Seek. Ask. Knock.

Poolesville Presbyterian Church

Rev. Dr. David Williams; 07.24.2016

Scripture Lesson:  Luke 11:1-12

LISTEN TO SERMON AUDIO HERE:

Name it and claim it.  That’s all you need to do.  If you want something, just set your heart on it, and it will come to pass.

This saying has become a peculiar part of American Jesus practice, front and center in our strange brand of 21st century consumer Christianity.  The idea, at least, is that God gives us everything that we want if only we ask faithfully.

I’ve read through the books by the great masters of the prosperity movement, by the Creflo A. Dollars and the Joel Osteens of the world.  I’ve got several of them on my twitter feed, for some reason that still eludes me, and I get their chirrupy words of positive-thinking encouragement mixed in with the art and the literature and the randomness.

Some spiritual practitioners elsewhere in this odd movement call that principle the Law of Attraction, asserting that the way you get something to happen is simply to desire it.  If you truly want something, it will happen.

I’ve tried this, and I find it doesn’t really quite hold water.

It’s not just with the stupid stuff, like the muscle cars and the yachts and the BMW R1200RTs of the world.  It isn’t...as one of the prosperity preachers wrote in his bestselling book...about praying to Jesus that you’ll find a parking space at the mall, and bam!  You get one.  Named it!  Claimed it!

It’s with other stuff.  The important stuff.

I truly wanted a friend not to die during brain surgery.  I didn’t just slightly want it.  I turned all of my hopes, all of my intention, all of my prayers, all of myself towards that end.  I named that future.  I claimed it.  I visualized it, and trusted in God. I rested my hopes in God that she’d pull through, when the surgery failed and she was induced into a coma.  She died.  I cannot possibly have wanted that not to happen more than I did.

I genuinely and utterly named and claimed the revitalization of my last congregation, my first call.  I could see it.  I could feel it.  I could visualize what it would mean for that church to turn around two decades of decay, and become something new and joyous.  I saw that, and I cast out that vision, and I prayed prayers full of hope.  

But folks got to fighting, and things didn’t work, and as much as I prayed and sweated and hoped and prayed some more, it just didn’t happen.  I left.  The church died.

What strikes me, every time I encounter prosperity preaching, is that it is complete and unmitigated bovine excrement.  The idea that you shape creation with your intention seems like egomaniacal bravado, preposterous bluster completely unfounded in the reality of our mortal frailty and our smallness.

And yet here Jesus is, telling us to do just that.

Ask, and you shall receive.  Seek, and you shall find.  Knock, and the door shall be opened to you.

That’s a little hard to hear, having lived enough life not to quite believe it.  So what does that mean?

Here in Luke chapter 11, we’ve worked our way through a sequence of Jesus teaching about prayer.  It’s a familiar teaching, one that we find in a more familiar form elsewhere in the Bible.  It’s in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, too, at the core of the spiritual and ethical teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.  It’s in the heart of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, too, at the core of the spiritual and ethical teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

It’s the most basic prayer, the most

In Luke, as in Matthew, that simple teaching of a simple prayer is followed by a section on what it is we can expect from our Creator, and in both, we are told not to fear.

But in Luke, Jesus lays out a little story, a mental exercise meant to stir the imaginations of his listeners.  Imagine a friend, arriving with need in the middle of the night.  What do you do for that friend, in their need?

You help them.  You give them what they ask.

In ancient Judah, the demand for hospitality was radical, a fundamental moral principle that provided the social glue of a culture.  The reason to have things was to share them, was to be generous with them.

I’m not sure that’s quite the same in our selfish, fearful, anxious society.  A knock on the door in the middle of the night might get us calling the cops, or racking a shell into the chamber of the shotgun.

But the principle Jesus is trying to convey is straightforward: God, like a good friend, will give us what we ask if we diligently ask for it.

So how does that play out, really, here in the reality we inhabit?  If we ask, do we receive?  If we knock, is it opened?

In many ways, no.  We do not become gods by the asking.  Sure, we can stand out in a cornfield directly in the path of an F5 tornado, and say, “Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you in the name of Jesus to turn this storm aside!”  I mean, we can, but then our next prayer will be something along the lines of “Dear Heavenly Father, now that I’m flying through the air, could you find something soft for me to land on?  No, by soft I didn’t mean a tree.”

We do not become less mortal through the asking.  We are not immune to the reality of being human, of being frail, of being easily broken.  Christianity is not and has never been the promise that everything will always go right for us, that we will not grow old, that we will never experience illness or loss or death.  That’s the lie of consumer culture, which sates us with stuff and coddles us while eternally stoking our hungers.  Following Jesus is and has never been a guarantee that you’ll never experience suffering and loss.  

So if that’s what you’re seeking, you’ll be disappointed.

But following Jesus also changes the world.  It does.  As I like to think of it, the commitment to Christ’s way bends local probability towards the reality of grace.

I’ll freely admit that saying “I’m bending local probability towards the reality of grace” is a great way to insure that no-one has a clue what you’re talking about, which is probably why Jesus never used those words.

What are we to ask for?  As Jesus makes clear in Luke’s gospel, we’re asking for the Holy Spirit, which means we’re asking to stand in unmediated relationship with the love of God.  That changes us, and it changes our relationships, and that changes...right up close, where it matters...our world.

If we ask for God’s grace to work in and through us, to fill us with the light of kindness and mercy, and that is our sincere yearning, that changes things.  We are more likely to be graceful.  We are more likely to give others the benefit of the doubt.  We are more likely to forgive, and to be resilient, and to endure times of hardship.

If we search, diligently, for the Way of life that Jesus taught, that makes a difference.  It shapes our deciding, transforms the choices we make, modifies the way we relate to every human being with whom we stand in encounter.   That, in turn, has the potential to change how they experience their lives, and that changes them.

If we knock, diligently, against what can sometimes seem like the dark, closed door of the universe, we may not receive material blessings.  But that Spirit of grace, which is the heart of the Way that Jesus taught, is and will always be available to us.

And in that, there’s hope, in the strange inversion of naming and claiming.

Let that be so, for you and for me, AMEN.