Give, Forgive, Deliver

1 Samuel 1:13-18; Matthew 6:5-13

            An ordained Minister of the Word and Sacrament … sits in the corner of a local coffee shop trying to prayerfully converse with God.   The pastor is relieved not to actually see God in the form of George Burns and to just generally sense God’s living presence.   At one point she finds herself asking, “Lord, why do I need to tell You what I need in prayer?”  She discerns God saying in reply, “Because I love you, my child.”   She knows this, of course, but feels the need to press a little further, to intellectually wrangle on. “Yes, for that I am forever thankful.  But You know my heart inside and out, you know what I need even before I do.   Why do I need to tell You what You already know?  I trust You will act with love and mercy whether I speak to You or not of my needs.”   She falls silent.  She waits for a reply.  She sips more coffee.  Silence.   Takes a bite of blueberry scone.   Time stretches out.  She starts questioning her line of questioning.   Ongoing silence.    About forty minutes and three saucers full of ground up caffeinated bean juice later, she detects a divine whisper.    “My dear child, we are family.   You and I have a unique, tight-knit relationship.  It’s one born of the love I personally bestowed upon you.   Loving relationships, most especially the one we share together, need honest conversation.   True enough, I will act as I will act and the reasons won’t often be clearly revealed to you.  But this doesn’t mean our relationship is like those necessary but frustrating One-Way streets you humans have constructed.   I do have dominion, but I also desire dialogue.   You didn’t enjoy not hearing right back from me, right?  Nor do I enjoy when I don’t hear from you.”

              In the midnight hours … outside after another loud ‘n wild show, the heavily tattooed and body pierced songwriter and lead singer of a hard rocking band pauses instead of passes out.   He takes note of his small place underneath the heavens,, of how the stars far outshine his overblown rock star ego.   They seem to dissect him in a soul-stirring way.  They call to him of a homecoming he’d been long away from since growing up with his preacher dad.   He can’t recall the last time he spoke with the Lord about his life.   Slowly, sullenly, in that sobering starlight, he begins to write down a few words.   “I looked up at the sky tonight,” he writes, “to see Your face and feel Your presence now.  I need You here right now. I came from a lonely place, the windows closed on my darkest hour.  I need You here right now, ‘cause You won’t leave me lonely … You won’t leave me broken in a world that not my home.” (Josey Scott of the band Saliva).   More words like this pour out in the shadow light of the stars, building a highway between his sin-sick soul and his Maker’s holy heart.    So much so an entire collection comes together, the makings of what would become his first non-rated “R” album.   He gives the collection the Christ-tinted title, “Blood Stained Love Story.”

            In the middle of an average day … a stay-at-home mom paused from daily chores in order to approach her Lord.   A life-long and self-dubbed “devout” Christian, she quietly speaks aloud saying, “Most gracious God, heavenly Father, eternal in the heavens, Alpha and Omega.  I hesitate to bother You with such petty details about my life.  But I’m so tired.  My spirit is sagging more than my aging skin.  I need energy, some new joy.   If You, according to Your most glorious, everlasting, wise, powerful, omniscient will would see fit, please grant this petition from for my humble spirit.   I know I’m just a sinful speck on the spacious screen of all that is sacred in You.   I’m a sinner, of the same idolatrous heart as any and all mayhem makers.  I’m not worth Your time.  But I read and believe in Your holy Word the Bible of how You care for even the smallest sparrows who’ve fallen from their nest.   My nest, most heavenly Father, feels like its falling.  So I pray, dear Jesus, if it be Your glorious and eternal will … please hold it up.”     From the nearby stairwell of the family home, her young son overhears these words.   He can’t quite understand them all.   He doesn’t get why the prayer sounded so complicated.  He’s confused because he’d learned in Sunday School that folks should just approach the Lord with faith like a child.    He suppresses the urge to run to his mom, confess that he heard everything and then instruct her to next time simply say, “Daddy, I’ve got a boo-boo in my heart.  Please make it better.”

            As these opening vignettes hopefully illustrated, approaching God to make a personal, prayerful petition isn’t always easy.   It can be more comfortable praying for others than for ourselves.   We can get caught up in intellectual arguments with ourselves about whether or not we even need to enter into conversation with the Almighty.   We can get caught up for many years totally ignoring the God we knew in our youth.   We can get trapped in tongue-twister prayers, more concerned with how to properly address God than with simply stating our soulful desire.  

            So how best to make a prayerful petition to God?   How do we come to experience what the poet John Greenleaf Whittier once affirmed by saying, “Every chain that humans wear crumbles ‘neath the weight of prayer”?   Like Hannah, how do we whole-heartedly petition God about our anxiety and sad countenance with honest hope of receiving a blessing?   

            In his book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home, Quaker theologian Richard Foster reminds us what our faith tradition highlights as the definitive model petitionary prayer.  He points us to Jesus’ example in Matthew 6:9-13.    He reminds us to frame our personal requests in this way, focusing on three words – give, forgive, and deliver.

            So many of us folks have deep pride in self-sufficiency.  Asking for help, admitting we are dependent on another … even God … can thus be a tough thing to do.  Jesus knows this, hence he teaches us to practice it.   He teaches us to petition God for our daily bread.   Daily nourishment of body and spirit.   The little things that sustain us and fuel our faithful service.  “What if,” writes Foster, “the only things we were allowed to talk about in prayer were weighty matters, the profound issues?  We would be orphaned in the cosmos, cold, and terribly alone.  But,” he goes on to conclude, “God welcomes us with our 1,001 trifles, for they are each important to God.  We pray for daily bread by taking to God those trifles that make up the bulk of our days.”  

            Accepting that God cares about and helps us with even our tiniest trifles builds up trust.   Upon this trust we then ask for holy help with bigger things burdening us.   We ask for forgiveness of our sins, those things we do against God and neighbor as well as don’t do for God and neighbor.    Believing that God is giving empowers and equips our belief that God is forgiving!  Foster hits a particularly honest stride when he invites us to consider what forgiveness is and is not.  It does not mean that “we will cease to hurt, that we will forget, that we can pretend the offense did not really matter.”  It is “not acting as if things are just the same as before the offense.”   What it means – and this is why it’s so crucial to our personal petitions – is that forgiveness “is a miracle of grace whereby the offense no longer separates.”  It means that God helps us not to use any offense to “drive a wedge” into our relationships.   When we experience this, we are far better able to accept that God, through Jesus Christ, doesn’t use our sin to punish us.   It is instead fully forgiven and we are constantly welcomed back to mutually loving fellowship.  Stay tuned for more on the topic of forgiveness – I’ll be preaching on it throughout Lent.

            In the strength of faithful community, we pray the third part of this petition.   We pray for ourselves and others to be delivered from evil temptations.   We’ve all wrestled and continue to wrestle with these in one form or another.  They come at us in our hearts and through sinful human systems.   Jesus knew first-hand what it was like to be encountered by both unholy enticements.   He experienced them in the wilderness alone and in the company of thieves beside his Cross.   So we can trust Him in our plea for protection.  We can believe we’ll be delivered by the righteous, resilient strength of our Savior.            

            Yes, it’s not always easy to pray for ourselves.   But our Lord gave us a definitive guide.   What simple sustenance do you need God to give you today?   What thoughts, words or actions have you failed to honor God with, thus accruing a spiritual debt needing to be forgiven?   What evils in this world do you pray for the power of our Lord to deliver you and so many others from?   May we pray our petitions this day, trusting that in the Lord we are given, forgiven and delivered.  Amen.