Sermon: Shameless Prayer
Luke 11:1-13
About 16 years ago, I attended seminary for the first time – an Episcopal seminary in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was getting a degree in feminist liberation theology. I was definitely in “seeker” mode. I was trying out new beliefs, new ways to worship. So I was test driving a Quaker silent meeting right across the street from the seminary. I loved the silence and the unspoken assumption that prayer was about a simple coming into the presence of God.
I was really working at this time to redefine God from this Big Daddy in the Sky image I had been raised with — a God who controlled things here on earth and answered prayer or didn’t answer prayer in alarmingly random ways, or so it seemed to me. I couldn’t make that God work with the reality of the Holocaust, with the reality of bad bad things happening to good good people.
The God I could believe in was the God who was the Ground of our Being, to quote the famous mid-century theologian Paul Tillich. In the stillness and silence of Quaker prayer, I could touch down into that Ground, which felt expansive. When I would touch into that Ground, I didn’t need to use words, and I didn’t even really have desires about which I needed to pray to this God. It was enough to be in this Presence, this Presence that I sensed was with me no matter what happened. What’s more, through connecting to God, the Ground of Being, I felt a deeper connection to all that lives and has lived, to all that has being.
But one day in Quaker meeting, a woman whom I knew to be a highly regarded in the community stood up to give verbal testimony. She seemed more impassioned than most of the people who spoke, who often gave quite philosophical or political verbal testimonies. She also uncharacteristically addressed God directly in her testimony. She was pleading with God, and it took me some seconds to realize that she was asking for a mattress. She really, really wanted a good mattress. I got the sense that she lived a very simple life. She may have been one of those Quakers deliberately living below the poverty line so as not to pay taxes that go toward the military, and she had no money for a mattress. I wasn’t sure what she was sleeping on, but her body seemed to cry out for the comfort and cushiness of a good bed.
Now, I don’t remember a word of any other verbal testimony given during the months I attended this Quaker meeting, except for this woman’s. Because it seemed to me, at the time, so very odd. It seemed odd to me that she would so publicly and shamelessly plead with God; it seemed odd to me that she would ask God so directly for what she needed, like God was a sort of genie who answers prayers for seemingly mundane requests for mattresses. (I’ve since come to appreciate that there is nothing mundane about a good mattress, something I could not understand at the age of 26.) For this woman, there was none of this “prayer is coming into the presence of God!” She wanted a good night’s sleep on a good mattress and she wanted it – needed it – now!
After reading this passage for today, I thought of this woman. And I wondered if her shameless prayer wasn’t actually quite similar to the spirit of how Jesus is teaching his disciples to pray in our passage for today.
Some context: Jesus’ disciples want him to teach them how to pray, just as John the Baptist had taught his disciples how to pray. They may have been thinking of a particular spoken prayer that John might have passed on to his adherents, and they wanted something similar from Jesus.
What he gives them, of course, is what we have come to call the Lord’s Prayer, although one commentator said it really should be called the “Disciple’s Prayer.” It’s not his prayer — it’s ours. The version in Luke is not the one we recite when we do communion (that is from Matthew). This one is a shorter, and probably earlier, form of the sprayer. I really love how simple it is:
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.
Jesus starts out by saying, “When you pray, say ‘Father.’” The form of the word “Father” that Jesus uses here is what’s called the vocative form in Greek, which is a form of direct address — like the woman at the Quaker meeting, Jesus is praying directly to God. People who understand Greek way better than me say this vocative form of the word “Father” can’t be translated directly into English; it can best be translated through the tone of our voice. It’s not a dispassionate “Father, I would like to request something of you” but more like a child crying out at night, “Daddy!” “Daddy, I had a scary dream; Daddy, I need some water; Daddy, where are you?”
This tone continues throughout the prayer. Notice how many of the verbs Jesus uses are imperatives — kind of like commands. “Give us our bread; forgive our sins; do not bring us to the time of trial.” Jesus is demanding his daily bread; insisting on forgiveness; and, in a particularly shameless part of the prayer, is pleading, “Don’t make us face the hard times.” This is not a man who wants to suffer, physically or spiritually. Rather, he asks God to take care of him, to forgive him, to protect him. If the prayer had continued, perhaps Jesus would have asked God for a good mattress.
