Luke 11:1-13
July 25, 2004
Sermon preached by Rev. Donald Ng at the First Chinese Baptist Church in San Francisco.
Some of our youth and young adults went to Estes Park, Colorado last week to attend the national gathering of American Baptist youth where 1800 people attended. There’s a picture of the conference in the vestibule for you to find our youth. The background of the picture is the Rocky Mountains where the elevation is over 14,000 feet.
There’s a story about Sir Edmund Hillary who was the first man to successfully climb Mount Everest on May 29, 1953. It was 29,000 feet straight up. He was knighted for his efforts. He made an American Express commercial because of it! But before he successfully climbed Mount Everest in 1953, his attempt in 1952 failed.
A few weeks after his 1952 failed attempt, Hillary was invited to speak to a group in England for his efforts. The audience gave him a thunderous applause recognizing his attempt at greatness. But Edmund Hillary saw himself as a failure. He moved away from the microphone and walked to the edge of the platform. He made a fist and pointed at the picture of the mountain. He said in a loud voice, “Mount Everest, you beat me the first time, but I’ll beat you the next time because you’ve grown all you are going to grow…but I’m still growing!”
Only when we are persistent and persevere in what we strive for would we reach our goals.
Persistence
Most of the time, we stress what God in Christ has done and will do for us for our salvation. We are saved by grace; that is, we are saved not by anything that we do, but by what God does. We can do nothing to add to our salvation in Jesus Christ. Think about it. Is there anything that we can do to add to the ultimate sacrifice of Christ on the Cross? All we can do is to receive it, accept it, and give thanks for it.
That being said, we see in this Scripture lesson that Jesus has a word for us about persistence. Even though we have received salvation from God’s grace, we still need to be persistent, striving to reach a goal. When his disciples saw Jesus praying, they asked him to teach them how to pray.
In response, Jesus tells a parable about a very persistent intruder at midnight. Jesus calls him a “friend,” but anyone, friend or not, who bangs on your door in the middle of the night seems more like an intruder to me. The man banging on the door says that he is in a desperate fix. A friend of his has arrived at his house in the middle of the night, probably hungry after a long trip, and he discovered that he had nothing for him to eat. So he goes to the house of this other friend who’s already in bed to ask for some bread.
I wonder who the man banging on the door thought his real friend is. Is it the one who drops by at midnight asking for bread to eat or is it the one who he rudely wakes up sound asleep with his family in bed?
For us moderns, this doesn’t sound like a serious problem. We have 7-Elevens or 24-hr. supermarkets to buy bread. But for first-century Palestine, it was a serious problem because whether you were rich or poor, bread was at the heart of the diet and it was hard to come by.
Hospitality requires that any guest arriving at one’s home be offered something to eat. And unlike round the clock supermarkets or convenient bread machines that greet you with fresh bread in the morning, providing the day’s supply of bread for one’s family was a project of considerable labor. Several hours of grinding would be needed to prepare the flour, and that part of the task would usually have been done late in the day. On the following morning the prepared dough would be brought down to the village baker to be baked. Without preservatives, the bread would have had to be baked fresh each day, or at least every other day.
So do we blame the friend who is already in bed with his family in his one-room house to say, “Get lost, and don’t bother me! I can’t get up in the middle of the night and waking up my whole family just because you ran out of bread.”
But this man is not easily put off. He keeps banging on the door, calling him, leaving messages on his answering machine, in short, making a general nuisance of himself until finally the man, though he cares little about the dilemma of his friend who would like to be a good host, goes out of his way in the middle of the night and give this man what he wants so that he can get back to sleep.
Jesus says that we ought to be like the man banging on the door when it comes to prayer.
Persistent Prayer
This is rather a disturbing parable for us. Is God like the man who doesn’t like to be bothered at midnight with our needs and requires constant banging on his door before we can get his attention? Is praying to God like that?
First, let us agree that prayer is more than the words that we say to God. Prayer is all the things that we do and say when we are in our relationship with God. In fact, our relationship with God is prayer. Let’s look at the prayer that Jesus taught us to say.
