The Texts: Luke 11:1-8 and Genesis 32:22-31
At first glance both our texts for today seem to have at least one thing in common to say about prayer: Be persistent. Jacob persistently wrestles with the stranger through the night at the river Jabbok and at last prevails – at daylight he is given a blessing and a name new because he has "striven with God and with humans and … prevailed" (Gen. 32:28). Jesus tells a story that seems to say that his disciples need to be persistent in prayer just like the person who knocks on a friend's door at midnight for bread to feed a guest; the friend responds to the persistent knock even when he would rather not be bothered.
So is that our lesson on how to pray: Keep asking persistently for what we want? Don't let go until we get it? Is that what we are being taught about prayer?
On the one side, it is easy to make a case for the power of persistence. Did any of you happen to see gold medal figure skater Kim Yu Na give one of her performances? The grace of her movements – which looked so natural, so beautiful and fluid, as if the human body was born for such graceful moving; and, even more, the look of utter radiance on her face as she skated to the music – almost took my breath away. But we know, of course, that even when someone is as extraordinarily gifted as Kim Yu Na or any of the other Olympians, for that matter, it takes an enormous amount of effort, of persistent practice, to make the moves they do. One trains the body to move through persistent effort, guided by a vision of excellence, a glimpse of grace-in-motion.
When I taught the introductory course in pastoral care, I often told my students to think of learning to listen to others as being like learning to dance. The seemingly silly exercises we did in class to learn to be attentive to others – these in and of themselves are not really listening, I said, any more than a dancer's practicing this or that step over and over is dancing. Listening is what happens when one so utterly attends to another's story that one forgets all the steps one has learned to help train the body and the mind to pay attention – it is like what dancing is when one is caught up in the music and no longer has to watch one's feet or arms. It is finally an experience of grace – for to be freed from self-consciousness and self-focus to be caught up in something beyond oneself is surely one manifestation of grace.
Thinking along those lines, it may be helpful to think of learning to pray as a practice of persistence … putting ourselves consistently in a watchful listening stance, hoping to hear God speaking to our hearts … or learning prayers by heart until they sink deep down inside of us like the roots of a tree. "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name." "The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want." "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?" "Into your hands I commend my spirit." In the Psalms, the Bible's largest collection of prayers, the wisdom psalms and the Torah psalms lift up the joys of following the law with persistent commitment. Psalm 1, which is about that "way of righteousness," has been called the "gateway to the Psalter," because it casts this image of the faithful life as trying to follow a way that is so life-giving that one becomes, over the many seasons of barrenness and bearing fruit, like a tree planted by streams of water.
Thus, on the one hand, it may be fruitful to imagine the life of faith or the life of prayer as a life of persistent effort. And there are wonderful guides: Teresa of Avila, Henri Nouwen, Julian of Norwich, Anthony Bloom, to name a tiny handful.
But, on the other hand, there is at least one danger of thinking of the life of prayer this way … and the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke portray a Jesus who knew this danger well.
Jesus knew what it was like to live in a world of persistent and anxious striving; a world where people were divided into categories with some on the bottom and some on the top; where life was lived according to certain principles of performance and conformity to certain standards. His remarkable ministry was the ministry of a person in the peasant class, near but not quite at the bottom since he was male and not impaired by illness. He was so extraordinary that people crossed social boundaries in all directions to interact with him. He consistently broke with conventional wisdom about what it means to live a faithful life and how to image God.
When Jesus responded to a disciple's plea to "teach them to pray," he taught them words that were radical and subversive words, not conventional words. In a world where access to God was so structured and dependent on carefully followed rituals and name of God so sacred that it could not even be uttered, he encouraged his disciples to address God with intimacy and freedom. In a world where some had access to bread in abundance and others had to eke out a living day by day, think of the revolutionary nature of the petition, "Give us each day our daily bread." In a land (not very different from ours) where people gained power over others through systems of indebtedness, imagine what it was like to say, in a prayer, that they would live a life of resistance to gaining power over others through what others owed them: "Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us" (Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer). And when, as in the story of Fannie Lou Hamer that we heard last Sunday that was inspired by the story of Jesus, we live in times where to act for justice and mercy for all may involve profound suffering, and where we are tempted away from such a life every day, how well we may need to cry out, "Save us from the time of trial!"
We say the Lord's Prayer every Sunday until the prayer seems part of our own religious establishment. There are people today who elevate the intimate term Jesus used ("Father") as the only real and proper name for God, replacing old conventions with new ones in the name of religious correctness … until we cannot hear anymore what may have been the gasps of those who heard the words for the first time, and in time made them their own.
In the story Jesus told about the persistent neighbor, which Luke places immediately following Jesus' teaching the disciples this prayer, what is Jesus saying about the God to whom we pray?
The Greek word translated "persistence" looks like this: ANAIDEIA. The primary meaning of the word is shamelessness or carelessness about the opinion of others, or ignoring of convention. In the passage from Luke, from which we have read a portion today, Luke is contrasting God, who is eager to give good gifts (especially, for Luke, the gift of the Spirit) to God's children with a so-called "friend" who has to be shamed into helping. And telling this story about a nagging friend also gives Luke another opportunity to expose a social system that is built on honor and social convention. That is why biblical scholar Ray Pickett believes the use of the term anaideia is used. The Jesus of Luke, and the other synoptic Gospels, contrasts a social vision that has a beneficent and merciful God at the center with the realities of a social world dictated by honor and patronage. God does not need to be shamed into loving us*.
It is possible, I believe, to affirm the place of persistent prayer in the life of faith without succumbing to the danger of holding an image of God that suggests we need to strive to win God's blessing or show ourselves "better" in some way than others as if our whole lives were an Olympic competition. But the line is a murky one at times.
John Wesley knew that murky line. He strived so hard for holiness with a heart never at rest until it was "strangely warmed" by a word of grace. Charles Wesley picks up the theme of that striving in the hymn we sang just before the sermon. This hymn uses imagery from the story of Jacob we read this morning. Again, we have only a portion of that story from Genesis. Jacob strives, yes. But he is in anguish beside the Jabbok river because he wants to return home after many years and he is afraid that the brother he tricked and cheated still has a warrant out on him. He has hatched a plan to appease his brother. Always the schemer, before Jacob walks alone by the river he sends a very well-organized group on ahead of him with a big appeasement present of animals and servants out front and the goods and people he loves most in the back, farthest away from Esau's grasp. But his grand plan to appease Esau with a generous gift is not necessary, because in the morning Esau comes to meet him and takes him into his arms and kisses him. Esau is not interested in appeasement, but in restored relationship. He has enough, he tells Jacob. And then Jacob presses Esau to take what is offered, but as a gift given in gratitude rather than as "payback," because, as the story goes, he tells Esau that seeing his forgiving and welcoming face was like "seeing the face of God" (Gen. 33:10).
It is that forgiving, empowering, loving God, whose face Jesus shows us. We pray persistently, not because persistence is an appeasement or price to see that face, but because God persistently desires to meet us, to warm us, to heal us, and to show us that God's very name and nature is love. Amen.
*I am indebted to the Rev. Dr. Raymond Pickett, Professor of New Testament at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago, for his insights about this text, and for help with the Greek!
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