What God Wants

Discipleship is about learning from Jesus how we are to live our lives. Last Sunday (July 27), I preached on the part of Luke including the Lord's Prayer and a few more paragraphs about prayer in general. One thing I said was that this is NOT a prosperity gospel incantation to get whatever you want. That's hard to reconcile with the text around it: Ask, Seek, Knock and you will get whatever you want; be persistent and you'll eventually wear God down and God will give you what you want. Again, I said that this is NOT how prayer works.

To understand what Jesus is teaching his disciples--teaching us--about prayer, I recommended looking at the context. This is in the part of Luke known as the Travel Narrative. In the Travel Narrative, Jesus has set his face to go to Jerusalem. There, he will be crucified and resurrected. There, the Holy Spirit will be given to the group and they will become the church. Jesus does not go the normal route to Jerusalem; it's like he has "Avoid Interstates" checked in his GPS. He goes the back way, through Samaria. We read the story of neighbor-love and the good Samaritan a couple of weeks ago--that's in the Travel Narrative. We read the story of Mary and Martha trying different ways to show hospitality to the itinerant preacher--that's in the Travel Narrative, and that means Mary and Martha might have been Samaritans themselves. The Travel Narrative is about Jesus healing, calling, and teaching people other than the normal in-group on his way to accomplish God's purposes in Jerusalem. In the Travel Narrative, his calling is expansive and his teaching prepares people to live changed lives as they follow his way.

What does that context mean about the Lord's Prayer and the other teachings on prayer in Luke, in the Travel Narrative? In Luke, the Lord's Prayer has five parts: hallowed be thy name, they kingdom come, forgive us as we forgive, give us daily bread, and save us from the time of trial. I think that the commonality among those five things is that they are all things that God wants for us anyway. God wants us to live our lives in a healthy relationship with God, ever wishing God's name to be hallowed. God wants us to live in the perfect society that is God's kingdom. God wants to forgive us and wants us to forgive each other. God wants to provide for us, while at the same time cultivating in us trust in God: give us daily bread. God wants us to thrive, and that means God wants us to strive AND succeed when we face a trial. Ask, Seek, Knock and your prayers will be answered--if you can learn to ask for what God wants, to seek what or whom God wants found, to look for opportunities that God wants to open for us. What Jesus is teaching the people he's called to follow him along the way to Jerusalem is to want what God wants.

So what does Good want? God wants relationship. God wants relationship with us, and God wants us to have relationship with each other. Not only that, but God wants all those relationships to be the best relationships. God wants a loving relationship with us. God wants us to have loving relationships with each other.

In the sermon I contrasted what Jesus was teaching with the sarcastic voice from that Janis Joplin song, "Lord, Won't You Buy Me a Mercedes Benz." Pray for God's name to be hallowed and God's kingdom to be accomplished, and God'll grant your petition. Ask for daily bread and it will be given to you, especially if we help feed each other. Seek and offer forgiveness, and you will find it. Knock on God's door in your time of trial and God will open up to you. God doesn't care what kind of car you drive. God doesn't care what your friends think about what kind of car you drive.

Here's another prayer with a similar theme by John Calvin. I'll be honest, I know very little about the context of this prayer; it's in the back of the Book of Common Worship and simply attributed to "John Calvin." Maybe one day I'll try to look it up and learn more about it.

Save us, Lord, from being self-centered in our prayers, and teach us to remember to pray for others. May we be so caught up in love for those for whom we pray, that we may feel their needs as keenly as our own, and pray for them with imagination, sensitivity, and knowledge. We ask this in Christ’s name. Amen.

What does God want? God wants us to not be self-centered. Do you think God granted John Calvin this request? God wants us to care for others. When John Calvin asks that we remember to pray for others, that's what God wants anyway. When John Calvin asks that we feel empathy and compassion for our neighbors, that's what God wants anyway. When John Calvin asks God to help us use our God-given gifts of imagination, sensitivity, and knowledge, that's what God wants anyway: for us to use God's gifts to do God's will.

Occasionally, I'll throw around the phrase, "the Beloved Community." Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said his ultimate aim was to foster and create the Beloved Community. Dr. King carried two books with him wherever he went. One was the Bible, the other was Howard Thurman's book, Jesus and the Disinherited. Dr. King's vision of the Beloved Community as a society of "love, justice, and solidarity," as Smith and Zepp described it, came from Howard Thurman. Howard Thurman, in turn built on the ideas created by Josiah Royce, an influential Harvard philosopher in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Royce's interest had to do with the origin of loyalty. As an oversimplification: What are we loyal to? We are loyal to the beloved community. What does God want? God wants us to be the beloved community of love, justice and solidarity because God loves us and God wants us to live and thrive in such a community.

As disciples, we are to learn from Jesus. Learning from Jesus might look like learning to live and do things a certain way, to follow rules about caring for neighbors, or praying a certain way, but this misses the point, and we can do better. Disciples ultimately need to learn what God wants, but not only to learn what God wants for the sake of knowledge, but to learn to WANT what God wants. When we want loving, trusting relationship with God and neighbor, then the things we ask for and seek, the things we do will be to accomplish that. God will certainly grant those prayers--that's what God wants anyway.

Sometimes, it seems frustratingly difficult to try to achieve it. The kingdom is already, because Christ has done all that is needed to win the victory. The kingdom is, at the same time, not yet; we see pain in the world and we struggle to forgive and we only trust ourselves and our prayers are self-centered. Here's what gives me hope: we are already the beloved community through no action of our own because GOD loves us; our community is beloved of God, and God is loyal to US. As the beloved community, all we have to do is learn to want what God-who-love-us wants. It's easy after that. Love and forgive one another. Trust God. BE the community that works for God's kingdom of love, justice, and solidarity. We are already loved; we just have to love one another.

Blessings,

--Chas