Hosea 1:2-10 Psalm 85
Colossians 2:6-15, (16-19). Luke 11:1-13
In the system of democracy, it is often said, that if people do not participate by voting, then they deserve the person that gets elected.
In in the realm or kingdom of heaven, that inner parallel reality which Jesus taught us about and asked us to participate in, prayer is like the correspondence of voting in a democracy.
If we don’t pray, then do we deserve what we get?
Very often we do not like some of the outcomes which happen within the freedom which is abroad in our world. We don’t like the competition if in creative order which pits people against people, nature against humanity, and nature against nature. We often feel like we are trapped within contrary forces in natural and human systems, and it causes us pain, anxiety, and loss of favorite preferred states of living.
In our distress, we often want God to be a benign dictator who would intervene directly in our situation for us, right now.
Jesus came to this world to show us the way of God’s democracy and to teach us about how we should vote in this democracy by persistent prayer.
God, who is perfect freedom, shares a significant degree of freedom with everyone, every creature, everything, every atom and sub-atomic particle within the universe. And if God were one to be selectively overriding that freedom, then the moral significance of true freedom would be lost.
Jesus came to show us that God doesn’t override freedom except with hope which is always another future. The past and the present is and will be override by future occasions in God sustaining this world.
Jesus came to show us how to live with the conditions of freedom, even the worst conditions, which brought him to his death on the cross.
Jesus came to reveal the parallel inner kingdom or realm of God, from which we can learn to live in and understand it to be the lure of God to know spiritual life within natural living.
Jesus came to teach us how to influence the nature order with the spiritual order, and the way to practice a mediation between the spiritual order, the kingdom of heaven, is through prayer.
So, we have the discourse on prayer presented in our Gospel reading, which includes the prayer which Jesus taught his disciples with some of the main ingredients of interacting as spiritual beings within the natural world.
First, we accept that we are dust and deity in our nature. God is our parent and Father, so we bear on ourselves the image of our parent. We call God our parent because we are God’s children. Accept it and promote this identity for all persons. Next, we need to acknowledge that we live in the heavenly realm of what is ideal, and in the world of what is natural and still growing. In asking that the will of heaven be done on earth, we are asking to follow the perfect arc of love and justice and with our words and deeds, we continually are trying to approximate the ideal. Second, ask for enough until right now, in health and sustenance. Give us this day our daily bread. Too often we are not thankful for what we have now; we are more worried and anxious about what we do not yet have. Live in asking a gratitude for bread now, and remember the asking pronoun “us” is plural. Give us. We are asking on behalf of others too.
Further, the words of Jesus instruct us to adopt forgiveness as a way of living. Why? The earthly realm is not perfect. How do we tolerate ourselves and others who are not perfect? We adopt the reciprocity of forgiveness which is way that communities can survive in peace. Forgiveness is also compatible with accountability. We can forgive even as we hold ourselves accountable to standards of mutual well-regard.
And the words of Jesus allow us to be “selfish,” in asking to be spared the time of trial, when we get caught in the clashes of the freedom conditions in this world. It doesn’t mean that we will be spared trials; it means we don’t go looking for them and we are asking wisdom to act in ways which would not give us a needless trial. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane prayed, “Father, if this cup could pass from me, but not my will but yours be done.” It is totally normal and natural to ask for protection from harm’s way.
The words after the proposed “Lord’s prayer” provide us with metaphors of the reality of freedom. Sometimes it seems as though there is a delay in our answers and sometimes it seems as though we are getting the opposite of what we want as desire as ideal. “God, I asked for a fish, why am I getting a snake? I asked for an egg, why am I getting a scorpion? God, I keep knocking at your door, are you going to answer the door?”
These scenarios are follow-ups on the fact that trials come to us even when we don’t want them. What is Jesus suggesting? “Just be persistent in prayer. Treat your prayers as votes being added with the votes of others to come to majority status. And when there are enough of those votes brought to the inner realm, there is a greater chance of that prayer energy with majority status will overflow into actual positive results within the natural and visible order. So, be persistent in prayer; this is how we vote in the kingdom of heaven to make the will of heaven, the practice in our world.
I hope we can appreciate how realistic the prayer advice of Jesus is about the actual conditions of freedom. He himself prayed and yet he was brought to a cruel death; he was not delivered from the evil death of the cross until a subsequent future event of his resurrection continuity in a different kind of new life.
Whether the good we seek wins the day in our time is not the issue because the conditions of freedom create a field of probable outcomes, some favorable and some not so. What do we do in the face of probabilities in the field of freedom. We pray as individuals; we pray as a community for goodness, love, and justice. We offer thanks when there are outcomes of goodness, love, and justice; we continue to persist in prayer when those do not seem to prevail.
And we do so in hope, because God is everlasting, the entire ground existence, of life itself, is everlasting and it will go on. The resurrection of Christ was a sign of existence on another plane, even the plane of the kingdom of heaven which always already co-exists as a parallel reality of this visible world.
The resurrection is the “trump” card which we can always play, as the winning card of hope of everlastingness which will always redefine our understanding of what has happened in the past.
Let us be co-creators with Christ by persisting in prayer; prayers are not just words; they are also the formation energy of what we do with our body language deeds in our world.
The Gospel words of Christ for us today is “Pray always, and do not grow weary, because what we pray helps to orient our bodies towards helping to fulfill the goodness we ask for. Amen.
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