Luke 11:1-9
Jodie: Matthew chapter 6 – And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others.
Doug: Luke chapter 11 – He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say: OUR Father in heaven …
J: Truly I tell you, they have their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door
D: Hallowed be your name, your kingdom come. Give us each day OUR bread for tomorrow.
J: [interrupting slightly] And pray to your Father who is in secret.
D: Secret? And forgive us OUR sins.
J: And YOUR Father who sees in secret will reward YOU.
D: You? For WE OURSEVLES forgive everyone indebted to US. And do not bring US to the time of trial.
J: As a church we have decided to encourage the spiritual disciplines more fully. During the last year, I have attempted to strengthen my own practices of prayer, meditation, bible reading, and as I have attempted to learn more about other forms of spiritual practice. I believe that as a congregation it would be good to continue our discussion of creative and fruitful ways to nurture personal spiritual transformation and formation.
D: Well, Jodie, I think you and I agree that there is something lacking in TUMC’s Spiritual Practices, and the church as a whole seems to agree since two years ago we committed ourselves to the following “Consider our programs of spiritual formation and transformation as preparation for being engaged in God’s mission in the world.” However, most of the practices that you’ve mentioned, and much of what passes for spiritual formation these days puts too much emphasis on the individual and her or his relationship with God. Mennonites have generally attended more carefully to the communal nature of our worship. Song and Sabbath, Breaking the Bread, Prayer Together, Bible Study Groups, Peaceable Living, Fraternal Admonition
J: Whoa, Doug, Fraternal Admonition? You mean “the ban,” I suppose. You see, that’s part of the problem, for many of us, traditional forms of spiritual discipline in a Mennonite community inspire guilt rather than a closer walk with God. Our listening process included support for an item that affirmed “Attention to desire for spiritual depth, listening for God’s spirit ([and] not [just in] worship), both individually and as a congregation.” Moreover, I do love song and sharing and sermonizing and coffee time and Sunday school as much as you do. Okay, maybe not quite AS much as you do. I am an introvert after all. But, I deeply enjoy these practices. Still, in the last year, I have hungered for more intimacy with God and I have been impressed with the conviction that more consideration to these individual practices would enrich my experience of worship.
D: Whoa, yourself, Jodie, intimacy with God? Many of us are a bit skeptical of the whole notion of “having a personal relationship with Jesus” of the entire Christian life being defined as just “praying and reading your Bible.” So many of these individual practices are actually quite self-centered. I am not sure that they are as suited for preparing you for corporate worship as they are for preparing you to slog through another week of hard work for the present economic order.
J: That is not fair! What if I desire to be more present, more patient, more loving during the week.
D: Well, generally, in my view, these sort of disciplines lead to a form of faith that is actually quite unconcerned with the world outside the narrow confines of the self and its experiences.
J: In the documents on initiatives you see the deep desire in our congregation to practice spiritual disciplines so that we can better live lives of peace and justice in our community. That is what I am trying to say: our disciplines whether individual or collective give us strength—not just to make it through another week at the grindstone—but the strength to love our enemies, to seek justice, to offer welcome, and to nurture our children in a vivid faith.
Moreover, I don’t think that your analysis of the personal dimension of faith takes into account something like Martin Luther King Jr.’s Kitchen Table Experience!
D: How so?
J: Early on during the bus boycott in Montgomery, the young Rev. King was awakened at midnight by a telephone call. It was a warning. Get out of Montgomery or else you and your family will be killed. He sat down at his kitchen table utterly broken. At that moment, as he recounts the story in the Stride Toward Freedom, he started to think of how he might remove himself from leadership in the movement without looking like a total coward.
I hung up but I could not sleep . . . I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing to be a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had almost gone, I determined to take my problem to God. My head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud: ‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. . .I can’t face it alone.’
“At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never before experienced God. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness; stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to pass from me. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything. The outer situation remained the same, but God had given me inner calm.
Three days later King’s house was bombed. He later said that because of his experience at the Kitchen table he was able to face the unruly crowd that night, a crowd teeming with anger over violence, ready to commit violence themselves … King was able to face them with confidence, hope and faith … and was able to turn their anger into a deeper commitment to nonviolence.
D: Yes, but, people are always forgetting that King did not emerge out of a cabbage patch. He was nurtured in the faith by an active and vibrant Black church community that taught him about justice, how to sing and eat together, how to read the Bible in community. There he learned that we are all tied together in a tangled garment of destiny.
