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You don’t remember this, but you had to be taught how to ask for what you wanted. For what seemed like forever, your parents had to interpret your non-verbal efforts to communicate. This was tiresome and frustrating, and your parents looked forward to the day when you could simply say what you want. Once this began, however, your parents found that they had created a monster! You asked constantly and loudly. Every sentence began with “I want.” So, your poor parents began the task of teaching you how to ask.

Many people see prayer as asking, and never pray except when they are asking for something. Other people question whether prayers of asking are appropriate or effective. Of course, there are many kinds of prayer. Prayers of thanksgiving, prayers of adoration, prayers of confession, for example, offer no particular difficulty for people of faith. We understand how such prayers could bring about changes within the person praying or among people praying together.

Prayers of asking, however, are in a different category and raise special questions. First, are prayers of petition and intercession appropriate, or even permissible? Second, do such prayers actually bring about changes in the real world? These questions bring up other questions. Is the will of God subject to change based on our request? Can the laws of nature, or the findings of science, be altered to honor our petitions? If God wills what is good, and is able to accomplish what is good, of what possible use are our prayers? What kind of God would allow a sick person to die were it not for our petitions? The questions are serious and daunting.

Furthermore, our own experiences with prayer may cause confusion. We have prayed for good weather and it has rained in torrents. We have prayed for health, and our condition has gotten worse. We have prayed for peace, and wars have multiplied. Such experiences may cause us to wonder if the times when we have received what we asked for were simply cases of coincidence.

At least three things need to be taken into account before petitionary prayer is simply dismissed. First, we are praying creatures. Whatever we may believe about prayer, we pray automatically, almost instinctively. When the situation becomes desperate enough, or the pain is intense enough, almost anyone will utter a petition for help. Such praying is done spontaneously, involuntarily, naturally. In a crisis, prayer wells up in us beyond our power to repress. Consider, also, that the situation does not have to be negative for us to cry out to God. At the birth of a child, a joyful parent may exclaim, “Oh, God!” These are the spontaneous cries of our creaturehood as we stand at the door of the infinite.

Second, Jesus encourages us to pray, and specifically to offer prayers of asking. All four Gospels record Jesus’ words instructing his disciples to “ask” God for what they needed. Also, in teaching his disciples to pray, Jesus told them to ask, “Give us this day our daily bread.” In Philippians 4:6, Paul writes, “Let your requests be made known to God.” The New Testament throughout, and Jesus specifically, encourage us to pray and  to ask God for what we want or need.

Third, we are not only encouraged to ask, but we are promised that we will receive. This promise is startling in its simplicity. An obvious confidence in this promise runs throughout the Bible. This was so long ago that we may wonder if the promise is still valid. Presumably it is, but within the proper context.

Remember, it was Jesus who said, “Ask, and you will receive,” not just anyone. And it was to his followers that he spoke these words. Also, Jesus and his followers had a certain understanding of God and God’s kingdom. Asking and receiving must be understood in terms of our relationship to God in Jesus Christ.

Prayer is a response. We do not speak first. The initiative is with God. God has spoken in creation, in the history of Israel, in the person of Jesus Christ, and through the Holy Spirit. If prayer is our response, this will qualify our petitions. We will ask in terms of the relationship God has initiated. This is the significance of praying “in Jesus’ name.” This phrase is no magical incantation, as if adding this formula guarantees success. To ask in Christ’s name is to ask in the spirit of Christ. It is to ask as Jesus would ask in our place. It is to ask with something of Jesus’ insight into the nature of God and God’s ways with us. Can we ask for fame and fortune in Jesus’ name? Can we ask for the destruction of our enemies in Jesus’ name? Can we ask for exceptional privileges in Jesus’ name?

The problem in our praying is not God. God hears and answers our prayers in ways that are appropriate to the relationship we have with God in Jesus Christ. The problem is in our asking. We ask selfishly, attempting to use God. We ask superficially, seeing prayer as a way of avoiding responsibility. We ask unreasonably, unwittingly. Utter chaos would result if all our prayers were answered in the ways we want. God loves us too much to grant some of our petitions.

