Persistence with God
…how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!
Our first lesson today is the beginning of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham has just spoken with God in the form of three men at the Oaks of Mamre, where he was promised that Sarah would have a son. The three men then decided to go on to Sodom. God wanted to know what was happening there because there had been complaints. The people of Sodom were accused of injustice, of not caring for others, of not showing proper respect or even kindness to the strangers in their midst, for oppressing the poor, the orphan and the widow. God was upset and wanted to get rid of them all, but out of respect, God decided to talk with Abraham about this issue. This was not simply because Abraham and God were close, but also because Abraham knew the people of Sodom. Abraham’s nephew Lot lived there. Abraham had brought Lot with him when he initially left his homeland for the land God promised. They had separated when the land couldn’t support both of them with their flocks. Lot’s home was Sodom.
Abraham had also rescued all of Sodom before. In the 14th chapter of Genesis, when Abraham was still named Abram, there had been a war. Sodom and their allies, all the people who lived in the valley near the Dead Sea, had stood up against their rivals and lost. Their cities were plundered and Lot was carried away into captivity. Abraham helped return everyone to their land. He brought back everything their rivals had looted.
The people of Sodom weren’t strangers to Abraham. He knew there were bad people there, but he wasn’t sure how many. Surely though, God couldn’t just wipe them all out. God couldn’t wipe out innocent lives along with the guilty. Where was God’s sense of justice? Abraham knew the nature and character of God, so he called God out. The surprising thing is, God worked with Abraham. They hashed it out. In the end, they came to an arrangement they both could feel comfortable with.
It’s a bizarre story really. God asks Abraham’s opinion. Abraham haggles with God. God agrees to Abraham’s terms. God takes a human opinion into consideration and agrees to act in a more just way. Human action influences God’s action, and actually help God do a more just thing.
While I do think this conversation is a mythical story, it does, like any myth, lead us to a truth: God listens to us. We have a full and complete relationship with God. We have the power to disagree with God and call God out. There’s even a longstanding Biblical tradition of this. Numerous Psalms that are essentially complaint psalms. Someone’s enemy is triumphing over them, the wicked are winning, and God needs to do something about it. The person reminds God of who God is and then asks God to act. Justice must be done.
Why does this tradition exist? What makes it so powerful? I think this tradition helps us define our values. It helps us see where injustice and hurt are being done in the world and to talk with God about it. It is in these moments of uncertainty, of doubt, of even anger at God, that values are defined within the self and one can explore the hopes and values of God. When we’re not sure where to go or what to do, we can lay it all out before God. God helps us figure it all out, and sometimes even changes things on our behalf. Our relationship with God is strengthened through mutual contemplation.
This tradition even makes it into the Lord’s Prayer. We often don’t see it though because for so many of us today it is a grounding prayer, something we can say to center ourselves. But the people Jesus was teaching this prayer to didn’t have many securities in life.The majority of the Lord’s Prayer is petition, asking God to act, asking God to be whom they know God to be: loving and full of compassion. Jesus and the disciples lived mostly on the road, moving from village to village. They weren’t always sure where the next meal would come from. They did have some financial backers, but there weren’t stores in the way we think of them. There were marketplaces, but not in every village and maybe not every day. Travelers relied on friends and strangers to help them along the way. Getting daily bread took effort. It took networking and reliance on others.
We can see the emphasis on networking and reliance in the story that directly follows the Lord’s Prayer in Luke. A person is in a panic. Guests, probably distant relatives, have arrived at his house in the middle of the night, starving after many long nights on the road. But this man’s pantry is completely bare. There is absolutely nothing he can give them. But he knows a guy. He knows his friend has food. So he bangs on the door. It doesn’t matter that the friend is asleep, that he’s curled up on the floor of his one room house with his spouse, his children, even their livestock. This man knocking at the door knows that his friend has bread. He knows that his friend can provide. So he keeps on knocking. His guests need something. They are too hungry to even fall asleep. The friend provides, not out of compassion, but out of annoyance. Stil, needs are met. Daily bread has been secured.