J: But, didn’t this church also teach him how to pray and how to discern the voice of God… didn’t it teach him that God was a personal God…. A God who might perchance be concerned about your sorrow—at midnight—over a cup of coffee at the kitchen table. A God who was personal and for that reason nobody was nobody and everybody was a somebody!
D: It is significant that when Jesus disciples asked him the question about John’s disciples and prayer that the words of the prayer he gave them were of necessity a communal prayer.
Our father
Our bread
Our sins
Forgive us
Lead us
Deliver us
J: But, isn’t it interesting that the paradigm of persistence in prayer is often the individual man who knocks on the door at midnight. The widow that pesters the judge for justice.
D: King
himself preached one of his most famous sermons on this passage. He hardly seemed overly concerned with the nurturing of individual spirituality. MLK makes this passage all about the church in a variety of ways. At one point in a Knock at Midnight, the church is the man from whom a neighbour seeks bread. Do we have the bread our world is looking for, King asks? Or are we a church that seizes up cold or burns up with fiery passion – zeal without knowledge? At other points, the church is the one who is knocking on the door, the black church which produced King is a cipher for the wider world which faces a three fold midnight in the social, psychological, and moral order.
J: It’s still true that King drew strength from quite moments alone with God.
D: A conversation such as this and on this topic between Jodie and I is not at all unusual. We may have exaggerated for effect here and cleaned it up for the pulpit a bit there, and it may have gone on a little longer. The basic positions are as suggested so far. And as we prepared for this sermon, we also wanted to find common ground. Eventually we asked ourselves to individually spell out what we think the problem is that we are working with. I suggested the following:
The spiritual world that produced us is not a world that we are willing to reproduce. Many of us feel that the spiritual world that produced us includes an overabundance of guilt, an under appreciation for the wider world politically and religiously, and insufficient intellectual rigor.
Jodie’s answer was very similar.
J: Fears of guilt! That we have a church filled with some people that are weary, weary, weary of the “read your bible… pray everyday” culture they grew up in; and others that are new to Christianity or Protestantism and don’t even know how to begin engaging in spiritual practices during the week.
D: We both seem to recognize as well that there was something positive in the world that raised many of us
J: We might think that the spiritual experiences that we had when we were younger were over-zealous and yet we can’t deny that there was something significant and meaningful about them.
D: Yes, and there are other things. Jo and I might not have ever become pacifist if it weren’t for the fundamentalist churches that taught us to take the bible as literal.
J: Or for that matter, we might not have been convinced that concerns about poverty were central to the teaching of Jesus if we weren’t taught to take our ethics from the Bible.
D: Perhaps most important in our Mennonite and wider Protestant heritage is the songs that do as much as anything to shape our worship and theology. The songs we sing are as vital to our spirituality as they were for King’s African-American congregation, and King’s “Knock at Midnight Sermon” wonderfully weaves together his clarion call for justice and the words of black sorrow songs.
J: It is important to remind ourselves of these positives. For one thing, there are many among us who don’t get our baggage with certain spiritual practices. Some grew up in other Christian traditions or came to faith later in life.
D: While I grew up weighed upon and nourished by continuous injunctions to read your Bible, pray everyday, or else you are failing in your Christian duty, there are those of us who, from King’s point of view are knocking at the door, searching for some of the very things that have taken on a wearisome character for others of us.
Jodie and I also agreed on a question for moving forward that Jodie recently posed at one of our community sessions on the marks of the New Monasticism:
J: What are the spiritual disciplines that are needed to make women and men who have the courage to follow Jesus’ difficult path on peace and justice issues.
D: It is one thing to agree intellectually and even with our dollars that Christian peace, grace, love, and nonviolent resistance to evil are good things, but what are the habits that will sustain us when peace, grace, love, and nonviolent resistance begin to make enemies that we then, in turn, have to work extra hard to love?
J: It is not so much a question of acceptance or rejection of the past but of creative reappropriation.
J: The whole agenda for our passage this morning from Luke 11 turns on the word persistence, or as the old King James puts it, importunity.
D: Importunity?
J: Importunity means to press or beset with solicitations; demand with urgency or persistence. to beg for (something) urgently or persistently.
D: Persistence, faithfulness, importunity. These are the critical words that anchor our text this morning from Luke chapter 11 along with a sister passage in Luke chapter eighteen. In verse eight of Luke chapter eleven, Jesus praises the man who knocks late, late into the evening. His persistence or importunity is what rouses a friend at midnight, when that friend would rather stay in bed.
