Persistence in Prayer: A Sermon for Proper 12

Today’s bulletin includes a handout entitled the Threefold Rule of Prayer, also known as the Benedictine Triangle. Many of you have heard me speak about this pattern of prayer before, whether it be in our Sunday Adult Forum or our Wednesday Noonday Prayer group on Zoom. You also may have seen it on the Prayer & Spiritual Formation section of our church website.

This pattern of prayer and the accompanying diagram is simultaneously ancient and contemporary. It is how Christians through the centuries and throughout the world have ordered their lives of prayer. And it was this threefold pattern of prayer that was the driving force in the development of the 1979 Book of Common Prayer. The primary emphases with the threefold pattern of prayer are balance and consistency.

If we want to lose weight, lower our cholesterol, and feel healthier, any personal trainer or fitness expert will tell us that the key is balance and consistency. A sensible diet and regular exercise that are achievable and sustainable over the long haul are how we will succeed. And the same goes for our lives of prayer. Consistency and balance are the key to success.

The longer I serve as a priest in the Church, the more convinced I become that the single-most important thing I am called to do is guide you in your lives of prayer – to invite and shepherd you into a deeper, more authentic relationship with God in Jesus Christ. That’s really my job in a nutshell. Like a personal trainer, dietician, or physician, I am called to promote healthy balance and consistency over trendy, quick-fix fads.

This hunger for a deeper, more authentic relationship with God that I find to be so prevalent in folks I encounter in my ministry as a priest is nothing new. It is simply the human condition… and has been since the dawn of time. This hunger for God was beautifully expressed when, in his Confessions, St. Augustine said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”  

If you struggle with knowing where or how to start when it comes to a healthy, balanced prayer life, you are in good company. One of Jesus’ very own disciples – a person who lived, traveled, and ministered with the Messiah himself - was struggling with the very same issue. 

In our gospel lesson today, after Jesus finished what was perhaps his own daily prayer routine, this disciple said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples." Jesus’ answer to his disciple ended up becoming one of the most well-known and oft-repeated prayers in the history of world. In this first part of Jesus’ response, he was offering an example of what one might say when they pray to their Father in Heaven. He was giving this disciple, and all who would follow, a prayer to pray when words escape us.

But in the second part of his response to the disciple, Jesus goes a step further than just offering an actual prayer to pray. He teaches the disciple to pray by offering a parable that illustrates what a life grounded in prayer might look like. The parable of the friend at midnight points to the fruit born out of bold, persistent, steadfast prayer. The man who knocked on his friend’s door late at night asking for three loaves of bread for a late-arriving guest is initially rebuffed by his understandably grumpy neighbor. And it is clear that when the sleepy man finally conceded and gave his neighbor what he asked for, his generosity was attributed to his neighbor’s persistence. The neighbor wouldn’t have received the blessing of bread if he hadn’t been steadfast, persistent, and even forceful in his request.

“Although God knows our needs before we ask, persistence strengthens our resolve and develops our openness to receive the blessings God has to give. Giving up easily shows no real concern for what one seeks.”[1] Jesus then follows the parable with some sage wisdom that illuminates the belief that “persistence strengthens our resolve and develops our openness to receive the blessings God has to give.” This wisdom isn’t as well-known as the Lord’s Prayer, but indeed consists of the most well-known of all of Jesus’ sayings - “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

These words from Jesus have received a good bit of pushback from folks who assert that this simply isn’t always true. And I think that we all can relate to doors that have never been opened for us… prayers that have seemingly gone unanswered. So, what do we do with this news that Jesus offers that seems too good to be true? It is important for us to remember the context in which these well-known sayings fall. Jesus says them immediately after telling the parable of the friend at midnight. I believe that “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” is more about how we pray – and how often we pray - than a quick-fix reward we will get when we do.

The neighbor who asked his friend for bread at midnight didn’t receive his wish upon his first request. But he persisted in his asking, and ultimately, his wish was granted. Jesus is challenging his followers to ground our lives in persistent, steadfast prayer. When we soak ourselves in a life of prayer – not only when we need or want something right now, we will be drawn into an intimate relationship with God. This intimacy with God is exemplified by Jesus when, in the prayer that he taught his disciple, he refers to his Father in heaven as “Abba,” which is translated best as Daddy or Papa. And by instructing his disciple to address his prayer to Abba, Jesus was inviting this disciple into the same intimate familiarity with his Father in heaven.

And so it goes for us too. When the friend knocked on his neighbor’s door, his persistence paid off, but equally important, so did his relationship with that neighbor. Had he been a complete stranger, my guess is that he could have knocked all night but never received a response.    

Prayer was clearly an integral part of Jesus’ life and ministry, and when this disciple asked Jesus to teach him and the others how to pray, Jesus offered a tangible response – the Lord’s Prayer – as well as some sage wisdom on how one, in general, is to be grounded in a life of steadfast, persistent prayer.

The most practical advice I can give in terms of how we might be steadfast and persistent in our prayer life is to use this Threefold Rule of Prayer as a guide. As I mentioned before, this diagram is simply a way of giving us a visual model for what our Anglican tradition has already given us – the Book of Common Prayer.

Praying the Daily Office – Morning and Evening prayer – has had a profound impact on my spiritual life. In a week where one prays Morning and Evening Prayer every day and then attends the Holy Eucharist service on Sunday, one will have prayed the Lord’s Prayer 15 times that week. And one will have also prayed the Psalms and read the Hebrew scriptures that Jesus prayed and read, as well as the scriptures of the New Testament. One will have affirmed their faith twice a day through the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed, while also praying the collects that have been passed down through the generations, and prayed by the great cloud of witnesses who have gone before us. This sort of repetition ends up forming us in the same way that repetitive drills in sports or musical instruments form athletes and musicians. Just as the concert pianist forms an intimacy with her instrument, such is the case with our intimacy with God.

It is this steadfast, persistent, form of daily prayer and scripture reading that has drawn me closer to God and been the source of answered prayers in my life.

Another point of the triangle in the diagram points us to other ways to ground ourselves in daily prayer, namely reflection and personal devotions. There are Contemplative Prayer forms such as Centering Prayer, body prayers, walking prayer, praying with icons, and lectio divina. There are countless daily devotional resources like Forward Day by Day. The options are vast, and certainly not “one size fits all.” But what is critically important for us to strive for is creating a habit of prayer in our daily lives. This is the steadfast persistence and intimacy that Jesus is speaking of to his disciple in our lesson today.

As the Psalmist says in our Psalm for today, “When I called, you answered me; you increased my strength within me.” And such a commitment to prayer is what allows us, as our Collect for the Day says, “to pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal.”  So, as we pass through this temporal life, let us do so grounded in steadfast, persistent prayer to our Father in heaven, who is up waiting with the light on.

[1] From Synthesis commentary on Proper,12, year C. 2019.