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The Eighth Sunday after Pentecost, July 29, 2007 Preached at by Pastor Dennis R. King "Jesus Teaches Us to Pray!" Luke 11:1-11 The Grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ, be with you all. Amen! The prayers you offer in public may not always be the prayers you offer in private. It is possible to pray out loud for peace, while in private what you really want is warfare in which you come out unscathed and victorious. You can pray aloud for humility and forgiveness, while in private your real desire is for revenge and vindication. David Head once wrote a book containing what he called “prayers for the natural man,” in which he disclosed what people really desire many times in private. Here are some examples of his “prayers for the natural man.” “Lord, if I can get away with it this time, I promise I’ll never steal again. Amen.” “Bless all foreigners, dear Lord, but don’t let them come live next door. Amen.” “Lord, I have every intention of repenting before I die. Amen.” In today’s Gospel, Jesus offers His disciples a model for prayer and then He illustrates it with a story about a man who awakens his neighbor in the middle of the night in order to borrow three loaves of bread. To understand what Jesus means by prayer, we begin with His illustration. The neighbor who is awakened in the middle of the night tells the man to go away and leave him alone. But the man persists. And so we can imagine the neighbor climbing out of bed, grumbling, putting on his robe, bumping into furniture in the dark, fumbling and banging around the kitchen, and finally opening the door and thrusting three loaves of bread into the hands of the man waiting there, and saying, ‘Now go away and leave me alone!” Notice that the man gets what he wants from his neighbor. But suppose the man gets it wrong. Suppose he thinks he needs eggs instead of bread, and asks for eggs. Then when he gets home, he finds that he only got more of something he already has. Or suppose he goes to the house of a neighbor who has no bread and cannot help him at all. Or suppose he is too bashful to knock on the door once he gets to his neighbor’s house, and so he just stands there unable to bring himself to ask for what he wants. What makes it all work is the fact that the man knows what he needs, he goes to a neighbor who has it, and he keeps knocking on the door until he get it. Here is a summary of how Jesus wants us to pray to our Heavenly Father! First of
all, we identify what we actually need. Now, that isn’t always the same as
what we might want. As human beings we might want all sorts of things, like
the ability to steal just one more time without getting caught. But as
beloved children of God, we know better than that. If it’s bread we need, we
don’t ask for eggs. If it’s righteousness we need, we don’t ask for the
license to practice immorality. If it’s the In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus identifies our needs. And notice, in that prayer it is God’s name, and not ours, that is to be hallowed. It is God’s kingdom, and not any earthly kingdom of ours, that is to come. Of course that doesn’t rule out respect for the name and reputation of every human being. Nor does it rule out the exercise of political power on earth. But it does set priorities. God’s name comes first, and the coming of His Kingdom takes precedence over the rise and fall of all kingdoms in this world. We live in a time when the name of God is increasingly taken in vain and not hallowed at all. Literature, prime time radio and television programs, and movies not only contain vulgar language and ever more vulgar situations, but they also use the simple word, God, over and over again in order to emphasize emotions. Even in daily conversations I hear people who do not consciously intend any disrespect for God punctuating their speech with phrases like, “God, I was angry about that” or “Oh my God!” Taking God’s name in vain does not just mean deliberately insulting or cursing God. It also means using the word, God, so often and so idly that the word becomes trivial and no longer holds any meaning. So, like the proverbial boy who cried “wolf,” when you face a life-and-death crisis and you cry out, “Oh God!” you ought not be surprised at all if you were to hear an angelic laughing at your dilemma. If you constantly treat the name of God casually, then what happens when you try to address God seriously? In much
the same way we pray that God’s kingdoms will come. As much as we may care
about whether a Republican or Democrat gets elected to a particular office,
the fact is that neither party will usher in the The man in the story Jesus told identified his need for bread. Then he went to a neighbor who had what he needed. In the same way we know our need for hallowing God’s name and our need for His Kingdom to come. And we go to the only one who can give us what we need: God Himself. No human being, no social institution can give us these things. God alone can meet these needs. So we pray to God and trust him, knowing that there is no other who can give us what we truly need. Finally, the man in the story is persistent in asking his neighbor for what he needs. He doesn’t go to his neighbor’s door and just stand there, too embarrassed to ask for what he wants. He keeps knocking on the door until his request is granted. We, too, are to be persistent in our prayers to God. We insist that God’s name be hallowed and that His Kingdom come. We also insist that we receive each day our daily bread and that we be forgiven our sins just as we forgive the sins of others. And we insist that we not be brought into those kinds of extreme trials and ordeals in which we are tempted to defect from our faith in God. All of these petitions in the Lord’s Prayer are based on the assumption that we are in need of something we cannot provide for ourselves. Just as the man in the story found that he had no bread that night, so also our prayer to God begins with the acknowledgment that we lack something important that God has. Our prayer is not based on our sufficiency, but on our deficiency. Further, prayer is persistent. We know that God’s timing is not our timing. We know that sometimes God withholds from us what we think we want, in order to give us what we really need. That should teach us patience with God. But it should never become an excuse for us to turn away from God after a few knocks at the door. Nor should it become a reason for never even going to the door in the first place. We pray persistently; that’s our job. God grants what we need when he sees fit to grant it; that’s His job. And the promise is that our asking, our searching, and our knocking at God’s door will not be in vain. If a grumpy neighbor gives out bread at midnight, and if parents give their children fish and not snakes, eggs and not scorpions, when they are hungry, than all the more we can expect God to give us His Holy Spirit when we ask Him for help. We may not get everything we want when we want it, but God in His goodness and mercy will give us everything we need when we need it. Our confidence that this is true is boldly stated in the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer: Our Father. For when we say Our Father, we identify our need as His children; we show our trust that God can fulfill that need, and we position ourselves at the very door to the Kingdom of Heaven, a door that God will open to us fully when the right time has come. Amen.
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