An Ongoing Conversation

Luke 11:1-13

When I was young, I believed prayer could cure cancer and guarantee we’d find a parking spot at the mall. I knew ways to pray that would bring Jesus into your heart or cast demons out of it.  I even believed that I had a magic super power prayer. I thought, if anyone tried to kidnap me, I would only need to shout with confidence, “I rebuke you in the name of the Lord!” and they would flee in fear.  I almost hoped someone would try it.  Thank God nobody did.

I prayed all the time, for everything, I didn’t hesitate, I asked brazenly for what I wanted, expecting it to be given unto me.  

I am not sure what I thought about God, who God was or what God was about, except that I had the bead on God. I knew how to get God to do what wanted. I would say the right words, the right way with the right attitude, and whatever I asked for would happen. “Your will be done, Lord!” I had the code cracked.  I knew God loved me and had a wonderful plan for my life. Seek and you will find! Ask and you will receive! I got this.

Here’s what’s tricky about this. It would be easy now to say I got it all wrong. That’s not how prayer works at all. And it’s true; it’s not. But there was one thing in this that I got right.  

In the parable Jesus tells his disciples, about the neighbor who knocks on the door at night asking for bread for an unexpected guest, the word for persistence, is actually, in the Greek, “shameless, audacious, bold.”  He tells his disciples to boldly, brazenly ask for what they want. I had some boldness about me in those days.  That part of prayer I got right.

Yesterday I googled “How to pray” and got 795,000,000 results. We want to do it right. We are trying to live a good life, and we don’t want to mess it up.  We would love to have a magic ace up our sleeve, but at the very least, we don’t want to piss off the almighty.  Or maybe we don’t even know if there is an almighty, but we think it wouldn’t hurt to hedge our bets.  We have things we want done, things we wish we’d never done, people we want to save and we wouldn’t mind making sure we ourselves are saved too.  The world is scary. Bad things happen. We do bad things. Prayer must be there to fix all of this, right?

Teach us to pray! Jesus’ disciples ask him. John’s taught his disciples! They got the bonus lesson, we want that too!  Jesus seems to got it going on in the prayer department. Give us a little of your mojo, Lord.  

So Jesus does gives them some words. And I love him for this. They wanted something concrete to hold onto, and he gave them that. We want something concrete to hold onto, and God gives us that.  

We’ve made his words into The Lord’s Prayer, a procedure almost, something we can rattle off.  And indeed, we do rattle them off - I have been asked to slow down in leading them so they can be felt and savored, and I keep forgetting about this until I’m in the car on the way home, and then I swear I’ll do the Lord’s Prayer slower next week.

This sample prayer Jesus gives to his disciples begins with addressing God as Abba, Daddy, Mommy – extremely intimate, parental language. Already, he’s way outside the box as far as rabbis teaching their students to address the divine. This is the tradition, remember, that replaced the name for God all throughout the bible with THE LORD, so as not to speak the holy name aloud.  And Jesus is brazenly, audaciously, assuming a very familiar, familial connection to God, like a trusting toddler.  Maisy used crawl up my lap and face me, and pat her chubby hands on my cheeks and look into my eyes and say, “Hi Mamamama!” 

Pray like that, Jesus says.

And then the prayer has two movements. Immediately it invites God to draw us into God’s concerns. You are holy other, Your kingdom come, your will be done, here on earth as it is in heaven. Reframe our perspective, God, give us your way of seeing and relating.

Then the prayer shifts to inviting God into our concerns – give us our daily bread, forgive us, as we forgive others, lead us not into temptation.  Help us with what we need for our survival, what we need for our being to be held in others, and in you.

Pray like this above everything, all-powerful and mighty God is actually your mommy, who cares about the intimate details of your life, and wants to be involved in them. Pray like you are invited also into the intimate details of God’s own life, like God wants you to be involved in them.

Two weeks ago I shared I was going on a silent retreat.  Well, I did, and it was wonderful, the walks and the naps and the writing and reading and the chanting with the monks. 