Perhaps the best lesson we have from Jesus on how to ask comes from Gethsemane’s garden. Bowed down in agony, he asked first for what he wanted. “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” Jesus was honest with God. We can be, too. God cares about whatever we are feeling or thinking we want. But then Jesus uttered the great qualification, the self-denying “nevertheless.” He prayed in that menacing darkness, “You have heard my plea, nevertheless, not my will, but thine be done.”

This is how we are to ask. With honesty and with submissiveness. With honesty to say, “O God, I cannot lie to you. Here is my heart’s desire.” With submissiveness to say, “Nevertheless, you alone are God. May your will be done.”

Prayer:  O God, may your kingdom come, may your will be done, in each of us, as it is in heaven. Amen.

C. David Matthews  /  Royal Lane Baptist Church  /  Dallas, Texas 75230  /  7.25.10

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Mary & Martha are the yin and yang of hosting a dinner party. One sister focused on last-minute preparations while the other sister focused on the guest of honor. Martha got mad at Mary for not helping out. Jesus stepped in and explained to Martha that, while she was doing good things, in the present situation Mary had chosen the best thing.

We all learn early that there is a significant difference between “good” and “bad.” Evil is the polar opposite of goodness. But in the persistent struggle between good choices and bad choices we frequently opt for the bad ones. Confession and repentance, then, are in order. As a Baptist minister, of course, I do not hear confessions as part of my job description, but I hear a good many; and I have my own confessors (who will remain anonymous!). A Roman Catholic priest once described the experience of hearing the confessions of nuns. He said it was like “being stoned to death with popcorn.”

What keeps most of us from being who God wants us to be is not so much the tension between good and evil as the conflict between the good and the best. When you are feeling bad about yourself and a bit done in by life, how often is it because of something evil you have done?

It is more likely the result of an unfortunate choice between the good and the best. The good can be a ferocious enemy of the best. We can become so involved in good things that we never get around to the best things.

Thomas Kelly, in A Testament of Devotion, writes of “the poverty of life that can result from an overabundance of opportunity.” We can become so involved in responding outwardly, even to good things, that we become inwardly poor. When we try to embrace too many possibilities, we get over-extended. The result is a diminishing of joy in almost everything.  We do not do this intentionally. We know what our priorities are. When we are under pressure, however, our priorities are put to the test. Facing deadlines, or being pulled in different directions, it is easy to lose sight of what matters most. Can’t we all relate to Martha? Jesus was coming to dinner!

Given the rapacious human appetite for nearly everything, it is difficult to accept the reality of limits. Life teaches us, however, that we simply cannot have everything. We are left with a painful truth: we cannot say Yes to something without saying No to something else.

A child in a candy store beholds a mind-blowing scene. There is candy everywhere! There is not only a lot of candy, but hundreds of different kinds of candy! And usually there is a parent saying, “Choose one.” Saying Yes to one kind of candy means saying No to all the rest!

Saying Yes always involves saying No. It is the nature of choice. If two people choose each other as marriage partners, if they commit their lives and futures to each other, then in saying Yes to each other, they are saying No to millions of other individuals. The Yes is meaningless if it is not exclusive, if it does not exclude all others. “I take you” means “I do not take any others.” At the opposite end of the spectrum is the foolish attempt to say Yes to everything and everyone, which becomes self-destructive.

This is not bad news. We are not children in a candy store. Sometimes we are dealing with matters of such worth, with things of such extraordinary value, that saying No becomes a glad part of saying Yes. Consider all the times when we say Yes by saying No. Saying No to peer pressure may be saying Yes to self-respect. Saying No to a loved one may be saying Yes to really loving the loved one. Saying No to a lucrative promotion may mean saying Yes to your family. Saying No to some Saturday preoccupation may mean you will say Yes to a neighbor. Saying No to drugs may mean saying Yes to hope. Saying No to a drink may mean saying Yes to real feelings. Saying No to a supervisor may mean saying Yes to integrity. Saying No to more may mean saying Yes to health. Saying No to longer hours may mean saying Yes to a child. Saying No to pleasure may mean saying Yes to purpose. Saying No to the present may mean saying Yes to the future. Saying No to anger may be saying Yes to healing. Saying No to an invitation may be saying Yes to rest. Saying No to self-pity may be saying Yes to God.

