Welcome to Pentecost 20. Welcome to the day commemorating Philip the Evangelist. Not Philip the Apostle. Philip the Evangelist. This is the Philip who, with Stephen and five other men of Spirit and wisdom – the first of the diakonoi – was asked by the Apostles to sort out the food bank for Greek-speaking widows in his area. There was some squabbling about this. And then, when Stephen was martyred, this was the Philip who headed out to Samaria, and preached and converted his way down to Gaza, where he converted an Ethiopian court official on the road, and thereby kind of established the church of Ethiopia. This Philip is the guy whom the Spirit miraculously teleported thereafter to Ashdod on the coast of Palestine, and there he preached his way back up to Caesarea, and settled down, with his four prophetess daughters, and later on, in his home, played host to Paul and his lecture-circuit companions, one of whom was the elderly Luke.
Oh, a lot of people asked a lot of things of our poor Philip. Philip, will you serve? Philip, tell me what these words mean. Philip, can we have some food? Hey, Phil, can we stay the night?
We do a lot of asking of each other – observes Duncan wryly thinking of the Stewardship Campaign going on now. And we do give. We’re like Philip in that respect. We give, and we give without being asked, to our parish home and to the people around us whom we serve. Nor do we need to be asked. Because of course we’ll give, and we already know what the needs are.
Well, so it is, with God, and our needs. So it is, with this whole business of asking, and receiving. God looks after us. God already knows our needs, and it’s the way of God to be giving to us all the time, even when we don’t ask.
So why do we ask?
Unfortunately, Scripture is confusing on this. Our readings today say that Moses implored the Lord, and then because of that the Lord changed his mind about what he was going to do to the turncoat Hebrews. God … changed his mind! He did it too when Abraham bargained him down, to 10 righteous citizens, to temper God’s stated plan to destroy Sodom. That changing your mind must mean that petition matters. But Jesus makes it sound like we don’t ever have to ask for anything, strictly speaking. We can be the lilies of the field, who toil not, neither do they spin. We can take no thought of the morrow, and head into our days with one tunic and empty purses. And Paul says not to worry about anything, too … but then he says also to let your requests be made known to God.
And so we’ve got this situation, evidently, where God knows what we need, and we shouldn’t worry, but he also might not give us things we need until he hears us ask. In James 4, to make matters more confusing still, we hear, ‘You don’t have what you want because you don’t ask – or if you do ask, you ask for the wrong reasons.’
So asking God for things doesn’t seem straightforward. Or anyway, asking God for things isn’t quite like the way we’re used to asking for things from each other.
Maybe God’s rules are different. Are we supposed to pray in petition? Under all circumstances? Are there times we’re not supposed to? And when we do, how do we ask? Don’t these various lines of Scripture conflict a bit? You’d think they’d be more coherent than they appear to be.
Hmmm …
Well, they actually do make sense if we consider how Jesus himself handled prayer of petition.
For he did indeed ask his Father for things, all the time. In public, he did this before he chose his 12 Apostles, he did it before he was baptized, he did it before he walked on water one of those times. He prayed before he raised Lazarus. He prayed in Gethsemane, to ask that he not be crucified, and also that his followers be protected and united whatever happened. And he prayed that the men who crucified him be forgiven.
He prayed in private, too. We would love to know more about how he did this, procedurally, so that we could do the same. But all evidence is that when Jesus prayed, and not for us to hear, he tended not to use words. He told us, God knows what you want, so don’t babble about it. When he was seen to do his praying, he was off by himself, and it was silent. (That was rare in the Roman world; even reading was normally done out loud.) When he was put on the spot by a disciple for a form of out-loud words to pray, he had to improvise something (that we still recite, like a formula), but he then spent a loooong time unpacking it, in language that makes clear that your inner disposition is what counts in prayer. And that the fact of your praying is more important than words you might use. That’s why in Franciscan life, we spend a lot of time – twice a day, in fact – practising contemplative prayer. The point is exactly to pray without words, or even thoughts. Thomas Merton, who loved jazz, used to sit in New York clubs with his friend, listening, and say, ‘Now, THAT’s prayer’. Deep, experiential prayer is an orienting thing, and critically, we don’t do the orienting ourselves.
I suggest that this is what Jesus did. I suggest that something like this is what he meant by ‘prayer’. It was about communion before it was about asking. It was prayer as way of being, more than a listing of requests. He did pray for things. But in his praying, it seems to me, before he asked anything he did his best to elide with whatever the will of his Father was.
I think this is the key to understanding intercessory prayer, the prayer that surfaces in our first two readings today. I think we’re asked to consider what ‘praying for things’ means.
On the face of it, it seems clear that we are allowed, and enjoined, to ask, to seek, to knock. That’s a good and right thing to do. And sometimes we get things after prayer, sure enough. (Other times, thank goodness, we don’t.) You may be interested to know that the National Institutes of Health database has studies on whether praying and desired medical outcomes are statistically related. Not surprisingly to us, they are related, but the authors of these various studies equivocate a bit. Because they find the results complicated. Because of course they do.
The fact is, intercessory prayer, or prayer of petition, doesn’t make sense as a simple request for stuff. Watching how Jesus prayed makes it clear that prayer in general couldn’t have been given to us so that we could talk God into things. That’s not necessary. (I doubt very much that with Moses or Abraham God actually changed his mind.) God wants to give us things, and God knows what’s right for us to have. Prayer of petition was actually given to us to align ourselves with God. Why? Because then we’ll want what God wants for us. That’s the point of our very redemption, after all. It’s in that spirit that ‘You don’t have because you don’t ask, or you ask for the wrong reasons’ makes sense. God’s not that vending machine – and I doubt there’s anyone in this room who thinks he is – into which you put prayer quarters until you get what you want.
Prayer in the manner of Jesus, and in the presence of Jesus, is a symbiosis, I guess you’d say. Praying, for real and not by formula, forms a living relationship with God. That is what it’s really for. In prayer we become the branches to the vine. We merge. I tell my students that the very Covenant our species made with God, aeons ago, is actually not what it sounds like. It is not, at least the way Jesus explained it, a reciprocal contract, in which we do or say righteous things, and then God rewards us. It’s not that. Jesus said, I am the Covenant. Be in me, and I in you.
And that’s why he talked about asking-prayer the way he did. It is a good thing to do. He did it himself. But why? Not so much because it gets us things, but because it brings us into union with God. Then we’re praying for the right things, and we’re looking to our Maker for direction as much as sustinence. It’s a kind of rehearsal, I guess you’d say. Or maybe prayer is an exercise. Its true function is to train us. And like training for anything, we need to do it a lot … unceasingly, as Paul and Timothy put it – not because it impresses God, or wears him out, or catches him in contractual debt to us, but because it makes us, God’s children, more like God. It isn’t that we’re reminding God of what we want … it’s that we’re coming to God, again and again, about the things we want, or think we want. We imagine that we’re discussing our desires with him; we’re actually discussing desire itself. That ‘again’ part is what’s important. Asking for things in prayer, receptive prayer, healthy, right-oriented prayer, God-led prayer, and I betcha this is what Philip would say, isn’t as much about asking and getting from God as it is growing and communing with our always-giving God.