Ask, Search, Knock?
Proper 12 C
Art: "The Insistent Friend" By Jesus Mafa
Jesus’ familiar teaching in this week’s gospel text, inviting us to “ask, search and knock,” sadly conjures up images and stories of our present time and place. ICE asking suspected “aliens” for their identification. ICE searching for “invaders,” “foreign enemies,” and those without the right papers. Or even those with the right papers but who “don’t belong.” The 13.7 million¹ people this administration has deemed “illegal.” ICE is knocking on the doors of our immigrant neighbors’ homes, schools, churches and workplaces. Immigrants are incarcerated, sometimes disappeared. Families are separated. I tell all my immigrant clients to never open the door to ICE, no matter what they say or what paper they claim to have. A broken door can be fixed. A detention may not be undone. This week, I met a family at a Latinx immigrant church where the parents were arrested and deported by ICE a month ago, leaving behind five children ages 3 months to 17.² How do we hear Jesus’ teaching on prayer against the backdrop of our current context, where searching and knocking are the mechanisms used by the Empire to terrorize our immigrant communities?
Luke places Jesus’ teaching on prayer right after the story of Mary and Martha. Jesus uplifts Mary’s choice to stop, listen and be silent, above the distraction of doing and responsibility. The disciples are “on the Way” with Jesus, moving with him from place to place. Yet, they are perplexed by their Teacher who repeatedly stops to pray. They want to know how to pray.
At the Anglican church where my husband and I worship, we pray The Lord’s Prayer every Sunday in preparation for the Eucharist. Most of us can recite it from memory. Lately, I've been pausing after “Your Kingdom come.” I so desperately want the Kingdom of God to burst through the door and take hold of all that is evil and cruel and awful in our world. So perhaps I’m not too different from the disciples who wanted Jesus to restore Israel to its greatness and take out the bad guys. Our Crucified and Risen Christ, however, comes to us proclaiming peace and suffering love.
Luke’s abbreviated version of The Lord’s Prayer boldly names our allegiance to the Father. Jesus tells us to pray for the Kingdom of God to come to earth. We name our hunger for daily bread and for forgiveness, which comes only from the Father. We ask for help. This prayer rejects all other claims of allegiance.
Jesus then tells a story about how we are to bring our needs to God. A midnight visitor arrives at his friend's house in need of food and shelter. We are not told why he is traveling alone in the dark. Was he delayed by an emergency? Did he travel in the dark intentionally to avoid being seen? The host friend also has a need. His need arises out of his hospitality to his midnight visiting friend. The host doesn’t have any bread left in his house. So he knocks on his neighbor’s door, rousing him up from sleep, seeking bread to share with his visiting friend. The host friend’s shameless, repeated appeal compels the sleepy friend to give his neighbor the bread he needs. Jesus uses this story to illustrate persistence not only in asking God for what we need, but also in asking God for what others need. Unlike the grouchy, sleepy friend, our God is a loving parent who gives generously to His children.
This story and Jesus’ encouragement to “ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you” is also an invitation to practice dependence. Perhaps the first step to prayer is to acknowledge our own neediness, that we need help. Often desperate help. We are invited to reject the Empire’s claim that our allegiance is to self-sufficiency and family first. Instead, our Creator invites us to practice a way of being that leans into our mutuality and interconnectedness, that our well-being is inextricably intertwined with all creatures. We are invited to join together and pray “Your Kingdom come,” particularly for those who are vulnerable and in peril. To boldly declare “shame on those who name as sane the absurdity of the world.”³
Paul tells the Colossian church, “Watch out that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental principles of the world, and not according to Christ.” In last week’s post, Kelsey Guckenberger beautifully wrote and referenced Brian Walsh and Sylvia Keesmaat’s Colossians Remixed. We, like Paul and the Colossian church, live under an Empire that is aggressively seeking to take us captive. In body and mind. Immigrant bodies are being taken captive – incarcerated, disappeared, silenced, deported. Our minds are held captive by a stifling imagination, overwhelmed by countless images and words of the Empire’s cruelty and disregard for human life and dignity. How do we keep praying and hoping when we feel bound, diminished and worn down?
Jesus promises that for those who ask, the Father will give the Holy Spirit. As someone who has not been part of a “Spirit-filled” church tradition, I confess that I really don’t know what to do with the gift of the Holy Spirit. Jesus doesn’t say that the Father will give us what we deserve, have earned or want. Yet, the Spirit seems to show up when we are scared, weary and struggle to keep following Jesus “on the Way.” Like how we may be feeling right now. As His disciples huddled behind locked doors with fear, the Crucified and Risen Jesus appeared (John 20:19-23). He pronounced shalom and forgiveness and “breathed” the Holy Spirit on them. In Acts, Luke narrates many stories of the post-ascension/post-Pentecost disciples’ devotion to prayer. I imagine that they asked and sought guidance on what it meant for them to be witnesses of the Resurrection, while still living under an imperial context that had executed their now-Risen Christ. Moreover, in Romans, Paul tells us that when we are weak and unable to pray or know what to pray, the Spirit intercedes for us. Eugene Peterson phrases it well in The Message:
Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God’s Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don’t know how or what to pray, it doesn’t matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition, and keeps us present before God. (Romans 8: 26-28)
So perhaps in our current time and place, when we may lack the words to pray, we can expect the Spirit to transform our “aching groans” to prayers for daily bread. For the Kingdom of God to come to earth. For forgiveness. For shalom for all of creation.
Lord have mercy, hear our prayer.
Footnotes
According to the Migration Policy Institute, (February 2025).
Five years ago, this week’s gospel text perhaps would’ve conjured up images and stories of the police searching and knocking at the homes of brown and black people. Resulting in incarceration, separation of families and even death. Although these stories have faded from the top headlines, this long-standing racism against brown and black people persists.
From a poem by Rubem Alves, a Brazilian theologian, poet and one of the founders of Latin American liberation theology. I first learned of him from Ruth Padilla DeBorst’s plenary at the Ekklesia Project’s gathering in Chicago earlier this month.