"Why Not Ask For God Help?
"
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Text: Matthew 8:5-13
There is a very unusual line in our passage this morning that talks about a banquet, a dinner, a feast. To any Jew who would have heard this, they would know exactly what Jesus was referring to: the great banquet feast of heaven, the time when the Messiah would come, and the people of Israel from all four corners of the world would gather in the presence of the Messiah at a great feast, a feast at which would be present Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, a feast that would be the uniting of all Israelites from all over the world. In the Book of Ezra, in the Book of Baruch and elsewhere, there are references to this great feast. But, in this text, that feast takes on a whole different character.
For Jesus, it is suggesting that coming to this feast would not only be those who belonged to the people of Israel, but that they will come from the east and the west, that all the nations would come and dine at this great feast and celebrate with the Messiah. Why? It is because Jesus knew that he would be the host of this great meal.
I have often thought what it would be like to be at the great feast, the banquet of heaven. If I am there, God willing, with all the saints, sitting around the table, enjoying the food, sitting down at the right hand of Jesus and being able to have a chat with him, I would probably have a few questions for him as the host.
My first question would be “What was on the menu when you dined with Zacchaeus at his house for our Membership Committee would like to know?” And, “Can you tell me how you turned water into wine, as our Stewardship Committee would like to know? It would make a great fundraiser!” And, “How are you present spiritually at the table when we break bread and drink wine, because our Worship Committee would like to know?”
Finally, I would ask him perhaps one other question: “Of all the people that you encountered in your ministry on earth, when all of those people came to you, which one did you like the most?” I suspect, although I could never answer with certainty, that Jesus would have the centurion in Capernaum on his list among those that are his favourites. In this great encounter with Jesus, this Gentile man, this leader of Romans, this military officer, came to him in humility and in compassion and with courage, and he asks for a very simple thing, for a healing to take place.
Many scholars have argued that this text is really about the relationship between Jews and Gentiles, between those who have access to the Kingdom and who will be at the great Messianic banquet. While it is true that Jesus is making a point, and both Matthew and Luke in their Gospels go to great length to show the relationship between Jews and Gentiles and the great feast in heaven, there is something more.
Agnes Sanford, who was a leader in the Charismatic Renewal in the 20th century, suggests that there was a simple meaning to this story of the centurion and Jesus. It is a central message that gets lost by all the other permutations in the story. She argues that it is simply this: the centurion, a Roman, a Gentile, a powerful man in his field, comes to Jesus, a Jew, and asks him to heal a servant, the lowest of the low, who is paralyzed and in this simple request, is the pattern for prayer for every generation.
In the encounter between Jesus and the centurion, we have in a sense a road-map for our prayer life. I thought about what Sanford said, and I went back and I read the text again, and she is correct, for I see emerging from this what I would like to call the four seeds of prayer. These invite us to deepen and strengthen and make our attitude towards prayer mature.
The first 'C' in all this is the power to connect. Look at the centurion again. He comes up to Jesus, and says, “Lord, my servant, who is not here, is paralyzed. Will you heal him?” Now, on the surface, this seems like an ordinary request, but it is not. He uses the word “Kurie” or “Lord” that would only apply to Caesar or you would apply it to God. Maybe, if you are a Jew, you might apply it to the Messiah, but probably not. The centurion uses the highest name - Lord - and so he is identifying Jesus as the one who has authority over him. He is connecting with what he believes is the power to heal his servant. He calls him, Lord.
Then, he does something else. As Sanford rightly suggests, he disconnects from his fears and his ambitions and his concerns. After all, this is a Roman who has power, and he is coming to Jesus in humility, he is calling him “Lord.” Here he is, a Gentile, the ruling power, the elite in Palestine, coming to a Jew, the subjugated, and calling him “Lord.” Here is a man, not in private, not behind closed doors like Nicodemus, but in public for everyone to see, calling Jesus “Lord.” Here is a man who has put aside his fears and his worries and his concerns and his ambitions, and even maybe some self-doubts, and he is calling him “Lord!” He is disconnected from the things that might stand in his way.
