Sermon preached by the Reverend Doctor Susan Kraus

St. Paul’s on the Green, Norwalk, Connecticut

9^th Sunday after Pentecost - July 29, 2007

Come, Holy Spirit, our souls inspire. In the name of Jesus. Amen.

When I attend the Sunday morning service, I often feel frustrated because the gospel readings are so short. I want to hear more! Sometimes I want to know what happened before the day’s passage. Sometimes I want to know what happened next. We who attend the Episcopal Church hear the gospel story chopped into small bits when we listen from Sunday to Sunday.

So one thing I want to recommend to you, as I have before, is reading the gospels at home in large sections. In fact, try reading an entire gospel – Matthew, Mark, or Luke. I remember one day several years ago when I was home alone. I sat down and read through the whole book of Mark, aloud, in one sitting. It was an amazing experience, and I commend it to you, perhaps as a vacation activity for your spiritual renewal and growth.

But back to our Sunday services. I must say that when I am asked to preach, I have a totally different response to the length of the gospel readings! Suddenly I see how even a short passage like today’s includes far too much to preach about! I calculated that the Lord’s Prayer is only 8 percent of today’s reading! How much has been written about this prayer? How many people have relied on it, grown in faith fed by it? How much could each of us talk about what it means to us? Each phrase of this prayer could be the subject of a sermon!

I want to speak to you about what Jesus says more generally about prayer and God’s response to our prayer. First of all, through the story of the man who finally gets out of bed to give his friend what he needs, Jesus suggests that we need to be persistent in our prayer. Like Abraham in the passage from Genesis – don’t give up when you have something to work out with God. Keep speaking up and God will listen!          

Luke gives us these familiar words of Jesus: “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

Jesus emphasizes this message by contrasting human parents with our heavenly Father. Even most “evil” human beings give their children what they ask for when they ask for what they need to nourish them. “Is there any among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake … or for an egg, will give a scorpion?” We human beings, imperfect as we are, know how to give good gifts to our children. So how much more will God the Creator, the perfect Parent, if you will, give what is good to God’s children when they ask?

This is a comforting passage – comforting because of its assurance that God will provide for us better than any parent. Perhaps especially comforting to those of us whose parents are no longer alive or whose parents sometimes gave us a scorpion when we asked for an egg.

It is comforting, but also troubling. Why do our prayers for what we need and what others need – no matter how persistent we are – sometimes go unanswered? Why do we pray for the healing of someone we love and she becomes more ill? Why do we ask God to give us strength, but we feel like we are crumbling in our weakness? Why do we pray to be delivered from an addiction or a besetting sin and God doesn’t seem to help? Why do the poor pray for food and shelter and yet go hungry and homeless? Why does our heavenly Father, our good and loving parent, fail to give us what we need when we ask? Is Jesus lying to us about God’s response to our prayer?

I don’t think so. I think the key is in the final words of our passage – “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” Ask for the Holy Spirit, search for the Holy Spirit, and your prayers will be answered.

Who is the Holy Spirit? We are in the heart of the Trinity now – one God, three Persons. God the Creator or Father, God the Son – incarnate in Jesus – and the Holy Spirit – the eternal, self-giving love of God poured out and received between the Father and the Son and given to the church and to all who seek God with all their hearts and minds and souls.

The Holy Spirit is the gift of the Risen Lord, the “power from on high” (Luke 24:49) given so that we might be the church, the body of Christ in the world. The Holy Spirit prays in us and gives us gifts more valuable than anything we know to ask for.

So Jesus promises us that if we ask, if we search, if we knock, God will listen and give us the Holy Spirit. We may have to ask over and over again, the search may be long and hard, our hands may become raw with knocking on the door, but God will give us the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit will enable us to truly pray those familiar words Jesus taught us his disciples and us – to revere God above all; to will what God wills, so that we may do our part in bringing about God’s kingdom on earth; to want nothing more than what we need each day, trusting in God’s provision; to forgive those who have sinned against us; to know that we must rely on God and not ourselves to resist temptation and to be delivered from evil. The Holy Spirit will do all this and more.

The Holy Spirit, if you ask, will transform you with the fire of God’s love, lead you on a path of love and giving that will bring you closer to Christ, closer to the human beings with whom you share life, closer to those who have gone to God already, closer to the infinite compassion at the heart of our triune God. The Holy Spirit will prepare you to receive the love of God in Christ which we are made to receive.

Here at St. Paul’s we offer everyone a radical welcome to this church community and to the holy table. This welcome is only a glimpse, a tiny foretaste of the radical welcome Jesus offers us. In the words of Jesus found in the gospel of John (14:2-3):

“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”

Take courage, good people, and pray for the Holy Spirit and for the transformation the Holy Spirit will work in you and in me, so that when Jesus welcomes us into the dwelling place he has prepared for us, into his everlasting company, we may enter joyfully. Amen.