The incomparable beauty of Jesus’ life is largely in its simplicity. It is the simplicity of single-mindedness. Single-mindedness is not the same as a one-track mind. Single-mindedness is centeredness, groundedness. It is living your priorities. How do we do this?

Right after the little episode with Mary and Martha in Luke, we find Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer. It is considerably shorter than Matthew’s version, but the priorities are the same. Father, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Give us our daily bread. Forgive us as we forgive. Keep us from temptation. That’s it.

Right after acknowledging God’s holiness is the petition, “thy kingdom come.” After that it speaks of our needs – - for bread, forgiveness, and help in avoiding temptation. But what is the primary thing we are to say Yes to? God’s kingdom. “Thy kingdom come.” People for generations have been so confused about the kingdom of God that it has been mainly thought of as heaven. But is Jesus teaching us to pray for heaven? Probably not.

In Matthew the Lord’s Prayer reads, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” The kingdom of God is wherever God’s will is done. Our principal petition is supposed to be for God’s will to be done.

Now, you ask me, how do we say Yes to the kingdom of God? How do we say Yes to the will of God? By saying No to our own wills. And, as willful as we are, that is extremely difficult!

The prayers of children are so simple – - simple and honest. The older I get the simpler my prayers become. It has taken most of a lifetime for me to believe that God’s will really is best – - in all things. Now my prayers consist mostly of asking, “Show me your will, be my guide today.” But saying No to my own stubborn will is still a large part of saying Yes to the kingdom of God.

Prayer:  Have your own way, Lord. Have your own way. Your are the Potter, we are the clay. Mold us and make us after your will, while we are waiting yielded and still. Amen.

C. David Matthews  /  Royal Lane Baptist Church  /  Dallas, Texas 75230  /  7.18.10

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Let’s talk about your neighbors. You know, the way you do at home! There are all kinds of neighbors, who generate all kinds of feelings in us. Chesterton said, “We make our friends; we make our enemies; but God makes our next-door neighbors.” How might your life be different if you could choose your neighbors?

A lawyer once asked Jesus how to inherit eternal life. He was actually a scribe, a religious expert in the Mosaic Law. Jesus told him what he already knew, that the key to eternal life is in the ancient commandments: “You shall love the Lord your God” with your whole being, “and your neighbor as yourself.” The scribe asked, “And who is my neighbor?” A favorite exercise of the rabbis was trying to determine the correct legal answer to this question. Who is my neighbor?

The scribes and Pharisees gave the question a very narrow answer. They knew their neighbor was not the Gentile, the non-Jew. They knew their neighbor was not the Samaritan, the corrupted Jew.

It is obvious they were trying to locate the limits of their obligation. “What is the least I can do to fulfill my duty?” Have you ever had such thoughts? Have you ever wondered, “How much fun can I have and still go to heaven?”

The scribe’s question led to the one parable of Jesus that everybody knows, the Good Samaritan. Adults have tended to leave it to the children. It is G-rated, an example of the Golden Rule, a little morality play about being kind. Come on, do you seriously think that’s all this parable was to Jesus?

If we are going to hear this parable as it was first heard, we need to do a little preparation. First, some background is necessary. Second, to personalize it, each of us needs to focus on the most despicable group of people we can think of – - – in-laws, IRS agents, umpires, religious fundamentalists, professional wrestlers, etc. It needs to be a group or class or type with whom you really have trouble.

Now, some background. Jesus, of course, was a Jew. Anyone who was not a Jew was a Gentile. The Jewish religious leaders of Jesus’ time taught the people that all Gentiles were unclean, profane and godless. At times, the extent of this discrimination was beyond belief. If there was a group more despised than Gentiles, it was the Samaritans. They lived in Samaria, which was between Judea in the south and Galilee in the north. They were Jews who had defiled their pure Jewish blood by intermarrying with foreigners who were moved into Palestine when most of the Jews were carried into captivity.

