Sunday: 9th Sunday after Pentecost 12C
Reading: Luke 11:1-11
Preacher: S. James Steen

During the adult inquirers' class this past winter, one participant asked, "What is the point of praying?" and we subsequently devoted an evening to exploring his question. I recall most clearly from the discussion that no one in the group believed that asking God to do something, like saving me or someone else from getting sick or from having an accident, works. In fact, the conversation continued, "What kind of God would choose to keep one person safe while allowing another to become sick or to be involved in a terrible accident?"

Instead, the general conclusion was that, while praying may not spare us from cancer or make the disease go away, and while it may not result in the friend we pray for getting the job he wants, praying does change us. We might say that it heals us, because the very act of expressing our concern for another or of acknowledging our own need for help opens us and changes us.

In the Gospel for today, Jesus' Disciples ask him to teach them to pray. They may have been looking for a kind of "how to book" answer: "Well, first you kneel, and then you say these words, etc." What they get is perhaps more than they bargain for. Jesus takes the Disciples and us deeper.

Let's begin with his deceptively simple, parable-like answer about a man who has a guest arrive at midnight and goes to a neighbor's house to borrow bread. At first the neighbor refuses to respond. But eventually the supplicant's persistent knocking causes him to give in.

Who would not sympathize with the sleeping neighbor? Recently, while I was on vacation in Washington State, the phone rang at about 1:00 a.m., just as I was getting into deep sleep. I was so groggy that I couldn't bring myself to answer it. Then, it put me in a state of wakefulness and I couldn't get back to sleep for a long time. This happened three times, and finally, around 4:00 a.m., I gave in. Would you believe it was a recording?: "This is United Airlines calling to inform you that your flight scheduled for 10:00 a.m. has been delayed one hour."

Do we really believe that what gets God's attention and secures God's favor is our acting like United Airlines ruining God's sleep, or the annoying neighbor trying to borrow a loaf of bread in the middle of the night? If that's what Jesus had in mind, I want to echo Rod Blagojevich's famous question of his opponent, Judy Baar Topinka: "What can Jesus be thinking?"

Sharon Ringe, a feminist Lukan scholar, transforms the meaning of this passage for me. She points out that, since bread was the staple of the diet and hospitality was such a fundamental value in first century Palestine, to have a friend arrive at midnight - a most unlikely occurrence - would create a real crisis if there were no bread. Of course there were no 24 hour supermarkets. In fact to produce your family's bread took many hours every day, beginning with grinding the wheat and concluding with going to the village oven to bake the bread. So, if you were out of bread at night, the only solution was to go to a neighbor.

Ringe says that the key to understanding this parable at a deeper level is found in how we translate the word typically rendered "persistence." She claims that a better translation would be "shamelessness."

For a moment, return with me to the scene. The neighbor has locked up his house for the night and he, naturally, doesn't want to disturb his family who are sleeping in the one room dwelling. Now imagine the friend in the street pounding relentlessly on the door and shouting to the householder. It takes me back to college and late night reveling. It's quite likely that this ruckus would have awakened not only the family, but the whole village.

"In a culture where criteria of honor and shame governed every aspect of life (including what one friend might expect of another), the [supplicant's] behavior is in fact "shameless" (in the way he violated the boundaries of his friend's privacy and disrupted the peace of the town). He sacrifices his own proper "shame" in order to obtain the help needed to [provide hospitality] for his guest." In this scenario, what convinces the householder to respond is not persistence, but rather the friend's willingness to become so vulnerable - indeed humiliated - in the pursuit of hospitality for his friend. That is radical hospitality!

When we read the passage from this perspective, it is not mere stubbornness, or even determination, that matters. Rather it is a willingness to sacrifice one's own prestige and security in pursuit of hospitality for a friend. Thus prayer ceases to be about getting God to do our bidding, and instead it becomes a way of opening ourselves and allowing God to move us toward empathy and action on behalf of others.

Luke began this passage with the Lord's Prayer as Jesus' initial response to the disciples' request that Jesus teach them to pray. If properly understood, The Lord's Prayer expresses the hope that we become citizens of a kingdom where God's radical hospitality is the first principle. When Jesus prays, "Thy kingdom come" and "Give us our daily bread" he is praying for a kingdom of justice and abundance, one that is opposed to Caesar's kingdom where only the privileged have enough to eat. When he prays that our debts be forgiven as we forgive the debts of others, he is standing in the midst of a kingdom where the poor are becoming ever poorer as the Roman system forces them into indebtedness and servitude.

So, prayer is powerful stuff, and praying is a risky business. For God answers our prayers by changing us, by moving us toward solidarity with one another and especially toward those we can easily ignore. The famous prayer "attributed to St. Francis" expresses beautifully the essence of the prayer Jesus taught:

"Lord, make us instruments of your peace....Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen."