PRAY PERSISTENTLY!
A sermon by the Rev. Dr. James G. Kirk
Harundale Presbyterian Church
Text: “because of his persistence he will get up.” (Luke 11:8)
First
Second
Jesus’ disciples want to know his secret when it comes to prayer. Obviously they want to call upon God’s merciful goodness and healing powers as Jesus is able to do. So, he gives them what he considers to be the keystone of his prayer life and ever since we have prayed this prayer time and again, sometimes to the extent that we don’t hear the words or their implications any more.
So it’s
time for us to have a primer on the Lord’s Prayer, a reminder of what it says
and what it should mean in our lives, and how it really can give us a framework
to pray persistently as Jesus intended his disciples to do. When I was in
This past week Becky Valenta and I took communion to a young lady in her forties who has multiple sclerosis. She’s confined to bed and has slight movement in her left hand, enough to be able to grasp the communion cup and lift it to her lips. While we were visiting with her she was quite conversant, able to talk, but it was her smile that attracted us to her. She had the most beatific look about her that radiated a warmth and hope that betrayed her physical appearance. Here was definitely a woman at home and at peace with her God. Her Bible lay beside her and I commented how dog eared it was. She definitely prayed persistently, and could just as well have said, “Let me call you Daddy,” for there was something quite intimate and familiar going on between her and her God.
After setting the stage of who we’re to pray to, Jesus defines the terms of the relationship. It’s not only going to be quite familiar, but the prayers should always be on God’s terms, not ours, “Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come.” Remember that Jesus always put God above all else in his ministry. He was sent to be about his father’s business and he wanted the disciples to hold that same vision in their ministry as well. So often we get the order of our priorities confused. When we do pray it’s because something isn’t going well for us. We want a fix, a cure, a miracle of sorts, anything that will allow us to go back to our routine. We don’t think often enough that it should be God’s will that’s uppermost in our scheme of things. So, when Jesus begins his prayer “Hallowed be your name, Your Kingdom come,” it’s meant to be a corrective to our way of thinking. Start with God and end with God and everything in between you’ll put in the proper perspective. Or as Gregory of Nyssa wrote, “Let the name of God be hallowed in me, so that others may see our good works and glorify our Father who is in heaven.”
“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done.” There’s four ways we can pray for God’s will to be done. We can do it with a clenched fist. People who pray with clenched fists feel there are no escape and no other way. They’re filled with rebellion, anger and bitter resentment. A loved one’s just died and they think they have to accept that it was God’s will, but they’ll spend their life in bitter resentment that it should be so.
Or, there’s the stooped shoulder approach. That’s when people accept God’s will in resignation, not so much in bitterness but that there’s nothing else but to admit defeat. God won, whatever that means. There’s acceptance of God’s will, but it’s a tired, defeated and resigned acceptance.
It’s only when we get to the third approach that we actually begin to hear some hope. This is God’s ultimate love approach. Paul comes closest to this approach in his Corinthian letter when he writes how, “we do not lost heart. Even though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed day by day. For this slight momentary affliction is preparing us for an eternal weight of glory beyond all measure, because we look not at what can be seen but at what cannot be seen; for what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hand, eternal in the heavens.” (2 Corinthians 4:16-5:1)
This leads then to the fourth and most hopeful approach, which is the confident approach. Here “thy will be done” is spoken with a serene and trustful love that God will never ask of us more than we can endure and the outcome of which God has already anticipated and cared for. I’ve mentioned to you before how I’ll always remember two deaths in the parish, one Virginia Loeffler’s and the other Leona Booze’s. In both cases they died with their family around them; they’d said their “good-byes,” they closed their eyes and each one acknowledged in their own way how Christ came to accompany them to their eternal glory.
Only after that eternal glory does the Lord’s Prayer get down to the specifics of our needs. “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” Here’s where we get to our shopping list. Most of us carry three lists around with us. There’s the list we carry for our next visit to the supermarket. That’s the essential list, the things we need daily for meals, to keep the pantry stocked, the things we need on a daily basis.
The second
list are those things we’d like to have, but don’t really need them. They’re not like the essentials. Last week John and his wife Kathy came for a
visit from
The third list is those big ticket items I mentioned last week. You’ll remember the couple who were about to get married and during their counseling, it came to light that they had $60,000 in credit card debt. They just loved their third list and didn’t let price get in the way of their purchasing whatever they thought they needed. The only problem with the third list is how to pay for it. The other day I was in Swanson Automotive for a new battery. The battery would be on the first list; it’s essential if the car’s going to run. But while I was there Eric Swanson said there was a new Pontiac GTO on the showroom floor with my name on it. That’s definitely an example of the third list.
So, when Jesus says, “Give us this day our daily bread,” he’s only talking about the first list. That’s what we’re to bother God for, not the second and third lists. And as time goes on it’s amazing how we can do without even many of those items. The prayer’s intent is to keep us focused on just what are the essentials in our lives.
The prayer then concludes with some housekeeping details, like forgiveness, temptation, keeping us away from evil and reminding us again that it’s God who’s to receive the ultimate glory in all that we do. A four year-old summed them all up in her interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer: “And forgive us our trash baskets, as we forgive those who put trash in our baskets.” What’s temptation if it isn’t some trash that’s going to keep us unfocused on what’s important and who’s important in our lives? What’s evil if it isn’t some trash that keeps us from doing God’s will?
In our neighborhood the trash is collected and hauled away twice a week. Twice weekly we’re reminded to clean our homes of those things we don’t need, the things that are useless, the things that are just pure waste and garbage. Yet when it comes to our lives we don’t exercise the same kind of discipline. We carry a lot of trash around with us. What the four year-old does is get us to think about those trash baskets we carry and like our homes how we should keep emptying them on a regular basis, not only the garbage we ourselves put in them, but also the trash others put in them as well.
So, as
Stephanie Frey reminds us, “I can think of no one other than Jesus who actually
encourages us to be annoying with
God. Jesus invites, even commands, us to
be as shameless and irritating in our prayers as that noisy neighbor at