Ask, Seek, Knock.

Luke 10:38-11:13. 

I.

            In the parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus lifts up active compassion and generosity towards even enemies as the truest expression of divinely inspired love.  It is a word for activists, people who know that Jesus is calling us not just to talk, but to do good in the world.  Faith bears fruit in love, and love is outwardly active.  It has to do with real service to people who are really suffering. 

            Immediately after this parable, Luke tells us that Jesus is welcomed into the home of two women named Mary and Martha.  The story is not a parable but it kind of functions like one.  One woman, Martha, probably the older, is very busy getting the house ready for a large meal.  The other, Mary, spends her time sitting with Jesus listening to his teachings.  Martha is active, involved in the world, devoted to serving her guests.  Mary is contemplative, attentive to Jesus, absorbing his words, and not accomplishing anything tangible and concrete.

            Martha gets upset.  She asks Jesus to instruct Mary to be of some use in the work that needs to be done.  It is not unreasonable. 

            We hear Jesus’ affection for Martha in the way he repeats her name.  “Martha, Martha,” he says, “you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.  Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”

            In his popular time-management books, Stephen Covey talks about not letting the urgent get in the way of what is important.  There is a lot of stuff that is always urgently demanding our attention.  But so much of what is considered urgent, is really a matter of someone else’s agenda: your boss, your client, your customer, your employee, your parents, your child, even your ego, and so on.  A lot of it may be your attempt to provide against future eventualities, or prevent past disasters from recurring.  Covey urges his readers to identify what is really important to them, what they are truly called and gifted to accomplish in this life, and make that their priority.

            We all have to choose between the demands of the many, which had Martha so frazzled and burned-out, and the promise of the one thing that can truly give our life meaning and purpose.  It’s this one big thing in your life that ought to govern and determine all these other little things.  The little things need to serve the big thing, not distract from it.

            Jesus is saying that if we don’t listen to him, if we don’t spend quality time with him, if we don’t pray and meditate, study the gospels, reflect with others, participate in worship and the sacraments he gives us, then we’re likely to get swept away by the chattering blizzard of urgent but not important business.  Only if we are firmly grounded in the Presence of Jesus Christ in our lives, will we be focused and collected enough to have these many other concerns under control and serving that one big thing.

II.

            How do we do that?  What strategies, techniques, and practices can we undertake that will help us to be like Mary, choosing the better part? 

            In order to reflect on questions like these and help us build on Mary’s insight, Luke then recounts a time when the disciples asked Jesus to instruct them in just this.  They see Jesus regularly going off to quiet places to pray.  They remember how John the Baptizer taught his disciples to pray.  They ask Jesus for some clear instruction in how to keep the main thing, Jesus, the main thing.   They want to know how to pray.  That is, they want to know how to sustain Christ’s presence with and within them.

            It might be a little surprising that they have to ask.  Maybe Jesus thought his presence and example were enough.  I think they are asking for our benefit.  In any case, they require something more explicit, and Jesus tells them.

            And what he gives them is more than the words of a prayer we can mouth unconsciously and imagine that we have satisfied some requirement… which is what we usually do, and Christians have done for two-thousand years.  Rather, he gives us in outline his form of life.  He gives us the basic stance in the world of his disciples.  This is how we imitate Mary and sit at our Lord’s feet.  This is a summary of what he was likely saying to her.   

            He tells them: “When you pray, say:
’Father, hallowed be your name.
 Your kingdom come. 
Give us each day our daily bread. 
And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
 And do not bring us to the time of trial.’”

            He starts by insisting that God is both “Father,” a term that would have been too intimate for many, and “holy.” 

            While we like to wallow in the sentimentality of the “loving daddy” image, Jesus’ use of the word Father may be more of an affront to our earthly fathers.  He is saying basically that God is our real father, our real supporter, leader, and sustainer, not our earthly father or, by extension, our earthly leaders. 

            Like the confession that Jesus is Lord actually undermined the authority of earthly lords, so calling God Father means that our earthly fathers are not over us; they are our siblings with us in God’s household.  God does not authorize and justify the hierarchies of this world; God smashes them by claiming all authority, power, respect, and reverence for God’s self.  So the first thing we are affirming when we pray the Lord Prayer is that we say to all those “leaders” who want to control and restrict and exploit us, “You’re not the boss of me.”  Only God is.

III.

            Keeping God’s name holy means more than simply not using it as an expletive when we bang our finger with a hammer or slice a drive deep into the woods playing golf.  It means that the One we claim as Father is the transcendent Lord and Creator of the universe. 

            Keeping God’s name holy is more than the little language game we like to reduce it to.  It means approaching not just God but by extension everything God has made with reverence, love, respect, care, non-violence, thanksgiving, and humility.  The truth is that if God is holy so is everything else.  Because everything bears the imprint, and is animated by the breath of the Creator.  God’s holiness and transcendent does not mean that God is impossibly far off, remote, and distant.  It is the whole insight of the Trinity that God’s transcendence is itself transcended in God’s shining forth in creation, in the Incarnation, and in the giving of the Spirit.