I recalled something I had read last year when I was there, about sabbath. God rests, so we rest because we’re made in God’s image. We all know that. But this person wrote something like, “God rests because keeping this world going is not the only thing to God. God has other interests and hobbies; it’s not all about us.”  And it struck me as so funny, so delightful, unexpected and surprising. Of course. We rest because keeping the world going is not the only thing that makes us us. There is more to us than the work we do to keep everything afloat. Why not God? 

So I tried something then.  I let myself wonder who God was apart from what God does to keep the world going. I let myself contemplate what it might be like to hang out with God in the rest of God, and not just the work, (the being of God, and not just the doing!) not just what I wanted God to do for me or for the world, but to be curious about who God is and what God was into, apart from keeping everything going. And on a trail deep in the woods, I cleared my throat and said, aloud, “Hi.”  

And as I walked along, feeling like I was walking along with God, in God, it became like a kind of centering prayer.  Every so often, I’d bring my attention back with my sacred word, which, in this case, was, “Hi.” And each time I got a little thrill. God was here. I was here. We were hanging out. “Hi God.” “Hi God, it’s me.” “Hi God, what are you into when you’re not keeping everything afloat? Hi God, Will you show me who you are?”

Last week, I got to go back and forth, between praying the Psalms, and being rooted in the liturgies of addressing God as the Great I AM, the mystery we must bow to approach, to trudging along the same path in the woods, stick in my hand, leaves crunching beneath my feet, praying, “Hi, God.” 

What Jesus is trying to show the disciples about prayer has far more to do with who God is, than how to pray. He gives them the how, because that’s what they’re asking for, he gives them some words and perspectives and even attitudes – pray audaciously! 

But he is showing them who God is by how we’re told to pray - Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened. God is a God who gives, who hears, who answers, who opens the door to us. 

Which of you, if your child asks for an egg will give a scorpion, or as Matthew 7 more helpfully suggests, when they ask for bread will give them a stone? If we, who are evil, can give good gifts to our children, how much more this God of ours?  

            

Our chapter this week in our book that we are reading together, Being Disciples, talks a lot about forgiveness.  “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” Forgiveness – both giving it and receiving it- returns us to the core of our humanity as a gift that is bestowed upon us, by God, and upheld by each other, rather than something we each possess and defend. Forgiveness breaks down the armor and shell of us, so the tender and defenseless human part inside is exposed – I need to admit my need, I need to let go my power, I need to see and be seen, I need to be ministered to.

We belong to each other and we belong to God – so the vulnerability of this connection means I am bound to uphold others’ humanity and I need others to uphold mine. We nurture each other’s dignity. 

Living is risky. Being human is an unsafe activity. We can get hurt. We can hurt others. But also, we can bestow dignity and uphold humanity. We can forgive; we can receive forgiveness. We can restore and be restored.

 “I cannot live without the word of mercy; I cannot complete this task of being myself,” Rowan Williams says, “without the healing of what I have wounded.” 

We need each other for this – the ones we wound and those who’ve wounded us. We are set free to live fully in our humanity when we release the hold we have on others with our unforgiveness.  And we are set free to liv fully in our humanity when we receive forgiveness from someone we have wounded.

Forgiveness pulls us into God’s life. And it pulls us back into our humanity.  

This is how to pray--as one connected already to God and to others, as one longing for that connection to be restored, shameless in asking for it to be.

We pray as a who, addressing a who, a personal being who is free to act or not, who has interests we know nothing about, who loves and adores us, and invites us to refer to the Great and all powerful Mystery as our closest, most trusted source and caregiver, We pray in an ongoing conversation that will never end.

Jesus prayed this way. Secure in his connection to God and all others, certain in where this is all going to end up –living from the complete here in the partial.  There is a kind of submission that happens, then. When I am in my most honest and vulnerable and human self, I return to the strength of the bond that will never let us go. 

During my life, my view of prayer radically shifted. 

