A few months ago, I wrote an Ash Wednesday homily for my local church. I preached again this past Sunday. Since it’s likely that I’ll do so a few times a year, I will continue to upload my written sermon manuscripts here to Substack.
Our Scriptures this week were Genesis 18:20–32 and Luke 11:1–13. Thank you for reading.
As a kid, I really loved stuffed animals. I slept with a few beside me every night; I arranged them by my pillows in the morning when I made my bed, knowing they were waiting for me when I returned that evening; I hid away many in my closet, where I believed they lived in peace and harmony; I and would sometimes pull out a few and put them on the bed when I sensed it was time for a rotation. And I had favorites: Lizzy, Blackie, Melody—I can still name many of them. Most are tucked away now in memory boxes at my parents’ house.
One night, probably in my very early teens, as I could feel the gravity of adolescence pulling me away from these childish toys, I was feeling nostalgic and grabbed one of my earliest stuffed animals. He was a small bear that wore a University of Kentucky shirt. After so many years he was starting to look a bit dingy. The shirt that the bear wore had a button on it that would play a sound; I can’t remember if it was a short clip of the UK fight song or a generic jingle, but the button had long since stopped working, its tiny, nonreplaceable watch battery of course had completely drained over the years. But as I laid in bed that night, a little bit sad and probably too reflective, as one is at thirteen years old, I really, really wanted to hear this bear make noise again. I pressed the button so much, pushed hard, pushed soft, double pressed, held down for five seconds—but in vain. Nothing, not even a little *squeak* sound, you know, that some battery-operated things make.
I nearly gave up, until I did something kind of crazy. I prayed “God, pleeeease make this work. Please let this button in my stuffed animal’s shirt work and please make this little speaker play the little song, just one more time.” I prayed that, and I pressed the button. And then…
My eyes widened, my jaw dropped, my soul swooned. I was overjoyed. There was absolutely no earthly reason why this silly little bear should be making this noise at this moment, after these many attempts, after so many years, and on one this one specific button press (and no more after that one push).
Did God do this? For me? Although I harbored a few doubts at the time, and I know we can interrogate it today—Young Alex nevertheless got a new lease on his spiritual life that night. I’m not saying we should call the Vatican and ask them to confirm a miracle. But this frivolous story is emblematic of the message that I see coming from our Scriptures today:
Prayer is efficacious. Right prayer, Scriptural prayer, gets things done.
In our Luke passage, we pick up immediately after the Mary and Martha scene which we heard in our sermon last week (Luke 10:38–42). Jesus has just taught us, albeit in mysterious language, what true hospitality means. And at the start of this chapter 11, we find a very familiar scene—the Lord’s Prayer, seemingly spoken by Jesus out of the blue (the text does say ambiguously, “He was praying in a certain place.”)
But we might recognize this passage from a different context, Matthew 6, where Jesus teaches Lord’s Prayer, in slightly altered form, after the Beatitudes and during his Sermon on the Mount; that is the more famous version. Our Luke instance could be the same interaction of Jesus instructing his disciples as put down by different authors—Luke and Matthew—or what we have here could be two separate times Jesus showed his followers how to pray. Either way, I love what one commentator says about it showing up twice and in diverse versions: “The fact that He did not repeat it the exact same way as in Matthew shows that it was not to be used as a precise ritual or magic formula for prayer.”
Let’s hear it again:
He said to them, “When you pray, say: ‘Father, may your name be revered as holy. May your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.”
The especially interesting part, however—if we are allowed to say that certain parts of the Bible are “more interesting” than others—comes just after this, in the form of an odd parable. We do not see this parable in the Matthew account of the Sermon on the Mount or anywhere else in Scripture:
And [Jesus] said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything out of friendship, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.”
What a strange little story! I don’t think I’ve ever been desperate enough to knock on my neighbor’s door at such an hour, but if I did, and if I was successful in my persistence at waking him up and taking his groceries, I might end up so embarrassed and they so annoyed that we stop being friends altogether. Why is Jesus telling us this tale? Is it a commission to “go and be an annoying pest”? Hardly. It makes much more sense in view of the final lines:
So I say to you, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened….If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!
Ah—this is a parable about the effects of praying, explaining something essential concerning the prayer Jesus just demonstrated. It serves as an illustration of what we are to do with prayer: repeat it, over and over again. Ask, ask, and ask again. The Greek word for “persistence” or “impudence” here that the text uses can literally mean “shamelessness,” which implies an urgency and possibly even rudeness. Like the man demandingly knocking on the door, we are to repeat the Lord’s Prayer, and God will listen.
When we think about what this parable means in context for first-century inhabitants of the Near East, the phrasing here makes even more sense. One source tells me,
In the custom of that day, a whole family lived together in a one-room house. On one side of the house was a raised platform where they all slept; down on the ground were all their animals—a cow, perhaps some sheep and goats and so forth. There was no way the man could come to the door without disturbing the whole household.
So it is a big deal to go to your neighbor and do this, in other words, because you are impolitely, rudely, disrupting the entire family unit.
Another beautiful detail here is the fact that the begging friend doesn’t even ask for the bread for himself—he is hosting: “Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him,” he says. It is a good and true sense of hospitality that brings him toward the desperate act, a lovely connection to the Mary and Martha story which we know precedes it.
Yet the awoken homeowner shows a willingness to bestow grace; he is faithful to his neighbor’s persistence. He gets up, stepping over cows and dogs and sleeping children, maybe a Lego or two, to give his friend some bread, if only because he won’t go away. Note where the text says that although “The door has already been locked,” the homeowner—our Christ figure—is that kind friend, our Heavenly Father, who wakes up to give us bread at any time of night, responding to our entreaties: “For everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”
The act of asking works, even more successfully than we can anticipate. The passage offers a powerful idea to drive this home. Because we are evil and we give good gifts, “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” What a lovely turn of phrase, one which feels so true in our soul. God is good, so how great must his gifts be!
