Hide And Seek

One Sunday morning a little girl in her Sunday best was running so she wouldn’t be late for church. Maybe it was daylight savings time.... As she ran she kept praying, “Dear God, please don’t let me be late to church. Please don’t let me be late to church...” As she was running she tripped and fell. When she got back up she began praying again... “Please, God don’t let me be late to church - but don’t shove me either!”

We always have some sort of outcome in mind when we pray, don’t we? And often when God answers us in a different way than we expected, we are surprised, sometimes upset, sometimes even angry. Back before I became a Christian, I was seriously dating a Christian man, and just as I discovered that I wanted to be a Christian too, God took the man out of my life and left me alone with him, yelling, “Bait and switch! You’re not fair!”

Sometimes we ask God for the same things over and over, and don’t seem to get any answer. And so we may tell ourselves that “sometimes the answer is "no,” and drop the item from our prayer list, especially when it’s something we’re asking for ourselves. But on the other hand, Jesus does teach us to persevere in prayer. There’s a parable about a poor widow importuning an unjust judge, with the lesson that if an unjust human being will answer a petition just to get the person off their back, how much more quickly will God, who IS just, respond to our pleas. What is the answer? How are we supposed to pray? What are we supposed to pray for?

The Lord’s Prayer is what Jesus responded with when his disciples asked him how to pray. But apparently that’s not the last word on the subject, because here it is again. Is his answer any different than it was the first time? Let’s take a look.

"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." [Mt 7:7-8]

That seems to say that the answers to our prayers will always be “yes.” But experience teaches us that such is not the case. So what are we to make of this?

There’s a wonderful book called Providence and Prayer: How Does God Work in The World? by Terrance Tiessen. In it he grapples with this thorny business of understanding how our prayers and God’s care for us and the rest of his creation fit together. There’s a whole long spectrum of theories about the relationship between our prayers and God’s acts; Tiessen sorts them according to how much of the everyday details of our lives God gets involved in, from the watchmaker theory on one end - you know, God made the world with orderly and predictable rules, and then stood back and let it run itself - and on the other end the classic ultra-Reformed view that God not only knows every hair on our heads, he also decides when they’re going to fall out.

Which reminds me of the old joke about the Presbyterian who, when he fell down the stairs, said, “Whew, I’m glad that’s over.”

I haven’t finished the book yet, so I can’t tell you how it ends. But the author does believe that God answers our prayers. And so do I. I believe that we are to take this passage seriously, in the sense in which it is meant, and understand them as God’s promises to his children that he will provide for them. But it’s conditional.

In order to interpret this particular passage of Scripture, we have to read it in context, as part of the whole lesson that Jesus is teaching on how to be an effective and fruitful disciple.

Do you remember what Matthew’s Gospel starts with? The Beatitudes? The first big lesson of the Beatitudes was to recognize our dependence on God. We have to be “poor in spirit;” we have to “hunger and thirst after righteousness.”

So the first condition is that we have to ask, and we have to keep on asking every day, because our dependence on God is a daily - even an hourly - reality. We have to ask in the right spirit, too, in humility and dependence and trust. Neither the attitude nor the habit are easily come by, and it takes practice. So don’t worry. For some of us the humility is the hard part; for others it’s the trust. For some of us it’s the dependency that takes some getting used to; after all, in our culture independence is highly esteemed - above rubies, in fact, to steal a phrase from Proverbs.