“Why did we pray and nothing happened?” “We prayed for healing, but there was
none. I don’t understand.” “Why does God seem to answer some prayers and
not others?” “What good is praying?”
I have
been asked all those questions many times, and have asked all of them
myself. I will confess they are not
questions that I like to answer, largely because I do not have an easy answer
for them.
What
did Jesus think? What did Jesus teach
about prayer? This is a good Sunday to
ask the question, because we have two parables about prayer from Jesus this
morning, and they are from Luke, which is sometimes called the Gospel of Prayer,
because of teachings like this that only appear in Luke’s Gospel and the fact
that Luke is always telling us that Jesus is praying.
So now
you would think that if anyone had prayer down to a science it was Jesus. Yet that is not exactly the evidence. There is the well-known scene in the Garden
of Gethsemane the night before his death when Jesus struggles deeply and even
painfully with what to pray for, and then in Mark and Matthew’s Gospel there is
Jesus’ prayer from the cross, “My God, why have you abandoned me?” to which he
receives no reply. This is so hard to
contemplate that Luke and John ignore Jesus’ helplessness on the cross and have
him, respectively, dispensing forgiveness and decreeing for himself when it is
finished.
And
then there are these two parables, particularly the first one, which we read
last week, but I saved for this week.
What do they have to tell us about prayer?
It’s
important to know the context. Jesus has
just given his warnings about the chaos at the end of the world, and they would
have been enough to set the disciples’ teeth on edge. It was not good news, or, at least, it did
not sound like any good news they had ever heard before.
“Those who
try to make their life secure will lose it,” Jesus had said, “but those who
lose their life will keep it. I tell
you, on that night there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the
other left. There will be two women
grinding meal together; one will be taken and the other left.” The disciples asked him, “Where, Lord?” He said to them, “Where the corpse is, there
the vultures will gather.”
And
immediately the text says,
Then Jesus
told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.
Of course he did, lest the image of the
corpse-gathered buzzards haunt their dreams, or even their attempts to pray.
It
occurs to me that Jesus would not have taken the time to encourage us not to
lose heart if he did not know just how easy that would be, to lose heart, that
is. And it is easy. We usually use the image of a “broken”
heart. I think I like this image better,
a “lost” heart, a heart that cannot find home.
Most,
if not all, of us have been there, if for no other reason than the loss of
someone we have dearly loved.
When I
was eleven years old my beloved grandmother died of colon cancer at the age of
49. I know I have told the story of our
last meeting through the screen of a hospital window. I may very well have told you this part also.
If so, forgive me. A day or two later
she died. My parents came home and my
father sat my seven year-old sister and me down on the couch and said, “You
know in heaven where God is? Well that
is where your grandmother is now.”
I
remember those words, clear as a bell, but I do not at all remember how I felt
or what I thought about them. I do know
that I did not find them particularly comforting. I spent the next few years not thinking about
God much. I had no real reason to do so.
When I did I did not particularly care if he existed or not. If he did,
he was certainly no friend of mine.
I think
we underestimate how many people get to that place and get stuck there, and
never come out.
Now I
know that I have told my “conversion” story before, how quite serendipitously I
got involved when I was a junior in high school with the musical Godspell. I learned the story of Jesus then, and I
liked it in the form I was hearing and telling, but I could not in my heart or
mind make the connection to my grandmother.
In the
end the connection was made for me. On
the last night of the performance, I was carried by several of my cast mates
through the auditorium crowd, lying on my back with my arms drooped toward the
ground. I was the dead Jesus. At one point, someone, I have never known
who, reached out and squeezed my hand.
It is odd how a simple touch like that can sometimes make the synapses
in your brain fire in ways they could not before.
As I
said, I did not know who it was, but I was absolutely sure it was my
grandmother, and the message could not have been clearer to me: in Jesus’ death
she was alive. I was not delusional. I
knew I could not see her and would not see her, but I also knew that she had
not been taken away from me, she was not in some far away place called heaven
that I could never get to, and that although she was not healed in the way that
I wanted her to be healed, she was, in Jesus’ death, alive.
Now I
know that is not much of a story about prayer, at least in the technical sense,
but it is a story about how I found my heart after having lost it. In one sense, Jesus’ advice was not
complicated at all. If you lose your
heart, keep looking until you find it.
Be stubborn, insistent, even angry and demanding if you have to be. But don’t give up the fight.
And
don’t, he goes on to say, try to fix things by papering over your lostness with
religion. We do this all the time. We
are not as arrogant as this Pharisee, but, then, he is supposed to be a caricature. But we do this often when someone else is
hurting and we try to paper it over with religion, and we inevitably say too
much, and it sounds helpful, and we mean well, but it only puts more distance
between the hurting person and God, not less.
Someone
asks us, “Why?” And we pretend we know
the answer. “God needed him.” “It was her time.” I actually believe that God does not really
want us to answer for him. I think it is
actually more comforting to say, “I don’t know.” But do not stop there. “I don’t know, but I do know we will get
through this, because if I know anything about God it is that he gets us
through things, and I even think he has gotten your grandmother, your friend,
your sister, through death.”
What
does this say about prayer? It says to
me that when we pray for
Julian
of Norwich wrote,
God did not
say, “You shall not be tempest-tossed, you shall not be work-weary, you shall
not be discomforted.” But our God said,
“You shall not be overcome.”
Which
is the ultimate answer to every prayer that has ever been made.
No comments:
Post a Comment