Sunday Evening’s Sermon: Prayer (2): Childlike Prayer

Luke 11:5-13

Introduction
Andrew Hamilton was born in Belfast in 1964. In 1974, his family emigrated to Australia. He became a Baptist minister, but eventually he and some others left the church he was serving to set up a Christian community in Brighton, a northern suburb of Perth. he thus dubs himself a ‘backyard missionary’. This last week on his blog he wrote a wonderful story about prayer, as it related to his six-year-old daughter Ellie and four-year-old son Sam. Here is an extract:

On a Monday morning after making the kids breakfast I let them know I was going to spend some time in my study ‘talking to Jesus’. They have seen me do this each day and it is just part our routine now.

My 6 year old daughter Ellie, asked ‘Daddy can I talk to Jesus with you some day?’

‘Sure honey’ I answered. ‘Finish your breakfast, grab your Bible and come in!’

I began wondering what to do and how to teach my 6 year old daughter to speak to Jesus…

She arrived five minutes later with her ‘Bible for Little Hearts’, a children’s book with one verse per page. As she sat on my lap we read two verses and discussed together what they were saying to us. We then took some time to pray for the people we know. She would pray a sentence, then it was my turn and so on. After that we would stop in quietness for a minute or so and ‘listen’ to Jesus, seeing if we could hear the voice of the spirit speaking to us. (Inevitably Ellie hears God telling her that he loves her!) The whole process took just 3 or 4 minutes, but I found she came back quite regularly in the mornings to sit with me and ‘talk to Jesus’.

Then a morning came when I was heading out for breakfast and I couldn’t spend the time with her. She was concerned, wondering what she would do, when I heard her say ‘Its ok dad, I know what to do now. You can go’. As I walked out the door I saw her sitting in my office armchair with her Bible open reading a verse of scripture. It was wonderful to see that she had ‘got it’ and didn’t need me there. But the most encouraging bit was yet to come…

When I got home that afternoon my wife told me that shortly after I had left, her little brother Sam came in and asked if he could speak to Jesus too. So, knowing what to do now, Ellie placed her brother on her lap and began to teach him the same process I had gone through with her. They read scripture, prayed for friends and listened to God. She was discipling her 4 year old brother and teaching him how to encounter Jesus.[1]

If you remember nothing else this evening, remember this one thing: Ellie and Sam show us that prayer is easy. It isn’t difficult. It’s a simple dialogue with the Father.

As I come to this theme of prayer tonight, I had the same reading of Luke 11:1-13 this morning in our Methodist service. There, I concentrated on verses 1 to 4, and gave a Cook’s tour of the Lord’s Prayer. Tonight I want to focus on the rest of the passage in verses 5 to 13: the parable of the friend at midnight, and the ask-seek-knock poem.

1. Parable
I firmly believe we have misunderstood the parable of the friend at midnight (verses 5-8). I’ll spare you all the technical scholarly details, but I am convinced that a scholar called Kenneth Bailey has shown us an accurate way to translate it and understand it in its original Palestinian context[2]. Cutting to the chase, let me suggest that a lot hinges on how we understand verse 8. In the New Revised Standard Version, it is rendered thus:

I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs.

The problem is with the words ‘his persistence’. The one who comes with the request is not persistent at all. He comes once, and the homeowner answers him immediately (even if not willingly!). Bailey argues that it should be translated ‘his avoidance of shame’. In other words, it is not about the persistence of the caller but the desire of the one in bed to avoid being shamed.

It makes perfect sense in the culture of the day. If someone turned up at night, needing food, as happens in the parable, it was the responsibility of the village to feed him. Guests needed bread, because they would use it as a sop to dip in the bowl and eat the food a host had put before them. If the host did not have enough bread, he would know who else had newly baked bread, and – provided he was not in a feud with that person – he could call on them for help. Failure to supply the visitor’s needs would be a slur on the honour of the village. Hence the man who is woken in the parable will grant his friend’s request, because otherwise he and the village will be brought to shame for their serious failure in hospitality.

Thus, the parable teaches us about the nature of God:

The parable said to the original listener/reader, “When you go to this kind of a neighbour everything is against you. It is night. He is asleep in bed. The door is locked. His children are asleep. He does not like you and yet you will receive even more than you ask. This is because your neighbour is a man of integrity and he will not violate that quality. The God to whom you pray also has an integrity that he will not violate; and beyond this, he loves you.”[3]

Come to prayer, then, to a God who loves you. A God who, for the sake of displaying that love and keeping the honour of his name, will provide your needs when you ask, and maybe more than that. You may have a simple confidence in prayer, because God is loving and honourable.

