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“Does God Anwer Prayers?”

The Reverend Ronald J. Kolanowski

July 29, 2007

The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

Proper 12, Year C

Hosea 1:2-10

Psalm 85

Colossians. 2:6-19

Luke 11:1-13

A question I’m often asked is, “Does God answer prayers?” Or, I’m asked similar questions such as, “What good does prayer do? Does God really intervene and alter events based on my petitions?”

People have also made statements like, “I haven’t found employment and prayer seems useless.” “I pray for freedom from my addictions but it’s not working.” “I prayed that my child would get better but she didn’t.”

These are tough questions and tough things to hear. Finding words that won’t add to feelings of alienation or rejection is difficult. To answer with certainty whether or not God will answer a prayer in a particular way is, for me, to presume to know the mind of God. It is arrogant and borders on idolatry. So I listen when those questions come and simply strive to be with the person in their frustration, fear, anger, and hope.

Today Jesus tells us how to pray: Father; your kingdom come; give us daily bread; forgive us; save us from trial; ask, seek, knock. In this passage Jesus helps us discover something about the nature of prayer. Firstly, we should persist in doing it. Secondly, we should approach it with childlike expectation. Thirdly, and most importantly, there is a radical relationality inherent in our dialogue with the divine. Persistent, childlike and relational.

As a parent of a 3-year old I am coming to know something about prayer. Practically the first thing Joshua says every morning when he wakes up is, “Can I have a Popsicle and can I watch TV?” There has not been a morning when he has been given a Popsicle for breakfast and it is extremely rare that we let him watch television in the morning. But that reality seems lost on him. He continues to ask each morning, “Can I have a Popsicle…can I watch TV?”

According to the gospel today this is his prayer. It is persistent, it is childlike in its expectation, and it is deeply relational…a petition delivered to his daddy. The answer to his prayer is “no” or more often “later.” And, most of the time, that suffices for the moment, but it doesn’t diminish the fervor of the same petition later in the day or the next morning. He asks, he seeks, and sometimes he knocks—or pounds out his demand.

In an article on prayer by Frederick Buechner, he says that, “We all pray whether we think of it as praying or not. The odd silence we fall into when something very beautiful is happening, or something very good or very bad. It is the words or sounds we use for ‘sighing-with’ over our own lives.”

Prayer, giving voice to the “sighings” of our lives is the truth we speak to ourselves – the inner groaning of those things which touch us most deeply. Whether formulated in words or not it is inherent to the human condition. We carry within us a restlessness – hopes and fears – known and unknown. We carry voices that lift us up or can tear us down. They inform how we view ourselves, the world, and God – the sound of the sighings of our lives.

Buechner goes on to say it’s a “talking to oneself.” He urges us, “Talk to yourself about your own life, about what you’ve done and what you’ve failed to do, about who you are and who you wish you were and who the people you love are and the people you don’t love too. Talk to yourself about what matters most to you, because if you don’t you may forget what matters most to you.”

What a concept, prayer as a way to help us not forget what matters most to us. Prayer as a way to help us remember who we are and, importantly, whose we are.

Jesus tells us that those persistent groanings in us are to be brought to our Father. Jesus calls God “Father” and uses the word “Abba,” which more accurately translates as “daddy,” a radically different concept of God at the time of Jesus. Like Joshua, who asks “daddy” for a popsicle each morning, Jesus tells us we are to come to our “daddy” like a child, persistent in our asking because we are, as the reading from Hosea tells us, “Children of the Living God.”

As we bring our persistent sighings to prayer, we discover who we are and the deeper knowledge of whose we are. We discover that we are in radical relationship with God and with all creation.

One of the sins of our time and in the current struggles in our communion is the denial of our interconnectedness. All of us are part of one another whether we like each other or not, whether we agree or disagree. To sever relationship is to deny the “us” dimension of the Lord’s Prayer. Note that there is not one “I” statement in it. But this whole topic of communion is another sermon for another day, so back to where I began. Does God answer prayers? I’ll tell you some of my story and you decide.

Over 35 years ago I had a prayer, a prayer that resided in the deepest part of my being. I prayed and believed I was called to ordained ministry. In 1975 I entered seminary to study for the Roman Catholic priesthood for a diocese in Michigan. During four years of formation – of talking to myself as it were – the notion came that this was not my path and I left. At that time it felt like a prayer unanswered or that I had failed to pray enough. As I look back over the years I can see that there was a lot of talking to myself and some forgetting about who I was too. There were moments of deep disappointment and restlessness – years of them, actually.

And here I stand all these years later with a spouse of 27 years; a beautiful child, and now the opportunity to be with you. An answer to prayer was given to me that I could never have anticipated.

I don’t think I’ve told Fr. Don this part of the story, but when we first moved to Connecticut in 2002 we joined the Hartford Chorale. We were singing a large piece with the Hartford Symphony and couldn’t use the Bushnell for our dress rehearsal. So, we rehearsed in this very room. The moment I walked in the door I felt something special about Trinity. Something wonderful was here. The banners and the architecture were beautiful but there was something else.

There’s an expression that I believe is true. From the minute you walk into someone’s house you can feel if there is love in that home or not. Walking into Trinity for the first time, I knew there is love in this house. Unknown to me, that deep sighing of who I am resonated with something about who you are at Trinity. Coming here for that rehearsal, the sighing of my life, that restless part of me felt a yearning to be here. What is interesting is at the time I first experienced this place I hadn’t yet even begun the discernment process for ordination with the Diocese of Connecticut and was far from certain that I would be called to ordained ministry.

Now five years later, here I stand to join you in your ministry; to join you in your work of welcome, hope and healing; to join my gifts to yours to help “God’s kingdom come” a bit nearer through this house of love.

I stand in your midst as witness to a prayer answered, a prayer that I had not known I had prayed when I walked through these doors in 2002.

Persistent, childlike and radically relational.

To persist in prayer, to approach it with childlike openness, to awaken to the interconnectedness between God, ourselves and all creation is Jesus’ call to us today. In prayer we remember what matters most to us. We discover more deeply who we are. And most of all we remember whose we are, children of a daddy God who promises to hear us.

So, does God answer prayers? Talk to yourself and see. Amen.