My friends, when we approach Christ in that spirit, when we are willing to acknowledge him as Lord and connect with him, then the fears, misgivings, and concerns that we have can be put to one side. To truly connect with God we have to do that. We have to put them to one side. We can't come to Christ and connect with him in prayer while at the same time in the back of our mind we are thinking, “You know, this isn't the thing that I should be doing” or “What will this mean for me if I actually commit myself to this? ”
Also, we need to connect honestly. What I love about the Centurion is that he comes to Jesus with one thing on his mind: his compassion for his servant. There is a singular approach to his prayer. I love what C. S. Lewis says: “Why do we often, when we pray, ask for A when actually what we are really asking for is B?” Why do we come to Christ with all the myriad of things that are on our hearts and our minds, but then, when there is one thing for which we really need prayer, often we don't enunciate it or state it? We need to be singular in our minds and in our approach to Christ in our prayer life. We need to ask for the thing that really is on our mind, the thing that really does matter most and not be afraid to enunciate it and to state it, and to connect with Christ in a direct and an honest way.
I love the centurion, I love him dearly, because he came to Jesus, he calls him Lord, and then, in a singular way, he asks for what is on his mind. He is truly connected with the source of power in his life.
But there is also a need to commit. Prayer is not simply about having an experience of God or naming the source or recognizing the source. There is a sense in which true prayer requires a degree of commitment. If there is one theme that is lacking in so many of our lives, it is the second one: it is the power of commitment. Often, we prevaricate, we pray around things, and we might even tell others that we are praying, when in fact we are not. We might actually set time aside to pray to God and we never show up. We find there are many other things in our lives that take our agenda from us, rather than us having the commitment to the time of prayer.
There is a wonderful story from the eastern world, and we know that our Prime Minister has been in India recently, and India has been on my mind. I was thinking of a story about a holy man who sat on the banks of the Ganges. A young boy saw the holy man praying, and he comes up to him, and he says, “Holy man, teach me how to pray.”
The holy man says, “I will do that.” So, he grabs the young boy by the head and he ducks his head into the river. He holds his head under the water. Finally, he releases it, and the boy comes up sputtering water.
He says to the holy man, “Why did you do that?”
The holy man responds, “I am teaching you how to pray.”
The boy says to the holy man, “Why would you do something like that?”
The holy man says to him, “When you long to pray as much as you longed to breathe under the water, then you will begin to learn how to pray.”
In other words, when prayer becomes a necessity in your life, when it becomes part of your life, like breathing, like air, then you learn how to pray. You will not learn how to pray if you learn without commitment.
I think we have been soft with ourselves, and that is why our prayer lives often do not reflect the depths that we really want, because we have told ourselves that prayer is an extra dimension to our lives, rather than a central part of them. Look at Jesus, Jesus commits to prayer. Jesus commits to responding to the man. Jesus says these remarkable words after the centurion made the request: “It will have happened, just as you say.” In other words, your servant is healed. In public, in front of his critics, in front of his disciples, in front of the centurion, probably there are Roman guards with the centurion, and Jesus declares that the prayer has been answered, and that the very thing that he has asked for has taken place. Now, that is commitment!
The commitment that Jesus makes to us is this: If we ask him, he will then commit to us. But, if we have this airy-fairy half-hearted thing, then how can we expect Christ to be committed to answering our prayers for us?
There is another element, and that is confession. By confession, I do not mean apology: I mean a declaration of our faith. Jesus pays the highest accolade in the New Testament to this centurion. Oh, he gives it to a few others along the way as well, but to the centurion, he gives this accolade: “In all of Israel, I have never seen faith like this.” The religious leaders there must have had a conniption! Jesus is saying that a centurion, who has come to pray for his slave no less, is considered to have faith. But, Jesus knew that this centurion came with faith first.
I know, for the last 250 or so years, probably as a result of the enlightenment and the questioning of Voltaire and Leibniz, and maybe even to a lesser extent, Locke and Kant, prayer has often been seen as superstitious, sort of reaching beyond reason, and therefore being called into question. Is there not within our minds just a little niggle, when we pray, that goes “This might not happen” or “I don't actually believe that this prayer can be answered.” We have that seed in our minds.
The post-moderns have come along and talked about things such as extra sensory perception, the numinous and the ability to know the transcendent God and mysticism, and while they have left us with a reason to pray, they haven't given us the source for prayer. The source for prayer is Christ, and that is what the centurion realized. What Jesus sees in the centurion is the most powerful thing of all: that his prayers can be answered and will be answered, because first he believed.
