Proper 12C
July 28, 2019

O God of everyone, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may, and cost what it will.

I want to say some things about our Gospel reading, but first, I want to say something about the First Testament lesson. Hosea – a prophet of Israel – was crying out against his people for breaking the covenant by not worshipping The Holy One alone. Idolatry and whoredom, in ancient Hebrew, are the same word – the very same thing. [1] Fidelity to the Holy One of Israel had been promised and the people have been seeing other gods. They have been engaged in moral defection, fraud and cheating, improper intercourse with other deities. They have been putting their faith in wealth and other forms of power, engaging in dishonorable and undignified behavior, rather than in compassion and regard for both neighbors and aliens. (This could be ripped from today’s headlines.) Hosea charged that economic resources are being exploited to wage war, the government is exploiting poor people. “When the Lord first spoke within Hosea, Hosea heard, ‘find a wife who is seeing other gods – because you’ll not be able to find one who is not seeing other gods – everyone in the land is doing it…Name your children Jezreel, after a place of a brutal massacre; Lo-Ruhamah meaning no compassion; and Lo-Ammi, not my people. Do this,’” Hosea hears God saying, “’because I am not your becoming; I am not your being; I am not your will be.’”

In the next verses, all of that was restored, and in the very next chapter, the new covenant went further and deeper than ever before. The covenant is no longer “you will be my people and I will be your god,” it is now that plus compassion. Hosea is a story about a forgiving, patient, and tender God. Regrettably (and dangerously) to Christian ears, our lectionary’s delivery system can make it sound as if God has forsaken and rejected God’s people in the 8th century BCE, not to be restored until Jesus came along. What we Christians don’t hear is that the whole of Hosea is a treatise on God’s redeeming love for God’s people in the 8th century BCE. 

On the other hand, I can’t leave this passage without mentioning what God has not yet redeemed. That is, our sacred texts are shot through with misogynistic imagery and metaphors. It was the case in ancient times as it is now, that often when men call each other names, the names they choose denigrate women. What’s more, women are treated as the primary offenders in societal disfunction and it is women who are punished by not having legal control of their own bodies, even as they bear (and deliver) the burdens of misogynist misconduct of all kinds. The enormous problem with the metaphor of God as a sometimes punishing and ultimately forgiving male, is that the Divine becomes male and then male becomes divine.” [2] The language of “King” and “Father” for the Holy One, that fills our prayer books and our hymnals, is oppressive for people of all gender identities. We are all incarcerated by it.

 Gender has been on my mind lately. As I alluded to last week, The Gospel of Luke was once thought of as the Gospel most friendly and supportive of women. It certainly names more women and includes more dialogue by women than the other gospels. Then in the 1990’s there was considerable pushback in the academy about among Bible scholars pointing out things like the effect of the Martha and Mary story which stops one and shuts up the other. Into that conversation, Brittany Wilson, Assistant Professor at Duke University, has contributed a fascinating study of masculinity in Luke and its companion volume, the Acts of the Apostles. In her book, Unmanly Men, she looks at how Luke’s male characters “measure up” compared with what it meant to “be a man” in first century Rome (which turns out not to be all that different from societal or commercial norms in the United States, by the way).[3]  Wilson takes a close look at Zechariah, father of John the Baptist, who lost his power to speak; the Ethiopian eunuch, who lost his power to procreate; the Apostle Paul, who lost his power to see; and Jesus, who lost his life in one of the most excruciating and humiliating ways ever devised, and ultimately showed us the powerless power of God. Wilson concludes that the Gospel of Luke “provides a refiguration of masculinity that is inextricably wed to [the writer’s] understanding of God’s powerless power…Luke’s portrayal…blurs gender boundaries, but presents a ‘Lord’ who looks unmanly to the world of the first century and to the world of the twenty-first century as well.” [4] It seems to me that this matters to all who are curious about or drawn to the love God in Jesus.

It also seems to me that this idea or this interpretive lens applies directly to the Gospel passage that we have before us today, because it sounds like if you’re not getting what you ask for from The Giver of All, you’re either not doing it right or you must not be persistent enough. It also reads like Jesus is saying that God is like a grumpy man trying to get some sleep. We all know of children who are asking for good things and are getting deadly things instead. The bottom line for some people is that this teaching about searching and finding, knocking and doors opening, asking and receiving just isn’t true. I recently heard of a friend of a friend who cited this very passage as the reason he walked away from Christianity altogether. 

