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Mark 11:12-25; Job 16:9-17
February 6, 2011 • Portage First UMC
I was in my dorm at Ball State somewhere in the late 80’s when I felt a sharp, piercing pain in my chest. I laid down for a while, but it didn’t go away, so I headed out to the campus health center, which the students affectionately called “The Death Center.” They ran a few tests and determined that I had a collapsed lung. I wasn’t going anywhere that night. The word got out quickly and people both at Ball State and in my hometown of Rossville began praying for me while I spent the night at the health center. It was a restless night, but the next morning, I knew I had been healed. I sensed it in my spirit. When I went to the doctor a couple of days later, it was confirmed. The lung that was supposed to take 2 weeks to reinflate had, in fact, done so in a very short time—I believe overnight. That weekend I went on a Lay Witness Mission to work with the youth. My friends prayed, and God responded, bringing healing where it was needed.
My senior year in high school, my family doctor discovered I had a heart murmur—a hole in my heart that caused it to leak blood. It was a birth defect, apparently, but since I had never played competitive sports, it hadn’t caused me any problems and had gone unnoticed. We shared the concern at our church, and one of the godliest women I’ve ever known, Esther Beard, laid hands on me and prayed for my healing. Esther was the kind of person you would always want to be praying for you. When I was a kid, I always thought that when Esther spoke, God really paid attention then. And so she prayed for me, that day and in the days to come, but it wasn’t until 1999, when I had valve replacement surgery, that healing took place through the hands of a skilled surgeon. So the question that has followed me all of these years is this: why? Why did God answer one prayer and not another?
This morning, we’re concluding our series of sermons on “Why?” questions, and I know we haven’t begun to scratch the surface on some of the questions you might deal with daily, so let me suggest that if there are questions we haven’t talked about, you write those down or send me an e-mail and we’ll do our best to include them in future sermons. But this morning we come to a question that bothers most if not all people of faith from time to time. We’re taught from an early age to pray, and we’re taught that if we pray, God will answer. And yet, our experience tells us that God doesn’t always give us what we want. We ask for this and it never happens. We pray for that and something different occurs. And we’re left with our question: why did my prayer go unanswered?
Part, maybe most, of our struggle is the way some people lift certain verses out of the Bible and make them say what they want them to say. One of those is found in our Gospel lesson this morning, where Jesus says, “Whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (11:24). There are other, similar verses throughout the Gospels, and it sounds like an iron-clad promise. Just ask, believe really hard, and you’ll get what you asked for. But that’s not our experience. As I said, I don’t know anyone who believed more deeply than Esther Beard, and yet when she prayed for my healing, it didn’t happen—at least not the way she asked for it to happen. So was the problem me? Did I not believe enough? And how much is “enough,” anyway? Those who teach that the answers to our prayers are dependent on our level of faith have forgotten who it is we pray to. We pray to a God who is limitless in his power. Why would God depend on my little faith to make things happen? That’s the problem we have when we confront this verse, especially when we yank it out of context. Jesus says this in a very specific setting, so if we’re going to understand what he’s actually saying, we need to understand why he’s saying it.
It’s early in the last week of Jesus’ life, maybe Monday, and he’s headed back to Jerusalem after staying the night in Bethany with his friends Mary, Martha and Lazarus. Bethany is just over the Mount of Olives, a suburb of sorts of Jerusalem. But why was he staying there instead of in the city? Was it not safe for him to stay in Jerusalem? Or was he wanting to spend as much time as he could with these dear friends, knowing the end was near? Either way, he heads toward the city and does a very strange thing on the way in. He curses a fig tree for not producing figs, even though, as Mark tells us, “it was not the season for figs” (11:13). It’s a strange thing, and I imagine the disciples must have been scratching their heads, but even stranger things were coming. When he gets to the Temple, he sees all the moneychangers and the salesmen, and he’s angry. Now, this would not have been a new sight to Jesus. It was common practice. After all, you couldn’t give your Roman coins as an offering, so that pagan money had to be changed into Tyrian currency, with, of course, a fee for the changing. And animals offered as sacrifices had to be without blemish. If you were coming from a long way away, chances are your animal might get hurt on the way. Better, you were told, to just buy your animal in Jerusalem. And in order to make things easier, the market, which at one time was across the valley on the Mount of Olives, had been moved to the Court of the Gentiles. What that meant, then, was that the Gentiles who wanted to worship God now had no quiet place to pray, no place to go for worship. Instead, when they came in, they saw a noisy, smelly market (Wessel, “Mark,” Expositor’s Bible Commentary, Vol. 8, pg. 727). It was a way of saying, “Your worship isn’t important to us.” And Jesus, having seen them perhaps every year since he was twelve, has had enough. He’s angry and throws out the moneychangers and the vendors. “My house,” Jesus says, quoting the prophet Isaiah (56:7), “will be called a house of prayer for all nations. But you have made it a den of robbers” (11:17). And, with the dust stirred up, Jesus says no more. He doesn’t need to.
