The Sheer Shamelessness of Prayer (July 27)

Reading, Luke 11:1-13
Image, Mario Sironi, Untitled (Man opening door), 1932
 
I wonder if you can recall a prayer you were taught? Perhaps in church, or as a child, or elsewhere? I can recall the start of the bedtime time prayer I was taught by my parents as a child. Dear God, please surround this house, my dreams, and my thoughts – an understandable beginning for a child nervous of bad dreams or the dark, then it continued, and please help the people in Third World countries and the poor to get the things that they need. An appropriate move, from ourselves to the world… but over time, I can remember adding my own bit that came after this… and please help me to get the things that I want. Child Liam had aspirations of his own alright. He had prayed for the poor to get the things they needed, but then didn’t have many material needs himself… but there were things I wanted – a new cricket bat, for instance – and why shouldn’t God help me get that. You can see the need to be taught to pray, left to our own devices, it can take some squirrely twists.  
 
We spoke a couple of weeks ago, in reference to the parable of the Good Samaritan, that the characters we relate to in stories of the Bible can shift with time. As our own experiences accumulate, we come to have new things in common with the experiences of others in the story. This week, in coming to this very familiar passage, I had my own experience of new found identification.
 
Jesus, in order to illustrate his point on the willingness of God to hear and respond to our prayers, tells this little parable.
Let’s say one of you has a friend and comes to him in the middle of the night and says to him, ‘My friend, lend me three loaves, since a friend of mine has dropped in on me after a journey, and I don’t have anything to put on the table for him.’ So the other answers from inside by saying, ‘Don’t bother me! My door is locked already, and my children are in bed with me. I can’t get up and give you anything.'*
In past readings, I thought of the man in bed lacked hospitality; being either too lazy or committed to his cosiness to respond to the need of a neighbour. Reading it this time I have newfound sympathy for the man in bed. I very much now identify with the freezing terror that strikes a parent when any loud noise risks waking children only recently gone to sleep, I know viscerally the tension that comes over in the body when any wrong move could wake those dozing next to you. I can feel the stress of seeing sleeping bodies between you and the edge of the bed and know that the list of things able to motivate me to crawl delicately over a sleeping kid is infinitesimal.
 
And yet, to the chagrin of the man in the bed, Jesus details how, the sheer shamelessness of the one knocking overcomes all fear and bargaining and forces the man inside to climb over children and out of bed, to give his neighbour everything he needs. And this, Jesus explains is the point. That if the motivation we assign to a new parent scared to wake their child is not enough to refuse a persistent request, how much more likely and gladly would God give the Holy Spirit to those who ask.
 
I used the phrase sheer shamelessness before. This comes from Sarah Rudden’s translation of the passage, and I like it because “persistence” feels a little too neutral to describe the actions of the knocking neighbour. Because there is a kind of brazenness, a distinct lack of good sense or respectability in hearing someone say, I can’t help you as I am in bed with my children and then deciding, you know that this situation calls for, louder knocking!
 
But sheer shamelessness is appropriate not only in discussing the behaviour but also in emphasising what Jesus is teaching us about prayer. That is to say that Jesus is instructing those in his care to pray to God with shamelessness. Jesus has just taught his followers to pray Our Father, that is to say, to pray for God with the boldness, intimacy, and directness of children speaking to a parent, to pray as those who are not only Christ’s followers, but as his siblings (co-heirs as Paul will later write). And having taught this posture of prayer, Jesus encourages us to pray not with timidity, not with respectability, not with the genteel politeness properly befitting a neighbour knocking on a door at night, but with the sheer shamelessness of one who needs not even consider the possibility of being turned away. Pray, Jesus says, in the spirit of a child who barges into their parent’s room at any hour of the night and hops up on the bed. Be shameless in your boldness and call out to the God of the universe as you would a loving parent.
 
Now readers of this passage have often got caught up on the line, For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. It’s a passage that can cause particular trouble and pain for anyone who carries the burden of unanswered prayer (no less cause havoc to a child thinking God should give him everything he wants). Does it not seem, that if the man would get out of bed to share some bread, God should not respond to our cries for healing, restoration, peace, and change? But the end of the passage makes clear what it is Jesus is referring to as the proper object of our asking, seeking, and knocking. If you are willing to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.
 
In teaching his followers to pray, Jesus instructs us to take up the boldness of beloved children of a trusted and generous parent and ask for the Holy Spirit to be poured out upon us. With the Spirit we receive the Spirit’s gifts, with the Spirit’s gifts we can bear the Spirit’s fruit, with the Spirit’s fruit we are prepared to hallow the name of God and seek first the kingdom of God, we are able to forgive sins and experience the forgiveness of God, we are able to persevere through trial and serve our neighbours in their own.
 
So friends, embrace the sheer shamelessness of those unconcerned with waking children, and pray with the boldness of beloved children of the Father and siblings of Christ, pray as those to whom the Spirit and her gifts shall never be withheld. In this posture we pray, and in this power we walk. Thanks be to God.   

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* The Gospels, a new translation by Sarah Rudden (Modern Library, 2021).