Prayers and Bargains

For Year C Proper 12, using the Genesis 18 reading

We pick up from last Sunday's reading in Genesis, with Abraham speaking to the men, the presence of the Lord, as they prepare to go to Sodom and Gomorrah. And Abraham is concerned, because Sodom is where his nephew Lot is living. And thus we have one of the most peculiar prayers in scripture: negotiations for the fate of those cities, negotiations which seemingly are completely successful and yet which are in the end utterly futile. For the men arrive at Sodom, where Lot takes them into his house, where the men of Sodom try and fail to break in for the express purpose of raping the divine guests. Lot and his family are made to flee, and the two cities are made the, um, fire and brimstone standard of the Lord's wrath, becoming watchwords through scripture both of wanton and willful immorality, and of divine retribution.

Abraham's deal-making with God is not listed among the seven types of prayer which our church commends to us. We are most familiar with petition (that is, asking God to do things for us) and intercession (asking him to do things for others), and I suppose that Abraham's bargaining could be classified as some form of the latter. We participate in other prayers on a Sunday, even if we do not name them as such: adoration (that is, worship), praise, thanksgiving, oblation (which is to say, making offerings), and penitence are all elements found in our liturgy, and they too are all ways of praying. But as a rule, the church does not encourage attempting to cut deals with the Lord God, and in reading on the subject, one is inclined to agree that it is unwise.

As to how we should pray: first, Jesus gives us the example of the Lord's Prayer, as related in Luke rather than the more familiar version from Matthew. But it is set in a different context in this gospel, for in Matthew it is delivered as part of the Sermon on the Mount, in the center of a longer passage on praying in general. Luke, however, relates it very briefly, and then follows it with a parable on the efficacy of praying. The Father, he says, will hear us and give us what is good, an egg, not a scorpion, and not because we merit it. Indeed, Jesus say, if a man will give another what he asks for simply to get rid of his persistent begging, how more so will the Father grant us out of love.

It is a statement to justify faith, a statement of hope. But it is also one of the hardest statements of the gospel, because so often it seems that nothing is forthcoming, not even no. Now in Matthew we are told not to make a public spectacle of our praying, and several other commands besides, but even those are not enough to account for the many times we sit on our beds, and beg and plead with God, and receive a silence that is not even stony, but only empty. Over the years many have tried to explain this, to provide reassurance, and even to deny that it represents any scandal. I will do no such thing, but only return to the oaks at Mamre.

Abraham's prayer is answered, oh, yes, more immediately and personally than any of us have a right to expect. And the Lord God does not go back on his word. And yet, the men arrive at Sodom, and are accosted, and they all but drag Lot and his family out of the city. The divine wrath rains down, and Sodom is no more. For all the fashionable universalism of our day, the warning is always there, that we must show our faith through our works to be truly faithful, as James writes; else, there is the fate of Sodom, and of the tares harvested with the wheat.

But one last look at the parable. A man goes to his neighbor, and his neighbor grants his prayer. And is it not so with us? God's purpose is not carried out only in miracles; we ourselves are his hands (as St. Teresa wrote), and we are the answers to the prayers of others. If the poor are to get their daily bread, then it is we who are well-endowed who must provide it; they must not be forced to rely on manna from heaven. It is we who can comfort, and can heal, and nourish. It is we who can refrain from wrath, and contempt, and treachery. It is our sin that is the cause of many of the world's ills—indeed, from the teaching of Genesis 3, we are responsible for all of it. But as we repent and refrain from sinning, we are also advancing the kingdom, so that “your will be done” can be realized in our daily lives.

We are not always answered as we please; we do not always hear the answer. And yet we are reassured, there is an answer, if we would but talk to God, the God who knows our needs before we ask, and what in our blindness we cannot ask. Therefore, I ask of you, pray without ceasing, to the Father who sees all, and hears all, and loves all through his Son, Jesus Christ, in the power of the Spirit. AMEN.

Dust, Made Living

Preached on Ash Wednesday, 2015

This year I have volunteered to relieve the rector of the annual task of explaining how one should “beware of practicing your piety before others” and then proceed to daub our foreheads with char. That task, however, I will cheat upon by suggesting that one may apply a damp tissue or, failing that, the back of one's hand upon leaving the church.

