17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
Genesis 18:20-32
Psalm 138:1-2, 2-3, 6-7, 7-8
Colossians 2:12-14
Luke 11:1-13

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Saint Theresa of Avila said that you pay God a big compliment when you ask big things of him. Saint Augustine said that God sometimes delays answering our prayers because he wants to give us more than we prayed for, and our hearts aren’t big enough to receive what he wants to give us; so our waiting and longing grows our heart to be large enough to receive the abundance of God’s response to our prayer.

If we ask God for something in prayer, there are three possibilities: No, Yes, and Not yet. And unlike asking the sun, or the moon, or a shooting star, when we ask God, his answer to our prayers—even if his answer is not what we hoped for—we have faith and trust is what is best for us, his answer out of his perfect love for us. The sin of the garden of Eden was humanity’s failure to trust God. And our prayer in the Holy Spirit is the healing of that wound: we offer our prayers in trust in God’s love for us. That’s the last part of our gospel reading: being able to trust God that he’s going to give us the good that we need, the best things, and of course, the best thing is the gift of the Holy Spirit.

Our readings are on the theme of persisting in prayer. I remember someone saying, “Every time a woman prays in the bible, God answers that prayer.” Maybe it’s that men ask God for something in prayer, they wait a bit, and then if they don’t get a response, they shrug it off and move on. But women in prayer are more persistent. And that persistence is the key.

Our gospel reading has a bunch of different parts. One is a parable on being persistent. The man in the parable, like Martha last week, wants to show the virtue of hospitality. But he has an unexpected guest show up in the middle of the night, and this poor man has to go to his neighbor’s house, pound on the door, and ask for bread to give to his guest. And the neighbor’s like, “Are you out of your mind? Go away, it’s midnight, we’re in bed, and I’m not getting up to give you bread.” And the man keeps pounding at the door. I think it’s Father Mike Schmitz who defined persistence as “the shameless refusal to quit.” The shameless refusal to quit. That’s what we need to bring to prayer. I’m going to keep persistently pursuing the Lord and asking for what I need and trusting in him. And if he doesn’t seem to be answering, then I’m going to allow my trust and my desire to grow as I shamelessly refuse to quit until he responds. Of course, it’s not that we have to keep pounding at the door to change God’s mind, like in the parable. It’s that we have to persist because we need to grow in our desire to receive from the Lord.

The beginning of our gospel reading is the shorter version of the Lord’s Prayer found in the Gospel of Luke. The disciples of Jesus see him deep in prayer, and when he’s finished, they ask him to teach them, to give them his deep, beautiful relationship of prayer with the Father. One thing we can learn from the difference between Matthew’s version and Luke’s version is that our prayer should not be just the same formula of words.

Some people just rattle off the same prayers, day after day. Remember that prayer is our relationship with God, like a relationship with our spouse, or other loved one. We don’t say the exact same words, as fast as we can, and end the conversation. Our words should be organic, natural, flowing expressively; we  mean, from the heart, the words we say to our beloved God. Even if we’re persisting in the same prayers, even if we’re reading a given prayer, like the rosary, mean every word, every time. It’s a conversation, an invitation to a deeper relationship. I’ll often slow down people in confession: We just had this deep, beautiful, authentic conversation, and then they race through the Act of Contrition. And I’ll stop them. No, start again, slower, and mean from your heart what you’re saying.

The same is true in the Mass. The words of the Mass are important. They come down to us through Sacred Tradition as the participation of the people of God in the authentic worship of the Church. They’re meaningful, and they’re important. We should think about them and take them seriously. And they help us to shape our own prayer life according to the spirit of the Church.

For those of you who are musicians, you’ll appreciate this. When I was teaching ensemble music, especially marching band or horn lines for drum corps, I would tell them, there’s a difference between practice and rehearsal. Practice is your own work: to learn the parts, learning the notes, the articulations, the timing, dynamics, and getting past the mechanics into actually being musical. Then rehearsal is when we come together to unite our individual parts into the offering of the whole group, unifying all of our individual work. And also, what we learn in rehearsal then helps us when we go back home to practice better.

The same is true with prayer. People often say, “I pray to God all day long.” That’s good, depending on the prayer. If you’re just giving God your wish list, giving him his instructions for the day, maybe that’s not such a healthy prayer life. Just like if your relationship with your spouse was just the list of chores to do, and nothing else to your relationship. Not a healthy marriage. Have deep conversations; listen as well as talking; give and receive.

God isn’t a wish granter. He’s a loving father who loves you and wants a meaningful relationship with you. Sometimes as Catholics we can bristle at the phrase, “a personal relationship with God.” It sounds un-Catholic to some. But it is absolutely the heart of Catholic life. God is not just personal, but a communion of persons, and prayer is for us to get personal with God. We have that access through the gift of the Holy Spirit. Get comfortable with the idea of the truly personal essence of prayer.

Look at the dialogue between Abraham and God in our first reading. What courage Abraham has to dare to haggle with God to save Sodom, principally on Abraham’s part to save his relative Lot and his family. Abraham repeatedly shows his humility and his awareness of the audacity of his requests. And God accepts and responds to his requests. It’s a personal conversation. Of course, God does destroy Sodom, after warning Lot and his family to flee. But the point is Abraham’s persistence in prayer, and his personal relationship with God that allowed that closeness (and courage) in conversation.

So nourishing that beautiful life of prayer, then bring the grace of your relationship with God and unite that to the prayer of the communion of the church. Each person’s personal prayer fuels our communal prayer, and our communal prayer shapes our personal prayer. We need both parts, the parts we do on our own, and then bringing that personal energy into the power of the church’s prayers of the Mass. In the Mass, we’re not a passive audience to an entertaining performance; we’re active participants in the Church’s liturgical worship of God.

For example, when the archangel Gabriel greets the virgin Mary, some artwork portrays Gabriel, this great angelic presence, as bowing low to this innocent teenage girl, and Gabriel addresses her with reverence, a reversal of roles from what we would expect, as Gabriel waits for Mary’s humble “Fiat,” her consent, her “May what you have said be true,” to the message of the angel. Do we pray the “Hail Mary” with that kind of authentic reverence and awe, like Gabriel did. Or like Elizabeth, filled with Holy Spirit, announcing, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.” Another example: Pope Saint John Paul the II in his reflection, “On the Church of the Eucharist” says that when the faithful receive communion, “there is a profound analogy between the ‘Fiat’ which Mary said in reply to the angel, and the ‘Amen’ which every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord.” Do we rush through and mumble our “Amen,” like saying “thank you” at the convenience store when we’re being given a receipt? Or do we reverently consider the gravity of that moment of encounter and gift? How much holiness can we inject into our response to the minister who holds up the sacred host and says to us, “The Body of Christ” and awaits the word of our response? Our “fiat”; our “Amen.”

How much can we consider the important words of the creed we proclaim, for which people at various times suffered and gave their lives to define and defend, in preserving the one / holy / catholic / and apostolic / church? Do we bow our heads, as the Church instructs us, as we say the words announcing our faith in the incarnation, that God himself “by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.”? Do we sing what we are called upon to sing? Do we say what we’re called upon to say? All of which the Church requires of us to help us strengthen and shape our Christian spiritual life rightly—our life as disciples of Christ, and through him, children of God, living out our faith, persevering in prayer, trusting that God will abundantly and lovingly give us the good things that we need.