Praying to the One Who Gives Good Gifts 

I recently had a conversation with a person who was clearly a faithful Christian, not to mention intelligent and, by all appearances, kind. I should point out that we had just met, we were in a crowded place and each of us would shortly be going our own way. And yet, our conversation quickly took a serious turn as the recent severe flooding in the Texas Hill Country came up; specifically, we discussed the tragic events at Camp Mystic, a Christian camp, where the owner, two college aged counselors and 27 girls, most of them 8 or 9 years old died in the deluge. Neither of us could really make sense of this tragedy and both of us clearly hurt for both those who died and for their families. Searching, I suspect, for some meaning or evidence of God’s goodness, my conversation partner suggested, with a tone of sadness and resignation, that perhaps God had taken those little girls—or at least allowed their deaths—to spare them from some future suffering. I was not at all comfortable with the suggestion, but given the setting of our conversation and the fact that we had only just met, I felt somewhat constrained in my response and simply suggested that God is always at work to bring about good, in spite of evil. It was an honest but inadequate response. That conversation was still on my mind when I read our Gospel reading early this week. Perhaps that’s why I recalled the following story.
    William Sloane Coffin was the long-time chaplain at Yale and the pastor of the Riverside Church in New York. Though he spent his ministry struggling for civil rights and peace, one of his best-known sermons was born of personal tragedy. In 1983, Coffin’s 24-year-old son Alex, driving in a storm, lost control of his car and skidded off the road and into the water. His death was deeply painful for Coffin, but almost as painful, were the comments of well-meaning people who said the young man’s death was God’s will.
    Just 10 days after the tragedy, Coffin was back in the Riverside pulpit addressing his loss and his consolation. He took issue with a common way of explaining unexpected, tragic events:
When a person dies, there are many things that can be said, and there is at least one thing that should never be said. The night after Alex died I was sitting in the living room of my sister's house outside of Boston, when the front door opened and in came a nice-looking, middle-aged woman, carrying about eighteen quiches. When she saw me, she shook her head, then headed for the kitchen, saying sadly over her shoulder, "I just don't understand the will of God." Instantly I was up and in hot pursuit, swarming all over her. "I'll say you don't, lady!" I said.
For some reason, nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn't go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels. God is dead set against all unnatural deaths…. The one thing that should never be said when someone dies is "It is the will of God." Never do we know enough to say that. My own consolation lies in knowing that it was not the will of God that Alex die; that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God's heart was the first of all our hearts to break.

    In the face of tragedy, suffering, loss and death, Coffin asserted one of the central claims of the Christian tradition: God is love. Hand in hand with this goes another claim: God is good. Thus, God does not cause tragedy, but instead, God always seeks to bring about good; God’s goals are always directed by love and always point toward life in all its fullness.
    Jesus’ teaching on prayer is grounded in the truth of this confession: God is love and seeks the good of humans.
    The disciples, after observing Jesus once more slip off to pray, ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. They seem to be asking for a specific way of prayer or even a specific set of words that would identify them as followers of Jesus, a prayer that would be an identifying mark of the community.  
    Jesus responds with words familiar to us as “The Lord’s Prayer.” This is one of three versions of the prayer found in the earliest Christian literature. Matthew’s version is most familiar because it is more or less the one we say weekly in worship and perhaps as often as everyday in our personal prayers. The concluding doxology— “for yours is the kingdom, the power and the glory”—comes from the Didache , a handbook of Christian teaching and liturgical practice that may date from the very early second century. Luke’s version is the shortest of the three.  
    The prayer begins with two clauses affirming God’s sovereignty and praying that it will be established in the world: “may your name be revered” and “may your reign be established.” Then come three clauses addressing human need, not the need of individuals, but the needs of the community, the needs of all: “give us…forgive us…lead us.” The prayer lifts up the need for physical sustenance, for the things that are necessary for survival and human thriving. Then it moves to spiritual sustenance: forgiveness and reconciliation, without which there can be no community with God or with each other and finally deliverance from the trials and tribulations which could break down the community or undermine our faith.
    These five clauses all fit together and point to the very heart of Jesus’ teaching and ministry according to Luke: the Kingdom of God. As Justo Gonzalez observes, “This is not a list of petitions. It is a single, ardent call for the kingdom in which God’s name is hallowed, and in which all have what they need.” [143] “What is at stake,” suggests Sharon Ringe, “is a wholly new basis for human interactions [in which] all things are made new.” The Lord’s prayer is a call, a plea for a new world characterized by love and justice, compassion and care, equality and community. “It is a prayer to be both spoken and lived.” 
    At the heart of Jesus’ prayer is a profound faith that God is good, a deep belief that God is “gracious and merciful and abounding in steadfast love,” a conviction that God can be trusted for God is faithful and caring. This is also the underlying truth communicated by the verses immediately following the Lord’s prayer. 
    In these teachings, Jesus is suggesting that we can pray with confidence, that we can make our requests in faith, because of the character of God. He makes this point with an argument from the lesser to the greater. This is most clearly seen at the end of the passage where Jesus asks a couple of absurd questions: “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asked for a fish, would give a snake instead of a fish? 12 Or if the child asked for an egg, would give a scorpion?”  These are, of course, rhetorical questions. The obvious answer is “of course not;” no halfway decent mother or father would do such a thing. One wonders if the disciples didn’t laugh a little at the ridiculousness of the questions. 
