Year C / Ordinary Time / Week 17/ Sunday
Readings: Genesis 18.20-32 / Ps 137.1-2, 2-3, 6-7, 7-8 (R/v 3a) / Colossians 2.12-14 / Luke 11.1-13
Sisters and brothers, how important is prayer in your life?
Many of us pray because we need God’s help. We do because we are often anxious about many things, including God’s approval. We hope to receive God’s care and goodness. So, it’s easy to identify with the refrain in today’s responsorial psalm: “Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me”.
For Jesus, prayer is at the heart of his relationship with God. Throughout the Gospels, we hear of Jesus praying, of his teachings about prayer, and of him calling his followers to pray.
I believe prayer is the way Jesus relates to God and how he deepens this relationship. He shows us that prayer is first about getting to know God and growing in relationship with God. Is this how we pray – to first know God and grow in relationship with God?
Genuine prayer is always God’s work: God draws us into prayer and labors to help us make our prayer. Our role is to cooperate with God.
What kind of a God should we expect to meet in prayer? Today’s readings provide us with three glimpses into who God is and what God does.
First, God is tender. In our gospel reading, Jesus speaks about God who is in heaven, and also about God who wants to be very near to every person. “Father, may your name be held holy, your kingdom come, give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our sins”. Here, Jesus reminds us that God wants to be involved in our lives by being with us daily to feed us and forgives us.
Second, God is merciful. Our first reading is about Abraham interceding for the people of Sodom and Gomorrah. God wants to punish these cities because of the wicked among them. He bargains with God to spare them because of the righteous few, even if it is only ten. Mercy, Abraham reminds God, is just when it saves every individual. God hears this, relents and does not destroy. Here is God caring to save in mercy.
Third, God is providential. In our Responsorial Psalm, the psalmist sings of how God fulfills God’s saving purpose in his life. His song invites Israel, and all of us, to trust in God. We can by having faith that God’s singular purpose is to redeem us to be with God. Here is God whose goodness and providence is never-ending and always for our salvation.
God is tender. God is merciful. God is providential. Our readings remind us of these three facets of the one, true God we pray to, like Jesus did to God while he was on earth.
In the gospel, Jesus teaches us to pray: “Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us, and do not subject us to the final test”. What gives you and me the confidence to pray like this? Simply this: that God already has a relationship with us, even if we think we are unworthy of this.
This is why Jesus teaches us to call God, Abba in our prayers. Abba: that intimate word of the relationship between child and father.
Such intimacy and relationship are also how he brings to Abba God the people he prays for – his disciples, the people he ministered to, the people he encountered, the people in need, and yes, us too. He brings all to Abba God who created each of us by our name. Why? Because Abba God wants to answer the prayers of each individual because we are unique and special, each of us with our own particular pains and joys, our particular regrets and hopes.
No matter our state of grace, Abba God cares for every single human person. Abraham could change God’s mind about destroying Sodom and Gomorrah because he appealed to God’s concern for each one’s salvation.
Such action is scandalous. Scandalous because God’s way of loving saves every person. Scandalous because he challenges us who think that God only saves those who are dutiful Christians, religiously obedient, morally upright, pious and devotional. This scandalous love of God then saves us; it makes us stumble in our self-righteousness and self-arrogance that we are the chosen and saved. It, therefore, keeps us humble before God who loves and bighearted to others to serve.
For the Christian writer Nora Gallagher, this scandal is expressed best in how the all-powerful and almighty God stoops down to be with each one of us in the mundane details of our own everyday lives to save us. God acts like this to save all, no matter whether we are Christian by faith or unchristian in our deeds as the baptized.*
Haven’t you and I experienced this scandal of God loving and saving us in prayer? In prayer, when God loves us still in our unworthiness, God’s mercy forgives still in our sinfulness, and God’s life is poured out still in our despair?
Yes, it would do us good to pray: when we do will encounter our loving God who wants to save us.
All too often, our prayer is noisy: we talk too much to God. We need to shut up and be silent. Then, we can prayerfully listen to God. What would we hear? God telling us he wants us to be better and happier by living more like Jesus.
Perhaps, the right disposition to pray in silence is that of a child resting on her father’s chest, secure in his embrace. Her eyes are closed. She is still. She breathes in tandem with her father. She hears his breath. She feels his heartbeat. It reassures. It gives hope. It tells all is well and her life can go on. Only by being in silence and resting in silence can she experience these.
Maybe, this is why we all ache to be held intimately by God in the silence of prayer. We want to experience what we once had when we were children when our parents' love embraced us. To hear words of care by our fathers speaking their concern. To listen to words of love by our mothers singing their heartfelt lullabies.
Love. Forgiveness. Hope. Delight. Don’t we strain to hear these words too from God in our prayerful silence? Words to live as better Christians each day?
I want you to know that we can experience all this in prayer because God is already having a relationship with us. This relationship draws us into prayer, and, more so, into the steady deepening of our relationship with God and one another.
God’s relationship with us then always consoles. In prayer, this relationship allows us to hear God’s life-giving words to live.
This is why Jesus teaches his disciples and us today that prayer can empower us to keep on seeking God, to keep on asking to receive love from God, and to keep on knocking to enter into God’s life.
To pray like this is to pray with hope. This is how you and I can meet no other than God in our prayer — Abba God whose only desire is to give us, his children, so much more than we can ever imagine whenever we pray.
* Nora Gallagher, "The Scandal of the Particular", guest essay for Trinity Church, Santa Barbara, CA.
Preached at Church of the Transfiguration
photo: www.crosswalk.com
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