My wife has been working diligently for many months to compile the genealogical histories of our families. She’s traced Fields, and Bendens, and Arbuthnots, and Delashmuts, and Cellas, and Cassarinos, and other lines too many to mention. She’s really “into it,” as they say. She’s found out that I’m Irish, Dutch, French/German, English, Native American (maybe), and at least half a dozen other ethnic groups. I’m a melting pot. She’s all Italian, as far as we can tell. Nothing but. I’m a mutt, she’s a purebred . . . but you probably already figured that out!
We have a family, she and I, and it goes back quite a way. I’m proud to know more about my roots now than when she started. I have a greater sense of belonging to my historic family.
But what does talking about being part of a particular family have to do with today’s Gospel? If we look at the Gospel only in a literal sense, then the answer is, “Probably not much.” If we look at it only literally, we’ll be tempted to say that this Gospel gives us two things: 1.) the exact words of a prayer to repeat over and over, and 2.) the understanding that all we have to do is pray hard enough and persistently enough and we can nag God into giving us whatever we want.
Understanding today’s Gospel that way leads to frustration because we’ll eventually knock up against the hard things in life, and in those circumstances, we might find, "I asked, but I didn’t receive. I knocked but that door wasn’t opened."
So . . . we have to realize that this reading isn’t just a "how-to" reading. It’s not intended to give us a sure-fired formula to use when we want or need something. It’s not about nagging God with the right requests, the right stock phrase, or the right procedure. To see what it is, we need to look deeper at these verses in their context in Luke’s Gospel, and then we’ll see that there’s a whole lot more going on here.
The 13 verses in today’s Gospel are just a brushstroke in the Gospel writer’s masterpiece portrait, and when seen as part of that greater whole, they tell us something very important about what it means to be a part of God’s family . . . what it means to be the people of God.
Do you remember the other Gospel lections we’ve read the past two Sundays? Let me review. Two weeks ago, we heard the parable of the Good Samaritan, which reminded us that it’s our actions, our works, and the way we treat others that proves whether we’re living in the kingdom of
God or not. We live life a certain way, make certain choices, and carry out our daily tasks in a certain way and that shows we understand Jesus’ lessons about how his followers ought to act.
Then last week, we heard again the story of Martha and Mary. Jesus was not putting one sister above the other. In the midst of a complex and multi-leveled dynamic, he was reminding us that we must constantly renew and strengthen ourselves to do God’s will by listening to God’s word and sharing together in prayer, just as we’re doing right now.
That sets the stage for today’s Gospel where Jesus again teaches on the meaning of discipleship. Note, if you will; the disciples want to learn. They’ve heard him teach others; they’ve heard him speak to Martha and Mary. Now they want him to teach them to pray. And that’s where things get interesting.
The New RSV translates Jesus’ introduction to his answer as, "When you pray, say . . . " But remember! What we read this morning is a translation of a Greek text. The Greek could just as correctly be translated, "When you pray, you are saying . . ." Doesn’t that give you something to think about? What Jesus was giving us was an interpretation of sound prayer, the attitude for Godly prayer, just as much as a prayer to repeat rote.
Jesus was talking to Jews, and the prayer we’ve come to call "the Lord’s Prayer" isn’t an exclusively Christian prayer. Any devout Jew could pray these same words without qualms. Perhaps, Jesus was reminding his followers that they already knew how to pray. Indeed, they’d been doing it all their lives. Perhaps, his answer to their request was just an attempt to renew their conscious understanding of what they’d been praying all along, but which might have lost its spiritual vigor by becoming too familiar.
Then he went on to give them an example of how prayer ought to affect us.
Now, we must not make the mistake of turning the neighbor-banging-on-the-door-to-get-bread story into an allegory. We can’t make God the neighbor and us the person who comes banging in the middle of the night. That’s how we could get the erroneous notion that God can be nagged into doing what we ask, and that’s not the point of the story. The point is that, if we are members of God’s family, we’re bound to act in a certain way.
Take a good look at the verses we’ve turned into contemporary hymns. The Gospel says, "Ask and it will be given to you." Ask whom? "Seek, and you will find." Seek where? "Knock and it will be opened." Knock where? Too often we say blithely, "God is the answer," and then we try to set things up as a me-and-Jesus vertical line.
But it’s also horizontal. We all have to be a part of this prayer. We’re all a part of this family, so we need to understand that sometimes we are going to be the ones who are asked for bread a midnight, and we are going to be the ones sought out by the needy, and we are the ones who must open our doors. Imagine the power of that openness. What if our doors and our hearts were truly and completely opened, not only to needy people outside the church, but to each other inside the church, giving and receiving the same kind of love Jesus modeled for us? If we can say that this is really who we are, then we’re living into this Gospel’s intent as people of God who happen to be Christians, who happen to be Episcopalians, and who happen to live and work in this place.
So this Gospel may be doing for you what it was doing for Jesus’ hearers. It may be reminding you that, yes, this is how we pray; nothing outlandish or extraordinary is needed. But we do need to keep our prayer always before us. We need to remember that God is the holy One, and—while God does provide— his holiness calls us to reach out to others and mirror God to them. We need to forgive and be forgiven. We need to remember that, however good we are, we fail and are sinners, all of us, but God forgives. If God forgives us, and we are God’s people, then oughtn’t we forgive each other? When we are open to the unconditional forgiveness of God, then we will become known as a people who welcome the stranger and the sinner.
So it’s exciting, really! Like Jesus’ prayer, we reflect the whole of the Gospel of Luke. We might see ourselves sometimes as Samaritans, sometimes as Marthas or Marys, even sometimes as priests and Levites, but above all we should see that we’re a community of faith. We’re people of prayer living in the kingdom of God.
This kingdom, as Jesus constantly taught, is here . . . now! In our baptism—the baptism we’ll share with three children in just a few moments—we’ve promised to live a different life, the type of life God would live, the kind of life God did live in Jesus. A life that looks to God through praying together and reading Scriptures, through worship in our Prayer Book tradition, and through our sharing in the Eucharist and the other Sacraments. It’s not an easy life, but as Paul said in Colossians, "As you . . . have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving."
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
