Whatever logic there is to the Revised Common Lectionary (the preaching schedule followed by a lot of mainline Protestant churches), part of it seems to be to skip over passages that are tough to preach on, even when they are well known verses. One of those came up last week.
___________________________
Ginger and I were in a car dealership not long ago. As we were talking to the salesperson about the car, I made the comment that one of my concerns was that the gas tank was on the wrong side. With most every car I have ever owned, the gas tank has been on the driver’s side. This model had it on the passenger side. The salesperson then asked, “Did you know that the gas gauge on any car will tell you which side the tank is on?”
He went on to say it was information he had only recently learned, and then he pointed out that if you look at the little gas pump icon on the dashboard there is an arrow, either on the left or right side, that tells you where the tank is. When I got back in my Honda, I looked and there it was, right next to the E: a tiny little arrow pointing to the left.
It’s been there all the time; I just never knew to look for it.
I had a sort of parallel experience as I worked on my sermon for this week. The words are familiar ones:
“Ask, and it will be given to you. Search, and you will find. Knock on the door and it will be opened to you. Everyone who asks, gets. Every seeker finds. And the door is opened to whoever knocks.”
But then I saw something I had not seen before that I think was there the whole time.
Over all of my years in church, I have been trained or led to see God as the one being asked, or the one on the other side of the door we are knocking on. Maybe that is the reason these verses never show up as the gospel passage for any Sunday in our three-year lectionary cycle. They may be familiar to many of us, but can anyone really preach that God gives us everything we ask for?
I’m not so sure . . .
Then I looked back at what Jesus had just said, as we have become accustomed to doing on our journey through his Sermon on the Mount, and I looked at what came after as well. The verses that immediately precede our passage for this morning call us not to write people off because we might get written off as well and not to share our deepest selves with those who do not value our humanity. In the verses that follow, Jesus called people to choose the narrow path of integrity, to beware of those whose words and actions didn’t match, and to make sure their lives were built on strong foundations.
All of a sudden, I saw the arrow on the side of the little gas pump. What struck me is Jesus wasn’t talking specifically about asking God as much as he was talking about all the asking and seeking and knocking that we do in life.
Jesus talked about prayer back in Chapter 6, when he offered what we have come to call The Lord’s Prayer, a large part of which gives us a model for how we make requests of God: give us bread for today, forgive us, protect us. But the words we read this morning come in the middle of Jesus’ words about relationships with other people, not specifically about prayer. The words apply to relationships in general, not just our relationship with God. That said, the dynamics are not necessarily different when it comes to asking, seeking, and knocking, whether we are talking to God or to each other.
At the heart of all of them is trust. And risk.
The rest of our passage underlines that.
Jesus used parenting examples to make his point. If your child asks for some bread, you wouldn’t give them a stone, would you? Or if they asked for fish, you wouldn’t hand them a snake. Even if we have our moments, Jesus said, we do what we can to meet the needs of those we love. We try to be trustworthy, and we also trust that God is even more reliable than we are. But the whole thing boils down to this: we are to respond to others (when they ask and seek and knock) the way we hope they will respond to us.
No metaphor is perfect, so even as we lean into the warmth of the parenting analogy, we do well to remember it’s not warm and fuzzy for everyone. Some parents have handed out their share of snakes. If that metaphor is broken, we can seek out others that make the connection Jesus was making about the mutual trust that fosters the community of God, that draws us together in interdependency.
I found this one in the words of Christina Koch, one of the astronauts on the Artemis II moon mission. When asked, upon her return, what she had learned in space, she said,
A crew is people or a group that is in it all of the time no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, that gives grace, that holds accountable. A crew has the same cares and the same needs. And a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked. So when we saw tiny Earth, people asked our crew what impressions we had. And honestly, what struck me wasn’t necessarily just earth, it was all the blackness around it. Earth was just this lifeboat hanging undisturbingly in the universe. So, I may have not learned . . . I know I haven’t learned everything that this journey has yet to teach me, but there’s one new thing I know. And that is planet Earth: you are a crew.
As a crew, a family, the community of God, how, then, do we live into our connectedness? How do we ask and seek and knock in ways that draw us deeper into relationship with one another?
One of the ways we do that is in actually learning how to ask for help when we need it, rather than just soldiering on or expecting that somehow people around us will figure it out. And that is not always an easy thing to learn how to do. We live in a culture that far too often equates vulnerability with weakness. We make champions of athletes who play hurt, who “take one for the team,” or people who completely exhaust themselves with their work schedules so they can be “overnight successes” or “self-made people,” even as we too often see people in financial straits as somehow responsible for their poverty.
Jesus said that’s not how God’s community—God’s economy—works. God is with us and we are with each other, which means there is enough to go around, enough to share, whether we are talking money or love or attention. To ask for help is to lean into the ties that bind us together, to trust the love that holds us all. That is not weakness; that is courage. Let us trust that when we are willing to seek the help we need, we will find someone willing to help, just as, at some point, we may be the ones who hear the knocking on our doors and it will be our turn to answer.
That said, we do well to be mindful of who we ask. My dad used to tell a joke about a policeman who came upon a drunk man wandering around under a streetlamp. The cop asked the man what he was doing and he replied he was looking for his car keys.
“Where did you lose them?” the officer asked.
“Over by the bridge,” the man answered.
“Then why are you looking here?”
“Because this is where the light is,” came the reply.
We need to seek help among those we trust will be willing to help, which means our daily work in our relationships with one another is to build and deepen the trust between us, even as we learn to widen our circles and look for those who are struggling to find people they feel like they can trust.
The last two sentences of our passage turn the whole thing upside down. Jesus was talking about being the ones asking and seeking and knocking, but then he flipped it over to say, “Whatever it is you want others to do for you, that’s what you must do for them.”
If we want others to respond when we ask, to help us find what we are looking for, or to open the door when we come knocking, then we must first be the ones we respond and who open our own doors to others.
Jesus said that kind of reciprocity and mutuality is the heart of our faith, at the heart of living into our full humanity. We don’t have a corner on the truth. We are not called to consolidate power or gain control. God doesn’t need us to convince the world we are right. God needs us—we need us—to be a crew, to do all we can to foster our connectedness.
We are called to trust God and to trust one another, to share who we are and what we have in a way that lets everyone find what they are looking for. If we want to live in a world, in a community, in a congregation, where we feel like we can ask for what we need and be heard, then we need, first, to be people who are listening to what others are asking and answer them.
Like the little arrow on my dashboard, that direction has been here the whole time. May we all see with new eyes that open the doors of hearts widely to one another. Amen.
Peace,
Milton