On prayer

A sermon for the seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (the giving of the Lord’s Prayer), from Fr Russell Goulbourne.

Looking back, I think I was probably insufferable as a teenager.

(Only as a teenager? I hear some of you asking under your breath…)

You see, as a teenager I had a phase of being a very earnest evangelical – and I was taught (and believed) that the more you pray, the more you get what you ask for.

I attended the parish church in which I’d been baptised, and which since my infancy had taken a charismatic turn and was hardly recognisable, really, as an Anglican church at all. Largely doing away with traditional liturgies, we instead had long – very long – prayer meetings. And we used to think that the more earnest we were in our prayer, the more devout we were in our prayer and very often the more verbose we were in our prayer, the more likely it was that we’d get God’s attention – and that we’d get from him what we were asking for.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there are many things and people I remain grateful for from that time in my journey of faith – but that particular understanding of prayer isn’t one of them.

We believed that the more you pray, the more you get what you ask for – because today’s gospel told us so. But I think that’s to misunderstand today’s gospel.

What do we see in today’s gospel? First, one of the disciples asks Jesus to teach them to pray. He teaches them – and us – part of what we call the Lord’s Prayer, the great prayer of relationship: our relationship with God, whom we call Father; our relationship with Jesus, who also calls God Father; and our relationship with one another, for wherever and whenever we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we’re praying it with Christians in every time and place who have prayed and are praying it.

And then, as a follow-up, Jesus tells a parable about someone asking a friend for bread – and then he follows this with some advice about asking, seeking and knocking: Everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.

Perhaps you can see why today’s gospel seemed to me in the past to be telling us that if you pray long enough and hard enough and piously enough, eventually your prayer will be answered. Eventually.

But I don’t think today’s gospel tells us any such thing. I don’t believe that Jesus is telling us that the more we pray, the more we get what we ask for.

Instead, Jesus is telling us that the more we pray, the more we get the Holy Spirit. Which is an entirely different matter.

Do you see, at the very end of today’s gospel: having mentioned the example of parents who give their children what they ask for, Jesus promises his disciples – and us – that our heavenly Father gives the Holy Spirit to those who ask him: 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!

That’s what happens when we pray: the more we pray, the more we get the Holy Spirit.

It’s not about getting what we ask for; it’s about getting God.

The more we pray, the more we encounter God’s own self: God’s Spirit, the abiding presence of perfect love in our world; the Holy Spirit, in which the crucified, risen and ascended Christ remains present in our world today.

In other words, to pray is to receive God’s own self, to be in union with God, to enter into a relationship with God – which is precisely why Jesus teaches his disciples – and us – to pray the Lord’s Prayer, the great prayer of relationship.

And since to pray is to enter into a relationship with God, there can be only one answer to every prayer: God. I don’t mean God answers our every prayer; I mean that God is the answer: God’s constant presence, boundless love, endless forgiveness and inexhaustible mercy are the answer to our every prayer. God gives his own self – God gives his Spirit – as the answer to our prayer.

And in giving his own self, God sustains us, nourishes us, shares our pain and so enables us to face everything that life throws at us. We face life, sometimes with joy and gratitude, other times with pain and grief, but always with God. To pray is to enter into a relationship with God and to recognise that we are always in the presence of divine love – the God who is nearer to each one of us than we are to ourselves.

Which is why – as in any good, solid, enduring relationship – in prayer we need to be open: open with God about what is on our hearts; open with God about what it is that we’re dealing with in our lives; open with God about our whole selves, trusting that all of who we are will be received with merciful kindness.

For this openness is what Jesus is talking about when he says, in today’s parable, that the friend gets up and gives the man what he is asking for because of his ‘persistence’: the word in the original translated as ‘persistence’ (anaídeia) – a word used only here in the whole of the New Testament – suggests not so much stubbornness or tenacity as shamelessness or fearlessness. In prayer we give ourselves fully, shamelessly, fearlessly to the God who gives himself to us totally in Christ and who loves us with a recklessly generous love.

Prayer isn’t a facet of our relationship with God; it is that relationship – and it’s a relationship based on mutuality, as we seek the God who seeks us, as we are there for the God who is there for us, as we grow into the humanity that God in Christ shows us.

So don’t be insufferable in prayer, as I was as a teenager; rather, be shameless, be fearless, be open – and let your relationship with God change your life as, through the power of the Holy Spirit, the life of Jesus comes alive in you.