On Prayer And Change

On Prayer And Change

Luke 11:1-13
July 29, 2007
Rev. Kevin J. McLemore

He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to
him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you
pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name. 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.” And he 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 because he is his friend, at least
because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs. “So I say to
you, Ask, and it will be given 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. Is there anyone among you
who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks
for an egg, will give a scorpion? 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!”

A magazine called THE SUN is one of my favorite periodicals, and one of the best parts
of it is when readers write in to share their experience on a certain topic. The topic for
this August was on change, and Joe Slevcove wrote in to tell a story about he and his
wife had experienced change when they moved from the suburbs back into the city.
Joe tells us of how his wife Beth fully embraced the move, this transition from the safety
of the suburbs to some of the challenges that simply come from living in a urban
environment. Joe had some trepidation about it all, but not Beth—she jumped into her
new life, even to the point of getting to know her homeless neighbors by name, the
ones who had come to haunt the neighborhood. The only thing that bothered her were
the guys who ran the tattoo shop across the street from their apartment building. The
owners and their friends got into traffic stopping fights, harassed women walking by
their shop and even attempted to intimidate some of the men who were simply on their
side of the street. Beth didn’t walk on that side of the street because of them, and it
bothered her tremendously, because otherwise she had come to living back in the city
again.

Joe goes on and I share his story in his own words: “Then one day she called me at
work to tell me she was getting a tattoo. She’d never wanted a tattoo before and had
even taken pride in being one of the few people in our group of [young] friends with no
body art. Though surprised, I said OK. Later, she called me back and announced, “I
did it.” When I got home, Beth excitedly showed me the delicately inscribed words
“Love they neighbor” on her wrist. She explained how she’d marched across the street
and gone into the tattoo parlor. The walls were covered with drawings of skulls, bloody
knives, naked women, and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Manuel, the proprietor, was
working on someone’s backside. Beth introduced herself as his neighbor and asked if
she could watch. He said sure. After a while, she went outside and sat in front to study
the world from their perspective. The guy next to her asked was she was getting done.
“Love thy neighbor,” she muttered. “Why?” he asked. “Well, you guys are my
neighbors and I’m having trouble loving you. You kind of scare me—you know, with all
the fights that break out over here and all.   He ushered her back into the shop and
announced, with complete sincerity, “Manuel, dude, we’re scaring our neighbors! We
got to stop fighting.” Manuel was defensive—until Beth explained that she didn’t want to
change him: she just wanted to get this tattoo. Manuel showed her a picture of “Love
thy neighbor” tattooed on a man’s inner forearm—with bloody knives in the
background. “Not exactly,” said Beth. After they settled on a design, Manuel began to
do his art on her wrist. Then he stopped. “How do you spell thy?” he asked shyly, “I
didn’t go to school.” The other tattoo artist piped in, “Dude, its not because you didn’t
go to school. It’s because you don’t read the Bible!” From then on Beth would wave to
the tattoo artists as if they were old pals. The music from across the street was not so
grating on her nerves. No more fights broke out. The sidewalk felt safe. Four months
later, Beth took our car in for an oil change and saw Manuel talking to the repairman
behind the counter. As she began to remind him who she was, he stepped forward and
gave her a warm hug. “Hey,” he said to his friend behind the counter, “this is my
neighbor, the one I was telling you about.”

You know, change is sometimes the most difficult thing, it seems. It is the hardest thing
to embrace, the hardest thing to do ourselves, and it is certainly the hardest thing to
impose on others. To move from this place to that place, to be one way and then
become something different, to experience the world this way, and suddenly or even
gradually, experience the world in a completely different way—all of it usually so difficult
for us human beings. And yet, it is possible—people do change, people do become
transformed, people do move into different directions all the time in this world, despite
our sometimes cynicism that people or things never change. They sometimes do, as
we heard in the story I just shared—sometimes people do surprise us, and we surprise
ourselves, though we would have swore that our future would never have included this
person in our lives or that new trait in our character.

And, of course, we pray for change all the time—change in the health of those we love,
change for the difficult circumstances of our lives, or the lives of others, change in this
world full of war and destruction, change in our selves so that we can be made whole.
Jesus in this passage before us today gives us that template for prayer that is so
familiar to us—the Lord’s Prayer, a prayer of change, a prayer that begs God to do
something different, to change the world, to bring about a new world, to make available
three square meals for us and others, and to deliver us from evil. And yet, we know we
don’t always get what we pray for, right? Some people in this world pray this prayer
and finds themselves in a whole heap of evil, and others pray for food, and don’t
receive anything on their plates. And the kingdom we’ve been praying for to arrive,
well, that hasn’t quite completely arrived yet, right, though we Christians do believe that
is both here and not yet come—a mystery wrapped in a enigma, as they say.

