PRAYER LIKE DIAMONDS Text: Luke 18: 1-8 October 17, 2010 Faith J. Conklin

Transcription

1 PRAYER LIKE DIAMONDS Text: Luke 18: 1-8 October 17, 2010 Faith J. Conklin A five-year-old boy was asked to say the blessing at dinner. He bowed his head and said, Dear God, thank you for these pancakes. Amen. He took his fork and began eating. As he did his mother asked, I m glad you said grace. Why did you thank God for pancakes when we re having chicken? The boy looked at her and smiled. Then he replied, I just thought I d see if God was paying attention tonight. There are times in our praying when we too want to know if God is paying attention. Have our prayers been heard? Will we be answered? How? When? If the waiting is long we get impatient. We get discouraged. Jesus understood. In today s scripture he speaks to his disciples need and to ours. Our text is from Luke. It s a lesson in prayer and in faithfulness, God s and ours. Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not lose heart. In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, 'Grant me justice against my opponent. For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, 'Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming'. Jesus concludes saying, And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth?. A persistent widow makes a pest of herself before an unjust judge. She refuses to stop pleading her case until he meets her demands. She won t give up until she gets what she needs. Finally in desperation and weary of her continuing presence the judge grants her what she wants. What lesson is Jesus teaching us here? Is God, like the judge, indifferent to our needs? Like the widow are we to badger heaven and make pests of ourselves with our petitions and needs? Are we to bother God until God finally surrenders and gives us what we ask? 1

2 Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. That s Jesus point. God isn t like this judge. It s a story of contrast. If an unjust judge will give a poor woman what she needs and asks, how much more will God give us what we need or ask. We dare to pray trusting that God will hear and help us. We keep praying even though prayer itself may sometimes be a struggle. Jesus makes it clear. We aren t wringing gifts from an unwilling, uncaring or indifferent God. God responds to us with the heart of a heavenly parent, a motheringfathering God, who loves us better than we love ourselves and knows in the deepest and most profound sense what s best and good for us. God wants to give it to us. Jesus addresses here the problem his disciples had with prayer. It s ours also. We believe in prayer. We pray. We don t see the changes in ourselves, others or the world for which we re praying. Our problems don t go away. Sometimes they even increase. Difficult people remain as difficult as ever. We don t have world peace or an end to war and violence. Our friends and loved ones still suffer. We become discouraged. We lose heart. Jesus tells us to persist in prayer and in faith. We re to keep at it. He assures us our prayers aren t in vain. He reminds us not to give up on God. God is faithful. God will be faithful. Prayer does work. Prayers are answered. Many of you here can give testimony to that truth. We are called to keep praying and to wait in the trust and confidence that they will. When the Son of man comes, will he find faith on earth? According to Jesus, persistence in prayer is a witness to both our faith and our faithfulness. We refuse to give in to appearances and we continue to trust God to act in his way and in his time. It may appear that God doesn t hear us. It may appear that we ve been left on our own. It may appear that injustice and evil are prevailing. Like the widow we refuse to surrender our hope. We pray because we have faith and because we have faith, we pray. The message of Luke is that God is faithful; therefore, the way to experience God's faithfulness is for us to have faith in him. We need the reminder. God doesn t always act as quickly, as decisively or as clearly as we wish. God doesn t always answer our prayers in the way we ask them. Perhaps the most important time to keep praying is when our prayers seem the most meaningless and God seems the most absent. It s often then that God teaches us, shapes us and re-orders our priorities. In a strange and unexplainable way through prayer God s grace takes up an even deeper residence in our hearts. The very act of 2

3 praying sustains our faith even when all we can manage is to show up knocking at God s door. So we keep praying and we work faithfully. We keep praying and we live our lives as Jesus taught us. We keep praying an anticipate God s answer. We keep praying and trust that God will take our prayers, our work and our lives and turn them to good. In Murfreesboro, Arkansas there s a diamond field. The diamonds are right there on the ground. Each rain washes away more soil revealing the precious stones. Tourists go into the park. Most walk around impatiently searching for a diamond. They don't see anything. They go away disappointed and empty-handed. There are those who come to the park every day. They find a place, sit down and watch a little tiny patch of ground for hours. They sit there waiting, hour after hour, attentive to one thing. One day they see it. There s a flash of light. There s a glimmer, as the sun's rays bounce off the diamond. Then they get up and claim their prize. That s also a parable for prayer. Praying is like searching for diamonds. It takes time to learn it. It takes patience to see the results of it. Prayer is a discipline. Disciplines aren t learned overnight. Sometimes while we re praying nothing seems to be happening. Then one day there it is. We realize what we ve learned. We realize how we ve changed. The answer we sought is right before us. Jesus parable assures us of God s love and faithfulness. It calls us to be faithful also. It names the kind of God to whom we pray loving, compassionate with a heart for justice and mercy. It holds another lesson also. It has to do with how we pray. Professor and preacher Fred Craddock tells about spending a Saturday with his three-year-old granddaughter, Kristin. They went for a walk and played together at the neighborhood park. It was a wonderful morning and they returned home in time for lunch. As the two of them sat down at the table, Kristin boldly announced to her grandfather that they should return thanks before eating and that she would do it. Then she bowed her head and said, God is great; God is good. Let us thank him for our food. Amen. Her grandfather also said Amen. Kristin immediately looked up at him and said, Gramps, we've got to do it again. Why? What's the matter? he asked. She replied, You didn't hold your hands right! Oh, I'm sorry, he said. Kristin got out of her chair; walked over to her grandfather, fixed his hands, and, like an instructor: said, Gramps, if you don't hold your hands right, it won t work! Fred Craddock ended the story saying, Do you know what? I held my hands right and it worked. It worked! Kristen was grateful and I was grateful. It worked! 3

