Hilton Head Island, SC – September 4, 2022
The Chapel Without Walls
I Kings 18:30-40; Mark 11:12-14, 20-26
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you receive it, and you will.” – Mark 11:24 (RSV)
Our responsive reading today was Psalm 13, one of the many psalms of David. According to the first four verses, his answer to the question addressed by this sermon title was “No.” He was feeling totally abandoned by God in the first two-thirds of his lament, as he inquired why God had not done anything to liberate him from an unnamed enemy. However, David answered his own uncertainties in the first four verses with a clear proclamation in the last two verses: “But I have trusted in thy steadfast love, (O God); my heart shall rejoice in thy salvation. I will sing to the Lord, because he has dealt bountifully with me” (Psalm 13:5-6).
If you don’t get what you ask for in your prayers, does that mean God does not answer them? When David did not escape his enemy, apparently he decided that if he continued to trust in God’s steadfast love, he would be okay whether or not he averted his adversary. Maybe he concluded that was the only answer he needed. Trust in God, and you’ll get through whatever is necessary. That may have not been a crystal-clear answer to the Sweet Singer of Israel, but it seemed to be enough of an answer for him all the same.
The story of Elijah and the prophets of Baal on Mt. Carmel is one of the most dramatic stories in the entire Bible. Mt. Carmel is a mountain ridge that juts out into the Mediterranean just south of the modern city of Haifa, Israel. The prophet Elijah, according to the story, was pitted all by himself against 450 of the prophets of Baal, the chief god of the Canaanites. Elijah set up a pile of wood for sacrificing a bull, and the Canaanite prophets did the same thing, except that Elijah poured water all over his wood, and that there was a deep ring of water around the doused wood.
The pagan prophets loudly called upon Baal to send down fire on their sacrifice, and nothing happened. Then Elijah prayed to God to send fire upon his sacrifice. It says the divine fire consumed not only the wood and the cut-up pieces of the bull, but the rocks under the wood, and the dirt under the rocks, and water in the trench around the place of sacrifice. In Mendelsohn’s oratorio Elijah, it is quite a dramatic scene. Elijah sings, “Take all the prophets of Baal, and let no one of them escape you; take them, and slay them!” And the Israelites do what they are told. If it happened as it is written, it was a spectacularly bloody ending to a highly tense tale.
In the Bible there are many such stories. But does God actually answer prayers in such a splashy fashion? Have you ever had any of your prayers answered in similar splendor?
A friend who served in the Navy seventy years ago loaned me a book whose title is Tin Can Titans. It is about a squadron of destroyers in World War II in the Pacific. Destroyers were the smallest of the warships in the US Navy fleet, and thus they were affectionately known as tin cans. These particular ships performed particularly admirably in many sea battles against the Japanese at Guadalcanal and in the Philippines. One of them, the O’Bannon, sank the Japanese battleship Hiei all by itself. A destroyer is eighteen times smaller than a battleship. The O’Bannon did not have a single casualty throughout the entire war.
At many points in the narrative, the author, John Wukovits, refers to the prayers of the crewmen as they faced the savagery of naval warfare. The mother of one of the enlisted men wrote the commander of the O’Bannon, “While you all were in the South Pacific I prayed day and night for God to go with the O’Bannon and each member of the crew.” No one on that ship was injured, but hundreds of men on other ships in the task force were injured and killed. So did God favor one ship over all the others? And what about the Japanese mothers who were praying for their sons? Surely God answers all prayers, but how, specifically, does He do that? And can we ever be certain exactly how He responds?
I will always remember the words of a parishioner suffering from a progressive disease. She said, “I used to pray for healing. Now I pray for the strength to put up with whatever I must face.” It seems to me that is a wise prayer. It gives God flexibility in how He responds to us. If we are too specific in what we ask for, we may preclude an effective divine response, but if we pray for general relief from whatever is bothering us, we may sense a more evident response.
Depending on the content of our prayers, we may set ourselves up for either gratitude or disappointment in our petitions to God. The night before his crucifixion, Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, “Father, if Thou art willing, remove this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but Thine, be done” (Luke 22:42). Despite the tradition of many centuries, I find it impossible to believe that God intended the crucifixion of Jesus, or that Jesus might assume that was what God wanted. In any event, it was wise for Jesus to pray for acceptance of whatever was to transpire in the final tense hours of his brief, inexpressibly influential life.
One of the most common of prayers is for healing from diseases or conditions which lead to ongoing illness. It is understandable for sick people or those concerned for the wellbeing of sick people to pray for healing, but it may be more prudent to pray for the courage and tenacity to withstand whatever assaults to good health might come our way. If God always prevented disease and illness in everyone who ever lived, no one would die of illness. In sober reality, however, everyone would die of starvation. Already there are too many people in the world, but if everyone who ever lived were still alive, tens of millions every year would starve to death, because there would not be food enough to feed all of them. In other words, it is physically impossible for everyone to live forever on Earth. Yet another way to express that thought is to say that when we pray, for our own sakes we need carefully to think through what we pray for.
