Ask and you will receive

How many of you pray? How many of you feel like you’re good at it? How many of you feel like you would pray, only you don’t know how? How many of you are thinking, oh dear, this is so embarrassing, but…I don’t really pray?

Terrible self-disclosure to demand of you all. So I’ll tell you, when I was in my early 20s and trying to determine what to do with my life, and whether maybe I was starting to feel a call to ordination, I went to talk to my parish priest about it all. What do your prayers tell you? he asked me. I dunno, I said. How do you pray? I’d gone through twenty years of Sunday School and youth group and young adult retreats, and still really didn’t know. Happily, he didn’t look shocked – he just recommended a book, and said, come talk to me after you try this. (It was Open Mind, Open Heart by Thomas Keating, a book that lays out a kind of Christian contemplation known as centering prayer. It was the right suggestion for me!)

And people have asked me similar questions over my time as a priest. Just because people have been part of church all their lives doesn’t mean they pray, or know how to pray. And that seems to be the case with Jesus’ disciples, who ask him in today’s gospel, Teach us to pray. They’ve been watching him pray, but they don’t know what he’s doing, and they want to know more.

So Jesus teaches them, using parables and images drawn from the ordinary life of friendship, hospitality, parenting– so ordinary, so personal. He tells them to call God Father – using an intimate term for father, ‘abba,’ as in their father, as in claiming that they are God’s children and have a direct relationship with God like a child does with her parent. And then he tells them to ask God for what they need, the basic stuff like the bread they need to live on. And that they should remember God’s mercy and holiness, and ask for help in living that out. All of this in language that is straightforward and to the point, without buttering God up or being fearful. And to bring the point home, Jesus goes on to tell the story about the nagging, shameless, irritating guy who gets his friend up at midnight to help him host a traveler – the friend will get up and go to the trouble because this guy is so bold in asking it. Talk to God like that, Jesus says. Or remember, even you know enough to feed your child when she asks for it – so go ahead and ask for what you need from God, who will give you what you need. Be intimate with God, bug God, irritate God with your requests, feel as comfortable with God as with your best friend and your parents. 

It’s all so simple and straightforward. But we still struggle with it. We took the words of the prayer Jesus taught the disciples and made them into a formal church prayer, bickering amongst our different denominations over which exact wording we’re using. Is it trespasses? Or sins? Or maybe debts and debtors? like God won’t listen unless we get the language right. And even though Jesus teaches we should ask for what we need, many people still carry around the idea that we’re not supposed to ask God for anything, and certainly not for our own selves. And even if we do, many of us fear that God won’t actually answer. We think we’ve asked and not received, or knocked on doors that never opened. Better not to ask; better to keep things polite and formal with God.

And yet we have another example of this intimacy in the Old Testament story today, the story of Abraham talking with God about what’s going to happen to Sodom. This is the precursor to the horrible story of atrocities that will happen there, the sacred trust of hospitality betrayed by lust and violence. God lets Abraham know the destruction he’s about to unleash, and Abraham is appalled, maybe partly because his family is there. So he ‘comes near’ to God and starts arguing. He manages to barter God down to ten, God promising not to destroy Sodom if he finds ten righteous people there. Spoiler alert: God apparently doesn’t even find 10 there, so Sodom is leveled. But Abraham certainly tries hard to save it, asking and asking and asking again of God – and God listens. Abraham too has that kind of intimacy, that kind of ordinariness, in his relationship with God.

But most of us, when it comes down to it, have a hard time relating to God in that intimate and trusting way. The way Abraham does, the way Jesus is talking about in today’s gospel.  Which is why over the centuries we developed some mighty theology – the idea of God’s omnipotence and omniscience, God as a collection of absolutes. It’s not actually the theology in the Bible – it’s a theology of the Greeks, of the Platonic ideal, the eternal majestic totally removed from our compromised limitations. But it’s also a safe theology, because it keeps God well away from us and out of our business. The problem is it trips us up, of course – a God who is all-powerful and all-knowing and all good, and yet who doesn’t intervene to stop a hurricane or heal us of cancer, is a God who makes no sense at all. Either such a God cannot exist, or such a God cannot care about us little ants here on earth. Well – no need to let that God in to mess up our lives.

It’s frankly much easier to have this absolutist God – a separate, undemanding figure who stays out of our everyday life. But that’s not Jesus’s message: intimacy with God is his whole purpose. It’s what he teaches in his sermons and parables, it is what he models in his own relationship with God, it is his very nature as God incarnate, God with us, God come to be one of us. We want to keep ourselves to ourselves, to fit God into the spare time we’ve allotted for spiritual things and leave God out of the others, protect ourselves from disappointment, from things not working out the way we hope. But Jesus shares with us a God who is totally in the midst of the messiness of everything. There to love and be loved just like our family and friends. To love and be loved in the real way of real relationship, in all the riskiness that involves.

Because, of course, the great risk of being in relationship is that you can’t control what the other person will do. We can’t control God; nor can God control us, either.

So there’s the risk: when we ask God for things the way Jesus tells us to, we might not get what we want when we ask for it. And we don’t always know why – whether it’s because ‘right now’ isn’t the right time, or that the outcome we want isn’t really the right outcome. But here’s also the risk: when God allows us our freedom, God can’t just intervene to make things all better for us. Doing that would be like moving the pawns on the chessboard, not allowing us full life and the choice to love in return.

Those of you who have children know what this is like – not everything your child asks for, not everything you want them to have, is something you make happen for them. But as any parent or lover knows, even when we can’t change things for our beloved, we want things to be better for them. And what Jesus assures us is that God desires for it to be better for us. And what is more, God acts in deep and subtle ways to bring blessing out of misery, to bring about healing and good, to bring about God’s kingdom. Jesus urges us to be bold in our asking, to be as shameless as the guy who wakes up his friend at midnight, as a child who makes demands of her parents – not because it guarantees that we get things exactly as we want. But to ask boldly is to presume upon a relationship with God that demands everything of God and everything of us. If we ask, God is with us – God gives us the gift of the Holy Spirit, God present with us. If we talk to God, we are in relationship with God; God is present.

What Jesus says to us is this: be in relationship with me. Ask and you will receive, more than you thought possible; search and you will find, what you truly need, what you never expected; knock and doors you did not see will open. Love me, risk trusting me, and see how deeply I love you. That is life, for all of us. It is a risk worth taking.