4 I m sure it did work. Kristin and her grandfather were both blessed by the experience. There s a danger in that kind of thinking. Prayer is fundamentally a relationship with God. It s opening ourselves to the presence of God. It s not a matter of right words, right thoughts, or even a right heart. As with any relationship there s a great mystery about prayer. There s no one way to do it. There s no one technique that always works. The only secret I ve discovered to an effective prayer life is to pray. So I pray when my faith is strong and I pray when I m full of doubts that border on disbelief. I pray when I know what I want and when I m not even sure what to ask. I pray when I m glad and grateful and when I m angry and mad, when I m certain and when I m afraid. Sometimes I pray because I simply don t know what else to do. Remember that persistent widow. In the beginning she probably came to the judge with her petitions well ordered and her phrases proper and polite. She made requests; she didn t demand or argue. She kept her voice low and well modulated. As time passed and the judge remained indifferent, my guess is she got mad. She got loud. She yelled. Her words sometimes tumbled over themselves. She poured out her heart, her frustration and her need. She stopped caring how her words came out or how they sounded or how she held her hands. She named her pain and also her expectation. The judge heard. He responded. How much more will God hear the prayers of his children whatever form they take. The widow s prayer also reminds us of God s concern for the weak, helpless victimized and powerless. It invites us to raise prayers, speak out and act on their behalf. It calls us to pray also for friends, family, colleagues, strangers, those we like and dislike, whose hearts are broken and whose throats are raw from crying out their need. Jesus asks, Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? The answer is Yes. God will. It will be much more and much sooner than a heartless judge. As this mother discovered, you never know when God will take the opportunity large or small to assure us that we re heard, we re cared for and we re loved. She writes: It was late afternoon on a beautiful spring day. The kids were out in the yard playing ball when my 5-year-old, Josh, discovered that one of his brand-new yellow stretchy frogs was lost among the dandelions. We looked and we looked for it while he and his sister prayed. At age 7, Madison was experienced at praying for lost things. Many a misplaced toy had been found through her earnest prayers. She was certain this would be no different. We didn t find the yellow frog. Tears rolled down 4

5 Josh's cheeks. Madison tried to comfort him, recalling the loss of her own beloved little pink elephant several years before.. It came time for bed. There was a good deal more crying before they finally settled down for the night. I still had some chores to do. I also had to find a safe place for a new mirror that had just arrived that day. Where to put it out of the way? I pulled out an armoire thinking I could slide the mirror behind it. Of course, there was an inch of dust covering the floor dust that needed to be cleaned up. Then I saw something right in the middle of it. What was it? A dead bug? I cautiously prodded it. To my great astonishment it was a purple stretchy frog! A long-lost forgot we ever had it stretchy frog. I quickly showed it to the kids. Madison's eyes mirrored the astonishment in mine. I said, God always answers our prayers. Sometimes God answers in a different way than we expect. What a powerful lesson. It made an impression on them. I tucked them in bed and went back to cleaning up the dust. That's when I noticed something else, something almost completely obscured by the dust one, lone, other thing. It was a little pink elephant. Madison's long-lost, beloved, pink elephant. I could hardly believe my eyes. What were the chances? She hadn't spoken of it in years until that very day. Lest you assume that I found a treasure trove of lost toys under that armoire, I did not. Amazingly there was nothing else, just one frog and one elephant. When I brought it to Madison, her eyes got even wider. I told her: God is always with you, Madison. God heard you outside in the yard and God found your elephant for you. The mother concludes: How amazing that with all the enormously important things in this world God would take the time to find a stretchy frog and a pink elephant for two of his smallest children to show them that he loves them and he is listening. Of all things, it just happened to be the National Day of Prayer! 1 God does show us that he s listening. Our prayers are answered in ways we expect and can anticipate and also in ways that continually surprise and amaze us. For God, every day is a good day to hear his children s prayers. Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not lose heart. God grant that we never do. Amen. 1 Edited from a story by Kari Myers in the HomeTouch newsletter, November