Pray without Ceasing: Yes even through doubt

In our reading from Luke this morning we hear Jesus teach his disciples to pray what becomes the Lord’s prayer: Our father who is in heaven, holy is your name, your kingdom has come to us in Jesus, so that by your will, the evil of this world is not the fate we ultimately receive (on earth as it is in heaven). Give us daily food: the faith, the hope, and the love to persevere through the difficult situations and relationships of this life, forgive us when we fail to follow your ways and strengthen us to forgive those who betray and hurt us, do not allow us to succumb to our own temptations when we’re angry, sad, afraid, and lose hope that you’re there at all, deliver us from death so that we might see this broken world through your love, and be girded with the armour of faith to live out Jesus’s life as a sign of the promise God has in store to bring all of us to him. 

Jesus teaches us to pray this prayer because he knows that we struggle with things like fear, sadness, despair, anger, arrogance, and complacency. So he tells us to be persistent when we aren’t getting the answer to our prayers that we want, when we want them. Picking up on this, St. Paul will say that we are to pray without ceasing, just as Jesus prayed that we might all be made one family in him, a prayer that was not and is still not answered 2000+ years after his death; pray without ceasing until God brings all things to completion in him. 

I don’t know about you, but my greatest doubt about God’s existence actually comes from unanswered prayer to end other’s sufferings. I have friends who prayed for years, fervently, for relief from suffering with brutal, debilitating diseases with seemingly no relief. I have prayed for my whole life that people would stop eating animals who are sentient and have the capacity to experience pain and suffering and the desire to live and the conscious awareness of young children, yet people still eat animals. Many of you I know have prayed for an end to your loved one’s suffering, for their healing, for an end to violent war, for an end to hunger.

If God allows so much evil in the world, and so much heartache in my own life, why would I trust him and keep seeking, asking and knocking? I’ll tell you why I continue to pray; why I continue to minister the Gospel. Because experience has taught me that I see everything only through a glass darkly. That is - as I read Scripture again and again while reading history and experience things in my own life, I realize that the things I think should happen, and when they should happen, and how they should happen, could never produce my actual desired outcome. My engineering of situations - and everyone’s engineering of situations - simply never works the way we hoped it would because we are not all good, all powerful, all seeing, all knowing, and we cannot see how all the threads of life fit together.  

So I continue to pray and minister because over my time in following Jesus, I have seen him work in situations and with people, in ways that I nor anyone I know, could have engineered. The outcome is astonishing; but sometimes not comfortable. I am reminded of his words: “My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” 

God doesn’t ask us for blind faith. He doesn’t ask us to be quiet or satisfied in the face of violence, hatred, suffering, poverty, abuse, or illness. He asks us to seek him, to follow Jesus, to stop imagining that our thoughts and the emotions that flow from them, and the actions that we take as a result, are all the world really consists of. To believe that is to get stuck in the flesh, as Paul calls sin, the flesh that leads us to fall into our own worst traits of coping. Persist in prayer, seek, follow so that we do not lose the threads of evidence God is drawing together pointing us to him, helping us to act not from the flesh, but from faith, not from mere duty, but out of desire sustained by God’s love for us which cannot end. 

Our prayers are not about fixing the world because God did not design it well enough. They’re not about changing God because he is imperfect. He is after all, the one who created the world and will bring all things to consummation in himself. Our prayers are about drawing us into God’s own life of healing, tending, challenging, growing, and redeeming. For it’s only in that participation in God’s own life that we can catch glimpses of the world as God intended, a world where hope is met by all consuming love that can sustain us and press us to love others as we have been loved, to forgive as we have been forgiven, even when all feels lost. AMEN