Strict Jews, when going from Galilee to Judea, or Judea to Galilee, would not even set foot on Samaritan soil. They would cross the Jordan River into present-day Jordan, going many miles out of the way, to avoid passing through Samaria. Jesus, however, went through Samaria.

If you were telling a story, you would probably make the hero someone with whom your audience would make a positive identification. You wouldn’t choose Donald Trump to play Gandhi. But consider what Jesus did. He drew the hero of his story from the most despised group in Palestine. The good Samaritan? It would not compute.

The road where the robbery took place was between Jerusalem and Jericho. It was a rough and rocky mountain road. Jerusalem is in the Judean highlands, which is why they are always going “up” to Jerusalem. It is twenty miles down to Jericho, but the descent is 3,600 ft.! There

were many hiding places for robbers. The victim was attacked, robbed and left for dead. Two Jewish religious leaders passed by, saw the victim, but did not stop. In truth, stopping was not advisable. The apparent “victim” might be a decoy, with other robbers lying in wait. Another possibility was that the victim was dead, and touching a dead body would render the religious leaders unclean, thus unable to perform their temple duties. Then a Samaritan came by. He took pity on the man and took the risk. You know the rest of the story.

Jesus’ parable suggests that we do choose our neighbors. Physical proximity means little today. In high-rise condominiums and apartment buildings, people who live literally inches apart may not know each other’s name. In any large city you may see hundreds of faces a day, and be within speaking distance of hundreds more, and remain utterly anonymous. If “neighbor” means someone for whom you accept some responsibility, then we do indeed choose. But on what basis?

Fred Rogers’ television program, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, is a wonderful example of what can happen to the concept of “neighborhood.” This gentle man, across the years, invited millions of individual children to be his neighbor. Probably none of them lived next door, literally.

Yet, most of them accepted his invitation and became, to a degree not to be minimized, his neighbor.

On what basis do we decide who will be our neighbors?         Of course, Jesus might suggest we choose someone in need. He might also remind us that everyone has some kind of need, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. The question the rabbis debated is still partially unanswered.

Let me put a wrinkle in the parable for you, as someone once did for me. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” We have heard it as a commandment. But it is also a statement of fact. We will love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We do love our neighbors as we love ourselves. We cannot give to another what we have not received. If we have received the gospel, we have accepted the good news that God loves us as we are, that we are good creations of God, that we have value and worth, that even our sinfulness does not dilute God’s compassionate grace.

Accepting God’s love makes it possible to love ourselves. This is not self-centeredness. Ego-centricity is godless. Rather, being God-centered allows us to see ourselves as a good gift of God, which is a source of great joy. Self-despising is a sin, despising what God has called good.

Self-despising cannot be the basis for loving other people. Loving the neighbor means giving myself to the neighbor, and I cannot give what I despise. Our attitudes toward others tell us significant things about ourselves, if we will listen.

Have you pictured the kind of people you do not like? This popular parable invites me to consider that God may be doing more of what really matters with one of them than with me.

Prayer:  O God, we cannot truly love our neighbors until, accepting your love for us, we love ourselves. Open our hearts to you. Amen.

C. David Matthews  /  Royal Lane Baptist Church  /  Dallas, Texas 75230

Galatians 5:13-25

If there is a key word for understanding the aspirations and the ambiguities of American history, and, in a sense, of all human history, that word must be “freedom.” Ask anyone in our story as we have learned it – - the Old World explorer, the Puritan pilgrim, the revolutionary patriot, the oppressed minorities of more recent times, the troubled youth, ask any of them what it is that agitates them so, what it is they want so desperately, all their answers boil down to this one word: freedom.

Those of us here, as free as we seem, are captives, too. We are captives to many different masters for many different reasons, but we all have some sense of yearning. The word that best describes the place where our longings come together, where our aspirations overlap, is freedom. Everybody wants to be free from something.

