The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
July 29, 2007

Proper 12 – C
Genesis 18:20-33
Colossians 2:6-15
Luke 11:1-13

In one place along the road to Jerusalem Jesus stops to pray, and the disciples ask him if he will teach them to pray. Jesus tells them to pray like this: “Father, hallowed be your name.” And then he tells this weird story about the man who knocks on his friend’s window at midnight to ask for some bread.

Many translations of the Bible call this story “The Importunate Friend at Midnight,” because the Revised Standard Version, for example, says that “although [the man who is asleep] will not get up and give [his friend] anything because he is his friend, yet because of his friend’s importunity, he will rise and give him whatever he needs.”

Right there, most of us have dropped out, because no one except Bible translators has ever heard of the word “importunity”! I, at least, have never heard any of you use it in ordinary conversation around here, nor have I heard it used anywhere except in some translations of this story, so it’s not a word that means anything to me.

And there must be some translators who agree with me, because some have begun to translate the word as “persistence,” as in the New Jerusalem Bible, and in the Revised English Bible from which the story was just read: “I tell you that even if the man will not get up and provide for him out of friendship, his very persistence will make the man get up and give him all he needs.”

But there’s still something fishy here, because this “persistence” translation makes it sound as if all we need to do is nag God enough and God will at some point get tired of our nagging and give us anything and everything we ask for. But that can’t be what Jesus means, especially if it is translated as “he will give us all we want,” as some translations have it, because all we have to do to prove that false is talk to the mother who prayed for months at her daughter’s bedside, but whose little girl died anyway.

Or, to realize that persistence is not what Jesus had in mind in the story, consider Jesus himself. No one was more persistent in prayer than Jesus, and yet even he did not receive what he asked for in his prayer just before his death: “Father, if it’s all the same with you, I’d just as soon not die.” But he did die.

So what are we to make of this Gospel reading this morning? Well, for me, in this lesson Jesus teaches us two things; he teaches us how to pray and he teaches why we need to pray.

This is how to pray, he says: Begin by saying, “Our Father....” This will remind you that we are all in this experience we call life together, all the children of one Father. Ask God for what you need – “Give us each day our daily bread.” This will remind you that all life is gift, that nothing, not even life itself, is yours by right. Ask God to forgive you your debts the way you forgive those who are in debt to you. This will remind you that we are all in relationship with each other as brothers and sisters, responsible for one another, and that everything else about prayer and life itself flows from this. Finally, ask that you not be brought to “the time of trial,” that God will grant you the grace not to be put to the test where you might presume to act as if your life is anything other than a gift from God.

Then Jesus adds his story in which he teaches us why we need to pray. And to understand how Jesus’ story does this, it is helpful to consider the meanings of two of the Greek words Luke used to tell the story originally. The first is the word we’ve already talked about, the word that has traditionally been translated into English as “importunity” and, more recently, as “persistence.” The word is anaideian. And what it means – get this now! – is shamelessness. The New English Bible has picked up on this and now has Jesus saying that even if the man in bed will not provide for his friend out of friendship, “the very shamelessness of the request will make him get up and give him all he needs.”

Hang on to that a moment, while we consider the other important Greek word in the story. This second word is anastas. When the man in bed says he is not able to get up, in Luke’s Greek he says, “I am not able to rise (anastas).” And anastas is from anistemi, which is the word most often used in the New Testament to mean resurrection.

Now, with the meanings of these two words in mind, let’s look at the story more closely. Suppose one of you has a friend, Jesus begins. You go to your friend’s house in the middle of the night, and you bang on his window and say, “Friend, I have a guest from out of town who has just arrived at my house, and I don’t have anything to offer him to eat. So you get up and give me something from your pantry.”

His friend, of course, is sound asleep, so we’re not surprised when he says, “Beat it! Go away! Don’t bother me. Go down to Safeway. My door is locked. I am sound asleep, and my children are asleep with me. I am not able to rise and give you what you ask.”

