A Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Genesis 18:20-32 Colossians 2:12-14 Luke 11:1-13
If you could have any superpower, what would it be?
I have always been partial to flying. On Christmas of my kindergarten year, I received a Superman costume. I had eyed it for months in the Sears Wish Book. I honestly thought that I would be able to fly when it came. Fortunately, my parents only let me jump off the bed and not the roof, as I had suggested. Of course, it is not the cape. It is the lighter gravity of our yellow sun, compared to Krypton’s red sun, that accounts for Superman’s ability to fly. The next year, I knew better than to ask for Mary Poppins’ umbrella.
Many people might like to be invisible on demand. Hard to imagine much good could come of that! You might start to steal all sorts of things, and even if you only wanted the power so that you could hear what other people are saying about you, you would probably come to learn what Oscar Wilde once suggested: “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” What a bummer! To eavesdrop on so many conversations and never hear yourself mentioned.
What about the superpower you already have? Because today the church suggests that it is prayer. Prayer is power, and prayer is supernatural. It comes from outside this world.
Some might object that as a superpower, prayer is too sporadic. What about all those unanswered prayers? Let’s pause that objection until we hear from a great saint.
In a letter he wrote to a wealthy widow who asked him about prayer, St. Augustine began with a simple question: What is the purpose of life? Come the end, how would we judge a life to have been well lived?
For Augustine, the answer to those questions is quite simple. Does the life we are living or the life that we might want to live make us fit for heaven? Because what else, in the final scheme of values, would define a good life? And should prayer for a good life not be the purpose of prayer? So, Augustine suggests, our prayers should be directed toward that end: a good life in the Lord. After all, prayer is a superpower. Do we want to aim it at the trivial?
Augustine offered a simple criterion for any prayer we make. Does it fit into, flesh out, the petitions already found in the Lord’s own prayer? And are those petitions—all of them—not directed toward a life well-lived?
So, Augustine queried, even when we pray in our own words, do we ask that we recognize the holiness of God’s name, that his kingdom come, that his will be done? Is what we want no more than our daily bread? Are we praying that our own sins and those of others be forgiven? That we be spared temptation and evil? For Augustine, the Lord’s Prayer does more than instruct us how to pray. It teaches us the purpose of all prayer.
Now we can consider our own unanswered prayers.
Start to list them and see if your experience is not something like my own. My catalogue of unanswered prayers is not as large as I once thought. Why might the same be true for you?
First, because most of the things we ask for are simply too trivial to remember. They belong so thoroughly to the moment at hand that, in a very short time, we forget what we even asked of God. And this is true whether the request was granted or not. Life is a rushing stream. We do not hold much of it in our hands and even less in our memories. We forget so much. Regarding answered and unanswered prayers, which outpace the other? Who can say?
Second, much of what we once requested of God no longer seems of much importance, though, if our memories are good, we can still remember how desperately we once prayed. How did that happen? How did something once so fiercely needed come to be obsolete?
St. Augustine suggested that if we pray hard enough, long enough, God will do one of two things. He will either grant the prayer or give us the wisdom to see why it should not, cannot, be granted.
The most obvious example would be death. How many desperate prayers have we offered for a loved one to be spared from death? And who could be so callous to suggest that, at such a time, we should not pray “for all we are worth”? Yet how small do these same prayers seem when our own deaths approach? Should anyone be spared the destiny of everyone? Clearly something happens in prayer—or at least it should—as we move through this life toward the one to come.
Perseverance in prayers helps us, eventually, to comprehend “the way of the Lord.” Though admittedly in some very few cases, we will be looking for insight into an unanswered prayer until the last moment, when we go to look upon the face of the Lord.
Augustine went on to identify the very heart of prayer. It is not petitioning; it is yearning. Commenting upon the command “to pray always,” the saint insisted that this is not a question of endless petitioning. “Multiplied words are one thing, long-continued warmth of desire is another.” He wrote, “When we cherish uninterrupted desire along with the exercise of faith and hope and charity, we pray always” (Letter to Proba, 9 & 10).
Our contemporary, the Anglican priest and poet R. S. Thomas (1913-2000), suggested something similar in a poem he so tellingly entitled “Emerging.” Unanswered prayers cannot be blamed on either God’s lack of care or our own unworthiness. No, something is coming to be in all that yearning.
Hear my prayer, Lord, hear
my prayer. As though you were deaf, myriads
of mortals have kept up their shrill
cry, explaining your silence by
their unfitness.
The poet suggests that prayer is not an endless processing of petitions. It will never recreate paradise on earth. No, prayer is the place that joins us to God. It is “an annihilation of difference” that fits us for a coming kingdom of gleaming towers.
It begins to appear
this is not what prayer is about.
It is the annihilation of difference,
the consciousness of myself in you,
of you in me; the emerging
from the adolescence of nature
into the adult geometry
of the mind. I begin to recognize
you anew, God of form and number.
There are questions we are the solution
to, others whose echoes we must expand
to contain. Circular as our way
is, it leads not back to that snake-haunted
garden, but onward to the tall city
of glass that is the laboratory of the spirit.
Prayer is a superpower. It does work wonders in this world, far beyond those we can number and describe. And St. Augustine and Father Thomas are no doubt correct. Its greatest wonder is how, for those who remain faithful, prayer lifts us above the world. The heart knows what it wants until it surrenders to prayer. And then it finds what it could never have imagined.
