to be discouraged. The needs of the world are so big and our resources so limited. You who will be attending the BWA meetings will soon discover that the problems of the world are so vast that we are often left with a sense of futility.
If we love the world the way God calls us to love the world, our hearts will end up broken, because the world does not seem to be getting better. Jesus commands us to be peacemakers, so it is discouraging that the United States is still waging two wars.
Just as it is difficult to follow Jesus today, it was difficult for the disciples to follow Jesus in our passage for this morning. The disciples have been wandering around the countryside for three years. They never knew where their next meal was coming from. In what Jesus was saying, they were making powerful enemies. Jesus says that the kingdom is coming, but all the disciples saw coming were more problems. It was frightening, and it was about to get worse. Their list of unanswered prayers was getting longer.
Teach Us to Pray
After Jesus finishes praying, one of the disciples asks, “Would you teach us to pray?”
He answers, “When you pray, say, Father, let us hallow your name by the way we live as well as by the words we speak. Let your kingdom come. Set the world right. Keep us all alive with three good meals. Keep forgiving us and we’ll keep forgiving everyone else. Keep us safe from ourselves and all evil.”
The disciples must have thought, “He’s not making this any easier. We’ve been praying for God to set the world right and it isn’t happening. Forgiving everyone is way too much to ask. Keeping our distance from all evil doesn’t sound like much fun either.”
Jesus tries again, “Think of prayer this way. Suppose a friend shows up unexpectedly at midnight. He’s been on the road all day and half the night with nothing to eat, so what are you going to do? You’re going to get up and put something on the table. But what if you don’t have anything? The refrigerator is empty. The cupboard is bare.”
“Across the street is a typical first century Palestinian friend bedded down in his one room house. Mom and Dad, the children, animals are all sleeping in the same room.”
“The friend answers from his bed, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is locked. My children are down for the night. Go home.’ But you keep pounding on the door. Even if he won’t get up because he’s a friend, he’ll finally get up and give you bread because if you keep knocking you’ll wake up the dog and then everyone is finished sleeping for the night.”
Jesus’ point is that the Christian life is about perseverance. Keep at it. Keep praying what you believe are God’s hopes and even if nothing comes, keep praying again and again.
Jesus wants to make it clearer, “Here’s what I’m saying. Ask and you’ll get. Seek and you’ll find. Knock and the door will open. Ask God for what the world needs. If your little boy asks for fish, do you scare him with a snake? If your little girl asks for an egg, do you trick her with a scorpion? As bad as you are, you wouldn’t think of such terrible things.”
But these words can be discouraging, too. If we pray believing we will receive what we ask for, then it may be hard to keep praying when we do not. Sometimes when our prayers do not get answered, it is easier not to pray at all.
But then Jesus says, “Don’t you think God who loves you will give the Spirit when you ask?”
Prayer Friend
One of the ways that we can keep at it and become persistent in praying is to have a friend in prayer. It’s the Holy Spirit who gathers us into becoming friends in Christ. In the parable that Jesus told, the man who needed bread to fulfill his obligation to host a tired traveler was based on his friendship with his already in bed friend.
Do you know what it is to have a friend? What is that like? Someone you can just enjoy being with, just be with. Someone you can talk to. Someone you can be silent with. Someone you can share your hopes, your dreams, your fears.
When you’re with a friend talking about your hopes, all the dreams grow better and bolder and more imaginative and seem more possible than ever. When you talk about your fears they don’t seem as dark and awful as they did before. That is the way it is with a friend.
When you are with a friend, you are more yourself. You feel better about yourself. More alive, stronger. You remember who you really are. Alone you forget so many things and so many things confuse you and cause you to lose your way. With a friend you remember who you are and why you are and where you are going and what it all matters. Being with friends reminds you of things like that.
Sometimes you say something incredibly stupid or you do something incredibly stupid, and friends forgive you for being incredibly stupid. Sometimes the relationship grows stronger because of that brokenness and the healing that follows. Friendships, like people, grow strong at the broken places.
At times when you might be saying to yourself, “I don’t know anyone I can talk to about this” could these also be times for prayer?
From this parable of these two neighbors, we see that their friendship allowed them to have the neighbor’s needs met. When he was persistent in making his requests known, the neighbor took care of his needs.
What would happen if we count God as our best friend? Would you share your hopes, dreams, and fears with God? When you are with God, might you feel better about yourself, more alive and stronger? When you are a friend with God, God will help you see whose you are, why you are who you are and where you might be going with your life. When we keep at being with God and having God as our best friend, we are doing what Jesus is teaching us to do—Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be open for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”
Keep at It
Every Sunday, we pray the Lord’s Prayer as Jesus first taught his disciples. We pray it even if you have not memorized it. We have the pastoral or corporate prayer when we hear your prayer petitions and thanksgiving even if you haven’t prayed all week. When I hear about a concern that you may have or when I visit you in the hospital and offer a prayer for you even when you may not have the energy or hope in your heart to pray, we keep at it.
We keep at it because Jesus promises that God will be with us. We work for what is right, because those who are buried with Christ in baptism will be raised by the power of God. We pray and do not give up, because God will take care of it all in the end.
We pray because changing the world is ultimately not our business. It is God’s. Our business is to live a life of charity and love, do works of compassion, and know that the ultimate outcome is in God’s hands. Our business is to do what we can, where we can, when we can, to witness God’s kingdom is coming, bit-by-bit, step-by-step until it’s here.
When we pray, it is not to inform God what needs to be done. Prayer is taking our place with God no matter what comes. When God is our friend like the way we relate to our human friends, we share with God our hopes, dreams and fears knowing that whatever happens, God will take care of all of it in the end.
The American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr was preaching for a vacationing pastor in New England during the Second World War. Following the sermon Niebuhr prayed a brief little prayer, something he scribbled down in the study before he came into the sanctuary. Afterwards, a worshiper approached Niebuhr telling him how much that prayer had meant. Niebuhr thinking nothing of it, pulled out of his Bible the little scrap of paper and gave it to him. The next year that worshiper used that prayer in his Christmas cards. Others picked it up and used it and reused it until it has become undoubtedly one of the best-known prayers in this country. As soon as I speak the words, you will recognize it; some of you know it by heart.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference.
Just a few words scratched out on a summer morning, but the right words make such a difference. Later, after the prayer was so widely published, Niebuhr himself was not even sure whether he had composed it himself or remembered it from somewhere else. Was it his? Someone else’s? To whom does a prayer belong?
It’s our prayer. The act of praying it aloud gives it to us. It is our prayer because there is no man, no woman who cannot pray.
So in the middle of the summer, I admire you for being here and keeping at it. I admire the Norwegian choir for being here and keeping at it and that you will remain following Jesus when you are in Hawaii. As a preacher, I am happy to say that you do deserve more attention than you receive for keeping at it, persistently praying to God and making him your friend.
Let us pray.
Thank you, dear God for teaching us how to pray and when times discourage us, we pray that we will know you as our friend whom we can share our hopes, dreams, and fears. We will keep praying to you because you in Christ have not given up on us. Help us never to lose heart in our attempts to pray because you have taught us that in the end, you will take care of it all. In Christ, we pray. Amen.