July 25, 2010
Genesis 18:20-32
Psalm 138
Colossians 2:12-14
Luke 11:1-13
The Human Experience Leading to God: Life Giver
Some years ago now I was visiting my brother and his family in San Jose, California. One evening we went for a sunset drive through the Santa Anna Mountains. By the time we arrived home, my 5 year-old nephew Michael had fallen sound asleep in his car seat. After I got out of the van, I reached into the back seat, scooped Michael up in my arms and then – always compulsively tidy – I tried to close the sliding door of the van with my shoulder and hip. Have you ever tried that? It didn’t work very well. The jostling and door slam woke Michael.
He looked up into my eyes, smiled and said, “I love you Uncle Mike.” Then he promptly nodded-off back to sleep.
In that moment, I felt a profound sense of joy, and wonder, and a deep ‘fire in the guts’ love for that little boy. In that moment, no need of Michael’s was too great that I wouldn’t have given up everything I had to give him the very best. In that moment, I would have laid the world at Michael’s feet if I could. Today, Michael is 6’3” and weighs 225 pounds. Still, whenever I see him, I remember that sleepy little boy and his “I love you Uncle Mike,” and I feel just the same about him now as I did then.
This experience is the very closest I have ever come to what it must be like to be life giver. I am told there’s no ecstasy quite like the ecstasy of a mother’s beholding for the first time her newborn son. I am told there’s no awe quite like the awe a father feels seeing his own hands and feet, and his wife’s eyes, in his newborn daughter. There is no experience of love, of commitment, of willingness to sacrifice, of wishing the very best for someone quite like that of being life giver. What is your experience of being life giver?
I share my experience of being life giver and ask you to reflect on yours because our experience of being life giver is critical to our grasping who God is for us and central to our growing in true prayer.
In the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus offers The Lord’s Prayer Jesus is the new Moses teaching from the mountaintop. In the Gospel of Luke, today’s text, the scene is different: it’s one of personal intimacy. The disciples are watching Jesus pray and there’s something in the way he prays that is unique for them, new, profoundly attractive ... and they long for it. So they ask, “Lord, teach us to pray ...”
With what would have been a stunning directness and amazing simplicity, Jesus instantly responds: When you pray, say:
ABBA, Daddy,
Holy is your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us today, once and for all, the bread for our subsistence.
Forgive our sin so we can forgive those who sin against us.
Do not bring us to the test.
Then after encouraging the disciples to be shamelessly persistent and absolutely trusting in prayer, Jesus invites them – and us – to ponder the fundamental human experience that teaches us who our God is for us and the attitude and disposition that must underlie for us true prayer:
What father among you would hand his son a snake
when he asks for a fish,
Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg?
If you then, who are wicked,
know how to give good gifts to your children,
how much more will the Father in heaven
give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.
In a surprise turn, to understand God and prayer Jesus asks us to look not at our human experience of having a father, to look not at our human experience of being a son or a daughter. Rather, if we would understand who God is for us and what true prayer is, Jesus asks us to look at our human experience of being father or mother, being life giver.
Jesus teaches us here in the Gospel of Luke that if we can reach down into our own experience of being life giver and understand it, then we can come to grasp who God is as life giver – our Daddy God who feels a profound sense of joy and wonder, and a deep “fire in the guts” love for us; our Daddy God, who believes that no need of ours is so great that he wouldn’t give up everything to give us the very best – and has in Jesus Christ; our Daddy God, who would lay the world at our feet – and has in Jesus Christ. If we know our own experience of being life giver, Jesus teaches us, then we can come to know God as God is for us and we can come to true prayer as brothers and sisters of Jesus.
In the second reading, Paul proclaims who God is for us. Even when we were dead in sin God forgave us, Paul writes. God canceled our IOU to Death, snatched it up and nailed it to the cross. Even in the face of our sin God is life giver, Paul proclaims.
In the first reading, Abraham knows himself as life giver and he knows God as life giver. Therefore, Abraham’s prayer is stunningly direct, amazingly simple and completely trusting. It is profoundly intimate, shamelessly persistent and, even as it makes demands, it is playful and joyous. And this is exactly the true prayer Jesus calls us to in the Lord’s Prayer.
My prayer for each and every one of us today is that we will reflect deeply and long on our experience of being life giver. I pray as well that we will open the eyes of our minds and hearts to our life giver, Daddy God who feels a profound sense of joy and wonder, and a deep ‘fire in the guts’ love for us; who is so committed to fulfilling our need that he has given up everything in Jesus Christ to give us the very best; who believes in us so deeply that he lays the world and eternity at our feet, and does so each and every day of our lives. For if we can see God the life giver as God is for us, and our life giving selves as our life giver God sees us, then perhaps we can dare to pray with the directness, simplicity and trust, with the intimacy, shameless persistence, wonder and joy to which Jesus calls us:
ABBA, Daddy,
Holy is your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us today, once and for all, the bread for our subsistence.
Forgive our sin so we can forgive those who sin against us.
Do not bring us to the test.
Fr. Michael Papesh