In other words, there is assurance for us here:

If you are confident of having your needs met when you got to such a neighbour in the night, how much more can you rest assured when you take your requests to a loving Father?[4]

Naturally, we adults have questions we bring to the subject of prayer – not least about the will of God, and about unanswered prayer. But however we resolve them (indeed if we do at all, sometimes), Jesus’ parable here still gives us a positive bottom line. God loves you so much he wants you to bring your needs to him. Do not be shy. Do not view him as one who only gives grudgingly, when he has his arm twisted or when he has been worn down by persistent requests (like the unjust judge in Luke 18:1-8). He is a loving Father. Come with the simplicity of a child, and bring your needs to your heavenly Father, who loves you.

2. Poem
The ‘ask-seek-knock’ language of verses 9 to 13 is like a poem.  Bailey[5] says it is a poem with three stanzas, each containing three double lines.

But if it is, to whom is Jesus singing? Whom is he trying to woo with beautiful words? Already in the parable, he has encouraged disciples to come in prayer to a Father who loves them, and who will not bear the shame of ignoring them. In this poem, Jesus may be singing to other people – his opponents, in this case, the Pharisees. The introductory phrase, ‘So I say to you,’ was one Jesus often used when speaking with his opponents. In verse 13, he says he is talking to ‘you, then, who are evil’.

The basic message seems beautiful, if almost inoffensive, usually: all will receive; all will receive and the gift will be good; the gift will be more than good – the gift will be the Holy Spirit. However, just imagine how that would rub some people up the wrong way. People who think that only a certain élite get spiritual blessings. People who aver that only the spiritually superior are in on God’s blessings. It is scandalous to such people to hear Jesus saying,

For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.
(verse 10, italics mine)

Worse, far worse, comes the punch line: they don’t just receive ‘good gifts’ (that would be bad enough!), they receive the Holy Spirit. Yes, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father in the Old Testament only gave to a select few, is now available to all and sundry who come in simple faith to ask the Father. It’s disgusting!

For Jesus, prayer is part of God’s ‘outrageous grace’. Access to God is thrown open to all. Prayer is not the preserve of the professionals, the specialists, the educated and those who have kept particular religious scruples and laws. It is for the ordinary pilgrim as much as for the spiritual hero.  It is for the obscure as much as those who hold rank in religious circles. It is for the child as much as for the experienced Christian.

I had a remarkable sustained experience of this when I went to my first theological college. I don’t have time to tell the whole story here, but the bare bones go like this: it was the days of student grants, not student loans, and the local authority declined my grant application. At the last-minute people started giving me money, and kept doing so for the three years of that degree course. When I wrote up some of the experiences, they read like the sort of things you only read about in exciting Christian paperbacks testimonies. I didn’t think they happened to nobodies. However, they do – because Jesus scandalously extends the invitation to ask, seek and knock beyond those who stand on platforms in front of thousands.

Just this last week I saw something similar, if briefer. We have had a friend from Sussex staying with us. Our children call him ‘Uncle Mike’. He is a handyman, and won the contract to repaint our children’s pre-school. As you can imagine, some of the weather these last seven days have not been conducive to painting the outside of a building. One afternoon, the rain came down. The next thing I knew, Rebekah, our four-year-old, was praying that Father God would stop the rain so Uncle Mike could get on with his work. And you know what?

We ‘grown-up’ Christians know all the difficulty with a prayer like that – weather that is good for one person is disastrous for another. But I know what I witnessed. Call it a coincidence if you must, but I am prepared to believe the interruption to the rainfall at that moment was a sign of the God of outrageous grace in the process of prayer. That he listens to a four-year-old ahead of experienced Christians is just another testimony to the crazy wonder the Father deals in when he turns all our human expectations upside-down.

Conclusion
Children have cropped up throughout this sermon. I began with the story of six-year-old Ellie and four-year-old Ben learning to read the Bible and speak to Jesus. When I spoke about the parable of the friend at midnight, I encouraged us to come to the Father with childlike simplicity. In speaking about the ask-seek-knock poem, I said that Jesus throws prayer open to the nobodies, including children, and told that story about our daughter and the weather. There is a strong call to bring the faith of a child with us when we are on our knees in prayer.

Am I saying we should not bring our difficult questions about prayer? Well, as someone about whom a teacher wrote in an early school report, ‘David never settles for the simple option when there is a complicated alternative,’ no! We cannot pretend that certain life experiences have not happened, and that they have not had an effect upon us.

However, Jesus’ call to prayer carries with it an invitation to embrace a new simplicity, a trust that accompanies our questions and doubts, a trust that stops those doubts morphing into unbelief, a trust that keeps us returning to the Father and sitting on his knee.

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