Trinity 6

Sermon preached by the Reverend Anna Matthews

A friend arrives for a visit. No communication device existed that could have alerted you to their expected arrival and it’s midnight before they wearily knock on your door. Hospitality requires you to welcome them, not just with shelter and a bed for the night but with food. But the cupboards are bare. Deliveroo and 24 hour shopping being a couple of millennia off, your options are either to let your friend go to bed hungry or to rouse a neighbour in the hope they can lend you some bread.

Hospitality wins out: the need of the hungry guest outweighs the neighbour’s need for sleep. So you go and bang on your neighbour’s door, waking him and his family, refusing to let up until he opens the door and gives you bread. If friendship won’t move him then shaming him or irritating him into action will do the trick.

This, our bibles tell us, is a parable about persistence in prayer, taught by Jesus after his disciples have asked him ‘Lord, teach us to pray’, and after he’d given them what we know as the Lord’s Prayer. What are we to make of what the parable tells us? That we are to keep on banging on heaven’s door until our sleeping Lord rouses himself to act? That we can shame God into doing what we want? That eventually he’ll give in to stop us bothering him?  

Our bibles actually do that thing our English translations quite often do, which is to make the text sound a bit more polite and respectable than it could. Where our translation says of the friend asking for bread ‘at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs’ it could just as easily be translated ‘at least because of his shamelessness…’ Jesus is teaching us to be shameless in prayer.

And we can be shameless because the one to whom we are praying wants to give us good gifts. As Jesus teaches his disciples, we are praying to our Father in heaven. It wasn’t entirely novel for God to be called ‘Father’ – we see this image used sometimes in the Old Testament to refer to the relationship between God and Israel. But Jesus takes it to a whole new level, referring to God as Father over and over again in the Gospels, with an unprecedented level of intimacy – claiming a relationship not just by metaphor or analogy, but a relationship of being: ‘I and the Father are one’, he says.

And what Jesus teaches is that we can call God 'our Father' because he calls God his Father, and Jesus' whole life, death and resurrection is about bringing us to the place where he is, with the Father. St Paul writes that 'God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, 'Abba! Father!'' (Galatians 4.6) This is the great gift we celebrate today in Teddy’s baptism: already the child of Olga and Simeon, today is he claimed as a child of God, and can grow up in all the dignity that that identity bestows, able to call God Father just as Jesus calls God Father.

That good gift that Jesus promises his disciples in today’s gospel is the Spirit, already at work in us, praying in us, and inviting us to join in. This is where all prayer begins: standing alongside Jesus in relationship with the God who loves us. Our baptism draws us into Jesus’ life as in the font we die with him and rise with him, and the Christian life then is a growing into Christ’s image and likeness, becoming more like Jesus.

And one of the ways we do that is through prayer. Through Jesus we are brought into relationship with the Father, responding to his love, opening ourselves up to the ongoing work of grace within us, drawn into God’s purposes for the world.

Abraham prefigures something of this in our Old Testament reading. What we hear is by way of a theological commentary on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and in Abraham’s dialogue with God we hear what audacious prayer sounds like. Conventional morality says that if you do something wrong, you deserve what you get. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah had sinned, therefore the punishment meted out to them is just. But Abraham interposes his prayer between the indictment and the punishment, allowing grace to intrude. If the guilty can condemn the innocent, he asks, can’t the innocent save the guilty?

In this exchange we see God’s character revealed. Abraham intercedes shamelessly for the people of Sodom, reminding God of God’s character, which is to act justly and to have mercy. And it is precisely because this is God’s character that Abraham can pray so boldly. He knows who God is, he trusts God’s character, which is why he can pray that God act in accordance with God’s character. This is, in fact, what it means to pray ‘hallowed be your Name’. It’s to pray that God’s Name, God’s character, be revealed in the world, and that the world be more oriented towards God. For us to pray it is to ask that our lives show forth God’s life: that his character be made visible in us. God’s desire is that Abraham show forth justice and righteousness – gifts not of Abraham’s own possession, but that flow from his relationship with God.

Abraham’s prayer doesn’t change God’s mind, or remind a forgetful God of his nature. Abraham’s prayer depends on God’s nature, and shows us a God who wants his people to be agents of his justice and mercy, who wants us to participate in his work in the world through interceding for it in its need. For justice to be done there needs to be a case made for the defence – a principle still enshrined in our law. And the theological counter-narrative to conventional morality that we hear on Abraham’s lips, that righteousness ultimately overrides human wickedness, will weave its way through the story of scripture until it reaches the cross. And here, as Paul writes to the Colossians, the innocent one saves the guilty. Grace intrudes between indictment and punishment as God himself makes the case for the defence and nails the record of human sin to the cross, erasing its demands.

And here, through the death and resurrection of Jesus, we are given the glorious liberty of the children of God. We are freed from sin, and freed for God’s purposes. This is what we celebrate with and for Teddy today: in all the potential he has before him, he is given the gift of becoming like Jesus. And so much of that becoming happens in prayer. It happens as we trust the God we pray to, as his character forms our character in prayer. It is no use whatsoever praying for God’s justice to be done on earth without expecting that one of the ways God will answer that prayer is by making us more just. When we pray for God to forgive us our sins we had better expect that he will also soften our hearts to make us more merciful towards others.

Rarely does this happen all at once. Prayer isn’t a matter of finding the right combination of words that unlock God’s power. Prayer is being drawn into fuller relationship with God and more into Christ’s likeness. I can think of situations where I’ve prayed for a long time for someone or something – a bit like the man who keeps on banging on his neighbour’s door – and over that time I’ve seen God’s grace at work in people’s lives, and I’ve noticed how God has shaped me through that prayer.

Sometimes, just like our bible translations, our prayers can be a bit too polite and respectable. But Jesus teaches us to be confident – shameless even – in prayer. We don’t have to hold back because we fear God won’t answer, or won’t approve of what we ask for (though we may find he reshapes our desires as we pray). Because of who God is, our loving Father who gives everything for us, we can pray with confidence that he will hallow his name in us; that he will make us the people through whom his kingdom will come; that he will give and forgive – and that he will not withhold the Holy Spirit who prays in us, conforming us to Christ, and who helps us to live out the identity we receive in baptism, as we live alongside Jesus in relationship with Abba, his Father and our Father.