THE RISK OF PRAYER Luke 11.5-13
Rev. Dr. Warner M. Bailey
No one likes to get a telephone call in the middle of the night. In the parable about the unexpected guest, you are jolted out of bed by a friend who arrives at your door, bleary eyed and starving from 16 hours on the road. He needs a place to crash and something to eat. But your cupboard is bare, so while you have him wash up, you dash across the yard to bang on your neighbor’s back door.
Now get the scene. In the neighbor’s bedroom, the entire family is sleeping on one bed, side-by-side, like sardines, from the youngest to the oldest with mother and father on the two outside edges. All of a sudden, a sharp knocking at the door would have shattered the stillness of the house and a rough whisper would have jolted you awake. “Friend, wake up. My friend has just arrived from a journey. I must feed him, but have no bread. Lend me three loaves, and I will repay you by sunrise.”
Can you imagine the rudeness of waking me up like that? Can you believe the stupidity of letting yourself run out of such a staple as bread? Isn’t this the height of impertinence to disturb and disorient someone’s much needed rest? Go away! It’s too much trouble.
But the next door neighbor would not be put off. He knocked louder, and he spoke louder. Inside the family begins to stir, babies begin to wail, cur dogs begin to bark. Outside a rooster begins to crow, and someone across the alley sticks his head out the window and shouts something about this being the middle of the night.
Can you believe that this guy will allow himself to be so embarrassed? Standing out there in the cold, empty handed, upsetting everybody’s sleep, fretting over how he will explain his lack of bread to his midnight guest. But he still stands there, making the situation more and more embarrassing. Finally, the man inside rises up out of bed with a roar, shouting to his neighbor to stop his infernal racket. He fumbles around in the dark, bangs his shin on the cabinet, and gathers up some left-over bread. Then, heaving the heavy beam that locked the door, he thrust out the loaves through a crack, slammed the door shut and tried to calm everybody down so that he might get some sleep, finally.
And Jesus says to us with a twinkle in his eye, “If a human being will get up in the middle of the night to grant the request of a rude friend, will not God much more answer your request? If among humans a request is granted even though it is rude, how much more will God listen to you? If you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, will not your heavenly Father give you the Holy Spirit when you ask?”
Jesus tells us this parable to encourage us to pray boldly. He does not teach us through this parable that we should be rude in prayer, nor does he suggest that God is asleep. He does not encourage us to think that we can weary God into hearing us through continually badgering God through prayer. Pray boldly. Ask, seek, knock.
I am constantly amazed at the bold praying you are doing over seemingly insoluble life-issues you are living with. An honest fear of the Evil One. A heart-felt sadness over the lack of a vibrant faith among your children and their children. A chronic, life-threatening condition recently discovered.
None of these are issues that are going to go away very fast, really soon, or not at all. Yet, you have asked that when we lift you up in prayer, we remember you as you are stuck with these intractable concerns. The conclusion I draw from this is that we will be boldly praying with you for a long, long time with concerns that will not go away. Answers to prayer may not be forthcoming. Things may get worse. The storm clouds of despair may gather.
Continued prayer that remains unanswered puts the spiritual life at risk. I want to talk about that risk and to show you how God minimizes their threat.
The risk is that unanswered prayer would make us stop praying boldly. That we would “lose heart,” which means to lose purpose, willpower, stamina, resiliency. The first risk is that boldness would surrender to the resignation and despair which accompany delay.
Jesus knows that unbelief and resignation are always possible. But look! In the parable of the friend at midnight the guy who has run out of bread risks the shame of awakening so rudely the neighborhood. What keeps him from slinking back home with his tail between his legs? How is it that he does not lose heart? In this parable the risk of prayer has been neutralized. What has happened to neutralize the risk of continual unanswered prayer?
Sure there is the shame and rudeness of asking for bread in the middle of the night. But the obligation to provide hospitality for the friend outweighs the shame. How can he betray his friend? “I would be true, for there are those who trust me. I would be brave, for there is much to dare.”
Friendship looms larger than shame. While at a surface level prayer may not be answered, at a deeper level God works to keep friendship strong. Strong friendship faces down the risk of embarrassment. Thus God works to keep us praying strongly.
As a young man, Joseph Scriven discovered how much he needed the presence of Christ in his life. Born in Ireland in 1819, he looked forward to a blissful life with the Irish lass of his choice. But then tragedy struck. On the eve of his intended wedding day, his bride-to-be was accidentally drowned.
In his loneliness and sorrow, he left the Emerald Isle and immigrated to Canada at the age of twenty-five. Once again he became engaged to be married, only to lose his second fiancée after a brief but fatal illness.
In 1855 his mother became seriously ill and was near death. It had been ten years since he had kissed her goodbye and now he was unable to go to her side. Instead, he wrote a poem and sent it with the prayer that it would remind her of her never-failing friend, Jesus.
That private message, written to comfort a sick and distant mother, has become a beloved hymn of comfort and assurance to millions of Christians around the world. It was listed as the fifth most popular hymn in a 1990 newspaper national poll.
So God encourages us never to lose heart!
¹Patience seems to be the key ingredient to winning. But as we have seen, this patience is “always accompanied by the haste and restlessness of the prayer which runs to God and beseeches Him, by the haste which rests on the knowledge that God takes our distress to heart, and expects that we for our part will take His mercy to heart and really live by it, so that in our mutual turning to one another He may be our God and therefore a Helper in our distress, allowing Himself to be moved by our entreaties.” Barth, loc.cit.
²Henry Gariepy, Songs in the Night, Inspiring Stories behind 100 Hymns Born in Trial and Suffering. (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1996) p. 9-10. See also Peter J. Gomes, Preaching at Harvard, Sermons for an Academic Year. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) p. 127.