Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me A ….
The Rev. Canon George M. Maxwell, Jr.
The Cathedral of St. Philip
Atlanta, Georgia
12 February 2006
Sixth Sunday after Epiphany – Year B
I have a proposition for you.
I want you to try something that you might actually want to do, but thought you shouldn’t.
I want you to ask God for something that you want – something just for yourself.
Be specific, make your request concrete and don’t worry about how it sounds. Don’t worry about what someone might think if they overheard your prayer.
Ask God to give you the job that you want. Ask God to help your partner stop doing those things that you don’t like. Ask God to cure you of the physical ailment that pains you.
Go ahead, and ask.
But, let me warn you. You might feel some resistance.
You might think this is all just a little too self-absorbed. If you came of age in the early ‘70s, you might hear the raspy voice of Janice Joplin asking God to buy her a Mercedes-Benz so that she can make amends for all of her friends who drive Porsches.
If you read the newspaper this morning, you might think that your relatively minor wants pale in comparison to the real needs of others who are suffering in our world today. It’s sometimes hard to even begin praying for ourselves when we are aware of those suffering from AIDS in Africa, or violence in the Middle East, or destruction in New Orleans and along the gulf coast of Mississippi.
You might think this is all just a little too immature. After all, God already knows what we want. We shouldn’t be telling God what to do. We should be sitting in silence listening for God to tell us what to do.
I want you to push on past this resistance. These arguments make good points, but I think that our minds often serve them up to prevent us from having to take any risk in our relationship with God. We are, after all, on relatively safe ground as long as we are praising God or asking God to help others. But, we take the risk of self-exposure when we ask God to do something just for us.
Yet, I am convinced that God wants us to take this risk.
I draw some inspiration from the story of Naaman. Naaman was the commander of the King’s army in Aram. Yet, he had heard that the God of Israel could heal him. So, he took the risk of going into the foreign territory of Israel and asking Elisha to call on the Lord to make him clean.
The same pattern appears in the story of the leper who approached Jesus. The leper had been excluded from his community. He was ritually unclean. Yet, he believed that Jesus could heal him. So, he took the risk of breaking the rules that isolated him and asking Jesus to make him clean.
And, of course, Jesus himself took this risk in the garden of Gethsemane. He asked God to be spared the physical pain and humiliation of a crucifixion.
I am convinced that God wants us to take this risk because I believe that asking for something that we want for ourselves has the potential to open us up to the real transforming power of God.
There is value in naming our deepest desires. If our goal is to desire for ourselves what God desires for us, then we must be willing to be honest with God about what our desires really are.
The rub, of course, is in how God answers these prayers.
There are those who believe that God does not answer our prayer when what we have asked for is not in our best interests, or when we have asked for something that we could not handle if we received.
But, I believe that God does answer our prayers – all of our prayers, all of the time. You have heard the promise before. “Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (Mt. 7:7-11). The question is whether we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear the answer.
Sometimes, the answer is just what we expected it to be. Naaman and the leper who approached Jesus had very specific requests. They wanted to be cured of their leprosy. Although Naaman wasn’t very happy about having to bath in the Jordan River, and the leper who approached Jesus couldn’t see the wisdom of keeping quiet about his encounter, both of them got what they asked for. Both were healed and made clean.
But, sometimes the answer is not what we expected it to be. We don’t get the job that we wanted. Our spouse doesn’t change in the way that we envisioned. We are not cured of the disease that ails us.
This, I think, is God’s way of inviting us to revisit what we really want. It is God’s way of asking us to imagine another solution to our problem that fits into the higher purpose he has for creation. More times than not, and for reasons that I can’t begin to explain, it means that we cannot avoid our suffering and must try to use it for some redemptive purpose.
When we don’t get the job that we wanted, we may gain a sense of self that is not dependent on the socio-economic status that we achieve.
When we don’t get the behavioral change in our partner that we wanted, we may learn how to meet more of our needs in other ways and to love them for whom they really are.
When we don’t get the cure that we wanted, we may find some relief from the fear of death that the illness triggered.
So, go ahead. Ask God for something that you want for yourself. Be specific, make your request concrete and don’t worry about how it sounds. Don’t worry about what someone might think if they overheard your prayer.
By lifting up our deepest desires to God, and accepting that God may answer us in ways that we have not yet imagined, we are setting the stage for the real miracles. We are taking the risk that opens us to the healing that we ultimately experience when our desires for ourselves match God’s desires for us.
I wouldn’t bet on getting the Mercedes-Benz, and you may not even be cured of your suffering, but you can open yourself to a dialog with God that will result in your being healed and made clean.
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* I owe the basic insight of this sermon – that praying for want you want and need starts you down a path that joins your desire for yourself with God’s desire for you – to the Rev. Brian C. Taylor, Rector of St. Michael and All Angels Episcopal Church in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He offers an insightful description of what happens when we pray for what we want and need in the chapter titled “pray for what you need” that appears in his book, becoming human: Core Teachings of Jesus (Cambridge: Cowley Publications, 2005). I recommend this book to you for further reading.
Comments? Contact George Maxwell at: GMaxwell@stphilipscathedral.org