Now, typically the way we read this passage is something like this: Jesus is mad because they’re selling stuff in the Temple, therefore we shouldn’t sell stuff in the church. I had a gentleman in one church who wouldn’t even come to a fundraiser dinner in the church because we sold tickets. And if that’s what we get from this passage, we’ve completely missed the context. Jesus has bigger concerns than whether we sell t-shirts or meals or CDs in the building. In fact, the next morning, according to Mark, the disciples see the fig tree withered and comment on it, and that’s when Jesus explains what all this has been about. The fig tree is a dramatic parable (Wright, Mark for Everyone, pg. 151); the cursing of the tree really had nothing to do with the absence of figs and the clearing of the Temple had little to do with how much was charged for a lamb. Both are metaphors for the bigger picture. Jesus is concerned with where people put their faith. “Have faith in God,” he says (11:22). The fig tree was not producing what it was designed to produce, and neither was the Temple. Rather than pointing people toward God, the Temple had become a business enterprise, a money-making endeavor. It was never primarily for sacrifices; it was for worship. The takeover of the Court of the Gentiles said that the Gentiles weren’t welcome to worship. Rather than including all, the Temple had become a place of exclusion (Wright 152). The religious leaders had robbed people of their chance to worship, to pray, and had put their faith in a religious system rather than in God. And Jesus says faith is at the heart of our struggle with prayer—not the amount of faith we have but the place we put our faith. Many of us put our faith in prayer—in the religious exercise or the holy enterprise—rather than in the God to whom we pray.
We demonstrate our misplaced faith when we tell God what to do. We often pray like this: “God, I really concerned about Bob, and I want you to help him. Now, here’s exactly how you should help him…” Am I right? We pray with very specific instructions for God. It’s like we picture God up in heaven, listening, and he says, “Boy, I’m sure glad Dennis told me how to fix Bob, because honestly, I had no idea. Good thing Dennis is on my team!” Or it’s because we think prayer is magic and if we say the right things, or enough things or pray in the right place, God will have to respond. “Most Jews regarded the temple as the place where prayer was particularly effective” (Garland 441), and we do the same thing with the church, or with a ritual, or with a certain way or amount of prayer. I lived part of my life thinking I had to fulfill a prayer quota of sorts. I was taught that if you don’t pray for a certain length of time, you’re not really praying. And I found that difficult. My mind wanders. My thoughts break in. And I never felt good enough. The crazy thing is: we don’t put that kind of an obligation or restriction on any other relationship we have. Can you imagine if we said you have to spend a full hour, uninterrupted, talking to your spouse for your marriage to be valid? Right about now, most of the women are saying “yes” while the men are thinking, “Are you kidding me?” But because we’ve put our faith in prayer rather than in God, we do that to God. We think, “If I pray in this way…or put in this amount of time…or give God good, clear instructions…then I’ll get what I want, what I ask for. God will HAVE to answer me.”