Jesus taught us that when we pray, we call God, “Father.” This is an expression of intimacy and familiarity and that we can ask and trust God for bread, for forgiveness, and for deliverance. God hears and answers our prayers as a loving parent. We have a personal relationship with God here.
But there is one important dimension to these requests that we need to keep in mind—all appeals need to be consistent with the words, “Your kingdom done.” God will only grant requests that conform to the priorities of his kingdom of love and peace and justice.
Although we ask for daily bread for the nourishment that we need each day or bread to extend hospitality to the intruder at midnight, we don’t live by bread alone. We also need forgiveness, a gift that is as necessary to our well-being as basic food and water. Without this gift from God, we would gradually be crushed by the burden of our guilt, a load that grows higher and heavier with every sin that we commit. Without forgiveness, we would lose all hope for the future and sink into deep despair. But with this gift come release and renewal, inspiration and encouragement, an assurance of pardon and a deep sense of peace. It’s a relationship with God that counts.
This forgiveness from God also gives us the ability to “forgive everyone indebted to us.” In fact, the two are not to be separated, since they are part of the same heavenly package. If we truly want God’s kingdom to come and have that relationship that God wants with us, we are going to want to show the same mercy to others that the Lord shows to us.
Then Jesus teaches us to pray that our Father will “not bring us to a time of trial.” In the long history of God’s people, we know that there have been many times of testing—the testing of Job in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New, the testing of the Israelites in the wilderness and the church in today’s highly secular society.
But fortunately, when we face times of testing, Jesus teaches us to pray for deliverance, asking God to protect us from anyone or anything that can endanger our bodies, our minds, or spirits or our relationship with God himself.
So when we pray, Jesus encourages us by the telling of this parable that we pray persistently. To have a relationship with God, we need to pray persistently. But some of us feel that we don’t have a relationship with God at all.
Distant from God
Let’s remember again that 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 us, lived among us, suffered for us, and died for us, 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? This parable teaches us what our part is. We are saved by God’s grace, not by our work. But when it comes to our part of the deal we are to pray persistently. But when we don’t pray to God, we blame God for being distant from us when it is actually the other way around. When we are not persistently praying to God, it is we who become distant from God.
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.
When people say that God is distant from them, I wonder how often they participate in the worship of the church. Do they ever read the Bible or seek God’s word for their lives? Do they ever pray?
Here’s a modern parable for you. A man and a woman were married. They promised, as people do in marriage, to be together forever, no matter what. Shortly after their honeymoon, the man went on a long trip. He left town and left no forwarding address. His young wife never heard from him again. Ten years later, he shows back up in town. He went to his wife and planned to resume married life just as they had after their honeymoon. And yet to his surprise, his wife hardly recognized him. She had already had their marriage annulled, and was now married to another man.
“Why don’t you love me anymore?” he protested. “Why have you forsaken me? Why have you broken our marriage promises?” When we are so distant from God and stopped trying to maintain a persistent relationship with him, how can we expect to know God?
How about when someone is touched by the death of someone they loved. This person has never been to a funeral, has never heard what the church does and says at the time of death. That person would be at a disadvantage when it comes to grief. The person would lack experience with grief and would not know what to think or say about death. How can anyone really deal with the end of life without knowing God’s promise of eternal life?
Now contrast this person who has never heard what the church says about grief and death with someone who has. How about someone who lost a loved one unexpectedly and suddenly? I rush over to her house and she meets me at the door. She’s in tears, to be sure, but she says to me, “This is terrible. But I feel as if I have been preparing for this moment for most of my life.”
And she is right. It was as if she sat through months of Sundays, heard dozens of sermons about Christians and how they deal with life’s tragedies, as if she were in training for an event of this magnitude.
Or how about someone who was unexpectedly fired from her job? This threw her into economic distress and terrible emotional turmoil. She suffered depression and even needed to be institutionalized where she can get some professional care for a couple of weeks. She gets a visit from a friend from the church. After visiting this woman in the hospital, the friend said, “Poor thing. When it came time for her to let down her bucket, to go deep down, she found out that she had no water in the well.”
