Sermon Archive
Persistant praying
Sermon preached by John Armes at Evensong on 10 March 2002
Exodus 1 6-22, 2 1-10; Luke 18 1-14
There is a story of a man trapped in his home by floods. As the waters reached his front door he prayed, 'Lord God, please rescue me. Ten minutes later a boat came by offering to take the man to safety. 'No,' said the man, 'God will save me.' The floods rose and the man, now trapped upstairs again prayed, 'Lord God, please help me.' Five minutes later another boat came, but again the man declined its help. 'God will save me,' he said, and the boat went away. At last the flood was so high that the man had retreated to the roof where he prayed, God, please help me. Almost at once there was a roaring sound and a helicopter arrived. I don't need your help,' said the man, 'God will rescue me.' The man drowned. In heaven he complained that even though he had prayed he had not been saved. Yes, said God, 'that puzzled me too - I sent two boats and a helicopter yet still you drowned.'
Persistence in prayer is not the same as pigheadedness. In our second reading, the poor widow persists in seeking help from the unjust judge. It is a very believable story - Jesus must have known such determined people, we probably do too. The point is that if even someone as nasty as this judge gives way at last, how much more will God respond when we ask?
But there's another side to this and it's important that we acknowledge it - though God is not an unjust judge, God's ways sometimes depend on unjust judges. Or rather, God's purposes are often thwarted by unjust judges, dictators and their like. But it is important still to persist in prayer, not so much to persuade God but because prayer impassions us. True prayer is not a spiritual sedative it is, to put it simply, an impassioned cry for a better world. And this constant reminder of what the world is not leads us into action to make it what it should be.
Signing of petitions or writing letters to governments may seem wearying, but our persistence in asking for justice, compassion, peace is a measure of our persistence in prayer. Organisations like Amnesty International thrive on it - look at the rewards for their determination. The anti-apartheid movement had its way at last, the Jubilee movement for the relief of international debt is making progress - and we can be sure that one by one dictators will fall and warmongers will be silenced; not tomorrow or next week, perhaps, but only keep on and the time will come. Here's a message for Zimbabwe, whatever becomes of their election.
In the same way we can see that Moses' campaign for justice began in the desert with an encounter at a burning bush, but it came to completion by his persistent and courageous opposition to Pharaoh.
There is a message here about incarnation, about God's openness to, vulnerability to the created world. For it is God's solidarity with our createdness, our humanness, that makes him subject to others' ability to answer prayer. But this in its turn implies a blessedness in every thing, every person, every action - that even the most churlish slob might have the capacity to serve God's purposes if for the wrong reasons, like the judge in the story. And if every person might answer our prayer so we ourselves also can answer others' prayers.
But I am not entirely agreeing with St Theresa here. For her wonderful and oft-quoted prayer claims that God has no hands on earth but our hands, no feet but ours and so on? She's right and yet not quite telling the whole story. For do strange coincidences not happen? When I think about it, life is so full of coincidences that I have almost trained myself to stop noticing them. For if I did notice them it would imply that some divine providence really was at work and this is problematic because if I am looked after why not everyone else? Yet, how often have you been thinking about someone and they 'phone or you meet them in the street? Or what about those stories of someone lying injured in some remote place and the first person who happens by is a doctor? Is all this mere coincidence, or is it God?
The story of Moses in the bulrushes (our first reading) illustrates this very well. His mother was crafty, no doubt about it, so was his sister, they must have known very well that the Egyptian princess was in the habit of bathing at that place in the river. Yet how fortunate that she reacted the way she did! And how fortunate too that this little boy saved from death and installed in the safest place you could imagine, Pharoah's court, actually turned out to be teachable, leader material. God, or coincidence?
Robert Bresson's 1956 film Un Condamn? a Mort s'est ?chapp? follows the events of a true story of a prisoner escaping from the Nazis. Almost accidentally the hero finds himself gradually assembling the tools that will ultimately make escape possible. He has no plan yet the plan emerges as if by accident. At each stage, uncannily, circumstances conspire in his favour even to the point where a cellmate arrives just when he needs another person to realise his plan. God, or just coincidence?*
It is a question we cannot answer with certainty. God is always elusive, and when we think of answers to prayer there is always the possibility that others or we ourselves have supplied them. Survivors of some disaster frequently speak of miracle, but if so, why them and not the ones who didn't survive? Why does coincidence happen to some and not others? Or perhaps it is that although grace accompanies us every day through life and even into death we, most of the time, are quite unable to perceive it.
It is possible to confine God to such a small gap in our experience that we don't notice the helicopter God has sent to our aid. The man in the flood was unable to see God's grace expressed in others, the grace that brings all things, all people into the purposes of salvation - even the unjust judge, even Pharaoh, even the most irrational and bloody of modern rulers.
I started with a story about prayer, I'll end with one which was told to me by a Nigerian friend. There was once a widow who lived in a tiny shack with her little child. She was very poor and very devout. She used to have heated discussions with her landlord who argued that prayer was pointless for if God answered prayers the woman would not be so poor. As it was he, the landlord, was far wealthier than the woman and had never said a prayer in his life. One day the landlord was passing the woman's house when he heard her praying aloud, explaining that she had nothing left to eat and no money to buy bread. The man decided to teach her a lesson. Rushing home he returned with a loaf of bread which he flung through the window. A few minutes later the woman burst out of her door and called to the man. 'Now I can prove that God answers prayers; I was praying for food and suddenly this loaf of bread appeared.' 'Not at all,' he laughed, 'it was me who threw the bread through the window, not God. Look, you can see the price label from the supermarket!' 'Well then,' said the woman, 'it is a double blessing, for not only did I receive bread when I asked for it, but God used you, an unbeliever, as an instrument of his mercy.'
Who answered the prayer? Was it the man, or was it God or was the woman in part the answer to her own prayer? Or could it have been all three?
Prayer is not a spiritual sedative, nor is it a warm bath - it is a part of the process by which we in our need reach out to others in their need. Although we may not always recognise it, we want them, they want us; self-interested love on the one hand calls forth self-giving love on the other. And mixed up with it all is God.
And whilst some people, including God, anticipate our needs before we ask, others like the unjust judge need to be cajoled, persuaded and pestered. But it is worth it, not only because our persistence feeds our passion and passion feeds our action, but also because in this way others, even if unwittingly, play their part in the purposes of God.
* I am using Tim Cawkwell's article, 'Salvation by Grace' in Theology, March/April, 2002, pp 127-134, for the reflections on Bresson's film.
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