In the lectionary that I use, and that we have copies of in the vestries of both churches in this benefice, against the Sunday readings there’s usually a few words in brackets that amount to a theme for that particular Sunday of the year. Today, those words are ‘God answers prayer’ and if we think about our readings this morning, there’s no doubt that’s a very fitting theme for today.  

In our Old Testament reading we hear about Abraham calling again and again on the Lord to spare the people of Sodom for the sake of a few just men who might be found there amongst the multitude of sinners. And again and again, the Lord hearing Abraham’s pleas and granting his request. This morning’s Psalm is a great song of thanks to the Lord for hearing the words of his faithful servant. Our reading from Colossians can be seen as an answer to the prayer that God may forgive us our sins and of course where we find that prayer is in the Lord’s Prayer which is the answer Jesus gives to his disciples when they asked him to teach them how to pray, which we read about in the Gospel reading this morning. So there’s no doubt that ‘God answers prayer’ is a very fitting theme for today given our readings this morning.  

As Christians, we’re called to be people of prayer. We’re called to be people who pray regularly because we sincerely believe that God can and does answer prayer. For many people though, as I’m sure we all know, prayer is regarded as something of a last resort, something to try when all else has failed to help or to provide an answer when they’re faced with a difficult situation. But for us, prayer should be our first response to a problem or difficulty, or to any situation that’s of concern to us. We should be praying to God both for his help and for his guidance so that we can help ourselves. And as those people of prayer, I’m sure we all know what it’s like when our prayers are answered. At least I hope we all know that. I do, and I know many other people who do, including some here today, because they’ve told me about times when their prayers have been answered. But as people of prayer, we’ll know that there are times when it seems that our prayers are not answered. For all of us, there must have been times when what we’ve prayed so hard for, hasn’t happened, or what we’ve prayed so hard might not happen, has happened. So why should this be? How can we make sense of why some prayers are answered and some aren’t?    

I think a good starting point would be to think about what we read in this morning’s Gospel. Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them how to pray and, in response, Jesus teaches them what we’ve come to know as the Lord’s Prayer. But what is the Lord’s Prayer? What are we actually praying for in the Lord’s Prayer?  

One of the criticisms that’s sometimes made of intercessory prayers in the Church is that they can amount to little more than ‘wish-lists’, a list of things that we want, or at least would like, with a prayer that God will let us have these things. But in praying the Lord’s Prayer, that is, praying as Jesus said we should pray, there’s no great list of wants or wishes. In fact, what we pray for in the Lord’s Prayer can be summed up under two headings; we’re  pray that we might live holy lives, dedicated to God and to his service, and for our daily bread, for what we need simply to live, and to live those holy lives dedicated to God. At the end of this morning’s Gospel Jesus tells his disciples,  

“What father among you, if his son asks for bread, will give him a stone; or if he asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”  

So in the Lord’s Prayer, we’re praying for what we need rather than simply what we want and, as a good Father, God will give us what we need, especially the Holy Spirit so that we can be the holy people we’re called to be.  

So, for example, both parishes in this benefice are faced with financial difficulties at the moment and I know people are praying that we might find a way out of these difficulties. Some might be praying that someone might win the lottery and give the parishes vast sums of money to solve these financial problems. If they are, that prayer hasn’t been answered, at least as far as I know. But despite the financial difficulties our parishes are facing  perhaps that’s a prayer that shouldn’t be answered because do we really need the kind of money that a lottery win would bring? I’m not saying that this is always that case because I know it’s not, but in my experience generally, the wealthier a parish has been in financial terms, the more poverty stricken it’s been in spiritual terms. The more money a parish has had, the more worldly and obsessed about its money it’s become.  

And the more worldly a parish, or a person, becomes, the more likely they are to lose sight of the heavenly things we need to be God’s people. So, if you’ve ever prayed for a lottery win or something along those lines, even for a worthy cause such as helping your parish church, but that prayer hasn’t been answered, perhaps it’s not because God hasn’t heard your prayer, it’s because he knows what you’re praying for is not what’s really needed.  

