July 25 Sermon: The Power of Persistence
The Power of Persistence
July 25, 2010
Holy Covenant UMC
Rev. Kate Hurst Floyd
Luke 11:1-13
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“How are we supposed to pray?” is the question before us this morning.
The Disciples are asking Jesus this familiar question that we so often find on our lips, on our hearts…How are we supposed to pray?
I get this question a lot, as a pastor.
And I’ll confess to you, as someone who spent three years and $30,000 getting a degree called “master of divinity”—I still ask this question, on a very regular basis. How am I supposed to pray? How are we supposed to pray?
At some point all of us wonder how/why/to whom/when about prayer. When we feel spiritually empty we want to fill up and seek prayer to give us that fullness.
Scripture gives us many images of prayer:
Moses literally talks to God, in the desert and on mountain tops, teaching us that our prayers can be direct dialogue with God, voicing our concerns and our hopes.
We have the psalms, full of rich imagery of praise and joy and also heartache and pain, teaching us that in prayer, we don’t hide anything from God—we bring our full selves and God receives us.
We have stories of Jesus stealing away by himself, teaching us about the power of private and silent prayer, alone-time with God
And Paul tells us to pray without ceasing, teaching us that our whole lives are a prayer, when we center ourselves in God.
So many beautiful options before us, from Scripture, so why don’t we know how to pray already? Why do we ask this question? I wonder if what we are really asking for, really yearning to know, is what happens with our prayers? Why do we pray? And to whom? And will they be answered? And what does that even mean?
Jesus knows that this is what we are really asking, so he attempts to answer these questions in our passage from Luke: He gives us a 3-part answer: First, he starts off with a version of the Lord’s Prayer that we say here every week. Telling the disciples, practically, what to say when they pray: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. 3Give us each day our daily bread. 4And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us. And do not bring us to the time of trial.”
It’s shorter and a bit punchier than the one in Matthew, from which we largely draw the prayer we say today. But it’s got the familiar rhythms, thanksgivings and petitions: We pray to God who is our loving and compassionate parent; we praise God’s holy name; we ask that God’s kingdom, full of justice and peace and mercy, come to earth as it exists in heaven; we pray for daily bread, so all humanity has enough to eat; we ask for forgiveness from God and the strength to forgive others; finally, we pray to be led to God’s glorious welcome instead of the trials of the world.
This is a beautiful start…and I would venture a good place to go when we don’t know how to pray, where to begin. When I find myself in need of prayer, but without words, I often turn to the Lord’s Prayer, in my own practice. After all, it’s the prayer that Jesus himself prays, so it seems hard to go wrong with it.
But prayer is more than those specific words, as we know from other places in Scripture, and as we know in our own lives. What about praying for our own specific needs? Praying for those we love? Or our enemies, those we hate? Praying for the world?
There’s more to prayer than the lord’s prayer, though it’s a good start. And Jesus knows this, so he doesn’t stop, he offers more:
He tells a curious parable about a man who receives some company late at night. In their area, because of the heat, people often didn’t start traveling until the end of the day and walked through the night, to avoid the sun. So when they finally came to a stopping point, in need of rest, it was the middle of the night. And there were few hotels, especially affordable ones, so travelers most often stayed with their friends or acquaintances. We have just such a situation before us. A man receives a knock on his door from a traveler and allows him to stay the night. The traveler is hungry, but the host has empty cupboards. Knowing no stores or restaurants are open that late, he decides to knock on his neighbor’s door to borrow some bread. That poor neighbor: He is finally settled down to sleep, soothed the kids, not once, but twice, and they are finally peaceful. He’s finished his book and done some counting of sheep, and just drifting off…when he gets a knock at his door. You’ve got to be kidding me! He thinks…seriously? Seriously? My neighbor is bothering me at this hour…so he hopes that if he lies really still, keeps the lights off, his neighbor will just go away and move onto the next house. But the neighbor keeps knocking, now he’s shouting, waking up the household..the dog is agitated and the children are stirring…more knocking, louder shouting, the children are now screaming, his wife’s awake and scared about what’s happening…it’s clear his neighbor’s not going anywhere, so to shut him up and get him out, he goes to the door with an arm full of bread.
This, Jesus, says, is what God is like. Be persistent in your prayers and God will give in.
This is curious and hard to understand—it reminds me more of my relationship with my dog than with God.
Well let’s see what Jesus says next, after he tells us to be persistent in prayer:
He says these famous words, oft quoted: Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 10For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.
And this is where things get really hard…for we know some ways to pray, even if we don’t always engage in them. We know what we want from God, and sometimes we are quite persistent in asking. But so often we don’t receive what we ask for and these words are hard for us to understand….
Because we do ask….for our marriage not to crumble and for healing to come into our relationships. We ask for abuse to stop. We ask for clarity, for the cancer to be removed from our dad, to be able to have children, to find a fulfilling job, for local and global hunger to end, we pray for peace, every time we pray….
Sometimes our prayers are answered and sometimes they aren’t…and when they aren’t, we wonder…is it us? Is it because we didn’t pray long enough, hard enough, the right way? Is God ignoring us? Are we asking for the right things? Are we even praying for the right things?
