July 28, 2013 | 8:00 a.m.

Are You There God? It’s Me, Abraham

Matt Helms
Minister for Children and Families, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 85
Genesis 18:20–32
Luke 11:1–13

When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

William Blake
“The Tyger”

Upon reading this biblical text, I was reminded of a story that my mom told me many years ago from her early childhood—a story about prayer, faith, and the hurt that can be caused by unfulfilled expectations. My grandparents own a cabin in northern Wisconsin, located right at the edge of a lake, and when my mom was growing up, the whole family would stay there over long weekends to relax, to fish, and to swim off the edge of the pier that jutted out from their house out onto the lake. One day, after the rest of the family had gone inside after swimming, my mom, at the age of eight, decided that she was going to try and put one of her favorite biblical stories in practice: the story of Jesus and Peter walking on water.

The story in a nutshell—for those of you who don’t remember it—is that the disciples see Jesus walking on the surface of the water one morning while they are out on their fishing boat. Amazed (and perhaps envious), Peter asks Jesus to command him to come out on the water as well, which Jesus does. Incredibly, Peter is able to step off the boat and move towards Jesus on the surface of the water, but after several steps, however, Peter begins to sink—something that Matthew, the author, attributes to Peter’s lack of faith—and he has to cry out to Jesus to save him as he sinks into the water. It is an amazing story, and it left quite an impression on my eight-year-old mother standing on the age of my grandparents’ dock. Armed with the idea that faith was the key ingredient in making this happen, my mom boldly walked towards the edge of the pier and then, with slight hesitation, took a full step off the edge. I’m sure you can guess what happened. This wasn’t a Peter-style, graceful sinking under; this was a full-fledged body flop onto the water’s surface. Undeterred, however, my mom decided that the reason this didn’t work was that she had hesitated before stepping off. Perhaps she just wasn’t showing enough faith that she could do it. So she tried it again, this time being sure to walk off the edge of the pier without hesitation. It goes without saying that this ended in the same submerged result. Frustrated, she lifted up a prayer to God that she be able to do this, that she could have deep enough faith to walk on the water. She tried again, to no avail. So she tried running. She tried closing her eyes and stepping off like Indiana Jones stepping out onto the invisible bridge from the Last Crusade. She tried everything, and every time the same result: total submersion and a mouthful of water. By the end of the experience my mom was in tears, upset that she couldn’t be like the disciples and worried that her faith wasn’t good enough for what God wanted.

Ask and it shall be given to you. Seek and you shall find. Stories like my mother’s are probably more common than you’d expect. I’d imagine many of us as children, or perhaps as adults, have expected more from our faith or more from our prayers at one time or another. Indeed, the Bible seems to suggest that we can expect clear answers from God: “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says later on in the Gospel of Matthew, “if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to a mountain, ‘move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” “Whatever you ask for in faith, you shall receive.” “If you ask anything in my name, my Father will do it.” There is a litany of quotes like these throughout the Gospels, including our passage from the Gospel of Luke today, and yet in our lived experience I’d imagine all of us have felt our prayers have gone unanswered before. These are difficult experiences, often causing us deep hurt or even anger with God. And while stories like my mom praying to God to help her walk on water are easy ones to write off, we know too there are serious prayers to which we never seem to get the answer that we desire.

In between my second and third year of seminary, I worked as a hospital chaplain intern at MacNeal Hospital in Berwyn and spent my days talking and praying with patients, primarily ones in the emergency room. It was one of the most emotionally difficult summers of my life, occasionally requiring a quick transition between celebrating a family member’s life being saved in one room and sitting with a family mourning a loved one’s death right next door. The vast majority of these families prayed fervently to God throughout this time of great need and certainly not in ways that we would describe as “testing” God. There were prayers for healing, prayers for successful surgeries, prayers to be free of pain. Sometimes these prayers received satisfying answers, but there were also many times when they didn’t. What are we to do with that as people of faith?

I’m sure that many of us who have received an unsatisfying answer to prayer have felt caught in that very question. We know intellectually that God is not some sort of cosmic vending machine for our desires, but it can be very hard not to question what good our prayers really do when things don’t go as we’d hoped, particularly when we read Gospel passages like the one from this morning that proclaim “Ask and you shall receive.” Most of us have come to expect unexpected answers to our prayers, including times when the answer will be no, but when we receive such an answer in a time of great need, it poses a challenge to our understanding of the efficacy of prayer. What is the purpose of praying to God for help in a world where suffering, natural disasters, and death are all as much fixtures of our experience as joy, triumph, and life?

