Sermon on Luke 11:1-13

Pastor Jennifer Garcia

What is prayer for? Why should we continue to pray when we don’t receive what we’re praying for? Why bother? Many of us, including me, wrestle with these questions.

I used to find a lot of encouragement in the saying that God only has three answers to prayer: yes, not yet, or I have something better in mind.

But I don’t find that satisfying anymore in the face of tragedies. I don’t know why kids get cancer, and I can’t accept that it’s God’s will. I can’t accept that God has something better in mind when people are praying for their child’s life.

Prayer is a mystery and not always in a good way.

I do find some small comfort in the fact that questions about prayer are nothing new. Even Jesus’ disciples asked Jesus to teach them how to pray.The disciples had Jesus right in front of them day after day, and they still didn’t feel like they knew how to talk to God.

I don’t have much in the way of answers about prayer. It’s something we can spend our whole lives learning about and practicing and still not fully understand. It’s one of the many mysteries of our faith, which is beautiful and frustrating.

But there are a few things our readings today tell us about prayer.

In our first reading, we see Abraham having a conversation, even negotiating with God. That’s not uncommon. You’re probably familiar with the stage of grief called “bargaining.” We often try to bargain with God when we’re grieving or in danger or even “I promise I’ll never risk eating too-old food again if you get me through this food poisoning.”

But Abraham didn’t bargain for himself. He bargained for the lives of the people in Sodom and Gomorrah. He tried to talk God down from raining fire and brimstone on a city for the sake of any righteous people living there.

I have to take moment here to talk about Sodom and Gomorrah. Our reading today comes right before a passage that has become known as a “clobber passage” or a “text of terror”: a part of the Bible that has been used to discredit, dehumanize, and terrorize LGBTQ people.

I can’t do a thorough enough job in a ten-minute sermon of unpacking why this passage shouldn’t be understood or used that way. If you want to dig deeper, let’s do it. Talk to me later. I can’t fully talk through this passage, but when our readings come this close to a clobber passage, I also can’t pass over it without comment.

So here we go. The story of Sodom and Gomorrah has been interpreted since pretty early on in Church history as God raining down judgment because of “homosexual behavior.” That interpretation is so steeped in our culture that it’s really hard to read it any other way.

But Ezekiel 16identifies Sodom and Gomorrah’s sin differently. God, through the prophet Ezekiel, compares God’s people with Sodom and Gomorrah. It says, “This was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy.”[1] God’s people, it says, had been behaving worse than Sodom and Gomorrah.

The three divine messengers that visited Abraham and Sarah in our reading last week were about to go to Sodom and Gomorrah to see if what God had heard about those cities was true. And indeed, the people of the city tried to commit sexual violence against the divine messengers. So, that is what has been interpreted as the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, despite what Ezekiel says. And of course, sexual violence is a terrible way we humans harm each other and abuse the image of God in each of us. But sexual violence of any sort is very different from a loving relationship between people of the same gender or between anyone besides a cisgender man and cisgender woman. Those should not be conflated.

The sins of Sodom and Gomorrah were pride, not aiding the poor and needy, and sexual violence.This is a tragic story, and it should not be used to harm LGBTQ folks. Again, if you want to explore this more, talk to me later.

Apart from its proximity to a clobber passage, I find the story of Abraham negotiating with God disquieting.I believe in a God who knows that we’re all simultaneously saints and sinners, who saves us by grace, and who would not rain down fire on any city, regardless of the righteousness of anyone there, because none of us are righteous by our own power.I want to believe God would be merciful from the start and wouldn’t need talking down by a mere mortal.

But on the other hand, the way this conversation shows Abraham’s value of mercy is beautiful.

I don’t know how much our prayers change God’s mind. Maybe they do, just like in this story. Or maybe it’s an opportunity for us to embody what we want God to be like. We want God to be merciful, so we pray for mercy. We want there to be peace, so we pray for peace. And in that process, we become more merciful and peaceful ourselves, which impacts the world around us.

Maybe that’s what the Lord’s Prayer is for: Jesus was teaching us how to imagine the Beloved Community, where earth is as it is in heaven.Maybe prayer is about aligning ourselves with how God is creating the world to be.

And when we read the rest of our Gospel story and it sounds like God will give us what we ask, maybe it’s about learning to want what God wants for the world.God isn’t a vending machine, but doesn’t mean we can’t bring ourmost trifling, petty requests to God. God wants to hear that too—whatever’s on our heart. C.S. Lewis wrote this in favor of bringing our tiny requests to God:

“…those who have not learned to ask Him for childish things will have less readiness to ask Him for great ones. We must not be too high-minded. I fancy we may sometimes be deterred from small prayers by a sense of our own dignity rather than of God’s.”

It's okay to bring every desire of our hearts to God to practice asking for the things that make this world like it is in heaven. Prayer may not be about getting every single thing we ask for, and I don’t know why some prayers are answered and some aren’t.

But I do know that prayer is about relationship. God wants us to ask, wants us to talk to God. When Paul says to pray without ceasing, it doesn’t mean that we have to be on our knees day and night, but our inner monologue can instead be a dialogue with God. And over time, that will change us.

Prayer is still a mystery—one we can explore for the rest of our lives. Whether we change God’s mind or just our own, it’s an important part of our relationship with God who is with us always, loving us just as we are and wanting the best for us.

With that, let us pray, continuing this mysterious, frustrating, and beautiful conversation with God:

Loving God, prayer can be hard. We don’t always know what to pray for or how to pray, but You are always listening. Thank you for being a better friend than the one in our Gospel reading. You are never to busy, and our requests are never an inconvenience to You. Make us brave in bringing everything that’s on our hearts to You. Please make us more like You and help us show Your love to this world where there is so much need. Teach us to pray and help us feel Your love and presence always. In Your name we pray, Amen.

[1] Ezekiel 16:49