No, it is the words which accompany the smearing to which I will speak first: “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This was the word of the LORD God to Adam, after the first sin, and it speaks the fundamental fact of formation from the inanimate matter of the earth. We are not spirits which occupying fleshly vessels, as Gnostics ancient and modern teach; we cannot live separate from our animal bodies. We must eat and drink, and rise and sleep, and in all but the warmest climes we must cloth ourselves and seek shelter from the weather. This is the way of our living, and yet, from the day of our conception, the day of our demise awaits, unless the Day of the Lord intervene. It is as a sign to ourselves, therefore, that we mark our foreheads: a sign of our mortality.

Nevertheless, we who are baptized carry the divine light and are joined into the holy body, the church of which Christ is the head. Still, our fallen nature struggles against the divine. Thus the Church, in her wisdom, has set apart seasons in the year for penitence, which is to say, times in which our minds and bodies are especially harnessed to spiritual discipline for the sake recollecting our sins and purifying our wills, as best we feebly can. Therefore we fast: by tradition we fast of meat, and in the East they also forgo eggs and dairy, and even cooking oils. But if other abstinences prove more fruitful to you, if some other act of self-denial more constantly keeps you mindful, then choose it. The point is recollection of the spiritual through discipline of the flesh, not mere obedience to a rule.

Beyond that, we are called to greater prayerfulness; and if you are not already doing so, I commend to you the daily devotions which may be found in the Prayer Book, even if you can fit only one into your day. And if you can start in Lent, perhaps you can continue through the year, so that prayer becomes ever more part of your daily living.

In these forty days we are reminded of the days spent in the ark during the flood, the days of Jesus' temptation, the days of resurrection before Jesus ascended to the throne of heaven, taking our earthly form to the heart of the Godhead. From thence he shall come to judge the living and the dead, on the day of the Lord, which as the prophet Joel says shall be terrible beyond human endurance, were it not for the mercy of the Lord in our salvation. Thus we prepare ourselves for that dread day, that we may watch with the wise virgins, our lamps well lighted. Our appetites, though, call us away, both in body and mind. Let us sleep! Let us find pleasant diversions! Let us give free rein to our impulses! they disobediently cry, as on that sorry day in Eden.

And thus it is given to us in some seasons to rejoice in our salvation, and in others to look upon our sins and acknowledge them. We reheat the twisted metal of our souls in the forge of self-denial to make them malleable, and hammer them on the anvil of spiritual disciplines to restore their proper shapes. And thus we begin this season, the mark of ashes recalling to us our origins in the substance of creation. We are but dust, made living through the first grace of God in creation, and now, made living again through the grace which comes through our savior Jesus Christ, who shares in our flesh, its morality made immortal. In that terrible last day, when the old earth and heavens pass away, all that is worldly will finally pass with them, all that has not withered or rusted or been eaten away long before. And before the last, we may, like Paul, be called to set aside wealth and comfort and the approbation of our fellows in our witness to the gospel; indeed, like those slain in Libya, we may lose our lives. But in these losses is salvation found, when what is worldly passes away. And thus it is well that we prepare through self-denial and prayer.

Easter will yet come, the day of glorious resurrection, and after the Day of the Lord, the glorious eternity of the new life. But we are not there yet; and the way to Easter leads first to the cross, that great sacrifice. Can we not watch with our Lord in our own Gethsemane, praying and fasting?

The Interesting Thing About Religion

Matt Gunter has posted a letter from Evelyn Underhill to Cosmo Lang (then Archbishop of Canterbury) on the subject of the purpose of religion and the need for "greater interiority and cultivation of the personal life of prayer" in the church's clergy. It is a message that is ever more pertinent in today's Episcopal Church, where it seems that matters of public policy come first, and where matters of theology are purely discretionary. There is no hope for the increase of the gospel where its ministers are not interested in what it tells us about God, and where its ministers are not in converse with that God. A priest without a regular rule of prayer is spiritually malnourished, and cannot properly feed his charges; a priest who is not conversant with the theology which is handed down from the fathers, and who does not walk in the path which they have written for her, cannot properly bring her people into the same knowledge. There is nothing wrong with preaching for action, but it is not all there is to preaching, and people can be inspired to action elsewhere. But it is only in the church that people can be brought to know Christ and to live in him, and to do that, those people much be led into religion, that is, the right relationship with the divine.