Luke 11:1-13
Not too long ago, I had a conversation with someone about all the funny superstitions our mothers had. Throw a little salt over your shoulder if you accidentally knock over the salt shaker. Never walk under a ladder or step on a sidewalk crack. Be sure to hold your breath when you drive past a cemetery, lift your feet when driving over railroad tracks, and heaven help you if you should break a mirror. To name just a few.
We laughed about these things, but of course in some situations, superstitious acts are deadly serious. I remember a man who wore the same pajamas for a whole football season without washing them because he was convinced the mojo was too great for him to dare mess with.
People are hardwired to believe in some kind of supernatural power, and are always trying to harness it to meet their needs and fulfill their desires. In its most primitive form, it is a belief in magical things. Incantations and ritual actions that have to be performed in just the right way for the magic to work. That is why you have to throw the salt over your left shoulder, for goodness sake, not over the right one. You have to do it correctly.
The belief in magic is as old as humankind; it is the less-than-rational idea that you can control the forces of nature. Even though we have evolved well beyond such thinking, these notions linger, persist, especially in times of distress. We want to do like Dorothy and close our eyes, tap our heels together three times and say the magic words that will take us home, back to safety.
When we are a little more rational, though, we understand that there is no controlling the forces of nature – at least not by us – and that there are probably higher powers, rational powers, that we might appeal to. God, that is,. And so we address God, sometimes awkwardly, sometimes with the elegant phrases we have been taught to say, and ask for what we need.
Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors; lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Magical thinking still persists, though, when we believe that if we only say the right words in the right way God will relent and give us what we want. Like the genie from the lamp, who is obliged to grant you three wishes. And the disappointment is enormous when we fail to get the response we desire. “I tried prayer, and that didn’t work,” I have heard people say. “It didn’t work,” we say when we are desperately trying to grasp the inherent logic of the universe, and failing.
Prayer is, indeed, as old as humankind – which is to say that there has never been a time when the human race has not struggled with the questions of how and why we pray. Philip and Carol Zaleski begin their history of prayer with this sentence: “The story of prayer is the story of the impossible.” It is the story of how flesh and blood creatures lay siege to heaven, speak to the creator of all, and await a response.
We are generally taught to do it with humility, a certain decorum. Parents teach their children to fold their hands and bow their heads. Sometimes we kneel, or prostrate ourselves, before God, the kinds of postures that would be appropriate before a king or queen. We are not worthy, yet we dare to approach the throne and beg for what we need.
You may have had discussions, as I have, about whether one should say please when asking something of God. It is what we say to one another when we want to be polite. We are taught to say thank you to God – shouldn’t we also say please? We wonder about this because the prayers we have been taught to say never include this word.
Please give us our daily bread and please forgive us our sins and please do not lead us into temptation?
The word seems to me to change the meaning of the petitions, adding the suggestion that we really don’t expect God to respond as we wish. That only if we say it nicely enough will God consider granting our wishes. There may be some truth to this, because we know that God is not in our control. We have long ago given up the magical belief that the right words and actions can control the forces of the world. God’s ways are mysterious to us, strange to us.
In fact, we know God is completely independent and even begin to wonder at the fact that we bother to pray at all. We have no control over God; why bother to ask when God has already decided? This leads to what I might even call fatalism among some Christians, such that they reduce the prayer Jesus taught us to the single fragment, “Thy will be done,” and even then knowing that God surely doesn’t need us to give God permission to do this.
What is prayer for?
Most of us, in our private moments, have wondered this very thing. I imagine that his disciples wondered as well. And so they asked him. “Lord, teach us how to pray. Give us the words to say, because we are lost and need direction.” Then he gave them these words we know so well – so well we don’t even have to think about them as we say them.
And then, perhaps knowing that they still would struggle, he gave them a funny little parable. Parables about prayer almost have to be funny – we are talking about the impossible, after all! He asked them to imagine they had unexpected guests arrive in the middle of the night. And imagine that you have no food in the house to offer your guests, yet you are obligated to feed them. So what can you do, except go to your friend’s house, knock on his door and ask him for bread? If the whole household is asleep they may not hear you at first, so you must knock harder, call louder. You must bang on the door until you raise the household and get what you need – what choice do you have? Even if he hisses at you through the door, saying leave me alone, you must persist. You must ask.
And eventually this friend will get out of bed, climbing over his sleeping children to get you some bread – if not out of love then out of a sense of self-preservation. If you are persistent, sooner or later you will get a response. Now: if even you and your friends will do this, how much more will God, who is the definition of goodness, do for you?
Ask and it will be given to you; search and you will find; knock and the door will be opened for you. This is his promise. And yet, we still wonder.
And yet, the question still persists: why pray?
In our own experience we can recall too many times when our prayers seemed to go unanswered, too many disappointments. Of course, it is in the nature of humans to dwell more on the disappointments than the blessings. It is typical of humans to take for granted the good gifts but be profoundly surprised at the times our requests seem to be denied.
There are no simple answers when it comes to prayer. After all, when we speak of prayer we are speaking of the impossible. Creatures of this finite realm trying to reach into the realm of infinity and force a change. Prayer is not logical, it is not simple, it is not comprehensible. And yet prayer is essential.
You must persist in knocking, calling, asking for what you need, as the parable says. What choice do you have? Knock harder. Call louder. Be bolder.
How we even dare to pray is a wonder. The scriptures say we are bold to approach the throne of grace with confidence, to find mercy there. And we are encouraged in this boldness. We believe that God actually wants us to be so audacious. Not just us modern folks – this, too, is old.
There is an old tale from the Hasidic Jewish tradition about a rabbi who approached an illiterate tailor to ask him what he did on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. He would be unable to read the prescribed prayers for forgiveness, since he was illiterate, so the rabbi wanted to know how he handled it. The tailor reluctantly told him, “I spoke to God and told him that the sins for which I am expected to repent are minor ones. I also said to him: ‘My sins are inconsequential; I may have kept leftover cloth or occasionally forgotten to recite some prayers. But you have committed really grave sins. You have removed mothers from their children, and children from their mothers. So let’s reach an agreement. If you’ll pardon me, I’m ready to pardon you.”
And the rabbi became angry and said to the tailor, “You are not only illiterate but foolish. You were too lenient with God. You should have insisted that he bring redemption to the whole Jewish people.”[1]
Be bold. Be audacious.
Prayer is a mystery and our belief in prayer is paradoxical. To say that prayer is efficacious and also that God is omnipotent – I don’t really know how these things reconcile. I believe that someday, in the sweet by and by, all these things will be explained to me.
But at its essence, prayer is about this: It is about our great need. And it is about God’s great power to meet our needs. And finally, it is about trust. Like a child who cries to be fed, to be held, we cry out to God for our needs and the needs of the world. There are a great many needs in this world, which we cannot fill on our own. There is a deep and wide brokenness in this world, which we cannot fix ourselves. Only God can heal the world, and our job, what the Lord requires of us, is to ask.
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[1] Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski, Prayer: A History, p. 51.
Photo: Andrea Rau, www.freebibleimages.org
