And [Jesus] said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything out of friendship, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs." (Luke 11:5-8)
You already know the old joke, I'd bet: "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" Practice, practice, practice.
That tired punch-line makes a point, though. For anybody to get better at playing their instrument of choice, from piano to piccolo, you need more than just a single look at the sheet music. Sure, some folks have a natural talent for sight-reading--they can look at notes on a page which they've never seen before and hammer out a pretty decent rendition of whatever the music is. But even those with such innate talent will tell you that you get better at playing this particular piece of music the more you practice it. That's because music is more than simply getting 100% of the notes played as written on the page--music involves interpretation, the shaping of the passage with louds and softs, with pauses and rushes, and with almost imperceptible nuances of expression that make a melody come alive. You only come to see those and feel where they need to be brought out by spending time with the music.
In other words, for a musician, practice comes to be about more than "getting the notes right." There comes a point when it is about the experience of letting the music come to life--where you almost have an unspoken conversation with the composer, even if the hand that first wrote the music has been dead for centuries. You get these "Aha!" moments where you see what clever or beautiful moves the composer made--inverting a melody here, suggesting a counterpoint there, weaving in a theme from back in the first movement, and such--and sometimes those only occur to you after your fiftieth time playing through the score. That is to say, sometimes, your understanding of what you are playing really only emerges after you have spent a certain amount of time immersed in the music, such that the composer seems to be in the room with you and you realize what he or she was expressing when the piece was first written.
I want to suggest that prayer is not that different for us as disciples of Jesus. We are not looking for a simple formula of "right words" to be recited once like a magic spell or incantation. We often mistakenly think that, of course. As we've been looking all week at the passage many of us heard this past Sunday in worship where Jesus' first disciples asked him to teach them "how to pray," we'll recall how often we treat Jesus' words like a recipe. And hopefully we've seen already that Jesus doesn't see praying as the rote repetition of approved words. Jesus doesn't answer by giving us a printed page with fixed words and say, "Just sight read this." Jesus has been inviting us to let our wants become aligned with God's wants, and to let God's vision shape our own. Now here as Jesus continues, it becomes clear (if it weren't already) that prayer is an ongoing practice, not a one-and-done declaration.
This story Jesus offers in today's verses gets at that very point. It's a sort of thought experiment about how a single one-time request from a friend in a desperate moment at night might not be adequate to get a response, but a persistent knocking on the door will eventually get through. His point isn't to say that God is like your sleeping neighbor who wants to be left alone, but rather to say that prayer isn't about sight-reading the "right words" after a single quick glance at a printed page, but rather an ongoing practice that brings us into communion and connection with God. Keep at it, Jesus says. Keep praying. Keep speaking. Keep pouring out your heart. Keep asking for God to shape and reorient your will. Keep getting to know who this God is in the course of the interactions, and just see how greater depth emerges in your connection with God--maybe not on the first attempt, but developing slowly over the course of daily seeking, daily asking, daily listening, and daily silence before God. This is what Jesus has in mind--that prayer become so much of a matter of friendship with God that we are in constant conversation. And when that happens, then there will of course be times where the conversation is just the daily check-in of life stuff, and sometimes it will include the urgent request after everyone is in bed. Prayer, then, is not about finding which "magic words" will compel God to grant our wishes, but about cultivating a relationship with God in which we bring the ordinary and the emergent, and in which God shapes us as much as we bring our desires to God. And the only way that kind of relationship develops is through the investment of time and attention. "How do you get better at prayer?" we might ask--and the answer might be just like in the joke: "Practice, practice, practice."
That notion of "practicing" prayer isn't about performance, however. It's about making a regular discipline of praying, with the awareness that something develops in us as we spend more time and attention on it. We have way of hearing the disciples' request, "Teach us how to pray," as merely about getting the correct words, but Jesus has continued giving his answer, well past the final phrases of what we call "The Lord's Prayer." Today's verses about persistence are also part of his response about "how to pray." That is, when we ask Jesus for how to pray, we should be prepared that he won't just give us words to recite but a rhythm to step into. His answer includes the direction, "Persistently." It includes the invitation, "Keep at this, and you'll be changed." It includes the notion that we are pulled into a dance that keeps moving.
Seeing ourselves as disciples of Jesus has a way of changing our perspective on a lot of things, really. We no longer look at praying like we are customers placing orders, but as children drawn into relationship with a parent who loves us. As disciples at prayer, we no longer see ourselves as in control, like we are the ones calling the shots with God, but rather as learners at Jesus' feet, as aspiring musicians practicing with our instruments and letting the genius of the Composer become clear to us the more time we spend letting the music soak into us and train our muscle memory. Jesus teaches us that prayer is not the answer to the question, "How do I make God give me what I want?" but rather, "How can I be more fully attuned to playing my part in the music God is making?" When we see it that way, it makes perfect sense that Jesus' response to "Teach us how to pray" includes the direction, "Keep at this." We pray as an ongoing practice, not because we have to wear God down, but maybe more because that is how a friendship is built up--in time, attention, daily check-in, and honest conversation. We keep praying because in that investment of time and, yes, of practice, the richness of the music and the personality of the Composer is brought to our attention.
How should we pray today? Like the old joke says--with practice, practice, practice.
We come to you again today, God, asking for you to shape our vision, to open our hearts, and to give us what we need. We ask it again, not because we think we have to wear you down, but in the honest admission that you may need to keep working on us through prayer to wear down our defenses.
No comments:
Post a Comment