Neither the man knocking nor the friend he annoyed were meant to represent God. This story is one that illustrates how much more God can do for us. If a simple friend who isn’t all that compassionate can help another out, how much more can God help us out? Jesus follows even further: If you, who can be quite selfish, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will God give to you?
We are told to ask, to search, to insist that the door be opened for us. This of course has been turned into damaging rhetoric over the years. Prosperity Gospel preachers promise that if you help them out with money, you will find exactly what you’re looking for. Some faith healers insist that if you truly ask and seek with all your heart, your medical condition can be miraculously cured. If it’s not, the answer is to pray harder. But it is not stuff we’re supposed to ask for, not things that we seek. In the end, God doesn’t promise us storehouses of stuff or illness-free lives. God promises us the Holy Spirit.
And what does the Holy Spirit do? How does the Holy Spirit help us? In the end, I think the purpose of petitionary prayer, of asking things of God, is not primarily to change God, but to change us. If we ask for daily bread, we have to have it in our hearts to provide it for others. If we ask for God’s Kingdom to come, we have to live into it. Our hearts have to be changed.
Our hearts are changed so that we of course do things like share food with others, care about those in poverty, and seek justice for the oppressed. We believe people need daily bread. We believe that others need forgiveness just as much as ourselves. We believe that we can be saved from systemic evil and times of trial. We believe it because we pray for it. The way we pray shapes our believing.
Our hearts are opened to the Holy Spirit and we are able to converse and bring our full selves before God, seeking God’s way, not our own. This kind of prayer helps us release, helps open up the pressure valves and let steam off. It helps us process what is happening and move forward. It is because we petition God, because we share our frustrations, our fears, and our doubts that we are able to move forward.
As an everyday example, I find myself complaining to God in my prayer journal more often than I care to admit. Part of that is because I’m honestly a bit of a grump in the morning. I’m groggy, tired, and prone to think of the things going wrong, not the things going right. I have to balance myself out every morning and get myself on the right foot. My prayer journal is something I use to help me do this. This journal is where I write about whatever is on my heart, both the good and the bad. The act of complaining, of stating my needs, or saying, “No God, that isn’t right” does something for me. The first thing it does is allow me to leave my pettiness at home each morning. I don’t need to carry it into the church building, which is often my next stop. The second thing it does is allow me to process where I need to act, how I can take healthy actions towards change, not just let things fester. I notice patterns. I see what bugs me more clearly, I hone in on my values, and I’m able to make plans of correction to live out those values.The final thing it does is connect me to the Holy Spirit. When I ask the Holy Spirit to come and listen, the Holy Spirit does indeed come and pay attention. I feel closer to God by bringing this bit of myself to God each morning, saying, “Here’s my junk. What do you think?” The Spirit listens to my ramblings without judgment and then asks: “How can you be a source of love today?” I end up driving to work with this question on my heart, not the junk I was thinking about when I woke up.
How can we be a source of love? How can we uphold our values that we pray God to enact in our lives? It is through our conversations with God that we find these answers. God always comes. God’s not afraid to hash it out with us. We shouldn’t be afraid to hash it out with God, just like Abraham did. Just like Jesus teaches us in the Lord’s Prayer. It’s not a sin to call God out. It actually helps us develop a richer and deeper relationship with God.
Abraham’s conversation with God is about big things, about a life or death situation. Jesus’ examples are small and everyday. But in coming to God about our daily needs, learning to navigate through our junk with God on our side, we build trust. It strengthens our relationship with God. As that relationship builds up, as it strengthens, we are better able to see and serve God in others. We are better able to get up in the middle of the night for the friend in need. We’re better able to see what God desires us to do, not always what is in our own self-interest, but what brings about the most good in the world. We ask, and we receive. We seek, and we find. We knock, and the door is opened to us. Not the doors of wealth or miraculous cures. These are the doors of the Kingdom of God. Through our conversations with God, even about the mundane and trivial stuff of life, we are unleashing the power of the Holy Spirit. God listens to us. God empowers us. This is why we pray. Amen.