That’s a slightly tongue-in-cheek way of making the point but another, far from amusing area of apparently unanswered prayers is our prayer for healing of the sick. We only have to look at the names of the sick on our intercessions list or hear them during the intercessions in church to know that many of the people we pray for have been ill for a long time; we’ve prayed for them regularly for a long time, and yet, many of them are not healed. In fact, they often get worse and some of them die while we’re still praying for them to be healed. So why aren’t these prayers answered?   

Well, again, I think we have to consider what’s needful in these situations. By that I don’t mean that illness and suffering are needful. In some certain circumstances where individual suffering happens for the sake of others you could make that case, and indeed that’s exactly what we see in the Passion and Cross of Christ. But on the whole that’s not the case. What I mean by needful is what’s needful to the individual whom we pray for, the one who is sick, the one who is dying. Whether we like it or not, and without wishing to sound too much like our dear friend Fr Neville Ashton, one day we’re all going to die. We get older, our bodies deteriorate, and we come to the end of our earthly lives. And we can, and do, eventually come to a time when, whilst we’re praying for healing as a recovery from illness and prolonged earthly life, the one who is ill is praying for a release from illness and suffering through the end of earthly life. In these circumstances, essentially, while we’re praying that they may live, they’re praying that they may die. And in these circumstances, whose prayer should be answered? What is most needful to the one we’re praying for in these circumstances. Of course, not every situation is like this but I think we always have to remember that eventually, and for all of us, the restoration to wholeness of health and life that we pray for the sick can no longer come in this life, but only in the next life and in those circumstances, whilst it may be very hard for us to bear, our prayer for healing hasn’t fallen on deaf ears, it’s just been answered in a way other than the way we wanted it to be.  

The knowledge that different people in the same situation can pray for different things also helps us, I think, in trying make sense of perhaps the other great area of unanswered prayer, our prayers for peace.  

I don’t think there’s anyone who would deny that peace is needful to all of us. I don’t think there’s anyone who doesn’t long for true and lasting peace in the world, and it’s something that we pray for constantly. But, as events in recent times have shown, peace is still a long, long way from being a reality, an answered prayer in the world. The problem though, I think, is not so much that some people don’t want peace, they do want peace, I’m sure they do, but they want it on their terms, and they’re quite prepared to sacrifice peace today so that they can impose their idea of peace tomorrow. But of course, because everyone has a different idea of what peace should look like, tomorrow never comes. But we shouldn’t really be surprised at this because didn’t Jesus himself say,  

“…you will hear of wars and rumours of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are but the beginning of the birth pains.” 

By Jesus’ own admission then, war is inevitable, so we shouldn’t be surprised that our prayers for peace in the world have not been answered in the way we’d like them to be. But that wasn’t the peace Jesus came to bring to the world anyway. The peace Jesus came to bring wasn’t peace between human beings but peace between human beings and God, and he gave us that peace though his Passion and Cross through which our sins are forgiven. And so when we pray for peace, we might see our prayer for peace in the world between human beings go unanswered, but our prayer for peace has already been answered in a different way because we’ve been given a peace that’s even more needful to us, peace with God himself, and that is a more needful peace because that’s the peace that leads us to eternal life.  

So does God answer prayer? Yes, certainly, it’s just that sometimes we’re praying for the wrong things and looking for the answer to our prayers in the wrong places.    

Amen.  

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The Propers for the 17th Sunday of Ordinary Time can be viewed here.

 

Entrance Antiphon

God himself is my help. The Lord upholds my life.
I will offer you a willing sacrifice; I will praise your name, O Lord, for its goodness

The Collect

Almighty and everlasting God,
by whose Spirit the whole body of the Church is governed and sanctified:
hear our prayer which we offer for all your faithful people,
that in their vocation and ministry,
they may serve you in holiness and truth
to the glory of your name;
through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

Amen.