Just three chapters over from where we are today in Mark is a story that puts the lie to the idea that if we believe enough, or pray correctly, we can get whatever we ask for. In Mark 14, we find the story of Jesus, just a few days after this encounter in the Temple, in a garden outside the walls and down the valley from the Temple mount. He knows they are coming to arrest him this night, and so in desperation, he goes to his father in prayer. Do you remember what he prays? “Abba, Father, everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me” (14:36). Jesus asks the Father to be able to avoid the cross the next day. He asks not to die, not to have to go through the pain and the suffering and the humiliation. This was not a prayer for show; Luke tells us he prays so intensely that his sweat is like drops of blood falling to the ground (22:44). Mark says he prays the same thing three times over. Jesus is begging his Father for a change of plan, and yet we know his prayer was not answered in the affirmative. God the Father said no. Did Jesus not pray the right way? Did he not use the right words? Did he not pray long enough? Did he not have enough faith? No. Jesus was the Son of God. If anyone was going to get his prayers answered the way he wanted them to, it would have been him. But Jesus prays with faith in God the Father. He prays: “Yet not what I will, but what you will” (14:36). Now, Jesus was not praying with a “well, whatever you want to do” sort of fatalism. Rather, Jesus’ prayer demonstrates a depth of faith in God that we ought to desire—a faith that calls us beyond telling God what to do and pushes us into deeper trust than we’ve ever known before. As Pastor Deb reminded us last week, God tells us through the prophet Isaiah, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:9). Prayer, then, is not about getting answers or making things happen the way we want them to. Prayer is about placing our faith in a God who knows better than we do. Prayer is not about getting our way. Prayer is about relationship. That’s what the leaders of the Temple had forgotten, and that’s why Jesus teaches his disciples to pray with an eye to God, because when we pray that way, when we pray as he models in Gethsemane (and as he earlier modeled in the Lord’s Prayer), we will receive what we ask because we’ll be asking for his will to be done.
So how, then, should we pray? Do we just repeat Jesus’ line from Gethesemane? Well, that would then lead us back into prayer as magic, wouldn’t it? Rather than tell you want to pray, I want to suggest an attitude for prayer today, the first part of which is to pray receptively. “Prayer,” one author says, “is not imposing our will on God but opening our lives to God’s will” (Garland, NIV Application Commentary: Mark, pg. 448). We’re not trying to get God to bend to our will; rather, we’re asking God to move our will closer to his. Think about it this way: this summer, I was out in a row boat on a lake in the Upper Peninsula when, through no fault of my own, the oar that I was using to move us around in the lake broke. We weren’t even that far from the shore, but suddenly we were left with one oar. So we maneuvered, and pushed and eventually got close to the shore, where I reached out to grab a hand. Now, at that point, I could have said, “I’m in control here. I will make the person on shore do what I want.” I could have pulled and we all would have ended up in a mess. Rather, I reached out and allowed myself and my boat to be pulled in to the shore, to the place where I wanted to be. I needed to do that, because I couldn’t help myself and my boat. I needed someone else to help me. Prayer is a little like that: we reach out and allow God to pull us close, to help us draw near to what he wants for us. And we do that when we pray receptively, open to what he has for us.
Second, we pray confidently. We believe nothing is impossible with God (cf. Luke 1:37). We believe in a God for whom all things are possible (Matthew 19:26; Mark 10:27). And we believe in a God who wants good things for us (Matthew 7:11). Prayer is not about overcoming God’s unwillingness. Prayer is not about being the “squeaky wheel that gets the grease” from God. Prayer is offered in the knowledge that we are speaking to a good God from whom we can ask anything. And so we pray confidently, like a child who knows they are loved, knowing God will respond. However, God may not respond the way we want him to. “There are some things [we] should not ask [for] and some things that God will not give” (Garland 449). We don’t have the whole picture. I don’t know why God didn’t instantly heal my heart murmur, but I do know God has used that experience for good in my life. He has given me a different perspective in caring for those who are ill than I would have had otherwise. He has given me ways to talk with those who are having heart difficulties. And he has allowed me, on many occasions, to experience the care of the church, the body of Christ. But just because God didn’t heal me right when I wanted him to didn’t mean I quit praying. I continued to pray for healing, to ask that God would work, and God did, just not the way I planned for him to. Just because it took the hands of a gifted surgeon to fix my heart doesn’t mean I wasn’t healed. And it doesn’t mean I give up praying confidently because I know I’m praying to a God who loves me and who wants the best for me.
