A sermon preached at Kowloon Union
Church on Sunday 28 July 2019, the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, by Peter Youngblood. The scripture readings that day were Genesis 18:20–32, Psalm 85, Luke
11:1–13.
Each time there is another public mass
shooting my country—and for a while that seemed like every other week—you’d
hear this same old two-way political argument. The politicians on one side of
it would make a sad face and offer their “thoughts and prayers”. Then, those on
the other side would get angry and say something like: “No! that’s not enough!
We need more than ‘thoughts and prayers’.” Now the “thoughts and prayers” side
is made up of mostly those who favor what we call “gun rights” in the U.S. That
means they don’t want any restrictions on gun ownership. These politicians, and
their voters, want to be able to own any kind of gun they want, and as many of them as they want.
Unfortunately, gun ownership (and gun
violence) has become a stereotype for Americans. The most frequent question I
get asked in Hong Kong is, first: “Do you have a gun?” (I don’t, they scare
me), and the second question is usually: “Why do so many Americans have guns?”
And I could go into a whole lecture about the 2nd Amendment to the
U.S. Constitution, but that would take too long. The basic fact is that it’s a
part of our culture; a lot of Americans like their guns, especially those in my
part of the country, the Southeast. So whenever we have a mass shooting, the
“gun rights” people want to be able to show their support to the victims, but they don’t want to admit that the
problem is guns. Instead the avoid the topic by simply offering their
“thoughts” and their “prayers”.
Now—again—on the other side, you have
the people who want gun control. They say that if we had fewer guns, fewer
people would die. And their right! Countries with stronger gun laws have far fewer violent crimes than the U.S.
Take Hong Kong for example: the last couple of months have been tense, but
overall this is a very safe city. Supported by these facts, the gun control
folks want to get rid of guns—or at least make them much less easy to buy. So
when the other side offers their “thoughts and prayers”, they get angry and
say: “Your thoughts and your prayers are not going to solve anything!”
Now I want to bracket this political
debate for a moment because it’s not my main point. Rather, I want to talk
about prayer itself. The effectiveness of prayer is an important question for
us. We have many reasons to doubt that just saying a few words to God every now
and then is going to fix things, especially when dealing with the shock and
grief of losing a loved one unexpectedly or violently. Whenever I was called
into these situations as a hospital chaplain, the family would usually be in absolute
shock. And when I was first starting out, I would also struggle to find the
right words to say to them. I might say something like “I will pray for you and
your family.” Not a great
consolation, but not a terrible one either; 9 times out of 10, such a statement
would be fine. But sometimes a family member would just cut me off and say:
“How is that supposed to help me? How is that going to bring them back?” They
are grieving. They are incredibly sad. But they also have a point.
But in the Bible we read all the time
about the power of prayer. Just today, in our Gospel reading, Jesus teaches the
disciples—and us—the Lord’s Prayer. Afterwards he shares the “Parable of the
Importunate Friend” (“importunate” is a fancy word for annoyingly persistent).
This parable teaches us valuable lesson, and it does so in two ways. First, it
seems to say that if we are honest and persistent in our requests, we will get
what we need, just like the person who asks his friend for bread in the middle
of the night. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I find it very difficult
to ask for things, even if I am asking my family, and even if it is something
that I really need. This feeling of shame gets worse as you get older and
you’re supposed to be a self-sufficient adult. But through this parable Jesus
is teaching us that, as his disciples, we are not only to provide great
generosity and great hospitality, we will also always need to ask for it,
intensively. But there is another level of meaning here. Jesus is saying that
if we can rely on friends and family for what we need materially, then we can
rely on God to give us so much more spiritually:
“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock and the door
will be opened for you” (11:9).
Here Jesus is saying that prayer works,
and this is something that we continue to believe today. Why else would we do
it every Sunday? We don’t just say the Lord’s Prayer, we have an Offertory
Prayer and each week we remember the rest of the world in our Prayers of the People.
We ask God to lift up those persons, families and communities that are
currently suffering due to war, poverty, and oppression. So what’s so wrong
with offering “thoughts and prayers”?
Well, you know how they say “the devil
is in the details?” In prayer, God is “in the details”! It’s not just that prayer is important, but
it’s also how we pray, and what we pray for. In the Gospel, we
rarely get to hear what Jesus actually says when he prays, but Luke 11 is one
of those rare moments where he is very explicit; where he basically says
“repeat after me”! This is how you pray!