I prayed, really hard in all the right ways, for a friend to be healed, and she died. 

I got a little more aware of the world’s suffering and a little humbled and scared to pray for my own puny old needs with so much worse tragedy unfolding on the planet. 

I got tangled up with people who used “prayer” as permission to do and say whatever you feel like in the name of “God,” with religious impunity.  

I got educated on histories, heresies, theologies and doctrines, and mixed up about which way was right and why it matters. 

I got suspicious of my motives, and curious about God’s priorities. 

So I got afraid about asking, and hesitant about seeking, and sheepish about knocking. I didn’t want to do it wrong. Perhaps it was better not to pray than to pray the wrong way.

We once said here that the only way to do it wrong, the only way not to pray, is not to show up as your real and authentic self, or not to acknowledge that God has shown up.  That if you do those two things- if you show up, and if you trust God is showing up, you’re praying.  

You’re praying with words, or silence, or walking, or breathing, or begging and pleading, or using formal written liturgy, or singing in your car, or dancing in a field, or crying with someone else in your arms. If you are present, and you attune to the presence of God, you are praying.

This sounds easy. This is not easy. 

We hardly ever show up in our real lives as we are. And we rarely expect God will. 

But the moment you say, “Hi God,” why, here you both are! 

God is already here, waiting, waiting for us to ask, to seek, to knock, ready to open the door. Not to open it with judgment or criticism, "Where have you been?” or ready to tell you how you’ve been doing it wrong, keeping track of how incorrectly you’ve been asking, or sporadically you’ve been seeking or how long it’s been since you knocked.

No, God is always, already here, with love. Ready to receive whatever we bring. God is inviting us to address the Divine with the audacious boldness of a toddler patting her mama’s cheeks, ready to soak in the gaze of love that is always turned to her. 

God is inviting us to be like an annoying neighbor pounding on a door demanding what we need to care for the unexpected guest.  If we can give good gifts to our children, How much more will the Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?

In other words, how much more than all the generosity and excitement I might have to show my own daughter that I love her, and she belongs to me no matter what, is God ready to draw me toward God’s own self through the power of the bond that connects the Father to the Son and breathes life into the world?

We don’t know why God does some things and not others. Sometimes prayers get “answered” how we hope they will, meaning, what we ask for happens. Sometimes they don’t.  Sometimes God cures cancer, and even gives us parking spots when we ask.   Sometimes God doesn’t.  God is free to act and free not to.  And we are free to ask. God wants us to ask because God wants to be with us, to share our place, to invite us to share in God’s. God does love us and have a wonderful plan for our lives.  God came into this human life, taking on all suffering and death, with us and for us.  God will minister to us. God will forgive us.  God love us.  That’s who God is. 

God is always ready to return us to the core of our humanity as a gift that is bestowed upon us, by God and through each other.  And we can receive this gift when we’re ready to let go of our humanity as something we each possess and defend. 

Teach us how to pray, Jesus, like you do. Teach us how to be human again. Teach us to trust, to forgive, to receive, to boldly live in our belonging to God and each other. 

So find some methods you like. Try out different strategies. Find a good structure to help you. But however you pray, show up with your real self.  

Trust that God has shown up in God’s real self. 

Ask. Seek. Knock.

And don’t hold back. Be shameless about it. Be all in.

The good news is you can’t fail at prayer.  The other good news is you can’t succeed at it either.  It’s not a game to win.  There’s no code to crack. There are no rules to memorize. There’s no magic formula to master. 

Be you. With God. That’s it.

Amen.



We are in a series with Rowan William's book, Being Disciples. The first chapter's sermon, "Being Disciples," is found here. The sermon corresponding to the second chapter, "Faith, hope and love" is here. This is connected to chapter 3, "Forgiveness."