The Readings

Missal (St Mark’s)         Genesis 18:1-10
                                    Psalm 15:2-5
                                    Colossians 1:24-28
                                    Luke 10:38-42

RCL (St Gabriel’s)          Genesis 18:1-10
                                    Psalm 15
                                    Colossians 1:15-28
                                    Luke 10:38-42

At various times in sermons, and on other occasions too, I’ve said that one of the most important things we can do, as Christians, is read the Scriptures on a regular basis. Having said that, I do know that the Scriptures aren’t always the easiest of things to read. Quite apart from the difficulty we can have in pronouncing some of the names, in the Old Testament in particular, it isn’t always easy to understand what a particular story in the Scriptures is about, what the message of the story is. And that’s sometimes made worse because, at times, one story in the Scriptures can seem to contradict another story. For that reason I’ve also said, on occasions, that when we’re reading the Scriptures, it’s often a good idea to have a Bible commentary to hand to help us get a deeper insight into the part of Scripture we’re reading, so that we can understand it more easily and in a better way.

That said, if we are going to use Bible commentaries, whether that’s in written form or a spoken commentary such as we can find on the internet, we do need to make sure that we use a good one. We need to make sure that the person giving the commentary knows and understands the particular text we’re reading and, just as importantly, is giving an accurate commentary on the text and not distorting it in any way to push their own agenda.

One thing we always have to be aware of when we’re reading or listening to what people say about the Scriptures is that some people are quite willing to distort the Scriptures in an attempt to make the Scriptures say what they want them to say rather than what they actually do say.

For example, when I was a student at the College of the Resurrection at Mirfield, I was once in a lecture during which a book by an American theologian was being quoted by the person giving the lecture. At one point one of my fellow ordinands, who was himself American, from Texas, put his hand up to speak, and when he did speak, what he said was that we should always be very wary of what American theologians and biblical commentators say because what a lot of them actually do, is preach American values and pass them off as scriptural and Christian values.

But it’s not only American theologians and biblical commentators who do this kind of thing. One of the most blatant, and I would say shameful examples of it I’ve ever come across, occurred at a CMD event I once attended. CMD or Continuing Ministerial Development to give it its full name, is something that all Anglican clergy are obliged to do these days. CMD events are designed as opportunities for the clergy to meet, sometimes for a full day, sometimes for half a day, to study either a topic, such as safeguarding, for example, or a biblical text together. And they are, as I say, compulsory. At one CMD event I attended, we were given a lecture on the well-known story from 1 Kings about the two women who come before king Solomon wanting him to settle their dispute about which of them was the mother of a child.

I’m sure you all know the story but just to remind you. Two women who live in the same house both give birth to sons within a few days of each other. One child dies and the women argue about who’s child has died and who’s is still alive. To solve the problem, Solomon orders the child cut in two so that both women can have half a child. One woman responds by telling the king to give the child to the other woman because she doesn’t want the child killed, but the other woman is quite happy to see the child killed and for neither of them to have him. Solomon, realising that a mother would never want any harm to come to her own child, makes his decision and give the child to the woman who wanted him to live.

Just before this story, we read that Solomon asks God for ‘an understanding mind’ so that he ‘may discern between good and evil’, and, because Solomon hasn’t asked for long life, earthly riches or victory over his enemies, God grants Solomon’s request. And at the end of the story about the two women we’re told that,

‘…all Israel heard of the judgement that the king had rendered, and they stood in awe of the king, because they perceived that the wisdom of God was in him to do justice.’

