“Keeping at It”

Psalm 138    Luke 11:1-13

Ninth Sunday after Pentecost    July 25, 2010

First Congregational UCC/Reverend Deb Davis                  

     I read a review of an interesting book this past week … and the book’s title is interesting as well: “Super Sad True Love Story.”

     The review describes a satirical novel set in the not-too-distant future … in a world not all that different from our own – only a whole lot worse.

     Government and big business have merged and China is calling the shots … for news people can choose between reading The New York Lifestyle Times and watching Fox/Liberty Prime.

     There are checkpoints and other security measures everywhere … erected by a government obsessed with protection from terrorism – which of course becomes its own form of terrorism …. … bulletins warn of the “danger of the day.”

     The characters move through their lives … focused on their texting and streaming and blogging. It is a culture so obsessed with technology and wealth … that people have forgotten how to feel.

     Then, about half way through the book, there is a scene where the protagonist, Lenny, and his girlfriend go to visit her parents … and they all attend a Christian revival service at Madison Square Garden.

     There they listen to a hellfire-and-brimstone evangelist preacher … who has his audience cowering in no time.

     But at some point during that revival … something happens inside Lenny … and he begins to preach his own sermon to himself. He says: “You have nothing to be ashamed of. You are better than this angry man. Your heart is all that matters. Throw away your shame!Accept the truth! And if there is more than one truth, then learn to do the difficult work – learn to choose. You are good enough, you are human enough, to choose!”

     And with that ephiphany … Lenny not only begins to care about himself in a new way … … for the first time … he also begins to care about others.

      In our gospel text this morning … the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray.

     Now the disciples were Galilean Jews … they knew the correct way to pray according to their tradition … had probably been praying their whole lives … … but they wanted to know more.

     So perhaps what they were really asking is what we also ask: How do we have more faith … how do we get closer to God?

     In respone to their request … Jesus gives them some guidelines for how to pray … gives them a portion of what we have come to know as the Lord’s Prayer or the Savior’s Prayer … that prayer we pray in this place each Sunday.

     Jesus begins his teaching by modeling for them – and so for us – that prayer is an intimate conversation with God … as intimate as a conversation with a father or a mother … prayer is about a relationship with a God whom we can know.

     Jesus then borrows from the first of the Ten Commandmants … and he says honor God’s name with both your words and your deeds … with your spoken prayers and with your lived prayers … … and then put your faith in God … instead of in money or technology or empire or anything else.

     Jesus then says, pray that God’s kingdom might come … that God’s dream of peace and justice … of equity and inclusion … might become our reality … … that the world might be set right.

     He says pray that God will give us our daily bread … give us enough for  each day … so we don’t learn to hoard and become stingy … but rather come to understand that God has created a world that will sustain us.

     He says understand that even when we try … we will fail in both our speaking and our doing … fail in the choices we make … so pray for God’s compassion … pray that God will mend us in the broken places … so we can then be strong enough to help mend others … by offering them our compassion.

     He says that as this life tests our character and our resolve … when unexpected challenges storm around us … pray that we will trust God to see us through … that God will keep us safe from ourselves and from all evil.

     And then please note one more thing … that Jesus gives us one last lesson … he uses “we” and “our” and “us” language … and so he also teaches us to pray with - and for - each other … teaches that true prayer puts us in harmony with all of creation.

     And if that wasn’t enough of a lesson for one day … Jesus follows all of that with a story … a story like all his other stories … one that tells us something about the kingdom of God … making use of ordinary choices in ordinary lives.

     This time it’s a story about a man who chooses not to get out of bed in the middle of the night and give his friend some needed bread … … and it’s a story about the friend  … who chooses to continue knocking … continues to pester his sleepy friend … until he changes his mind and does what is right.

     This story should remind us of other stories Jesus told … about other seemingly ordinary choices … like being invited to a party and refusing to go … like being jealous of a younger brother who seems to have it all his way … like resenting other workers who get the same pay for less work … … or perhaps it reminds us of Lenny’s story in that novel … who realizes in the midst of a revival in Madison Square Garden that he is capable of … he is human enough … to make better choices.

     It is in those mundane and ordinary places that the ultimate questions of our lives are decided … in those mundane and ordinary ways … that we do - or do not - bring God’s kingdom close.

     Jesus is asked to teach the disciples about prayer … about how to become closer to God … and he ends up talking about the importance of persistence in making good choices … about keeping at it … about not giving up.

     Here as in many other places … while he’s teaching many other things … Jesus says the same thing: Pay attention to the details of your lives … the ordinary things … the everyday choices … … for in the end they will determine who you are and who you become … they will determine your relationship with God and with neighbor.

     For as the Reverend William Sloan Coffin once said, “One thing we can know for sure … our living is consequential … … and it is the high calling of every Christian to be the one that provides the breakthrough … that shows things can change for the better … that dispels a lie by replacing it with a life-enhancing truth.”

     Jesus is saying this morning … there are no magical prayer formulas that will get us closer to God … no certain set of words or phrases that work … rather it will be our persistence in living into the kingdom … our persistence in saying I am human enough … to live differently.

     Every single one of us has persistently prayed for something that we haven’t gotten in this life …  someone we love is ill and even with all of our prayers that person dies … we pray and pray that a relationship will heal and it doesn’t … we pray that we might find the perfect job and we don’t.

     So let’s be clear about what Jesus isn’t saying … he isn’t saying if you are persistant in your prayers and in making right choices … you will get everything you want in this life … that’s not how it works.

      Rather the promise in this morning’s text is that doing those things will give you the presence of Holy Spirit … the certain knowledge that the living God is with you … that God is also persistent … … and that is what allows us to live in hope even when our optimism has died … that is what allows us to choose what is right even in the midst of so much that is wrong … that is what allows us to keep at it … … because we know that God is not only in our past and present … but God is ahead of us …in our future as well.

     Biblical scholar Marcus Borg says that this life we live as Christians involves us in an “unending conversation.”

     He writes: “Where does the drama of history get its material? From the unending conversation that is going on at the point in history when we are born.

     It’s as if we enter a parlor. We come late. When we arrive, others have long preceded us, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated to pause and tell us exactly what it is about.

     In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for us all the steps that had gone before.

     We listen for a while; then we put in our oar. Someone answers; we answer back; the discussion goes on.

     But the hour grows late, we must depart … with the discussion still vigorously in progress.”

     Our lives, our choices, our persistence … are all a part of an ongoing conversation … part of a link in a long chain … part of a call to keep at it … building God’s kindom one day at a time.

     That’s why when Christians gather … we continue to pray that prayer Jesus taught those first disciples … that prayer he continues to teach us … that prayer he will teach to those who come after us.

      So now, will you pray with me the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray saying: Our Father …