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.
The second condition is that we have to ask for the right things. What has Jesus been trying to teach his disciples all this time? He’s been trying to get it through their heads that their values and goals are going to have to change if they’re to continue following him. What are their marching orders?
They have to be more righteous than the Pharisees. Their goodness should be the kind that lights up the world. They aren’t to get angry, or lust after other men’s wives (or other women’s husbands!), or break their promises, even when they haven’t sworn an oath. They can’t get even, or nurse a grudge. They have to quit chasing after money, and not even worry about where their next meal is coming from. And to top it all off, they aren’t to practice their religion in public for everyone to see and admire their surpassing virtue! No wonder the disciples despaired of living up to all of these requirements, saying later on when it finally began to sink in, “Then who can be saved?” [Mt 19:25]
The answer is, of course, no one - under their own steam. Or as Jesus put it, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.” [Mt 19:26]
And that is the context in which this passage that we are studying today has to be put. With God’s help, we can do what Jesus asks us to do, and be what Jesus asks us to be. All we have to do is ask.
So we ask... for what? I got a real gem emailed to me not too long ago...
? I asked God to take away my pain.
God said, No. It is not for me to take away, but for you to give it up.
? I asked God to grant me patience.
God said, No. Patience is a by-product of tribulations; it isn’t granted, it is earned.
? I asked God to give me happiness.
God said, No. I give you blessings, happiness is up to you.
? I asked God to spare me pain.
God said, No. Suffering draws you apart from worldly cares and brings you closer to me.
? I asked God to make my spirit grow.
God said, No. You must grow on your own, but I will prune you to make you fruitful.
? I asked for all things that I might enjoy life.
God said, No. I will give you life so that you may enjoy all things.
? I asked God to help me love others as much as He loves me.
God said..............Ahhh, finally! you have the idea.
So does that mean we aren’t supposed to go directly to God with everything that’s on our hearts and minds, but carefully check them first so that we don’t ask for something unworthy of our concern or his attention? No. That’s not the lesson we’re to take away from this. God can’t do anything with us if we only tell him what we think he wants to hear. But if we always tell God the truth then he can bring us to a deeper, better truth.
The point is that whatever the answer is, God is there in it ... teaching us something, guiding us somewhere. There is only silence because we haven’t learned to hear.
The first step is to Ask... because it will be given to you.
The next step is to Seek... open your eyes, and learn to see God in a new way, as he really is, though, not as we would like him to be. When we pray, “Give me strength”, God assigns us free weights and aerobics. When we pray, “God, please take away the thorn in my flesh,” he answers us, as he did Paul, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” [2 Cor 12:9]
God answers our prayer by giving us what we need to grow more like Jesus. And he does this instead of giving us what we think we want because he loves us.
"Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake?" [Mt 7:9-10]
Remember when your children were growing up? When your child asked for candy, sometimes you gave it to her, but didn’t you more often steer her to something that’s good for her instead? If your child asked for an R-rated movie, didn’t you get him a G or maybe a PG one instead? If they want to stay out late on a school night, didn’t you insist that they come in at a decent hour?'
"If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!" [Mt 7:11]
So if God seems hidden, maybe we’re not looking in the right place, or maybe we expect him to look more like us. God isn’t like us. He’s different. And so we have to move to a different place, stand at a different angle, look from a different perspective, before we can find God in the answer.
Are any of you familiar with a kind of optical illusion they used to have in the comics section of the newspaper, where an image is hidden until you hold the paper at just the right angle, at just the right distance from your eyes before it springs into focus? I had a friend who could get it right off the bat every time - but then, she’d been practicing. I never got very good at it.
That’s what we have to do. We have to learn to see differently. And the place to stand to get the best view is right next to Jesus. In fact, if we can sort of try to climb inside Jesus’ skin, that’s the best vantage point of all. Paul puts it more elegantly - we’re to “clothe ourselves in Christ.” [Gal 3:7]
And the last step is to knock. When at last we do start to get a glimpse of what God is up to, then we ask to come into his presence and talk with him. And he will be there.