The two passages which were read earlier from the Gospel of Mark are a total enigma, but indirectly they raise questions about the historical veracity of many of the things that are written in the Bible. On the day after Palm Sunday, according to Mark, Jesus and his disciples were walking from the village of Bethany into Jerusalem. Jesus saw a fig tree in leaf, and he went over to pick some figs. But, said Mark, it was not the season for figs, and so there were none hanging from the tree. Apparently in anger, Jesus said to the tree, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.” Mark notes, “And his disciples heard it” (Mark 11:14).
In his commentary on this passage, William Barclay says that either Mark didn’t report the story correctly or whoever told the story to Mark didn’t know the facts. Jesus should not have cursed a fig tree for not bearing figs when it was not the fig-bearing season. In Matthew’s account of this story, which was written a few years after Mark wrote his Gospel, Matthew says nothing about it not being the season when figs were on fig trees. It just says there were no figs, and for no reason Jesus cursed the tree, and it immediately withered. In Mark, the tree didn’t die until the next day. In Luke Jesus tells a parable about a fig tree, but Luke doesn’t say Jesus saw a fig tree and instantaneously caused it to shrivel up and die.
You may wonder why I am telling you all this puzzling background. It is to suggest that all three of the Gospels contain a similar saying of Jesus about prayer. They all got the concluding statement right, but they probably incorrectly reported the context in which the statement was made. The essence of what Jesus intended to say is today’s sermon text: “Therefore, I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you receive it, and you will” (Mark 11:24).
Does that mean that mountains will move if we believe they will move? Jesus could not possibly have meant that to be literally true, but it can be figuratively true. If there is something troubling you in your life, and if you believe it can be overcome, praying for it to be eliminated may assist in making it happen. However, be prepared that you may be the primary factor necessary for it to happen.
There is something else we need to prepare for when we pray. When we ask God to do something for us or for someone else, we need to understand that sometimes His answer will be “No.” What we request of God He may not give us, and the reasons for His decision may never be made clear to us. As the hymn declares, “God works in a mysterious way His wonders to perform.” If God doesn’t give us what we ask, does that mean He didn’t hear us? Does it mean He was oblivious to our heartfelt prayer? Or might it mean that sometimes, and perhaps fairly frequently, God does not provide us what we want, and only He knows why He doesn’t?
Another side to how God answers prayers is to say that He answers prayers that we never even pray. We know what we want, but God knows what we need. Therefore sometimes God’s providence provides what we need without our even praying for it. God regularly inspires us with inspirations of which we may have no conscious awareness. If we don’t feel like doing something which needs to be done, we finally do it, and it was God who led us out of our lethargy. If we refrain from doing something we shouldn’t do, it may have been God who convinced us not to do it, but we were not aware of it. Not only does God answer prayers, but He also answers un-prayed prayers.
Tennyson wrote, “More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.” Nevertheless, we come to accept that truth because God inspires us to believe it. That may be the best answer to our prayers; God inspires us to believe He answers prayers, and so, when we believe it, the answers come. It may not be exactly as we prayed, perhaps not even close to what we prayed, but God leads us to trust that He does answer our prayers, and that therefore, for us, they are answered. However, almost always, and maybe even always, He answers indirectly, not directly. He communicates back to us through other people, or through unfolding events, or in the glory of a beautiful sunset, and thus we know that He has spoken.
Does God always answer everyone’s prayers precisely as they are prayed? That isn’t possible. Not all prayers are prayed with identical intensity or maturity or awareness. An old saying declares that there are no atheists in the foxholes. But men under enemy fire petition the Almighty One of Israel like men under fire, and that may not be the most ideal circumstance under which to petition the Almighty. It is understandable why they do it, but the impetus may not be of the loftiest theological caliber.
We are more inclined to pray when things are falling apart, and prayer may therefore put us back together. A more reasoned prayer is when we feel moved to pray for no reason at all, other than to thank God for listening to us in the quiet of a contented heart and mind. Furthermore, there may appear to be a glaring inequity if God grants the requests of some people and does not grant the requests of others. However, the “quality” of our prayers is surely not the factor by which God does or does not answer prayers. Otherwise only the most virtuous would have their prayers answered, and they may be the ones who least need it. If prayer doesn’t work for totally inept novices, it doesn’t work for experts either.
Whether God answers prayers probably depends completely on whether people believe He answers prayers. God answers every prayer, but we might not perceive the answer, or agree with it if we do perceive it. But, as Jesus said, if we do believe that we will receive answers, we will receive them, even if we do not understand them.
Prayer is one of the most common activities of spiritual people, but by no means is it a simple activity. It involves much continuous introspection and reflection. Maturity of prayer may request less and less of God and praise Him more and more.
The movie Shadowlands is about the life of C.S. Lewis, the atheist-Oxford-don-turned-evangelical-Christian-writer. There is a scene in which Lewis was addressing a large gathering of people, after which there was a Q-and-A. A lady asked him if he thought prayer caused God to change His mind. He emphatically answered, “Prayer doesn’t change God; it changes me.”
The best answer to prayer is if it ends up changing us. It can, … and does, … and will.