One thing I know, is that this teaching is not the bottom line. It’s a teaching in the early days, a conversation along the way about 1/5 of the way into the combined books of Luke and Acts. This is the only time in all of the Gospels that the disciples ask to be taught. They don’t ask to be taught to think more clearly or more accurately about God. They’re not asking for a systematic theology. They’re not seeking better strategic plans or stronger managerial skills, or more effective organizing tactics. “Teach us to pray,” they say. Now my strong hunch is that they already knew prayers; they were looking for something deeper, some of what Jesus (or John and his disciples) had.

It reminds me of the late Bishop Shaw. For twenty years, the Diocese of Massachusetts had a monk for a bishop. He had spent more time in prayer than any person I’ve probably ever met. I was with him on many occasions when people would ask him to teach them about prayer. One person asked, “How much time should I spend praying?” Tom’s answer was: “whatever amount you think you should be praying, cut that amount in half and don’t start there, make that your goal.” Another person was sheepish about asking for something from God, not sure if it was the right thing to ask for, or whether it was important enough to bother The Divine. Tom smiled and gently said, “I think you should ask God for whatever your heart desires.”

Like Bishop Shaw’s teaching, what Jesus taught is simple and direct. It’s very similar to the to the Kiddush, ideas found in Hebrew Scripture and in teachings of other first century Jews. None of the words or ideas are elaborate or innovative. They are words of participation and engagement with the Divine. As Rabbi Abraham Heschel wrote, “The purpose of prayer is not the same as the purpose of speech. The purpose of speech is to inform; the purpose of prayer is to partake.” [5] Partake in the hallowing of God’s name. Pray that God’s name be Holy for people. Partake in the manifestations of the realm of God on earth. Pray for the mercy and the compassion and the just distribution of resources that are so close. Pray for a world where the most basic needs of all are met. “Your kingdom come.” It’s imperative. Partake in the hunger for actual food and spiritual sustenance. Pray that the 1/3 of the world’s population that is overfed and wasting food will have the spiritual means to change our ways to benefit the other 2/3 who need actual food and potable water. Partake in forgiveness. Pray for an open circuit of debt relief. Partake in deliverance. Pray that we all might be spared from that which is too great to bear.

And then Jesus told them a parable. Like all parables, this one is subversive and funny. But we’ve lost the humor in the translation of time, and culture, and in this one in particular, by a weird translation[6] into English of a word that means “with no shame” into the word “persistence.” The story Jesus tells about a grumpy man who won’t open the door to give his neighbor bread is absurd. It would make his disciples belly laugh. It’s as funny as someone ringing a doorbell and hearing a voice from inside yell, “go away, there’s nobody here.” In Jesus’ time, no one in their right mind would deny bread to a nighttime traveler or the friend of a nighttime traveler, and they all knew it. It had to do with life and death, and it had to do with honor — the honor of the individual, the honor of the family, and the honor of the whole village. It’s not the persistence of the person knocking that results in the gift of bread, it’s the “without shame” of the person who has been awakened which will cause him to rise to give his friend what is needed. 

The peculiar theology that results from this parable seeming like a lesson about persistence in prayer, makes God seem like a reluctant grouch who answers our requests to get some relief from our constant nagging. And it makes anyone who hasn’t received what he or she has been asking for into someone who must not have been asking often enough or crying out loudly enough. That kind of theology oppresses the very ones Jesus sought to liberate. David Buttrick, in his book about parables, writes: “the notion that, repeatedly, we must bang on the doors of heaven if we are to catch God’s attention is hardly an appropriate theology of prayer.”

So what is an appropriate theology of prayer? If, as Soren Kierkegaard wrote “Prayer does not change God, but it changes [the one] who prays,” then it seems to me that prayer is a partaking, a calling and a practice that reminds us just who and Whose we are. Prayer is a reminder that the realm and spirit of holiness is in us and among us. (In and among everyone, Jesus says three times.) Ask and you will have it. Seek and you will find it. Knock and it will open. It’s in you. It’s among you – every one. To pray, according to Jesus, is to partake in liberative, just, loving, compassionate, and redemptive praxis, because this is how we are when we are God’s people. This is how we act. This is our stance. Prayer is not a transaction, it is a posture, as my wife Joy always says. Prayer is an open posture of humility and vulnerability and the kind of bravery that comes from acknowledging God’s powerless power and our own.[7]

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