Jesus reinforces the shamelessness of this way of praying with the story that follows about the midnight visitor. A traveler, perhaps traveling in the evening to avoid the heat of the afternoon, arrives late at night at his destination. His host, having no bread, wakes up a neighbor and asks him for some bread to feed his guest. People in that time and place took hospitality seriously. The traveler’s friend had an obligation to show hospitality to the traveler and to fail in this obligation would be to bring shame on himself and his family. So he wakes up another friend in the middle of the night and, eventually, gets the bread he needs because of his persistence.
The word “persistence” is probably not the best translation of the Greek in the verse: “I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs” (verse 8). Almost every scholar I read said that the word is really more accurately translated as “shamelessness.” “Persistence” is too nice of a word. Jesus is saying that, because of this man’s shamelessness, he’s going to get the bread he needs. Even if his sleeping friend won’t give him the bread because they’re friends, he will at least get the bread because he won’t take no for an answer and is willing to make a bit of a fool of himself in the process.
The Biblical scholar Walter Wink says about this passage: “Jesus’ teaching on prayer is impertinent, rude, a theological embarrassment. Jesus understands nothing of Christian etiquette. Prayer, as he describes it, is pure effrontery. He commands us to command God. We are to hammer on the door until God, out of pure irritation, answers our need. Like the widow haranguing the judge (in Luke 18), we are to persist in prayer like a dog worrying a bone.” (From lectionary commentary provided by Wink on the Sojourners Online web site in 2004.)
I don’t know about you, but this is not the way I was taught to pray. And it’s not the kind of prayer I came to learn from Quaker worship or from Christian meditation. That “coming into the presence” prayer is still one I regularly practice and still one that is deeply meaning to me.
But over the years I have been learning about the place of longing, of desire, of shamelessness in prayer. When my son Patrick was in the hospital in a coma, coming into the presence of God was not how I prayed. I fell on my knees, my head on the ground, and I pleaded with God to save my son. Every day, Sarah Augustine — who has been working for decades for justice for Indigenous People around the globe — prays, “Let my people live.” I have learned a lot about this kind of prayer from siblings from the Global South as well.
Now in my morning prayers, which I do outside, I pray out loud, directly addressing God, asking that my son would thrive, that my brother would heal, that my friend who lost her daughter two years ago to a drug overdose would be comforted. I pray for you. I ask. Sometimes, I plead. I haven’t yet graduated to commanding God, but maybe that’s coming.
Praye can be about coming into the presence of God, finding the calm center and it is also about holy, shameless desiring. A holy, shameless desire that cries out for peace, for an end to stupid wars, for an end to the starvation of the children of Gaza. A holy, shameless desire that pleads that God would do right by our loved ones, protect them from pain and sorrow. A holy, shameless desire that demands that God give us what we need to be whole. Daddy, listen to us!
Walter Wink says, “Jesus, and the entire Bible with him, teach prayer as jawboning. Abraham haggles with God like a merchant in a bazaar. Moses makes God repent. God, it appears, wants relationship, not unapproachable authority and power. God, it seems, is creating history with us, alongside us, and wants, needs, cannot do without our input. The limp passivity of what so often passes as Christian prayer is anathema to the Bible. When we pray, we are to be totally energized beings staking everything on God’s future for the world.”
Totally energized beings staking everything on God’s future for the world. I know that does not always describe my prayer. But I am challenged to see this kind of shameless prayer as something to which I – to which we – are called. I don’t know if such shameless prayer will change God — maybe that’s not for us to know. But I know it will change us.
I want to end with this poem by Aaron Zeitlin, a Jewish-American educator and writer. Eli Ramer shared it with me, and I think it represents so beautifully the spirit in which we are to pray.
If you look at the stars
“Praise me,” says God, “and I will know that you love me.”
“Curse me,” says God, “and I will know that you love me.”
“Praise me or curse me and I will know that you love me.”
“Sing out my graces,” says God,
“Raise your fist against me and revile,” says God.
“Sing out graces or revile,
Reviling is also a kind of praise,” says God.
“But if you sit fenced off in your apathy,” says God,
“If you sit entrenched in: “I don’t give a damn,” says God,
“If you look at the stars and yawn,
If you see suffering and don’t cry out,
If you don’t praise and you don’t revile,
Then I created you in vain,” says God.