In these individual struggles to get free from something or someone, some of us would secretly like to be free even from God. If freedom is what we want most, if freedom is our God, who needs God? Have you ever run from God? “I fled Him down the nights and down the days; / I fled Him down the arches of the years; / I fled  Him down the labyrinthine ways / Of my own mind, and in the midst of tears / I hid from Him, and under running laughter.” (Francis Thompson, The Hound of Heaven}

Do you realize that both the desirability and the possibility of freedom are taken seriously in the Bible? Probably you assume as much. But, actually, this was unique in the ancient world. No ancient philosophy saw freedom as its highest virtue. No ancient culture deemed freedom the highest good. Yet the Bible affirms freedom as a gift of God.

Here is a truth worth pondering on this Independence Day. The freest person who ever lived was the person who was most dependent on God.

Jesus was so free it threatens us. Free in all the ways we are not. Jesus was free from the terrible insecurity that keeps us needing to prove ourselves and justify our existence. Look at him!

Secure enough in who he was and what he was about that he could openly challenge the religious authorities of his own people. So secure he could let the brightest prospect for discipleship simply walk away. Jesus was so grounded in his own truth that he could watch his followers betray him and his enemies condemn him without speaking a word in his own defense. He was the freest person who ever lived.

Jesus was free from the heavy weight of other people’s expectations. This is impressive to pastors and other clergy because we can’t pull it off. The congregation’s expectations so often seem both more immediate and more important than God’s expectations. But you and I both, because we aren’t sure who we are, let the expectations of others determine how we live.

Not Jesus. Everyone, absolutely everyone, loaded him up with expectations. Messianic expectations are the worst, and the most impossible. They expected Jesus to enter Jerusalem in a chariot like a conquering hero, but he showed up riding a little donkey. Jesus was free enough to say, “No, thank you,” to those who wanted to make him king, preferring to remain among the common people as one of them. He was the freest person who ever lived.

Jesus was free even from the rules and proscriptions of religion. Look at him! Free enough to be seen at Jacob’s well telling a Samaritan woman with a scandalous reputation that God loved her anyway. Jesus even broke the Sabbath laws, because he was keeping the higher law of love.

Jesus was the personification and definition of freedom. In him freedom rang like a frenzied bell. His was the freedom we know we need, and, in our better moments, want.

But what was the secret of his freedom? Not any of the things we would suppose. Not his courage, though he endured encounters with the devil, Pontius Pilate, and God-forsakenness. Not his wisdom, though what little we have from his mind is, two millennia later, utterly inexhaustible.

The secret of Jesus’ freedom was in his subservience to God. We freedom-lovers and freedom-seekers have understood freedom as the annihilation of all forms of bondage and constraint, and this may be our gravest mistake.

Take a child. Turn the child loose in the world, free from every restriction and constraint, and the child will not survive. But hold a child within the confines of a family, and those loving constraints will provide the environment in which the child  can  become a responsible self. Love creates the constraints that make true freedom possible. Love creates, not the restraints of legalistic relationships, but the constraints of committed relationships.

Ask the person who has fallen in love. Ask the person who has lived for years in a life of love with another person. Ask them, Does love create bondage? The “yes” will come through a smile. A chosen bond, a blessed bond, the bond of communion.

Finally, I have a hypothesis: the higher the love that holds you, the greater the number of constraints from which you are free.

Paul said, “The love of Christ constrains us.” Constrains. Encircles us. Holds us. Sets our limits. This is why Augustine could say, “Love God and do as you please.” But we cannot have the freedom of the resurrection without the discipline and constraint of the cross. We have never been told the way would be easy. Certainly we have not been told it would be the way of self-indulgent license. But it is the way of true freedom. And “if the Son shall make us free, we shall be free indeed.”

He was the freest person who ever lived.

Prayer:

O God, when we have anchored our souls in you, we are most truly free. When we have bound our wills to your will, we are most truly free. When we have aligned our hopes with your promises, we are most truly free. Grant us such dependence on you, we pray, through Christ our Lord. Amen.

C. David Matthews  /  Royal Lane Baptist Church, Dallas, TX  /  7.4.10