One of my children has a gift that I don’t think is all that unusual in this parish, but I want to tell you about it anyway. Unfortunately, this gift is only really in evidence when she wants something. She is the most charming, persistent and relentless asker I have ever seen. Her approach has everything — great timing, endless, wearing-down frequency, cheery smiles, logical and not-so-logical arguments, moving examples of injustice, a little flattery when appropriate, very occasionally, when all else fails, even PowerPoint. The things she asks for aren’t always possible, much less sensible, and she doesn’t always get what she wants, at least as best I can tell. It’s also fair to say there are times when I can’t stand it, I want her to stop, to get the message, N-O, to go away. But here’s the thing that’s important about this gift: I know that the day she stops doing this, this in-your-face presence, this direct contact, is a day I’ll have lost something in our relationship that I love very much.
The relationship God wants with us turns out to have a lot in common with this. Today’s readings are about how we relate to God, how we should ask for things, what we get from doing it. The message we start from these readings is loud and clear: God wants us in his face, just the way I like having my daughter working on me, God wants to hear what we want, rewards us for asking, misses us when we stop.
Do we feel that way about prayer? We know we should pray, but there’s a problem if it’s only a should. That can make it like exercise, like a membership in a gym we know we don’t use enough. But it’s not like that at all. It’s a relationship, with give and take. It might be news to us that God wants us to pray, is expecting it, looks forward to it, wants that conversation. Apparently God wants us to treat him something like the same way we’d treat a friend, a dear relative, a parent, that same honesty, the same intensity of feeling, the same respect, the same freedom.
In that first reading, Abraham had no difficulty talking with God in a way that we find startling, negotiating with this God he really just met the same way he might have haggled at a house closing: You’re great, you’re all powerful, so how could you be so unjust, how could you lower yourself? He uses flattery, but really only as a lead-in to pressing harder and harder, what if I found 50 honest men, 45, 40, 10? Can we talk to God this way, push back when something seems wrong? Can we do what Jesus seems to suggest we can resort to in today’s gospel, hammer on the door in the middle of the night, wake God up, make a scene because we need something so badly?
The fact is, as Jesus goes on to say, we don’t need to resort to that, at least not very often. God wants us to pray about what we want most, the things we can’t live without answers for. Prayer can be hard, we know that. If you don’t know what you want, if you have checked out of life, narrowed your circle, protected yourself against high expectations or disappointment, if you’re not looking for anything much out of the rest of your life, then it is hard to pray. But if you want something, even if what you want first is simply to understand what it is you really want, or how to get past discouragement or pain, then the only solution is to ask, ask again, keep asking.
So good, God welcomes our prayer, can’t wait for it. But now here is the real problem today: Do we get what we ask for? Because people pray for things all the time. We pray for everything from a parking spot on a crowded street to much more serious things, healing for a relative who is dying, safety for someone who is headed into danger. It sounds simple, ask, and you will receive, Jesus says in today’s gospel. But receive what?
We have to be honest, and acknowledge that however relentless we are, prayers don’t always produce the things we are asking for. We hear about success stories, of course, great prayer accomplishments, but despite that, God isn’t subject to us, and ultimately, like a parent, he exists somewhere outside of our control. Abraham’s negotiation with God looked like it was going well, didn’t it? He had a good case, he had God on the ropes there, because after all there was at least one honest man in Sodom. But go back and check the book of Genesis, God did destroy Sodom, and almost everyone in it. So what did Abraham get for his trouble? What do we get?
Think about the prayer that Jesus tells us is the one to use above all others, the Our Father in today’s gospel. That prayer asks for a lot, but it turns out it doesn’t ask for everything. It asks for all the necessities of life, everything we need to build the Kingdom. That prayer says we can ask God to keep us alive, to make us people who accept the way God does things, to forgive us, to come quickly, to never leave.
If we ask for that, in return, what we get, Jesus says today, is God close to us, close like a family member. We get God the Holy Spirit, the Spirit who changes us, and shapes us, who sends us where we need to go. We might like God to do everything we want, but it might be better to have a God who will love us and turn us into who we are meant to be.
I had a friend and a teacher who said something about prayer that I’ll never forget. She said there were five rules for prayer, but that you really only had to worry about two. The first one: Show up. The second one: Ask for what you are looking for. She summed up today better than I ever could. Do that over and over. Never stop showing up, never stop asking.