Living from the complete

1 Corinthians 13:8-13

On Monday I will fly to Kentucky.  I will land in the airport in Louisville and I will call for an Uber. I will ask the Uber to drive me an hour away outside of all cities and towns, past miles and miles of white-fenced horse ranches, to Trappist, Kentucky, where a huge, stone, white-washed building filled with silent monks sits on a hill overlooking rolling farmland and woods with winding trails. 

I will get out of the car. Then I’ll ask the Uber driver to come back on Friday and get me, because there is no taxi or Uber service out there, and no cell phone service either.  So I will trust that the driver will return to get me at the end of my time.

Then I will spend five days expecting God to do something.  I don’t know what it is I expect God to do.  Just something. As to my part, I will make myself available.  

I will do this by not bringing any fiction along.  I just finished reading an excellent novel, and I’d love to start another one on the plane. But I won’t, because there is no greater escape for me than into a world created by strong turn of phrase and compelling characters.  And I want to be as present as possible.

I will also make myself available to God by turning off my phone for the entire time without peeking at it. Not even once. This one is harder. It means trusting God with my family. It means letting go of the illusion that if I were with my kids nothing bad could happen to them, or if I were reachable then I could prevent or solve a tragedy.  

I will simply have to be in my life and let them be in theirs.  

I will pack sturdy walking shoes.  And a journal.  And a big book I bought recently called, An Anthology of Christian Mysticism that I’ve looked at for weeks but can’t stay focused enough to read- especially with a novel nearby. And I will bring some markers and paper.  And comfy clothes.

These things will help me be available for whatever ends up happening between God and me.

This is to be five whole days of silence.  

So I will leave behind the politeness and niceties that make me want to apologize when I reach the doorknob at the same time as someone else, or use my Thank yous, pleases, and excuse mes.  I will be a silent person among silent people, who express gratitude or deference with a head nod, a smile, eye contact.   

I will make myself available to God by going to the church to read scripture and chant along with the monks, (the only time they use their voices). I won’t go all eight times a day, I’m not thatwild.  But a few times.  I am already looking forward 7:30 pm compline each evening, when the monks put themselves to bed with the startling words, “May the all-powerful Lord grant us a restful night and a peaceful death.” And then we all line up for a goodnight blessing splashed over us in holy water, one at a time, as a reminder of our baptism and eternal life in Christ.

And maybe once I will go to the 3:15 am candlelit Vigil, when the vast ceiling is cloaked in darkness, and the scant candle flames dance along the walls and the silence of the star-studded sky and rolling hills is swathed around the chapel like a blanket so thick you can almost feel it.  And when the last tone of the bell in the tower rings out, I’ll pad back down the hallway and crawl back into bed. 

I know there will be restlessness.  I will crash around the woods until I can settle into my own body, until I can carry the silence within enough to start hearing the symphony all around me in the forest and fields.  

I know there will be lots of noise inside my head and heart that needs to clean itself out, and I will try to be patient with myself as that expulsion happens. I also know there will be tears as things loosen up.  

And I know, from experience, that I will be mostly, but not perfectly, silent.  That sometimes – when I stub a toe, or lock myself out of my room, or drop an earring down a drain – I will unwittingly swear outloud.  Then I will immediately judge myself for it, and scold myself that the only words coming up from my dark heart into the God-soaked silence are bad words.  Then I will find some self-compassion and laugh at myself, and maybe even imagine God laughing too, so there will be another sound coming from me than the swears, and the cleansing of the laughter will set me free and I will go back to my silence.  

I know I will nap a lot because the tiredness catches up to you when you stop.  I know I’ll struggle to try to achieve something and then remind myself I am simply trying to be aware and expectant and that in itself is a big enough challenge. 

I don’t know how God will meet me, or what God will do. But I know God will meet me there.

Now we see dimly, like in a shadowy mirror, squinting to tell exactly what we are looking at, but at least catching glimpses. But then we will see face to face, God and us, no confusion, clear as day. Now we know in part, and then we will know fully, even as we are already fully known.