There are those moments in life that require us to “let down our bucket,” so that we can return to the wellsprings of hope and courage. We expect when we go to the ATM machine to take out some money that there’s money there to take out. There are times when we need emotional and spiritual resources to draw upon.
Therefore we need to pray persistently to have a personal relationship with God.
Persistent at Church
It has been five weeks that I have been behind this pulpit. I’ve been on vacation, at the church retreat, and preaching at the new 9:30 service. Even though I haven’t been here, have you been here?
When we come to church, we need to come persistently. You will notice that in church, despite the variation in our four Sunday services, 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. When we recite the Lord’s Prayer Sunday after Sunday whether it’s at the services in the sanctuary or over at the recreation center or at the church retreat, we are forming good habits and meaningful rituals.
There are some times that I know that my message didn’t do anything for you. I see you dozing off. You are most polite when you say, “Thank you, but I was real tire today.” There are times when I fail to be relevant to where you are.
But there are also times when we need to ask ourselves the question, “What makes me think that every Sunday, right on cue, the service is tailor made for me?” Sometimes, the Sunday morning may be a time for your neighbor to worship while you sit by, listening in, giving encouragement, while you wait for another Sunday to be “yours.” Not every hymn can be the one you need to sing and to hear. Not every sermon can be specifically addressed to you.
Persistence means to keep at it. In 52 Sundays a year, if we keep at it, there will be Sundays enough when we will hear our name called, a Sunday when we feel that our need has been addressed.
We come to church on Sunday to learn and adopt new rituals and allowing ourselves to be formed by these rituals. So that when those moments in life come when we grieve over the lost of loved ones, when life gets out of kilter for us, when we are depressed and distressed, we would be able to draw upon these habits and rituals and know that deep down there’s a wellspring of hope and courage.
We live in a society of instant gratification. We get things fixed right away. There are people who think that they can get the Christian faith in a weekend. But when we think about a relationship with God, there’s no quick payoff.
Think about the friends that you have. One of the reasons why some people have so few friends is that friendship takes time. You can’t expect one encounter is all you need to become good friends. There must be hours, years of being with one another, hanging out together, conversing with one another, hearing stories about life, and exploring the richness of another human being. You can’t have a really good friend overnight. It requires time. It requires persistence. The same is true in regard to our friendship with God.
God is totally available to us. But we, due to our sin, our distractions, the numerous cares of the world, are not totally available to God. We must keep focusing, listening, tuning in our souls to God’s gracious wishes to be among us. We must keep praying to God, Sunday after Sunday until our relationship with him is one of a very good friend.
When we are persistently praying to God, God won’t give us a snake if we ask for a fish, won’t give us a scorpion when we ask for an egg. What parent would give something bad or harmful to a child who has asked for something good? None. When we come to God, our Father and pray persistently in doing our part in having a relationship with the Lord, we will receive much more through the Holy Spirit.
Be a Flame
Once upon a time there was a piece of iron which was very strong. One after another, the ax, the saw, the hammer and the flame tried to break it.
“I’ll master it,” said the ax. Its blows fell heavily on the iron, but every blow made its edge more blunt until it cease to strike.
“Leave it up to me,” said the saw; and it worked backward and forward on the iron’s surface until its jagged teeth were all worn and broken. Then it fell aside.
“Ah!” said the hammer. “I knew you wouldn’t succeed. I’ll show you the way.” But at the first fierce blow, off flew its head and the iron remained as before.
“Shall I try?” ask the small soft flame.
“Forget it,” all replied. “What can you do?”
But the flame curled around the iron, embraced it, and never left the iron until it melted under the flame’s irresistible influence.
We may able to climb Mount Everest. We may stay married for a lifetime. We may have the same job for all our working years. And we can have a lifelong relationship with God in Jesus Christ as long as we are persistent.
Let us pray.
Dear God, teach us to pray persistently to you because we want to know you as our friend and your people. Help us to grow closer in knowing you through Jesus Christ our Lord and Savior as the way, truth, and life. Grant us your peace today. Amen.