In William Blake’s famous poem “The Tyger,” a portion of which is on the bulletin cover this morning, Blake wrestles with this very question of the presence of evil and danger in God’s creation even amidst the beauty and wonder of life. “Did he who made the Lamb make thee?” Blake inquires, wondering aloud about the unexplainable but very real presence of evil in the world. “Tyger? Tyger! burning bright / in the forests of the night; / what immortal hand or eye / dare frame thy fearful symmetry?” Blake’s vision of the creator is one who is omnipotent but aloof, notes Karen Armstrong, a preeminent scholar of religion, which is very much in keeping with the attitudes that many people, both religious and nonreligious, have towards prayer today. Seeing God as aloof, of being set apart as a creator rather than a sustainer, can cause serious harm to our understanding of God. “What good is God if he does not answer prayer?” I read on a message board recently. “If there is suffering in the world, and God does not help that, why should we worship God at all?”

These questions of evil and suffering—theodicy questions—are far from new, of course, and I certainly won’t pretend to have a perfect answer for them. However, I do think it is worth going back to the text of the Gospels and unpacking what is being said when Jesus proclaims that the disciples need only to “ask and it shall be given.” There is not a carte blanche promise being made here where we can receive anything in our heart’s desire. Instead, Luke writes, God will give the Holy Spirit freely to all those who ask it of him. The Holy Spirit is, for Luke, the crucial gift that we receive from God—an ability to love more deeply, to persevere in difficult times, and to hold a reverence for the sacred quality of life. Receiving the Spirit is not a promise of an easy or painless life; indeed looking at the life of Peter, Paul, or any of the early Christians shows that is far from what Jesus is promising his followers. Instead, receiving the Spirit as an answer to prayer is a promise that God will be with us even during the times of suffering that we each are bound to experience. Rather than the distant God presented by William Blake in “The Tyger,” God is instead an intimate presence with whom we can share deeply and can speak freely—the God who appears to Abraham and bargains with him from our first lesson today from Genesis 18.

There is an endearing element to Abraham’s insistence on God’s grace in this story: scholars have noted the humor that is inherent within Abraham talking God down from fifty people to ten as if they were haggling over a good, with Abraham insisting that God must spare the people of Sodom based upon God’s own inherent righteousness. But the real remarkable element of this story is not the outcome of this bargaining process—for after all, even though Abraham succeeds in haggling God down to only needing ten righteous people, Sodom is still destroyed when ten righteous people are not found. It seems as though the problem of evil—and God’s response to it—will remain unsatisfying no matter what the outcome is. Instead the real remarkable element here is the intimate relationship that God and Abraham have, as Abraham enters into dialogue with God about big-picture questions of morality. This is not the God of Job, appearing from the whirlwind to offer pronouncements. This is the God of Jonah, probing Jonah’s own biases at the end of the story as they argue over justice. This is the God of Moses, with whom God was constantly conversing. This is the God of Abraham, who invites Abraham into this wider struggle for morality and meaning.

John Calvin was once quoted as saying, “Let the first rule of right prayer then be to have our heart and mind framed as becoming those who are entering into a conversation with God.” Our prayers and hopes will not always receive a sufficient answer in our eyes, but we are gifted the ability to lament, to argue, and to struggle with God. Even Jesus prayed in such a way, as Matthew, Mark, and Luke record him praying in the Garden of Gethsemane that God would take his suffering away—a prayer that would receive an answer that he did not want. But in Jesus’ prayer, he closes by saying to God, “not my will, but your will be done”—words reminiscent of the most famous and well-known prayer in Christianity.

As with Abraham’s conversation with God in Genesis, the prayer Jesus teaches to his disciples is one founded in intimacy. We are not to call God “God,” “Lord,” or attach any mighty epithets to his name. Instead, it begins with “Father”—pater in Greek, abba in Aramaic. It is a familiar name that moves away from the distant God portrayed within “The Tyger” and instead suggests that God is fully present in the world, both in the evil and the good. In the Gospel of Matthew’s slightly longer version, the disciples are taught “thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”—a call that John Ortberg has characterized as making the “up there” come “down here.” It is a call to participate in the transformation of the world, to be involved in the struggle, to give each one their daily bread and to forgive others just as we are forgiven. Even though the Lord’s Prayer sounds like a mere request, it is entering into a conversation with God about the world and how things are to be. It presents a vision of how things should be and invites us to build it along with God.

Ask and you shall receive. Seek and you shall find. We will not be given everything that we want in life, but we will be given the gifts to enter into this conversation with God and to participate in shaping this world. Our prayers are indeed answered, not always in ways that remove us from pain and hurt but always in ways that draw us closer to God. That lesson that my mom learned on the docks when she was eight years old is an important one: we won’t walk on water through life. We aren’t promised to be free from pain, challenges, or difficulties. Instead, we swim. We struggle. But it is in that struggle that we’re strengthened and in that struggle that we are fully alive. Thanks be to God. Amen.