J: As a Michigander, progeny of lapsed Lutherans on one side and lapsed Presbyterians on the other, this parable that so closely links importunity and prayer is disconcerting. First of all a few points on the ethics I grew up with: first point one should never make a public spectacle of oneself like the man knocking at the door at midnight does. And even worse, one should never make a public spectacle of others. Particularly, the neighbor in this passage who is minding his own business at home in bed and now the whole neighborhood is listening as he yell down his “nos” and reluctatant “yes” to the persistent man in the street. And one certainly never makes a burden of oneself. Depending on someone else’s loaves of bread. Outing him self—for the whole neighborhood– as “breadless.”
D: But there’s more! In Luke chapter eighteen we hear about a certain judge who neither feared God nor did he treat the people over whom he presided with dignity. But a woman, a woman who had lost her husband, a widow with no where else to turn, approaches the judge and asks for justice against her opponent. Initially turned down, the widow persists, she keeps coming to him, and eventually the judge says that he has no choice but to grant her justice. He cannot get any rest, he cannot move on in life until she stops bothering him by continually coming to him. “Listen to what even the unjust judge says,” says Jesus. “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?” When Jesus comes again, the passage continues, when the hour for the Son of Man’s return has reached midnight, this continual knocking, this bothering, persistent, importune coming is the very picture of faith. This is what Jesus hopes to find in those who are preparing his coming kingdom.
J: To my Michigander consciousness and perhaps also to the first century Judeaen context …
This woman and this man act in a way that is utterly shameless.
It is hard to know what to make of this strong linking of shamelessness with devotion.
And its not like this is the only time that it occurs in the Gospels.
Mary with her extravagant gift.
Zachaeus up in the tree
The Syro-phoenecian women that challenged Jesus to re-think his entire messianic ministry by comparing herself to a DOG.
D: But the Scripture also witnesses to the importance of patience
J: But, there is always importunity to this patience. A restlessness and hopefulness that infuses patience with a particular quality. A reminder that now is as much of tomorrow as we are going to get today.
D: We are still many weeks away from advent, but we cannot help but notice that some of these same traits are praised earlier in the Gospel of Luke in a woman and a man who help to announce Jesus birth as of divine import. Our children are named in p
art after this prophet and prophetess. Anna or Hannah is an eighty-four year old widow who, since her husband died a mere seven years after their marriage, has not ceased to fast and pray in the temple. “She never left the temple,” Luke chapter two says, “but worshipped there with fasting and prayer night and day.” Simeon or Shimon likewise. He was righteous and devout. An old man patiently awaiting the consolation of Israel, the day when Messiah would lead his people out from under the iron hand of Rome. Simeon and Hannah’s faithfulness aided by the power of the Holy Spirit allows them to see very, very early on what so many others would miss even when it stared them right in the face. This child, had come to rescue Israel, and not only Israel, but also come as a light to the Gentiles.
J: What was it about Simeon and Hannah, about the man knocking at midnight and the widow determined to obtain justice from an unjust judge. What is the common thread? What prepared them to seek justice and announce God’s peaceable salvation? To provide bread to the weary and hungry, to praise God and provide the earliest template for Christian faithfulness?
I have not been a Mennonite very long. Although, I suppose we are now entering our sixth year here at TUMC. Mennonites are a patient people, they share with my own ancestors a strong commitment to self-reliance and a suspicion of too much emotion. A QUIET COMMUNITY. And yet, this has ALSO been an importune community, a community with a persistent commitment to pacifism that HAS been drawn from a commitment that the peacable kingdom must be practiced NOW. We can be a burdensome, `troublesome people.
D: When we think about this patience and this restless persistence we do ask ourselves: How can we pass it on to our children? What are the practices that help us to discern what is right. And what are the practices that not only make us know what is right, but likewise give us the strength to do what is right!
J: I believe that some of those disciplines are the very ones that worry us. A strong sense of the presence of God in our lives, practices of quiet and patience listening, a deep knowledge of scripture, importune prayers. And to gain these thing fully and deeply we are each going to have to spend some time as Matthew puts in “praying in secret.”
D: In many ways we are in a similar position as Jesus’ Disciples. We would like someone to tell us how we should we pray. To give us a three point plan for spiritual formation and transformation. Jesus’s answer includes the familiar words of the Lord’s Prayer and immediately moves to an insistence that we pray with persistence, that if we knock loudly at midnight, the door will be opened. If we seek, we will find. If we ask, it will be given. Jesus’s teachings in the first century and Martin Luther King’s in the twentieth ask us together to doggedly,
J: faithfully
D: importunely pursue Christian transformation.