And then Jesus says, “I tell you the truth, even if he will not rise to provide out of friendship for the man who is banging on his window, the very shamelessness of his friend’s request will make him rise to give him all he needs.” (NEB)

Consider, too, the context. When this story comes up in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is on the road, on his way to Jerusalem to die. And he knows he is going to die. And, as Capon says, the man in bed in Jesus’ story, who in the parable is a stand-in for God, is a person who is deep into that experience – sleep – that is for us human beings the closest we come to death while we are alive. Sleep, deep midnight sleep, the very image of the darkness of the grave, is like death. It is that “radically uncontrollable, lost state in which all reasonable responses to life are suspended,” Capon adds. (The Parables of Grace, p. 71)

This, then, is the situation: Jesus is traveling the road with the awareness of his anticipated death on his heart while teaching the disciples how to pray. He then adds a story about why we need to pray, a story about a man who is dead to the world in the middle of the night when a friend shamelessly knocks on his door to ask a favor. The friend, as Capon puts it, “break(s) in upon this parabolic death of God with a veritable battering ram of reasonable requests”: I need three loaves of bread. I need them because I need to feed a hungry guest. And I couldn’t have come earlier, before you went to sleep, friend, because my guest just arrived, and I didn’t know he was coming. I would, of course, have gotten something from my own pantry, but yesterday wasn’t my shopping day, so I don’t have any food in the house. And although Safeway is open at this time of night, I don’t have any gas in my car, because I didn’t stop to get any yesterday, and I ran out of gas in front of my house just as I got home. So I can’t go to Safeway. And yes, I should have planned ahead, but I didn’t. You, the Sleeper, are my only hope!

It’s a shameless thing to do! If you’re a respectable person, you’d be ashamed to go over to your neighbor’s house in the middle of the night to ask for such things, because, if you should, it will show that you are a thoughtless, helpless beggar who can’t take care of your own affairs. The only people who would behave like that are shameless people, desperate people.

And that, as Capon says, is the point of Jesus’ story. What God will not do because of the reasonableness or logic of our requests or explanations, God will do because of the shamelessness of it all, because of the desperation of our situation. God will rise from his own death to raise us from our deaths, because, in our mortality, we are not only shameless, but helpless.

Notice in the story that the man asleep in bed does not give any credit at all to all his friend’s logical justifications. In response to all that, the man says, “Go away! I’m asleep, dead to the world!” In this story, God does not rise to our help simply because we go on repeating our same arguments or reasons or justifications for not doing what we are able to do on our own. Our persistence is not the issue.

As I said earlier, no one was more persistent in prayer than Jesus, and yet not even Jesus’ last prayer was answered the way Jesus wanted it: “Father, I’d just as soon not die.” But he did die. And then, and only then, did God stir himself from his divine rest to raise Jesus to life. Because the only people God can raise from the dead are dead people, those without any resources of their own.

The parable of “The Shameless Friend at Midnight” is, to me, Jesus’ version of Abraham Lincoln’s account of his awareness of his desperate situation during the Civil War, his awareness that only with the help of the Almighty could the nation be saved: “I have been driven many times to my knees,” he said, “by the overwhelming conviction that I had nowhere else to go.”

What must we do to be saved? That is the question the lawyer asked Jesus two weeks ago, and it is the question we ask of Jesus today. What must we do?

Nothing. There’s nothing we can do, except forgive those who have wronged us so that God can forgive us in the same way. Not even Jesus, at Gethsemane, could do anything other than that, so he prayed the way he taught others to pray: “Father, forgive them, for they don’t know what they do.” Remember that Jesus did not raise himself. Jesus was raised by his Father. And the only people God can raise from the dead are dead people, people without resources of their own, shameless people, hopeless people, who have nothing but the forgiveness of others to offer to the One whose Name is holy.

This is why the only petition in the Lord’s Prayer that speaks at all about what we human beings can do or should do is the petition that asks God to forgive us our sins in the same way we have forgiven those who have sinned against us. “Father, cancel our debts in the same way that we cancel the debts of those who have wronged us.” Forgiveness – that is the one thing that is within our power to do that is worthy of imitation and that has any connection at all to our salvation!

And what is it to forgive? What is it to cancel a debt? It is, in effect, to die, to die to all that is reasonable and just, to give up what you have a right to according to logic and justice. Forgiveness, like sleep, is to forfeit one’s control. It is to die to self. It is shameless behavior, unrespectable behavior, because all dignity and control and self-justification are put aside and are, in fact, beside the point.