All we have now is the partial. Partial attention and partial presence and partial ability to know, or to love, or to trust.  But the partial serves its purpose because it points us to the complete, and the complete is coming.   And when it does, the partial will fade away.

We want the complete. We live in the longing that cannot and will not be fulfilled until the complete comes, and so we are always pining, always a little lost, a little hungry, a little unsatisfied. We long for God. But we mostly don’t know it is God that we are longing for. 

But some things come into the partial from the complete. They give us somewhere to abide, something to remain in that will persist past the incomplete into the whole.  “Faith, hope, and love,” Paul says, “these three remain.” 

Faith is a loaded word. 

We think it means religion. Or certainty. Or doctrine. And all of those things can go into it, but they are not faith.  We are filled with questions. Filled with doubts. Filled with contradictions and failures. And so we judge ourselves for the “faith” we have or don't have.  We think we need to arrive at some truth, or at least be on a quest for it.  But that’s not faith either.

Faith is, quite simply and purely, the presence that does not let us go.  It is this dependable relationship, and the trust inside us that grows toward this presence, this One who knows all and sees all and holds all, who knows and sees and holds US.  

So together the people of faith embody this kind of trust. We become with and for each other and the world, the kind of people who don’t let go.  We stand alongside in suffering.  We stay near in sorrow. We see and stand with the marginalized, the lost, the undependable, those with nothing to give back.  We stay. We abide with each other, because God abides with us. The way we say it around here is that we meet Jesus, who is with and for us, when we are with and for each other. That’s faith.

What about Hope?

Is hope naïve or entitled?  I heard that said this week.  That hope is something for those who are privileged enough to be sheltered from the extremities of injustice, or from the mortal suffering of war or famine.   That hope anesthetizes people, keeps them from action, because it’s pie in the sky projection that everything will turn out ok, and things, for some, clearly are not ok, and may never be.

 I don’t know what that is, but it’s not hope. 

Hope from God comes from outside our reality. It is not limited by our limitations, not skewed by our perspectives, not clouded by our suffering or perceived lack thereof.  

Hope unflinchingly recognizes all the anguish of the partial and says, Nevertheless, the complete is coming.  The complete is coming when all will be whole, when the fullness of all we ever have been and ever will be, will be, without end. 

Hope means nothing is lost, nothing is overlooked, nothing is forgotten. Instead, death is overcome with life, fullness of life, for each one and for all.  Hope not a human sentiment about a disconnected future that we manufacture in our dimly mirror-gazing, in-part knowing existence.  It’s the unwavering gaze of the loving witness who sees and bears all, and who holds in the Divine self the continuity of the whole story – the human story and each human story inside of it.  All that has been and all that is, and even all that has yet to unfold, is held already in the love and completeness of God.  

And so Hope and patience belong together.  It takes time for us to deepen and grow in Christ into people who are shaped by the complete and not the partial.  So if we long for hope, and want to embody and live in hope, we practice patience. With and for each other, with our learning and our letting go, our struggles and our questions, our disagreements and our searching, our naiveté and our judgments.  We are patient as the Holy Spirit sets us freer and freer.  And out of that patience, hope will begin to bloom and grow.

And Love, what a commodified word, Love.  

We love pizza, The West Wing, autumn in Minnesota, and our grandchildren.  But if we’re honest we don't really know what it means to love God.  

We’re so flooded with choices, Rowan Williams suggests (in the book we are reading together, Being Disciples), that we confuse wanting with loving. We think it’s about our freedom to choose whatever we want, whoever we want, however we want.  Our lives become “an endless stream of disconnected acts of choosing.”  It doesn’t really matter whatwe choose, just that we feel free to choose for ourselves.

But love is not wants and choices.  Love is the deepest life instinct, the Greek word eros.  It’s the energy that drives us to what really matters.  Love is what helps us step back from distraction and anxiety and turn toward something beyond us that gives our lives purpose and meaning.  It grabs us as a deep regard for the world, for humanity in general and the specific humans our lives are bound up with, and for God. Love is living in a state of openness to joy. Williams says, “Love is what permits us to be breathed into, to be given to, to be made alive.”  We love because God first loved us.