So this is undeniably a story about the wisdom of Solomon. And yet, the person who spoke to us about it that day, a canon theologian, as I recall, said it isn’t. Despite what the Scriptures plainly say, he said that this isn’t a story about Solomon’s wisdom at all, it’s a story about the wisdom of women. In his interpretation of this story, Solomon showed no wisdom at all in this case, he would have just had the child killed and cut in half. In his interpretation of this story, it was the woman who intervened to stop him from doing that, who showed wisdom. That’s not what the Scriptures themselves say about this story and I think the deafening silence from virtually everyone in the room, including the female clergy, both when he finished his lecture and when he was thanked for it by the bishop at the end of the day, showed what the clergy thought of his rather distorted interpretation of it.

I think this example in particular shows just how careful we have to be when we’re reading or listening to commentaries on the Scriptures. It shows how even a well-known and well-understood story can be distorted to make it fit the personal agenda of the person writing or speaking about it.

So how do we avoid being drawn in by people who distort the Scriptures in this way? One very good way is to take each story in the Scriptures as part of the whole of the Scriptures rather than taking them out of context by reading and interpreting them as stand-alone stories. That was the trap the person who so appallingly distorted the story of Solomon’s wisdom fell into; he failed to take into account (or worse, perhaps deliberately ignored) what comes before and after the story of the two women and took the story out of its scriptural context in order to change its meaning. And that’s something we could very easily do, and has on occasions been done, with this morning’s Gospel story of the Good Samaritan.

We interpret the story of the Good Samaritan as a teaching on how to love our neighbour, as a teaching that we’re supposed to be good to them, to love them and care for them, whoever they are. And you might think it’s impossible to misunderstand the meaning of this story or to distort it to give it a different meaning; but it’s not, I’ve heard it done, and it’s been done by treating it as a stand-alone story so that it’s been taken out of the context of Jesus’ teaching as a whole. And it’s very easy to do that if we treat the story of the Good Samaritan as a stand-alone story, because then we can put a very different interpretation than we normally do on how it answers the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’

We know that the Jews and the Samaritans were not on good terms with one another because of their cultural and religious differences. It could even be said that they hated each other because we also know that during the 1^st Century, fighting between the Jews and Samaritans because so bad that Roman legions had to be called in to stop it. So for a Samaritan to help a Jew would have been unthinkable. And yet, it’s the Samaritan in the story who shows himself to be a neighbour to the man who was robbed and beaten.  And this fits with Jesus’ teaching in general. In St Matthew’s Gospel we read,  

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbour and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you”

And St Luke’s Gospel tells us,

“But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. If you love those who love you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what benefit is that to you? For even sinners do the same.” 

So if we take this story of the Good Samaritan in the context of Jesus’ teaching as a whole, the answer to the question ‘Who is my neighbour?’ is ‘Everyone is my neighbour’, even those who hate me are my neighbours, even Jews and Samaritans are neighbours, and we’re to love everyone, even them, as we love ourselves and treat them as the Good Samaritan treated the man who was robbed and beaten in the story.

But just think about what we read towards the end of this story;

“Which of these three, do you think, proved to be a neighbour to the man who fell among the robbers?”He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” And Jesus said to him, “You go, and do likewise.”

If we take this story out of the context of Jesus’ teaching as a whole, we can read this to mean that my neighbour is the one who acts as the Good Samaritan did. In other words, my neighbour is the one who does good to me and cares for me and it’s those people who we’re called to love as ourselves. And I have heard that interpretation put on this story. But that contradicts what Jesus says about loving our enemies so it can’t be the right interpretation of this story.

What all this shows us is just how careful we have to be when we’re reading and interpreting Scripture. It shows us that we can’t treat stories in the Scriptures as stand-alone stories but that we have to treat them as part of the whole and we have to read them both in the context in which they’re set in the Scriptures and in the context of the whole of Scripture. And it shows us too that, as helpful as commentaries can be in helping us to understand the meaning of what we read in Scripture, we have to be careful that we use good commentaries and good interpreters rather than commentaries and interpreters who are trying to push their own agenda by distorting Scripture to make it say what they want it to say. People who, in effect, are trying to turn the Word of God, into their word.

Amen.   

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The Propers for the 15th Sunday of Ordinary Time can be viewed here.