Homily - Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time   July 25, 2004

 

 

Edward Hays in his book Prayer Notes for a Friend shares this with us:

 

I have a saying on my desk that I wrote to remind me how to pray:  “When you pray, howl like a wolf – don’t bleat like a lamb.”  So I ask:  Are you bold enough in what you ask of God in your prayers?  Do you have the daring audacity to daily beg to become Godlike, to be a saint?  Are you audacious enough to pray with presumption that you might be able to taste the Invisible and savor the Sacred, or do you only pray for practical things?

 

Consider investing your prayers with more nerve and cheek, with what the Jews call chutzpah, pure brazenness.  Be gutsy and throw your lukewarm, dishwater tepid prayers down the drain, replacing them with furnace feverish petitions.  Then fasten your safety belts, for Jesus promised, “Ask and you shall receive”!

 

Hays continues:

 

God aches for you to begin to pray for what you truly need.  Moreover, you and the world have the same need.  What the world needs – even more urgently than peace – is saints. Imagine the impact a hundred living saints would have on the world society.  What the church needs more than obedient docile members is contrary prophets.  Imagine the effect a hundred living prophets would have on the church.  I don’t mean oracles of the future but, rather, those who live fully, who live the Gospel, the radical will of God, without compromise. Regardless of your other present needs, what you most deeply need to become a saint.  So pray for it with passion and with chutzpah.

 

Our readings from Sacred Scripture today encourage us to be bold in our prayer.  But our illustrations from the book of Genesis in which Abraham seems to spar with God and our Gospel reading from Luke which almost makes the response to the request seem grudging are not to be taken lightly.

 

The style of the reading from Genesis as well as the Gospel of Luke has to be looked at. The writer of the ancient book of Genesis is using metaphor – attributing to God human characteristics to help us to comprehend the incomprehensible.  Any logical argument we employ in describing God is bound to be far afield of the mystery of who God is.  And so Abraham’s dialogue – indeed argument with God – is to illustrate what it is hard to imagine – God’s unbounded mercy.

 

The reality is that this Abraham is described as bartering with God – this Abraham who is daring and “pushy” does so because he had repeatedly experienced his God as understanding, merciful and true?  He was not a stranger with his God. Theologian and Pastor Robert McAfee Brown once remarked that “for many, prayer is like a foreign land. When we go there, we go as tourists.  Like most tourists, we feel uncomfortable and out of place and because of that we move on before long and go somewhere else.” 

And so we see that Abraham – knowing his God – experiencing his God – is not a tourist with God, is not uncomfortable with God – but trusts his God.

 

And Jesus would have his disciples act in the same way – to be intimate enough with God as the guy who banged down the door and petition their God.

 

If we trust someone – if we are confident in another person – we don’t hesitate to be bold with them.

If we really trust God’s goodness and mercy and love for us –we will be bold as Edward Hays suggests and let loose in our prayer.

 

And what is it we would pray for?

Do we really think we would pray for the unnecessary? A bigger house – a longer vacation –to win the lottery!

If we really had a relationship with our God – trusted in God’s intimate love for us we would pray for the essentials: for peace within our selves – for the ability to be in right relationships with the other important people in our lives – for health – for the ability to face the difficult times – for the security and happiness of our loved ones.

Our prayer is not timid – because we know our God loves us.

And we ask our God to empower us and have our live who God called us to be –

What more could we ask for?

 

Now we could sit here and wonder how we could trust enough to pray well – how we can be believing enough to pray well. What if God doesn’t see the end out as I do? What if I’m praying for the wrong things? What if I’ve got it all wrong?

 

Once upon a time there was a small Jewish village that had all the necessary facilities, a law court, a hospital and a cemetery; as well as the usual assortment of craftsmen – shoemaker, tailors, bakers and carpenters. The village, however, lacked one trade:  a watchmaker.  Over many years the clocks in the town became so annoyingly inaccurate that many of their owners stopped winding them anymore and just ignored them.

 

However, there were a few people in the village who believed that as long as their clocks were running they should not be discarded. Day after day they religiously wound their clocks, even tough they no longer kept the correct time. Their neighbors made fun of them:  “How silly to keep winding your clock when it doesn’t keep accurate time.”  But one day the good news traveled like lightning that a master watchmaker had just moved into the village. Everyone rushed to his house with their clocks.  To their dismay they discovered the only ones he could repair were those that had been kept running, for the abandoned clocks had grown too rusty to fix.

 

The fact is that the only bad prayer is no prayer.  Even prayers that may be rushed and rambled, bad theology and even a little superstitious still are based on a belief in a good God. 

I guess as long as we believe that are prayers a worthwhile – that God wants us to communicate and engage God – its good.

 

And so pray about whatever – ask God for what you need.  We know that as long as we invite God in to our days and nights – wonderful things will happen - even if they are surprises to us.

 

And so let’s pray!