And love never ends. Not ever.

True freedom is not to be self-determined choosers who feed our wants. 

True freedom is to be our deepest and truest selves, who come from, and exist for, and return to, love.  We are free to discover slowly and patiently “the deepest rhythms of our life,” Williams says, “to find the context in which we will grow in God.” 

This kind of freedom requires resistance to the consumer culture of wants and choosing.  It means renouncing what looks like freedom but is actually slavery, and choosing instead, the freedom that leads us to fullness. 

And it insists that we face honestly and confess our own refusals of faith hope and love.  The ways we act like they are ours to produce, or they’re aspirational, or they’re for some and not all.  We must face the many ways we reject the complete in favor of the partial, over and over, each day.  

We are here to receive from the relationship that wants to make us whole.  The unconditional witness and presence that breathed life into the universe breathes life into you and me, and is wholly committed to who we are and will be, each of us, and the whole of us together.  

We are not in the complete yet, but God is.  And so at any moment we can abide in the one who was and is and will be.  

“Faith, hope and love,” Paul tells us, “these three things remain.” They are from the complete and come to meet us in the partial. Faith, hope and love come from God to us.  We receive them.  

The Spirit gives faith as a reliable relationship, a transcendent and grounded truth that holds us. And hope, as an abiding and tender witness to all that we, and the world, have been and will be and are right now.  And love, as unrestricted and absolute bond with God, ourselves and each other that will not end. When everything else fades away, this is what will be, familiar because we’ve tasted it partially, but the fullness of it will satisfy us completely.  And the greatest of these is love.

So we show up. We can’t manufacture faith from our stuttered and stunted attempts toward truth, or produce hope from the despair and despondency around and within us, or duplicate love from the shallow self-selection of wants. 

But we can be patient together. And still.  And gentle with ourselves and each other.  We can make space for the Divine to meet us here, and work in us and change us.  We can expect to be changed. We can expect to be encountered. We can let faith take root, and hope open us up, and love grow in us like a strong and mighty tree.

There will be restlessness. And lots of inner noise.  

And there will be tiredness and naps.  

There will also likely be swearing, and most certainly self-judgment. 

But we can show up with our sturdy walking shoes and our comfy clothes to be available for how God might want to meet us.  

And while my tools may be a journal and pen, yours may be knitting needles, or a fishing pole, or a prayer cushion, or a labyrinth, or your camera – whatever help you listen and look and pray, by which I mean, be open to the great openness where God will meet you.  

We can’t make faith, hope and love real in our lives, but we can practice self-compassion and forgiveness.  And we can risk trying out the things that feel strange and new that may lead us deeper into reality, to abide in the eternal.  In Jesus, God came to be with us in the discomfort and newness of human existence; we can come into discomfort and newness too, to find Jesus. So maybe it’s not chanting with monks. Maybe it’s chanting Psalms here with us. Or seeing a spiritual director. Maybe it’s reading the bible with a friend, or volunteering in the community soup kitchen, or trying centering prayer with a group.  Maybe it’s risking being vulnerable about what’s really going on inside of you and letting someone else near.

You can be sure there will be tears as things loosen up, and cleansing laughter too.  And we might struggle to try to achieve something and then have to remind each other that we are simply trying to be aware and expectant, and that in itself is a big enough challenge.  

But we will trust together that if we seek simply to live in awareness with expectancy, our deeper life-instinct will awaken, which is love. And the yearning at the core of us will permit the Holy Spirit to shape us into people who abide in faith, hope and love, who live freely as a person among people. And we won’t know how God will meet us, or what God will do.  But we know God will meet us here.

Amen.

(This is a sermon series based on a book the congregation is reading together, Being Disciples, by Rowan Williams. This is week 2, chapter 2, "Faith, Hope and Love."  First Installment, "Being Disciples." Next up: "Forgiveness").