            In this view, Samaritans are just as chosen as Jews, animals are just as blessed as humans, and non-living things are just as infused with God’s Spirit as lifeforms.  As Gerard Manley Hopkins says in his greatest poem about the whole world being “charged with the grandeur of God.”  God’s holiness is God’s Presence.

            Keeping God’s name holy means being blown away by the miracle of each little thing that God has spoken into being.  It means cherishing every created manifestation as a demonstration of what God can generate out of nothing.  Jesus says that even flowers, and birds, and foxes are parables of God’s presence.  The creation is not stocked with objects for humans to exploit, deplete, waste, and pollute.  The whole place points to and reflects the light of the One who made it, and can only be approached with deep thanksgiving and humility.  For we are surrounded by miracles at every instant.

            Seeing this truth is what Jesus means when he talks about “repentance.”  In Greek the word has to do with gaining a new mind, a new way of thinking, a new perception.  We conveniently reduce it to mourning over our sins in guilt and shame.  But true repentance is not about looking back over whatever we might have done wrong in the past.  It is about being in tune with God’s love at work in the world now. 

IV.

            Which leads us directly to “your Kingdom come.”  This is less an appeal for something to happen which hasn’t happened yet, as it is a cry for us to be able to perceive and dwell within a reality that is already here all around us, but from which we have separated ourselves and to which we have made ourselves willfully blind.  The worst way to interpret what Jesus says here is to assume that what he means by “your Kingdom” is something we will only experience after we die or at the end of time.

            God’s Kingdom, God’s realm, God’s commonwealth of justice, goodness, beauty, and peace, is already here.  It is embedded into the very structure of matter and energy, and life itself.  It is we who have wandered off like the younger son in Jesus’ famous parable in chapter 15, squandering our inheritance on self-serving foolishness.  “Your Kingdom come” means more like “may your household come into view as we follow your commandments and carry our sorry butts in humility back to you, the One we have in our greed and pride forsaken.” 

            Then we pray that God would nourish us for this “journey,” this exhausting effort, like in one of those dreams where you can’t open your eyes….  We pray for “bread,” and not just literal bread to feed the body.  The word we usually translate as “daily” literally means “substantial” or “necessary.”  So while feeding the body is essential, so is feeding our inner nature.  Jesus refers to himself and his teaching as the bread of life.  He gives us his body as bread in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.  Mary is clearly receiving this dimension of nourishment as she sits at Jesus’ feet listening to him.

            Jesus has us pray for participation in the matrix of forgiveness or release.  We receive the forgiveness of God and others as we ourselves forgive others.  There is a reciprocality of mutual liberation here in which we do not hold people’s sins against them, but welcome them in joy and blessing.

            Not forgiving someone who has wronged you is kind of like taking poison and hoping they will get sick.  Holding on to anger, resentment, hurts, and dreams of retribution only serves to block God’s life and forgiveness and freedom coming to you.  In any case, forgiveness is the light of the new community; it is what keeps us alive and functioning with each other.

            Finally, Jesus has makes us aware of our propensity to temptation.  We are always so easily led astray, distracted by shiny things that come into our field of vision.  There is a certain Attention Deficit Disorder that is endemic to the human condition.  The many concerns of Martha keep calling us away from the blessed single-mindedness of Mary.  We have to keep self-aware, and keep catching ourselves in the act of wandering off the path.

V.

            So in the last part of today’s passage Jesus hammers the need for persistence, perseverance, and patience.  We have to keep at it.  We can’t expect prayers to be answered according to our desires or timetable.  The weight of our blindness and distraction, our cherishing our own ways, and our waywardness, is immense.   

            He has given us this exemplary prayer; now he says we have to pray it fiercely, persistently, continually, and wholeheartedly.  Not just repeating the words like a mantra.  But letting our lives, our thinking and feeling, our words and actions, conform to this brief, simple pattern.

            The persistence is necessary not because God is hard of hearing.  But because we have so many barriers, so much sludge, and such strong gravity in our hearts that have to be overcome.  Even our asking is perverted by self-interest.  Even our seeking is for the wrong things in the wrong places.  And we are habitually knocking on the wrong doors for the wrong things.  Our blindness, as well as our fear, anger, and shame, twist our desires and limit them to the shiny trinkets that decorate our lives, but which in the end are meaningless at best, and at worst kill us. 

            This prayer is about reorienting our desires.  Instead of wanting stuff for ourselves, this prayer is not about us as separate, independent entities anymore.  Now it is about “us” as participants in the larger body of humanity and creation.  Now it is about the advancement not of my personal little kingdom, but of the Kingdom of God.  Now it’s not about the betterment of my self, my family, my tribe, my nation, my religion… but of the whole holy creation.  This prayer is about breaking through those layers of our own ego-centricity that bind us and blind us.

            But if we ask according to this prayer, we will receive what this prayer promises.

            If we seek according to this prayer, we will find what this prayer has for us. 

            If we knock according to this prayer, the door will be opened to the apparently new world of God’s Kingdom, a reality that is always closer to us than we are to ourselves, something already within us, something that is waiting to be born and which is called into our experience by this prayer.

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