6th SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY
Listen to audio version
Readings: Genesis 18: 20-32 and Luke 11: 1-13
As part of my volunteering duties at Worcester Cathedral I sometimes help out with the many school visits that take place. Schools and colleges find the cathedral a useful place for visits, because it can offer something on architecture, the monastic life, King John, the Civil War, the Tudors – and, of course Christian Worship. I’m often asked to do the tour on Places of Christian Worship and we get to look at the service of Holy Communion. It’s interesting that when I ask the students what we should pray for in church, they nearly always start off with forgiveness, or to be a better person, or for love, or for family. I encourage them to think more widely, and slowly the penny drops that you could pray for peace in the world, for refugees, for an end to world hunger, or for the environment.
These young people come from a variety of schools, and I guess that only a tiny minority would ever find themselves in church on a Sunday. So it is perhaps unsurprising that they don’t immediately come up with the idea that in a church service you might pray for the world. But I don’t suppose they are alone in maybe thinking that what happens in church is completely separate from the life of the world outside.
It might seem that people who join religious communities, such as the monks and nuns we met from Mucknell Abbey two weeks ago, enter a life cut off from the world for a lot of the time, but you don’t have to be in the company of these good folk for very long to realise that they are deeply in touch with the world and its pain and problems. In fact, religious communities are power-houses of prayer.
In the Old Testament reading today, Abraham appears to be pleading with the Lord to spare the wicked cities of Sodom and Gomorrah from the destruction he intends to bring on them. The Lord announces his intention to visit those cities because their sin is very great. What that sin is is not spelled out in this chapter. Abraham believes that the Lord will destroy those cities, and is particularly concerned because his nephew Lot is living in Sodom.
There follows what appears to be a bargaining session between the Lord and Abraham. Abraham asks “Will you sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous people found within the city?” “No”, the Lord answers, “I won’t do it if there are fifty righteous there.” And you know how it goes on. Abraham almost haggles with God. What about 45, 40, 30, 20, 10. “No,” says God, “I will not destroy the city if ten are found there.”
If we were giving a master-class on prayer, this is not one of the passages we would encourage people to consult. There’s something less-than-edifying about Abraham, generous and merciful, pleading with God, apparently bloodthirsty and violent. But is this really what the story is all about?
Could it not be a case of the Lord, little by little, revealing his true nature? In the verses immediately before today’s, God debates whether or not to let Abraham in on his plan. This plan could be about destroying Sodom and Gomorrah, but it is more likely that it is his larger plan, of how the mighty should treat the weak – a plan that is to come to its fulfilment in Jesus.
To go back to Abraham’s bargaining with God, we are left with the question of what prayer should be about. Abraham was pleading with God for the sake of the righteous people left in Sodom and Gomorrah. But many people’s prayers remain at an infantile level, where they are bargaining with God about less honourable things. If I do this for you, Lord, will you give me that? If I respond to this charity appeal or help that neighbour, will you help me win the Lottery, or secure that house exchange that looks like slipping away?
That’s all very different from the prayer Jesus himself gave us – the Lord’s Prayer. It features in today’s gospel. Those verses ask for only one thing for the pray-er – ‘Give us this day our daily bread.’ Give us each day the things necessary for existence. In the little parable that followed, the man disturbing his neighbour in the middle of the night for bread was not doing so for himself, but for the guest who had arrived unexpectedly at his house. Are our prayers similarly unselfish? The fact that we so often pray ‘through Jesus Christ our Lord’ should help us concentrate on the important things to ask for in our prayers.
Now in the New Testament reading, St. Paul was writing to the church in Colossae. Paul was aware that there, as in many of the Greek cities where the Christian message was being proclaimed, there were many philosophical and religious ideas in the air. In fact, religious syncretism – that is, combining ideas from different sources – was very common. Paul knew that the gospel could easily be watered down with inputs from paganism or Judaism. It may not be dissimilar to the situation today, where so many life theories abound that people are either confused about what Christianity is, or justify their life-styles or behaviour with other prevailing cultures. Was it not David Beckham who famously said that he wanted his children baptised, but was not sure into which religion?
Paul uses the opportunity to remind the Christians in Colossae, or perhaps to assure them, that God’s fullness dwells in Christ, so that they need not incorporate bits of other religions into their faith. Of course, there is a delicate balance to be struck here. All faiths are not the same; they may be different pathways to the truth, only God knows. But we are encouraged to hold fast to what we know and have experienced of Christ. See to it, he says, that no-one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit; continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving.
‘Go direct to Christ’ might be the salient teaching. The Lord is close, close enough for Abraham to have that intimate conversation, concerned about every part of our lives. Don’t shut ‘God’ and ‘prayer’ into a small box that only comes out on Sundays, is the message. As you pester God, as Abraham did, and as the persistent friend did to the sleepy householder in the gospel, you will learn more about God, and about yourself in relation to him.
As so often, the Collect for today crystallizes this teaching: Merciful God, you have prepared for those who love you such good things as pass our understanding….Pour into our hearts such love toward you, that we…may obtain your promises which exceed all that we can desire, through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.