I have never been comfortable with the notion that God grants favors based on the persistence of my praying. In the cardiac intensive care unit at Children’s Hospital, I was by the bed bedside of a young child recovering from open heart surgery the day before. Surrounded by blinking monitoring devices, oxygen tanks, IVs, connected by tubes and wires, she was also surrounded by the love of her big caring family: parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, taking turns by her bedside and praying constantly, not only when a minister visited and asked everyone to stand around her bed holding hands while praying, but individually, I am sure, silently. “Dear God, make her well.”

In that room was another child, an infant, born prematurely, a tiny little thing. She was also connected by wires and tubes to a battery of monitors and machines providing nutrients and oxygen. I never saw anyone visit her. I asked and was told that no, she had no visitors. I concluded that she was probably abandoned, that no one even knew she was alive and no one knew she was here, except the wonderful nurses and hospital staff caring for her. I cannot bring myself to believe that God cares less, is less present to her, surrounds her with less healing love because no one is praying for her. I remind myself that one of our most precious beliefs is that she is written on the hand of God, too. She too is unforgettable. And it is that baby I think about when, during the Sacrament of Baptism, we pray for the baptized children, their parents and all the children of our congregation and community.

And further on in the sermon –

And so, of course, we ask God to bless and keep our dear ones and to be a healing presence, a comfort, a giver of strength and courage for friends in the hospital, for families grieving the loss of a dear one, for young men and women of our armed forces in harm’s way, and a loving presence for children everywhere. And we pray for ourselves, for the resources and strength and courage to be the people God created us to be.

We ask, search, and knock at heaven’s door all our lives, asking not so much for things, but for some sign that God is there, that, in our heart of hearts, God knows we are here, and that our lives make some kind of final sense because God does provide what we most desperately need—namely God’s own presence, God’s own love.

That is what is so powerfully profound about what Jesus taught his disciples that day. We share with all religions the idea of a God who creates, a God who is holy and just and perfect. The radical heart of the faith Jesus taught is that God is personal, that God has a heart, that the almighty Lord of the universe may be addressed intimately as Jesus did when he taught his disciples to pray: not Almighty, Omnipotent, Mysterious God, but “Our Father,” using a startlingly intimate word—Abba—a word little children use to address their father. The most radical idea I can think of is that the Creator of all is affected by what happens to me, that God finally is not an abstract philosophic concept but a loving parent, the Father and Mother who loves each of us, as Augustine once said, as if there were only one of us to love. That is the most profound and the best idea in the world. A God who knows us and who, when we ask and seek and knock, comes to us and opens to us.

John M. Buchanan

April 3, 2011

Full Sermon

https://www.fourthchurch.org/sermons/2011/040311.html

Link to Substack (if you prefer rhat platform)

https://open.substack.com/pub/holdtothegood/p/a-full-and-faithful-life-part-4-asking?r=5kfndf&utm_medium=ios