But then in Luke 11 Jesus begins an extended discussion of this issue of prayer, where
he tells this disturbing parable about a not so great friend who won’t help his other
friend during a time of need---who, in fact, must be bothered into helping out. Jesus
seems to be saying that persistence will get everywhere with God—the more you nag,
the more likely you will get your way. And yet, to be honest, I hate that image of God—
and to be frank, do any of us believe that if we barrage God with enough of our
prayers, or we get 100 of our closest friends to pray with us, that somehow God will
THEN answer our prayer…almost as if God has to have a bare minimum number of
requests before God will do anything to change the situation we are praying about—
5000 prayer requests gets you partial granting of your request, but if you get 10,000
prayers, you get the whole kit and caboodle! Is that really how God works—is God as
number oriented as human beings are?

I don’t think so, because I don’t think parable is necessarily all about God—I think this is
also about us, and our relationship with this God who often doesn’t always give us what
we want—even the good and just and righteous things we want, like healing for those
we love, or for peace in Darfur, or whatever. I think this parable is about the
transformative change that can come about in our asking, in our persistence, but it’s
not a change in God that is transformative—it is the transformation in us that makes all
the difference. “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 whoever knocks, the door will be opened.” The emphasis in the
parable is not on the man who didn’t seem like much of a friend, who must be nagged
into being generous and helpful to his friend, but on the persistence of the one who
asks, and the God who knows what to give to those who ask, even if what was given to
us is not what is asked for.

Sometimes you will see a saying on bumper sticker that goes “prayer changes things”
but really, mostly, the thing that is most changed in prayer is us, the ones doing the
praying. We are what is transformed in the asking, we are the ones made whole by
praying for those we love, praying for those we struggle with, even praying for those we
hate. We are changed by asking God to change the circumstances of our lives and the
circumstances of the world. And sometimes, our nagging of God doesn’t so much
change the future as it changes our ability to get up and get that bread for ourselves,
or to get it for the brother or sister who is asking for something to eat. And sometimes
our prayers for change does work, especially if we are really open to our own prayers,
because we change in the asking—we come to accept what is sometimes inevitable:
the loss of loved one, the difficulty that is obviously ahead of us, the crucifixion that is
surely to come, if we continue to go down the good and right road we happen to
headed down.   I think of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane, begging God to change
the future, to change the inevitable, to remove this cup of torture from him….and yet,
God did not take the cup from his hand—instead, he gets a scorpion, so it seems. But
Jesus’ beautiful and so human prayer—it is answered, of course, because it didn’t so
much change what was about to happen to him as it changed his willingness to
embrace the inevitable and to get through the coming moments, the coming hell on
earth he would experience on that cross on Golgotha. Christ didn’t get what he wanted
in that moment, but he got what he needed. And we too will not always get what we
want in this world, but we will always get what we need, even if only what we need is the
strength to get through the hell that is staring right down at us at that very moment.

In conclusion, I want to share with you another story from that same issue of THE SUN
that was focused on change—about how change we seek so often comes to us in ways
we didn’t expect or want, but was needed to get through the coming days. It is in the
words of its author, Susan Regan, of Fayetteville, Arkansas:

My husband, Pat, had never been more content. He had a faithful dog, a pond full of
fish, a property that kept him busy, a job he relished, and a good marriage. I, on the
other hand, sensed a void in our life together. Pat had so far rejected all my proposals
to fill the void: having a baby, adopting a puppy, keeping bees. He feared my ideas
would ultimately become his responsibility. But my true quest was to find something
that would bring us closer together. My latest scheme was raising chickens. I
prepared my case by reading a book about urban chicken coops. Then we sat down
to talk about it. Pat listened without much comment, but he didn’t say no, which I took
to be a positive sign. A few days later, Pat awoke in the middle of the night with a
raging pain in his chest, worse than any heartburn he’d ever experienced. He thought
he might die. Finally, the pain subsided, and he got back into bed. The next morning I
heard fear in his voice as he described the ordeal. (I had slept through it.)   Soon after
that, Pat and I made a date to look at chickens. I was excited, but Pat seemed tired
and reluctant to go. I thought he should have been in good spirits: an EKG earlier that
day had shown that his chest pain wasn’t heart related. We got to the market thirty
minutes before it closed and immediately heard the peeps of many chicks. Pat picked
a few chicks up and gently held them to his cheek. He was smitten. The woman told
us the chicks would be available until the summer; no need to rush. After we’d left, Pat
casually mentioned that he’d had chickens when he was a boy, and he shared his fond
memories with me. I went to bed that night feeling reconnected with him already. By
four o’clock the next day, Pat was gone. The heart attack was sudden. His change of
heart had been his last gift to me.

As it is true for Susan, so it is true for us: friends, we don’t always get what we want in
this world, or the changes we pray for, but know this, God will give us what we need,
and the change we are praying for, that we are begging God for in our prayers—it may
not come to us the way we expect, but it will come and it will be enough, always
enough. Amen.