Pray receptively. Pray confidently. And pray expectantly. We pray with the long view. Every week in worship, we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” How can we pray such a thing for two thousand years and not be discouraged? I mean, God’s kingdom has not come. Much of what happens in this world does not reflect the will of God. And yet we keep praying it, don’t we? Why do we do that? Not just because Jesus told us to (He told us to do a lot of things we don’t do). We keep praying that because we are expectant people, believing that in spite of how it appears, one day God is going to set all things right. All the brokenness, all the pain, and all the “wrong-ness” of this world will be done away with. All things will be made new. We believe that, and so in spite of how things appear, we can continue to pray expectantly, to let go of our own small vision in order to release the greater good God has for us (cf. Foster, Prayer, pg. 53). In the midst of our lives that sometimes fall apart, we can continue to pray expectantly to a God who is working to put it all back together. In the face of seemingly unanswered prayers, we continue to pray expectantly to God who is on our side and who, in the long view, will work all things for good (Romans 8:28).
Such a prayer is known as the prayer of relinquishment, where we give up our will, like Jesus did in Gethsemane, and give our lives over to a God who loves us. It’s a risky move; it may be the most risky move—to give up control and allow God to take over, to throw ourselves into God’s will rather than our own. It takes courage to pray this way. It takes strength to live this way. Only the truly brave can really dive into such a prayer. But that’s what Jesus’ call to “have faith in God” leads us to. A fourteenth century English mystic learned that. When she was about 30 years old and desperately ill, she received a series of intense visions of Jesus. After recovering from her illness, Julian of Norwich wrote them down and published them under the title, Sixteen Revelations of Divine Love. It is believed to be the first book in the English language to be written by a woman. Julian’s life was shaped by this time of prayer during her illness, and her theology (her belief about God) was said to be summed up in a short little prayer, which she said was given to her by God himself. It goes like this: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” Twentieth century poet T. S. Eliot used that line in one of his poems, reminding us that all shall be well when we “purify our motives,” when we put our faith in one who is higher than we are. [That line was also set to music, and SONday GLOry is going to come and sing a version of that for us now. Use this as a time of prayer, to hear God remind you that he is working for your good.
BAND: “ALL MUST BE WELL”
1. Through the love of God our Savior, All will be well
Free and changeless is His favor, All is well
Precious is the blood that healed us
Perfect is the grace that sealed us
Strong the hand stretched forth to shield us, all must be well
2. Though we pass through tribulation, All will be well
Ours is such a full salvation, All is well
Happy still in God confiding
Fruitful if in Christ abiding
Steadfast through the Spirit's guiding, all must be well
3. We expect a bright tomorrow; All will be well
Faith can sing through days of sorrow, All is well
On our Father's love relying
Jesus every need supplying
Yes in living or in dying, all must be well
© 2007 Detuned Radio Music (ASCAP). Used by permission. All rights reserved.
All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. There’s one final piece to our prayers, which Jesus emphasizes at the end of verse 24: “When you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive them, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.” Not only are we to pray receptively, confidently, and expectantly. We’re also to pray with a forgiving spirit. One author sums it up this way: “We cannot make peace with God if we bear animosity for others” (Garland 449). And so, after praying in Gethsemane, Jesus arises and follows God’s will all the way to the cross. He went to make forgiveness possible once and for all. Before he did that, though, he left his disciples with a meal to help them remember why he did what we did. Today, we call that meal holy communion—bread that reminds us of his body and grape juice that reminds us of his blood…his life offered for ours. God’s answer to our prayers is found in this bread and cup: he loves us and wants the very best for us. Sometimes that is what we want, and sometimes it’s something else. Sometimes it comes with joy and sometimes it comes with pain. Sometimes we see the answer right away, and sometimes the answer may not be seen for a generation or two. But God’s answer to every prayer is certain: He loves us. And trusting that truth may just be the bravest thing we ever do. So we come to the table this morning, in trust, in hope, in expectation, believing that all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.