 |
Prayer:
|
|
Prayer:
|
Last Sunday the Gospel
was Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer and we focused on prayer.
On the way out the door and through the week, people blessed me with
their own vignettes on prayer. One
person told me the story of a man who prepared himself for the day by rising
early to pray. One day when he
noticed a craftsman already up and off to work carrying his tool box, he thought
he should be getting up even earlier for prayer.
Another very caring
person shared that she really wanted to pray more, and felt badly when she
didn’t get to it. She was grateful
for the thought that sometimes we’re praying and don’t even know its prayer
– like when our hearts overflow with compassion over someone’s loss, or with
elation at someone’s joy. Seeing
that too as prayer shifted her from guilt to praise.
Another person shared the
story of an older person who reflected back and said the best answer to prayer
he ever received was the answer “no.” It
kept him out of a lot of trouble. These
conversations helped me hear – in today’s Gospel – a call to a sequel on
prayer: “When the answer to prayer is “No.”
Today’s Gospel begins
with a “No.” “Someone in the
crowd said to Jesus, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family
inheritance with me.” But Jesus
said, essentially, “No, I won’t do that.”
Have you ever gotten a
“no” answer from your conversations with God?
I have. I attended a High
School with 4000 other students – at least half of whom it seemed to want to
be on the Drill Team. I really
wanted to be on it and prayed for God to help me.
In retrospect, I think I’d have been better off getting help from
someone who knew something about marching. I’m
not sure God cares that much about everyone marching in rhythm.
I didn’t make it and it made me rethink my rather young theology on
prayer.
The answer to prayer has
been “No” other times too. Like
when I’ve prayed for people who seemed too young for their lives to be cut
short. Sometimes the person would
recover and it felt good to have been persistent in prayer.
But other times they didn’t recover and I don’t know why.
I do know God loves them all and I believe God’s hears prayers, but
sometimes the answer is “No.” Or
maybe it’s a “no” needing interpretation.
I preached at an AIDS
Mass a few years ago. I remember
well because Arlo Gutherie was the singer. (By
the way, he sang Morning is Broken and
sat right next to me through the whole service.
He also told me he really liked my sermon and somehow it got published
– so the whole thing was a rather over the top event.) I
had been working with people living with AIDS and focused on how healing isn’t
limited to curing. Healing can
happen even if our prayer for a cure gets a “no.”
But maybe it’s not so much a “no” that we get as it is a call to
re-envision healing. Healing can go
beyond curing.
Healing is much like
grace. Grace requires us to
re-envision mistakes because, as late Trappist monk Thomas Merton says, “God
brings good even out of all our mistakes.”
Grace makes us view our mistakes with a new kind of hope and even humor.
So too with healing! Merton
also says, God is pleased by our desire to please God, whether we actually do
please God or not. God looks on the
desire and the effort.
I think we do well to
look on God that way too. God
desires that we all be healed and whole. If
God desires that for us that in itself is healing on a heart-level even when
where not given they answer we want.
In today’s Gospel a man
from the crowd had the courage to ask Jesus to help in the family inheritance.
That means the father in the family must have died.
It was probably a moment of grief. But
Jesus also sensed it was a moment of greed.
Squabbles over inheritance are not uncommon and it’s usually not a
problem with the inheritance, but with someone wanting what they haven’t been
given.
And Jesus said “No.”
He wasn’t going to be triangulated in such disputes.
Instead he told them a parable about the meaning of life.
He looked at the heart of the people – at their desires, not their
possessions. Possessions are not the
problem. It’s the use of
possessions, or the misuse. The real
problem was that there was no one in the picture but the man himself.
It was all about “me, my-self, and I.”
So the “no” answer was probably the healthiest answer Jesus could
have given him. Jesus desired his
wholeness.
Jesus himself was said
“No” to more than once. He was
told “No” over and over by people who he asked to follow him when they had
other things in mind. But more
unexpectedly for him, perhaps, was the “No” he got from God.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, when Jesus knew his life was at risk –
when he knew people were out to get him for his marching to the beat of a
different drummer – he prayed, “Father, take this cup from me, nevertheless,
not my will but yours be done.” What
a trusting soul Jesus was – to put out there what he wanted – what would
have been his will, his desire, his choice, but then to add: “nevertheless,
not my will, but yours be done.”
Glenn Hinson writes in
the most recent Weavings magazine that
when Jesus said we could move mountains if we prayed believing, Jesus was using
exaggeration. “Jesus wasn’t in
the earth-moving business,” Hinson writes.
The kind of faith Jesus was talking about was the kind of faith a mustard
seed has – concrete trust; child-like faith, that it will become in God’s
good time what God created it to become.
Jesus’ own prayer life
was the prayer of a trusting child. Joachim
Jeremias did an intensive study of the word Jesus uses to address God in the
Lord’s Prayer. The word translates
from Mark’s Gospel as “Abba”. It’s
a word not pointing so much at gender as at accessibility
and approachability.
Jesus approached God, even in the Garden of Gethsemane, with trusting
child-like faith – willing to speak his own mind – express his own wishes,
but entrusting himself to God no matter whether he got a yes or a no.
Amen.
+Pastor Peg Schultz-Akerson,
to the glory of God
Faith