    But the ridiculousness underscores the point—if fallible, frail, foolish, sinful humans like you and I will respond to our children out of care, compassion and love, certainly God—who is love, who is the very definition of goodness—can be trusted to hear our prayers and respond. The love and care of good parents is but a pale reflection of the love and care of God. So, we should approach God with the faith of a child who trusts in her parents’ goodness and care, who knows her parents will not harm her but will give her good things.   
       This helps to explain the parable of sorts with which Jesus begins his teaching. A man is surprised by the unexpected arrival of a guest at midnight. The man has no bread left—for normally fresh bread was made daily and eaten on the same day. Thus, he cannot feed his guest who, arriving so late at night, must be famished from a long journey. The man, blindsided by the guest’s arrival, cannot be a good host and fulfill the social and religious obligation to show hospitality.
    Desperate, the man goes to the house of a friend and ask if he has bread to spare. His friend at first refuses. But Jesus says that even if the man is not moved to help by friendship, he will be moved to act by the persistence, or better the “brashness” or “shamelessness” of the first man. 
    The point is the same as with the rhetorical questions: if a shameless, brazen man can show up in the dead of night and annoy his neighbor into giving him what he needs for his guest, then surely God will listen and respond to our prayers for the needs of others.
    Tom Long expresses this in his own inimitable way: “If in a scene of almost burlesque miscalculations, with human beings mucking it up right and left, needed gifts are nonetheless given and received, then how much more will the God who loves us respond to our needs. So ask, search, and knock. Human parents don’t give snakes to their children when they ask for fish, or scorpions when they ask for eggs. No, they give the best gifts they can, and if broken human beings give good gifts to their children, how much more can come from the hand of God?’ 
    This doesn’t mean of course that we will always get the gifts that we ask for. It doesn’t mean that we will receive the things we expect. But it does mean that God will hear us and respond according to God’s wisdom and abounding goodness.
    Years ago, Rev. Bob Stulman was volunteering as a chaplain in a local hospital. One day, he was assigned to visit a “Mrs. Szymanski.” Mrs. Szymanski had recently been diagnosed with an advanced case of cancer. Stulman visited with and found her to be a delightful person who possessed a very deep faith. At the conclusion of his visit, he invited her to come to a special service of healing that was to be held in the chapel on the following Sunday. 
    On Sunday, Mrs. Szymanski was wheeled into the chapel. She was accompanied by what seemed to be her entire family, 15 people in all. They constituted a full quarter of the congregation. When the time came, folks were invited to come forward to the rail around the altar to receive the laying on of hands.  Mrs. Szymanski was the first to come forward, accompanied by her family. Stulman placed his hands on her head and prayed. As he described it, “Heat was building up in my body like a wave coming through my head into my hands and seemed to be pouring out onto the heads of those who came forward.  I was convinced that Mrs. Szymanski had been healed. The entire congregation came forward that day, following the example of the Szymanskis, and received the laying on of hands. It was a powerful day.” And indeed, it was not long Mrs. Szymanski went home.
    A few months after the healing service, Bob Stulman heard the distressing news that she had been admitted to the region’s major cancer hospital. He went to visit her. Stulman recalls their conversation in the hospital room: “‘Mrs. Szymanski,’ I blurted out, ‘b-but I prayed that you would be healed.’
“The woman, of deeper faith and insight than I, replied, ‘But I was healed. Before that day my family could not face the fact that I was going to die. There was absolute silence around the subject. After that morning the floodgates opened. Since then we’ve been able to talk, family and friends have come to visit, we’ve been able to plan for my service and the celebration afterwards….’
“She died three months later. I visited the funeral home to pay respects to the family. A cousin who had been at the service took me aside and told me that her death was the most beautiful he had ever experienced: ‘We spent the day before in her hospital room telling stories. She had a memory to share for each one of us. The day she died we were all gathered around her bed; she looked at each one of us, and gently slipped away.’”
Bob Stulman’s prayers, and those of Mrs. Symanski and her family, were heard and answered, but not in the way they expected. They prayed for the curing of her cancer. What they got was a healing:      the healing of relationships, the binding up old wounds of the spirit, the opening of doors for communication, and the [opening] up of hearts to forgive.                                    
           Because God is good, God cannot, will not bring evil upon us. God will always work for our human thriving, because God is the source of life, the archetype of all beauty and the very essence of all goodness. As David Bentley Hart observed, in a theological reflection on another flood—the deadly South Asian tsunami of 2004—we should look to Christ to “learn how God relates himself to sin, suffering, evil and death.” In Christ’s life, death and resurrection, we see “little evidence of anything other than a regal, relentless, and miraculous enmity [to all that destroys life]: sin [God] forgives, suffering he heals, evil he casts out, and death he conquers.” 
This is why we can pray with confidence, because God is inherently good. God is the giver of life in this world and in the world to come. God is love.  Thus, the One who raised Christ from the dead is always at work to draw us into the Divine mystery, to draw us into the life abundant and eternal, to draw us into God’s Kingdom of love and peace. God is faithful, Jesus tells us, and may be trusted, for our human capacity for goodness and compassion is but a pale reflection of God’s infinite mercies. So, let us be bold to ask, to seek and to knock, for God will hear and will respond according to God’s steadfast love and faithfulness.