This is why St. Paul says, “It is by grace that you have been saved, through faith, not by anything of your own, but by a gift from God, not by anything that you have done, so that no one can claim credit. We are God’s work of art....” All life is gift. Everything is gift. (Ephesians 2:8-9)

And, again, from today’s epistle: “You have died, and you have been buried with Christ by your baptism. And by your baptism, too, you have been raised up with him through your belief in the power of God, who raised Christ from the dead. You were dead, but he has brought you to life with him, and he has forgiven us every one of our sins. Christ has wiped out the record of our debt, which stood against us. He has destroyed it by nailing it to the Cross.”

What must you do, what can you do, to be saved? Nothing. It has been done for you by the One who died for you. Everything is gift. We are saved by grace, not by anything we in our shameless hopelessness must do, or have done, or can do, lest any of us should boast.

This is the Gospel news! And it has been the Gospel news forever, not just since Jesus. Look for a moment at Abraham. “Lord,” Abraham said, ”I know that I am nothing but dust and ashes, a pitiful creature, and I know that what I’m about to ask of You whose Name is holy is shameless, totally unreasonable, because the folks in Sodom and Gomorrah are no more than I am, a sinful, shameless, hopeless lot. But I’m going to presume to ask anyway. Suppose, Lord, that there are fifty righteous people living in the city, fifty upright people who do what is right. Would you put the upright to death together with the shameless and sinful? Wouldn’t you spare the city for the sake of fifty righteous people?” And the Lord says, “Yes, if there are fifty righteous people in Sodom, I will spare the city for their sake.”

“But what if there are not quite fifty, Lord, but only forty-five?” Abraham shamelessly adds. And the Lord says, “For forty-five righteous people I would spare the city.”

And Abraham keeps raising the ante, shamelessly – from forty-five to forty, and then thirty, and then twenty, and finally to ten – because Abraham knows that if there are any righteous people in Sodom, there aren’t many, and there probably aren’t any. So “what if there are only ten righteous people in the city?” Abraham persists. And the Lord says, “For the sake of ten I would spare the city.”

What Abraham sees in his hopelessness – in his shameless wheeling and dealing with God when he knocks on God’s window in the middle of the night at a time that is the very image of the grave – is that God is far ahead of Abraham in forgiveness and mercy and grace. Abraham loses his courage at ten, but if he had pushed his efforts a little further, he would have found that God, in fact, was prepared to spare not only the city of Sodom, but the entire world, for the sake of just one righteous person, even if God himself had to rise from his divine rest to send that One from heaven for the sake of the world, and even if the only way it could have been done was for that One to die and be raised, so that we, the shameless and the unrighteous, the dead, those without resources of our own, might be raised with him.

When the great Rabbi Israel Baal Shem-Tov saw that misfortune was threatening his people, it was his custom to go into a certain part of the forest to meditate. And there, in that place, he would light a fire and say a prayer, and a miracle would occur, and the misfortune would be averted.

Later, when his disciple, the celebrated Rabbi Magid of Mezritch, had occasion, for the same reason, to say the same prayer, he would go to the same place in the forest and say, “Master of the Universe, it is a dark time for your people, and I do not know how to light the fire. But I am still able to say the prayer.” And again, a miracle would occur, and the people would be spared.

Still later, Rabbi Moshe-Leib of Sasov, in order to save the people in his day, would go into the forest and say, “Lord, it is a dark time for your people, and I do not know how to light the fire, and I do not know the prayer. But I know the place, and this must be sufficient.” And once again, a miracle. And the people were spared.

Then it fell to Rabbi Israel of Rizhen to meet with God to overcome misfortune for his people. Sitting in his armchair, his head in his hands, Rabbi Israel of Rizhen said, “Master of the Universe, it is a dark time for your people. I am unable to light the fire, and I do not know the prayer, and I cannot even find the place in the forest. All I can do is tell the story, and it must be sufficient.” And it was.

And the story is that Christ, though he was himself in the form of God, did not count equality with God something to be grasped, but for our sake he took the form of a slave, and became as we are. He became in every way like us, and for our sake, and out of love for us in the darkness of our world, he became even humbler yet, even to accepting death, even death on a Cross. And for this shamelessness, God raised him on high, that we might be raised with him.

And that must be sufficient.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.