I think we get caught up in this question: How do we pray? When what we really want to know is: what happens to our prayers?
I’ve been sitting with this text, this question, all week: Asking God…How do we pray? Why do we pray? And Thursday, many of my questions were answered. I was privileged to go with a group from Holy Covenant to the “Enough is Enough” event at the Hyatt hotel downtown supporting thousands of Hyatt hotel workers who are seeking fair pay and adequate health care from the owners/management of Hyatt Hotels. Many of these workers have been working without a contract for over a year, enduring layoffs, wage and benefits cuts, and intimidation, all the while the Pritzker family (who are majority shareholders in Hyatt) have enjoyed increasing profits and a huge $900 million earning when their business went public. We joined thousands of other workers all over the U.S. as they say ‘Enough is Enough’ at the same time.
And the image of knocking on the door kept coming up, it was being lived out right before our eyes. Because our group stayed on the sidewalk with signs, advocating for fair contracts, for justice, for human dignity while chanting for justice. But there was another group of people who chose, courageously, to participate in an act of civil disobedience—to sit in the road, arm in arm, blocking traffic. They had arranged this demonstration ahead of time with police to be peaceful advocates. It was a diverse group standing up for their own rights and for the rights of others: there were clergy: priests, pastors, and rabbis, professional organizers, average citizens willing to make a difference. But perhaps the most powerful group were the Hyatt employees themselves, many marked by their profession, in their chef whites, Starbucks aprons, housekeeper uniforms, manager nametags…
And despite the risk to their employment, the risk of being arrested, all of those gathered kept knocking at the door. Persistently asked for justice. Sat side by side with each other and named their human dignity, refusing to be silent. And if you listened closely, there were echoes of Moses negotiating with God; of the lament of the Psalms, crying out for injustice to end; there were moments of silence, stealing away like Jesus before the action; and the whole action was one big prayer without ceasing.
And you better believe that God showed up. The presence of the Spirit was palpable, it was tangible—we could feel it in one another.
Does this mean that the Hyatt workers now have contracts? No.
But did we grow into a deeper relationship with God? Yes. And should we keep on knocking, praying, asking for justice? Absolutely.
And so it is with our own prayers. Because every time we engage in prayer, be it silently or shouting, in our own private rooms or gathered with a hundred others, we draw nearer to God and draw God nearer to us and our broken world.
When we pray persistently, we are helping to usher in God’s kingdom, God’s beloved community. The more we pray for God’s healing, God’s justice, God’s mercy; the more we pray for forgiveness and peace and grace; the more we pray for abundance…the closer we are to God’s kingdom.
Because God, through Jesus, is always, already active and working to bring about the beloved community…And when we pray we grow closer to God’s reality and pull ourselves away from the world’s empty promises. And once we are attuned, persistently, to God’s powerful presence, the world begins to change. When we pray, we encounter the world with hope.
This doesn’t mean our prayers will always be answered exactly how we want them to. Jesus doesn’t say: “ask and you shall receive exactly what you asked for; knock and the door will be open to the room of your choosing; search and you’ll find precisely what you were looking for”. He does say, pray “thy kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven”
And when we pray for the kingdom, for what we know God wills for us: abundant life, freedom from pain and suffering, eradication of poverty and hunger and disease; a world where divisions are no more and all of us feast at the heavenly banquet together, as brothers and sisters reconciled with one another and with God….when we pray for the kingdom, with persistence, we are helping to usher it in.
The prayers won’t necessarily be answered in our time, in our ways or understanding…as humans, we can never know the full mysteries of God, the mysteries of prayer. But we do pray, believing that peace and justice, that healing and wholeness, that freedom and mercy are achievable in our lifetime.
When we pray for healing for a friend with cancer, she may not live past her 36th birthday….but as we pray, and draw closer to God, we’ll begin to rally a network of people passionate about breast cancer who create a foundation to help find its cure; our friend will be surrounded by peace and love in her final days; and as she and we grow closer to God, we’ll be more confident that death brings a relationship with God and isn’t the end.
The world will be filled with more healing power than before because of our prayers.
When we pray for our relationship to work out, it still may crumble in heartache or divorce. But when we draw closer to God through prayer, when we are persistent in our petitions, we will know, deep down that we are not alone. We’ll connect with others who are heartbroken and in pain, and we’ll find new life as we emerge on the other side. We’ll be powerful witnesses for the gift of resurrection to a world who needs new life.
When we pray at night to eradicate injustice, we probably won’t wake up to a world filled with peace and wholeness. But as we draw closer to God, we draw closer to God’s children…we’ll no longer be able to live complacent to the suffering around us and we’ll do what we can to bring healing to God’s world. We’ll inspire others to do the same.
Pain is real, but persistence is powerful. Jesus knows this. Because every time we pray, God hears us. When we knock at the door of injustice, God opens it up, wider and wider. When we ask for healing, the world becomes more whole. When we search for peace, God opens up the way of new life. Hope wins. When we pray, hope wins.
So let us pray, let us knock, let us ask, let us search. Confident that when we seek first the kingdom of God, we will be part of ushering it in, through the one who promises us new life, now and forever. Amen.
Tags: Kate