To recap: On the one hand, man’s persistence, his prayer, brings him toward the door to disturb an entire household, and God our homeowner responds with grace. When we approach him, we need to pray with literal shamelessness like this, like a friend at 2am unafraid to wake up all the sleeping children and soon-to-be-barking dogs.
I say this with complete sincerity: I think our Luke passage, and the Genesis Scripture which we will look at in a moment, are about pestering the Lord until we get what we want—or rather, until what we want aligns with what God wants.
My subtle argument today is that sometimes we overemphasize the spiritual “inner work” of prayer, an important portion of it, and thereby forget that prayer in Scripture achieves things. Our stories are trying to remind us of this essential fact, that we can influence our world with prayer.
What better way to briefly drive this home this than with our Genesis text. After God sees the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, He resolves to “go down and see” for himself what all the hubbub is about, and what Abraham has to say about this:
I must go down and see whether they have done altogether according to the outcry that has come to me, and if not, I will know.
I love the way our narrator phrases this, a beautiful and intimate personification of God who cares about our affairs and desires to meet us face to face.
So “Abraham remained standing before the Lord,” we read, and here he makes his prayerful petition. A shameless, rude, persistent knocking on the door (and, if you recall, Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family lives in Sodom, a good reason to want it saved from destruction).
Reading these lines that followed has always made me wince with anxiety. Abraham, play it cool man! Why are you being such a pest? This is the Old Testament God, dude! He might strike you down for looking at him funny. Relax.
But he is shameless and simultaneously humble. “Far be that from you” is a phrase he repeats in his praise to God; you know I am just dust and ashes, God, so let me ask again, etc.:
Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city….Suppose five of the fifty righteous are lacking….Suppose forty are found there….Suppose thirty are found there….Suppose twenty are found there….Oh, do not let my lord be angry if I speak just once more. Suppose ten are found there.
I will consider it a technicality that this passage never mentions “praying” specifically, since this is more a miraculous conversation between Abraham and a figure of the Lord, but the point stands:
Bother God enough with our prayer, from a posture of humility and love, and He may honor even our most monumental, egregious requests, like staving off apocalyptic destruction.
I am going to pick a bone with one commentator as a way of sharpening my point. This particular author writes, “We must remember that the purpose of prayer is not to persuade a reluctant God to do our bidding. The purpose of prayer is to align our will with His, and in partnership with Him, to ask Him to accomplish His will on this earth.”
One the one hand, this is obviously true: God does not need to be convinced that, if there are 10 people worth saving in Sodom and Gomorrah, He should save them. Likewise, He doesn’t need to be reminded that He should not lead us into temptation. Yet I still bristle a little at strong statements such as this, which only seem to view prayer as a symbolic gesture, useful just for spiritual formation.
The Lord’s Prayer, after all, is asking for things to get done: Can you deliver me my bread for the day? Can you forgive me? Can you help me to forgive others, Lord? Can you stop temptations from reaching me? and so on. And haven’t you gone to God for answers and special requests, and sometimes received them? Don’t we do this here every week during our communal prayer time, as we lift our hands and vocalize our wants, needs, and requests? Don’t buttons on little stuffed animals sometimes come back to life? Prayer, in this way, is more than just a stage act; praying goes beyond the hidden and mysterious “inner workings” of the soul to have consequences in our world. We are partners with God, acting agents alongside his Creation.
The connection between our two passages today on close inspection is now clear: We are to come to God with requests that the world in front of us be changed—now, immediately. God can take it. His is not a fragile ego offended by loud knocking at midnight or our haggling like a yard sale hound for the souls in Sodom and Gomorra.
I look out at this congregation and see a lot of very smart people. We in this room like to grapple with systems and theories and the momentum of ideologies, and we understand these as the way that humanity works. History in this view feels like a narrative; its course and the paths of nation-states exist out of our control. There is some truth to that, but ultimately the world also consists of singular people taking specific action, leaders making choices, actors determining futures in their boldness or cowardice; and it is God who, we must believe, prevents or vouchsafes certain courses from coming true. What else are we to take away from Genesis and Luke today than this, that prayer works to certain ends to change things?
Other places in Scripture can help us out here, if you’re not convinced by Luke and Genesis that prayer affects the world. For example, in his epistle to scattered believers, James confronts Christians about a type of wrong prayer and the consequences. Chapter 4, verse 3, says,
You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.
So again we see that there are real-world repercussions when we pray or don’t pray—and in this case—when we pray wrongly (without humility and submission to God), we will not receive what we request.
I beseech you this next week to say lots of short, little, demanding prayers, and to repeat those prayers to a God who can bear them. Try and adopt the mixture of humility and expectation that Jesus himself demonstrates and which Abraham lives out.
As the Psalm we sang today reminds us, when God eventually responds,
Steadfast love and faithfulness will meet; righteousness and peace will kiss each other.
Recently I’ve gotten into the habit of reciting what is commonly called the “Jesus Prayer,” when I don’t know exactly what to say but I still want to speak to Him. It’s easy, and goes like this: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
It’s an ancient prayer that has been used by monastics and laypeople and saints alike for hundreds and hundreds of years, and for this reason it gives me a lot of comfort. Let’s hear it again: Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. That’s it.
You are allowed to do small prayers like this and also very big ones. You don’t have to pray that God spare entire cities and nations, but you can. And He very well might listen to your pleas. Amen.
