Proper 12C / Ordinary 17C / Pentecost +7 July 28, 2019
Luther Memorial Lutheran Church Seattle, WA
The Rev. Julie Hutson
Beloved, grace and peace are yours through the Triune God. Amen.
I looked in the mailbox about a week after our group had returned from Holden Village. There it was. Marked in large letters: “RETURN TO SENDER”.
I had sent the card to my high school friend the day before leaving for Holden, knowing that I would be unable to communicate with her through Facebook Messenger, which was her preferred method of keeping in touch, and our favorite method of witnessing her zest for life.
In the little Alabama town where I grew up, Brenda had become known as the Queen. She ruled over the town, not with judgment, but with joy and sass. For awhile she worked in the county courthouse office where you get your license car tabs renewed. If you forgot to come in, Brenda might very likely post publicly on Facebook: Jimmy McHendron, you forgot to get your car tabs sweetie. You need to come in today to avoid late fees. That’s how life works in southern small towns.
But Brenda had been diagnosed with liver cancer about fifteen months ago. Nothing will mobilize a small southern town like the illness of its Queen. T-Shirts were made that said “Cancer Picked the Wrong Queen” and everyone in town had one. Bracelets were made bearing the same statement. Throughout the town signs at restaurants and churches said “Pray For Brenda”. And pray they did. Prayer is at the heart of every small southern town. It begins meetings, not just at churches, but everywhere.
But the town of Sulligent, Alabama, population about 1200, and the suburbs around it, including Beaverton, where Brenda reigned, rallied in prayer. They claimed her healing in the name of God in whom they live and move with every fiber of their individual lives and their lives together. They never stopped praying for healing for Brenda. They never stopped praying that she would beat the cancer.
The Gospel reading today invites us to consider our prayers. The disciples, who we might have imagined had at least some semblance of a prayer life, have inexplicably asked Jesus to teach them to pray. What would have prompted that request if they’d already spent time with Jesus praying?
It’s worth noting that the disciples question comes after Jesus has just finished praying. Maybe, as they witnessed him in prayer, they longed to deepen their own prayer life. Whatever their reason for asking, Jesus answers them with a prayer, a parable, and a promise.
The prayer that Jesus gives to his disciples has come to be known by the Church as the Lord’s Prayer, for obvious reasons. Some churches use the language of trespasses, others sins; some add “for the kingdom, the power, and the glory are yours now and always”, which you might notice is missing in this Gospel. What Jesus is giving to the disciples, though, isn’t a doctrine to be followed religiously or argued over endlessly; it’s a reminder to them and to us of what we might bring before God in our prayers. That the reign of God would come near. That for the day, all people would have what they need. That God would forgive the times we fall short, and that we would too.
While this seems almost simple, it is complex and worth an entire season of consideration and maybe someday we will do that, but if we were to do that today, we’d be here for far longer than Lutherans are accustomed to and we wouldn’t get to the parable and the promise portion of today’s Gospel reading.
So, after offering them this prayer, Jesus moves to a parable, as he often did, using a story to make a point to his disciples who more often than not missed the point. And as he often did, he used hyperbole…fantastical examples, over the top illustrations….things they would NEVER have taken literally while they were listening to him then. I don’t know why some insist on doing so now. So this story of the friend who arrives at midnight demanding that another friend give them three loaves of bread because another friend has shown up. What kind of friend shows up at midnight? What kind of friend needs THREE loaves of bread? What kind of friend goes to their neighbor, banging repeatedly on the door, asking for the bread needed?
It’s a story that Jesus invents to make a point about asking God for what we need.
Before we get to the promise portion of this text, though, we have to wade through some difficult verses. And we need to return to my mailbox and the card that was returned to me. Because, as you might have guessed, Brenda, the Queen, died from liver cancer before my card could arrive to her hospital room. Or as her son put it: “The Queen has Left the Building: My dearest mother, Brenda, accepted her promotion early this morning. She reigned over Beaverton hill & the Hyster-Yale plant in Sulligent many years, until an opening for a Queen came available in Heaven. It’s a big promotion, & it required leaving Wayne, Mallory, me, her mother, brothers & all of her subjects down here behind.”
So what about the prayers of an entire corner of North Alabama? Were they fruitless? Were they unheard? Look, it’s right there, in our text for today, straight from Jesus’ mouth: “Ask and it will be given you; search, and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”
And what of our prayers, for we have all surely had this experience, to pray….and pray hard….for some outcome that did not come to pass. Prayers that felt as though they’d been flung at the locked up house of our neighbor who wasn’t having any part of our demands for bread at midnight.
I mean, isn’t this whole reading about persisting in prayer? Or to ask for what we need or want or desire or are begging for on behalf of someone we love?
If that’s how prayer worked, I would still have loved ones who have received that heavenly promotion and so would you. But there is more to prayer than an answer. Prayer is not some sort of divine slot machine where we put in our good living coins and pull the lever hoping for the jackpot. Prayer is about a relationship with the very One who created us and loves us beyond our wildest imaginings. It is about coming to God, our loving parent, with the deepest longings of our hearts.
Sometimes looking at translation options helps with our understandings of hard texts. I was troubled by that word “persistence”. Because I had watched an entire county persist in their prayer and their belief. So, I looked it up. And another translation for the Greek word used here is “shameless”. To be shameless in our coming to God. Of course, shameless is a word with some baggage, but think about it: What would we bring before God if we had no concerns about appearances? No concerns about how it looked that we were asking. No concerns about whether it was okay or appropriate. Because friends, God already knows the desires of our hearts. God already knows what we long for and what our fears are.
When we name them, it is we who are changed. And that makes all the difference.
The promise in this text, and the promise to which we cling, and the promise that upholds the grief stricken folks of Lamar County Alabama is found in the last verse of our reading today: (and I am taking some liberties here) “If you, if we, with all our sins, with all the ways we fall short, if we know how to give our children, our friends, our beloveds good things, how much more will our heavenly Abba give the Holy Spirit to us who ask?”
We ask for healing, and God give us life.
We ask for mercy and God gives us life.
We ask for help and relief and safety and God gives us life.
No matter what our prayer might be, we are assured that God, whose love for us never ends, answers with the gift of the Holy Spirit, who does not leave us in the trials and turns of this life.
Sometimes that is not the answer we want. We want our loved ones healed. We want three loaves of bread. And God gives us what we need…God’s never ending presence with us.
Thanks be to God, and let the people of God say…Amen.
This sermon is offered to the Glory of God and in thanksgiving for the life of the Queen, Brenda Stockman Lucas. Soli Deo Gloria!