The Lord’s Prayer is a model for all of
our prayers, so let’s use it to consider how we pray. Well, first off, if
someone says something like “You’re in my/our thoughts and prayers”, we can
already see we have a problem. That’s not a prayer! It’s a statement! Plenty of
people say they pray about things,
especially politicians (including some of the Christian leaders in Hong Kong).
Well, I’ll believe that when I see it.
What is the topic or object of those
thoughts and prayers? What are they—what are we—asking God for? I suppose if
you are praying with or for someone who is grieving a loved one, it’s only
natural to ask God that they find peace and comfort. But is that enough? Jesus
tells us to say, “give us each day our daily bread” (11:3), but I think we take
that statement too metaphorically. What I mean is, when we hear “bread” we
think of its spiritual meaning, as in, it nourishes our souls. But we’ve got to consider material things too—actual bread!
For instance, we should pray that a family that has lost a mother or father has
the financial means to survive (and thrive), that they have the social and
psychological support they need so they are not driven into poverty, depression
and despair. And we pray this for everyone,
not just those who have suffered. We ask God to give us—all of us—our daily bread.
We ask God to “save us from the time of
trial” (11:4), to overcome all the evil that surrounds us. The Christians
during Luke’s time faced severe challenges. They were being marginalized,
persecuted and murdered by the Roman authorities. Today many of us live pretty
comfortable lives. In most places like Hong Kong and U.S., it’s pretty easy to
be Christian (though obviously many of us are not very good at it). A lot of
Christians in my country like to complain that they are persecuted, but in
reality they hold most of the political power. They are ones who like their guns: “It’s right there in the Bible,
see? It says ‘blessed are the peacemakers’. We keep the peace with guns!”
(There actually was a pistol called the “peacemaker” that cowboys used).
Privileged Christians like that—and I have to include myself in that group—
forget that real marginalization, persecution and killing still happen all
around us.
If this sounds like I’m saying we
should be praying for certain things and not others, that’s the truth. We can’t
just ask for anything, can we? When we pray it’s not just for something we
want, it’s for something God wants. This is one of those rare times where I
actually prefer Matthew’s version more that Luke’s. In Matthew Chapter 6, you
have the longer version of the Lord’s Prayer that goes: “Our father in heaven,
hallowed be your name….” and then: “Your
will be done” (6:10). When we pray for something, we can only do so seriously
if we believe that God wants that something too. Praying for your favorite
sport’s team never really works, right? God doesn’t care if Manchester United
or Liverpool win. Jesus is telling that prayer is for what God wants and also
what we should want—not necessarily
what we actually want.
When we ask God to forgive our sins,
this is a reminder that because we are sinners, we don’t always know what is
right and what we should be praying for. So a good prayer is actually one that
makes us think: Am I doing this right? Am I praying for the thing that God
wants me to pray for? The act of prayer is an act of questioning not just God,
but ourselves. For instance, Abraham prays to God, asking him to spare the city
of Sodom if he finds any righteous people. He bargains Him down to fifty, to
forty-five, and so on. All the way down to ten. Through this prayer we see that
God is a just God who wants to be merciful. But Abraham is also discovering
that he, too, is a good man who cannot bear to see the innocent perish because
of the wicked. But part of understanding ourselves through prayer is also
understanding how we may be actually responsible for the suffering of others.
Sometimes those we pray for are victims of things we support, like capitalism
and war—and of course, guns. If we don’t recognize that irony in our prayers,
then we are not praying correctly.
When it seems like we don’t get what we
want when we pray, it is because we are not asking for the right things. And
when we figure that out, then we can see how God has actually already answered
our prayers. Another great line in Matthew’s version is: “…your Father knows
what you need before you ask him” (6:7). Prayer brings our attention to what we
need and where in our lives God has already provided it to us. More
importantly, it shows us what we can do, with our own power, to help these
prayers be realized. Prayer not only needs persistence, compassion and
humility—it also needs action. It’s not just saying a wish and sitting back
waiting for it to come true. It is a call to action. Through prayer we see what
gifts God has already given us and—more importantly—how to use these gifts to
meet any challenge. As we heard from Pastor Phyllis last week, we need the
power of prayer now more than ever in our city. Each week we pray that our
leaders, both here in Hong Kong and elsewhere in the world, will have the
wisdom and the compassion to do the right thing. I admit, I don’t always have
faith that that will happen. What I do have faith in is that all of us have
been given the gift of prayer, from God and through Jesus Christ. And with that
gift we can see, “through a glass darkly” (1 Cor. 13:12), the future that God
wills for us, and what we need to do to get there.
So let us pray…
# posted by Kowloon Union Church : Sunday, July 28, 2019
