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I
remember a day when I was in Seminary when I was sitting across from my
spiritual director in her tranquil office. Soft, spiritual music
was playing in the background and we had cups of herbal tea and it was
all very tranquil and feng shui, and I told her that I felt as if I
didn’t pray enough.
Now,
I have to confess that while I was in seminary I didn’t go to church
on Sunday very often. John Bennet had become involved in a parish ways I
could not,
so if I went with him and he was reading or serving at the altar it
pretty much meant that I’d be sitting by myself in the midst of people
I hadn’t had the time to get
to know and the fact was, that
would mean giving up three or four hours during which I could be
knocking out some studying during daylight hours, and I had
already been to church a minimum of five times that week.
I
can really identify with the disciple who asked Jesus, “OK, now tell
me how to pray right.” I felt as if I were not praying right. I can
pretty much guarantee that
there is at least somebody here today and I’ll bet more than a few
somebodies who are at least thinking about reaching into your purse or
the back of the pew
to get something to write with. You can relax, because I’m not going
to give you the last word on prayer or even the last word on the
Lord’s Prayer. I cannot
tell you how to pray right any more than my spiritual director could
tell me.
I
cannot tell you how prayer works, though I do indeed believe that it
works even when what we get is not what we asked for. If we did, that
would make God
into what some have called the celestial bellhop, and I cannot imagine
trusting in a God so small that he is waiting for me to give him
directions. And if every prayer
came true, high school football would be a mess and nobody would ever
flunk a math test.
So
nobody needs to take notes. It’s not going to be that tidy and I think
that prayer itself is extremely untidy. I think Jesus calls us into the
mess of it as part of how
he transforms us into his likeness. Luke gives us three images of prayer
in what we just read. One is the real-time scene in which Jesus gives
the disciples the bare
bones of what we call the Lord’s Prayer. When new people come to St.
Alban’s for the first time with that look of trepidation on their
faces and I can see
that
they are uncertain whether to stand or kneel and they are fumbling with
the hymnal and wondering if they fit in, more often than not, when we
say the Lord’s Prayer,
I see the muscles in their face relax as they rest in words they’ve
known since they were children.
The
next two parts of the lesson are sort of parables, and they more or less
work against each other.
In
the first one Jesus asks us to imagine that we are home at night when a
friend of a friend knocks on our door and says he is stranded and needs
a place to sleep.
Hospitality in Jesus’ time was a commandment and you would have been
required to offer him something to eat as well as a safe and cozy bed,
but when you check
the kitchen cupboard you see that the teenagers have eaten every last
chip and cookie, so you run next door to borrow something from your
neighbor. What I want
to stress is that Jesus is not saying that God is like this grouchy
neighbor, who says, “Go away. My kids are asleep. No, I won’t give
you any bread even though I
just went to the store this afternoon.” You know how it ends.
You
keep knocking until he gets up and gives you a loaf of bread just to get
you to go away. No, this parable is not about how God works. God is not
like that.
It is about how we are supposed to ask for what we need in our prayers.
The word that usually gets translated as persistent actually means
shameless. Jesus is
saying, Go ahead and ask. Ask for enough. Ask as if you deserve what you
need. It is OK to ask God for the moon. You may or may not get it, but
you will get
what you need.
And
then the parable that follows is about who God is, how God loves us, and
how God will answer our prayers. Jesus asks us to look at how we love
our
children. We give them the best food we can. We listen for what they
need and don’t trick them or cheat them. And we are crummy people who
fall short again
and again. If we are essentially kind to our children, then imagine how
kind God is when we pray. I know, this doesn’t help to answer why some
prayers are
answered the way we ask and some are not. I told you up front I can’t
tell you why. The heart of the Lord’s Prayer for me is where Jesus
says, Thy Kingdom
come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Everything else
radiates from that one central prayer.
I
want to tell you a story about the Kingdom. It is a scene in the TV
show, Glee. Yes, I am a card-carrying Gleek, and I’m thinking about
putting together a class
called the Gospel According to Glee, except somebody will probably beat
me to it. So, in case you don’t know beans about Glee, it is about the
show choir of
William
McKinley
High School
in
Lima
,
Ohio
, and the kids who join at first are all the losers. The director is a
Spanish teacher named Mr. Schuster and the villain
is the cheerleading coach, Sue Sylvester. She is evil personified.
In
this episode, there is an important competition between McKinley and a
school for delinquent girls and a school for deaf kids, and Coach
Sylvester, just to be
mean, has given the list of songs to the competition so they can trounce
McKinley. Mr. Schuster finds this out and ends up inviting the
competition to come rehearse
at McKinley. In this scene it is the kids from the deaf school who are
rehearsing. Now if you are not thinking to yourself, “What kind of
competition can a deaf choir
be?” well, I don’t think you are being entirely honest with
yourself. The kids stand up on the risers, all dressed in their neat
uniforms, and the pianist begins playing
“Imagine” by John Lennon. One boy speaks the words to the music in
the kind of watery, soft-consonant way that some deaf people speak, and
the whole rest
of the choir signs to the music.
About
half-way through, one of the McKinley students begins to sing along,
softly offering her sweet soprano voice almost as another accompaniment
to the
performance of the deaf kids, and, one by one, the members of the
McKinley choir walk up and join the others, and they sing and they sign
together, and it is no
coincidence that they sing,
You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will live as one.
If
this is not a Kingdom moment, then I’ve never seen one, and I think
ultimately that is what prayer is about. It is not asking for God to
bring the Kingdom because
he already has, but asking for the eyes to see it all around us, to
catch glimpses of it when it breaks through all the grit and pain and
ugliness that also occupies this
world. It is to ask God to allow our voices to join the voices of angels
and archangels and all the company of heaven, to teach us to lend our
breath and our energy
to his work of harmony and justice and peace, even though that vision
might not be what we know enough to pray for.
Three
years ago, on the Sunday after Easter, a friend of mine visited St.
Alban’s because she needed a break from the church where she was
heavily involved. Our
youth minister was leaving soon and I’d hired someone to start in the
fall, so I asked Pam if she could fill in as interim youth minister. She
did a great job, and a year
later when I needed yet another interim, she consented to fill in again.
The problem was that she got awfully attached to this parish, so when it
was time for her to
leave, she didn’t want to go. But just at that moment, Julie, who was
our director of children’s ministries came to tell me she’d taken a
full-time job, so Pam took
over that ministry, and she has touched and blessed the lives of more
people than I can begin to count.
Pam
has always felt called to ordained ministry, but growing up Roman
Catholic, that option was not open to her. She came to the Episcopal
Church at a time in her
life when I know she felt as if God was not hearing her prayers or just
didn’t give a darn what she wanted. She entered the process for
ordination as a bi-vocational
priest and when the diocese said, “Not yet,” I know for a fact that
she experienced another prayer dashed to smithereens. Today is her last
Sunday with us, and it is
a very bittersweet day for all of us, but she is leaving because her
prayer is coming true, in God’s time and in God’s way. I am grateful
for all the ways in which she
has been an agent of the
Kingdom breaking through in this parish, and we send her with our
blessings as she begins her ministry at
St. Thomas
’ Church in Rockdale.
So, you may say that I’m a dreamer, but I am not the author of the
dream. We might say that we are all dreamers in the sense that we pray
for the best our
imagination can come up with. We pray with hope and eagerness. We pray
for healing and happiness for ourselves and others, but in the end it is
God who has the
bigger dream, the one in which we are all agents and heirs of the
Kingdom, and where in the end the world will be as one.
Amen.
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