Prayer as Resistance
Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
Genesis 18: 20-32; Psalm 138; Luke 11: 1-13
“For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”
I have to tell you that I have a really hard time with this gospel lesson. I have a really hard time with any teaching—especially when it comes from Jesus-- that seems to say that if we pray with enough persistence or enough faith or enough mysterious something (that we have apparently yet to discover), then all of our prayers will be answered.
Frankly, I don’t buy it. We’ve all asked and not received, all searched and not found, all knocked and knocked and knocked until our knuckles bled and our hearts broke and we crumbled on the floor before a decidedly and steadfastly closed door.
Getting a snake instead of a fish? A scorpion instead of an egg? If we haven’t been the recipients of such soul-sucking, death-dealing responses to our prayers for life-giving divine help, we don’t have to look very hard to find someone who has. We’ve all known good, faithful, God-fearing folks to whom horrible things have happened. So it’s natural for us to wonder why we bother to pray at all… to conclude that our prayers are, despite Jesus’ promises to the contrary, futile.
But I am convinced that nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, I’ve come to believe that prayer is a daring and courageous act of resistance. Prayer is a bold and determined act of outright defiance. Prayer stares down what our baptismal service refers to as, “the spiritual forces of wickedness” and “the evil powers of this world that oppose God’s will” and says, “Oh no you don’t!” Prayer says, “I see you,” to the reality of darkness, all the while bearing steadfast witness to the Light of the Christ.
You see, I am a firm believer that Jesus wouldn’t have taught us to pray, “Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done,” if either of those things were already a reality. There’d be no point, would there? But God’s Kingdom has clearly not been fully realized yet, and God’s will is most certainly not always done.
Yet because God’s love was so powerful that it was able to vanquish the forces of fear and hatred and death through Jesus’ self-offering and resurrection, we do have our Kingdom moments now. We do have the power to do God’s will, through the power of the Holy Spirit. And we need to remember that what we’ve been witnessing for the last 2,000 plus years is the death throes of a dying beast whose number is up. A beast that knows God’s Kingdom has broken into this world and that God’s will is going to be done. Prayer is looking that dying beast in the eye and saying, “You don’t own me, I am marked as Christ’s own forever.”
In our translation of the gospel this morning from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Jesus tells a story about a man who gets what he needs because of his persistence. But instead of “persistence,” the New International Version actually translates the Greek word here as, “shameless audacity.”
Shameless audacity. Yes! That’s what we need! We need to pray with shameless audacity! Not in opposition to God---whose own prayers for life and love, healing and health, peace and justice, we are simply joining in progress---but in resistance and defiance of the one who tries to tell us that our prayers don’t work, or that God’s not listening, or that God answers our prayers but sometimes the answer is just no.
Don’t buy that, my friends. God’s desire for us is always for healing and love and deep joy. But the world in which we live is a broken one. It has not yet been restored to the Kingdom of God’s dream. So pray with shameless audacity in defiance of the lie that prayer is pointless. Pray with shameless audacity to the Love that gave its life for us to prove that the Divine answer is “Yes”, always “Yes”! Pray with shameless audacity and persistence, knowing that the God of Love is listening and praying with you.
And when you pray say: “Your Kingdom come, your will be done.” Then do all that you possibly can to make it so.
Amen.