I was reading a children's Christian magazine in a bookstore. It was a magazine that was at my intellectual level, it had lots of pictures, and bubbles and quotes, and nice stories! I really enjoyed it. In fact, I got a lot out of it. There was a story about a farmer and some of his erudite, sophisticated, intellectual family members from the city who came to visit him on the farm. When it was time for dinner and to sit down to the great feast that the farmer had prepared, the farmer held his hands together and gave thanks to God.
One of the erudite, sophisticated intellectuals from his family called this practice into question. He said, “Don't you think this is just a little bit old fashioned? I mean, after all, who believes in prayer anymore? Come on, old man, this is passé. We are beyond this now!”
The farmer said, “Well, you might think that. I don't think it is old fashioned. Some do, and I suppose there are some here on the farm who also don't pray before a meal.”
And so, one of the family members said, “Oh, that is good to know that there are some intellectual and some solid types on this farm. Pray tell me, who are they?”
The farmer said, “The pigs. That is who!”
Under it, there was a caption, and it simply said the following for little children: “God has given us this great gift as humans to be able to connect with God, so we should.”
And it is a great gift! It may seem old fashioned, and it may seem not quite sophisticated enough, but is there not something that suggests that what precedes our prayers is faith? And, if you want a solid intellectual foundation for that, all you need to do for that is turn to St. Anselm in his Proslogion, in Chapter I, where he talks about the need for faith to lead to understanding - something that Augustine had said. In other words, “I believe in order that I may understand,” said St. Anselm, “that faith is a thing that unlocks our knowledge of what God can do.”
The first thing in prayer is faith, my friends. That is why I love Jesus' comment to the centurion: “In all of Israel, I haven't seen anyone with faith like this.” The centurion came, and called him “Lord” and then made his request.
Finally, there is a need for a fourth 'C', and that is to contemplate the outcome of our prayers. Oh, we often pray for the big things in life: world peace, justice, the end to hunger, human rights. Rightly so, we ask for these big things. But then, sometimes, we become depressed and anxious when we see wars continuing, even though one might have ended, and when we see people who are still starving, even though there were many who were fed, and when we look for human rights, even when people in some countries have been able to find their freedom.
We don't often thank God for the things that we have prayed for before, because there are always other things coming along that cause us to worry a little bit more. It keeps us on our toes! We pray for those big things, but what about the little things? What about the personal things? What about the intimate things?
G. Morgan Campbell, the great minister, once had a woman come up to him and say, “Dr. Campbell, I want to ask you this: do you think that God cares for the little things in my life or only the big things?”
Dr. Campbell said very, very straightforwardly, “Do you think there are any things in your life that are big to God?”
In other words, we have an inflated view sometimes of what we think God is concerned about, and then a deflated view of the smaller things, when they are all in a sense, to the Great Creator of the universe, small things.
But, here is the majesty of our text: those seemingly small things are always important to God. In God's eyes, there are not big things and little things, there are all things that we can bring. “In everything,” says Paul, “by prayer, and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.” For the centurion it was the healing of his beloved slave.
I think at times, my friends, we are not, as I suggested before, direct enough with God. We do not ask God to answer specific things. We talk in generalities to Jesus; we don't talk in particularities. Yet, it is in particularities, when we look back in our lives, that we can see that some things have been answered. In fact, there have been things that we have requested that have come to pass, maybe not always as we expected, but they have come to pass. That is why, at times my friends, we become depressed about our prayer life, rather than inspired by it.
I love the centurion story. I love it so much I hope he is at the banquet! I hope I get to talk to him and say, “Where did you find the courage to speak to Jesus so directly?” And to you, I would say: “Bring today, as if it were the banquet, all those things that you want to ask for to God.” Don't be frightened. Don't prevaricate. Be straightforward.
Whether it is a relationship that you are struggling with; personal health that is in need of healing; compassion for another person in need; tension in your workplace; a deep and profound sorrow that you have in your heart; guilt for something that you have left undone or that you have done; concern or a passion for this church and its ministry and its future; to say thank you, joyfully, for prayers that have been answered. Whatever it is, come to the banquet table, come to Christ, lay it out, present it to him, because there is one thing in this story that is so engaging: if this centurion, a Gentile, could come to Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, and be concerned about a slave, believe you me, you can bring whatever is in your heart and mind to him also. And here is the key: We are told that the slave was healed immediately. Why not bring your requests to God? Amen.