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5-14-26
Unanswered Prayers
Our youth group spent some of their last full meeting this past week on the topic of unanswered prayers. This is one of the deeper topics of our journeys of faith, and it challenges us to really put to use the breadth of ways in which we’re invited into relationship with God and our neighbor. I was proud of our young people for getting into the conversation a bit, and of Kate’s leadership in putting the question very directly on the table, and on Mother Lisa’s work in shepherding a conversation that evening around prayer.
What happens in our life when we hit an unanswered prayer? It often forces us to review how we understand prayer itself. This journey is different, person by person, but one of the common early experiences is changing our sense of how it is that God answers prayers. For example, earlier this week my six-year-old daughter, excited to see adoptable cats as we went in to buy cat toys for our (SEVERAL) current cats, spontaneously shouted “I pray God that there are cute cats to see today!” I loved that for her … and I don’t think that prayer “works” by asking God to adjust creation to our preferences. The prayer is still “real” to me – but it’s real in that it’s an expression of her joy and excitement – her eagerness to see what is to come. Her prayer is full of hope and expectation, the knowledge of where joy has been and the hope that joy will abound and continue. Because cats are a feline delight.
But prayers aren’t always answered. We talked a bit in the youth group about “competitive” prayers – what happens when a football team thanks God for answering their prayers for victory? Did the other team not pray hard enough? Does God play favorites? Did the Cornhuskers abandon their piety in 1998? An unanswered prayer for our favorite team, or in a competitive job interview, or to get a part in a play, might instead change our understanding of what prayer is for. Perhaps instead of praying for the outcome, we can pray for the process: “May I do my best today,” or “May God ease my anxieties and bless my efforts,” or “May I feel the presence of God who is always my companion as I take on something challenging today,” might be prayers we can trust in.
We also talked a bit about unanswered prayers in the face of natural disasters, or illness. Here, there’s no competition. Spiritually and theologically, we might look on these moments and say “there’s no other team that wins when we lose so much; why allow this to happen?” Here, I think the unanswered prayer deepens our awareness of our world. It’s a hard truth, but a real one: creation is not always kind to us. What generations have called “brokenness” is a part of our world. Some of the oldest scriptures seek to explain this – the expulsion of Adam and Eve from paradise in Eden and into a world with hardship and death is a tale about the distance we have from God’s hope for our perfect ease. The book of Job
is a tale of a man who lives as perfectly as a human being can (apart from Jesus), and yet is still faced with terrible tragedies. Should Job curse God? His faithfulness is deep enough that he knows he shouldn’t, even in the face of an unfair world. The book of Job invites us to behold and wonder at that kind of faith, and to see within it the possibility of a deep relationship with God and neighbor that can endure even within terrible tragedy: Job still cries out his pain and weeps bitterly at the unfairnesses … but he also knows that God is good, and a righteous life is worth living.
The other fundamental reality for Christians who experience the broken world is that it shows us the need to be, as presbyterian minister and early television visionary Fred Rogers once said, “Part of the helpers.” In speaking to even very young children, Mr Rogers told them that when he sees really sad or terrible things, he likes to look for the helpers. I told our youth group the story of how several summers ago, as great wind storms shattered trees across Omaha, I walked outside to watch the cloud departing to the East, and even with the cloud line still in sight, I could hear chainsaws starting up throughout my neighborhood, as those who could help stepped forward to begin repairs and healing for our community.
Sometimes, we have to have a personal experience of the brokenness of the world to begin seeing how profoundly important it is to live as helpers. The great poem attributed to St Teresa of Avila goes:
Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet, on earth but yours
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.
This understanding – that we must be hands and feet to work and walk where Jesus now goes only by the incarnation we make of the body he invited us to be – is a powerful lesson, and often it comes to us from unanswered prayers. How many foundations and funds are established in memory of one who was lost to an illness? How many tasks are taken up because we’ve seen the impact of failing to serve? Our own blood drive here at St Augustine’s was the brainchild (or perhaps heartchild or soulchild?) of a woman who had needed blood transfusions in her own cancer treatments, and having seen that need, wanted to give back more than she took. The famous contemporary Lutheran preacher, Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, famously noted that “we preach from our scars, not our wounds,” describing the work of preachers to reflect on our hardest experiences, and from them draw wisdom to share with the communities entrusted to our care.
Finally, let me offer this reflection: unanswered prayers sometimes deepen our awareness of theology. When I was young, I was taught, at least at times, that God “has a plan.” The idea was that if I could see the plumbing of my life, and not just the experience of living it, there was a perfect clockwork bringing about a very specifically tailored salvation for me. Every bad thing was, therefore, actually part of the best possible thing.
As I’ve grown, and studied the Bible, and lived and worked as a priest, I’ve become more and more convicted that God doesn’t have a plan for me. Or rather … God doesn’t have “A” plan. There’s no single specific journey on which I’m being automatically guided. I’ll surrender a layer of humble unknowing here: perhaps God truly has woven all things together in a level beyond my understanding.
However, what has become powerfully important to my faith is the sense that God, rather than having a single plan or single path that I must walk, is rather holding out a whole banquet of possibilities and hopes for me. When I was considering what career to pursue, I thought about being a lawyer, or a professor, or a psychologist or psychiatrist. I assumed that I would at some point have the title “Doctor” in front of my name – that’s what smart kids good at school did … that was “the plan.” My life as a priest has in some ways been far more humble and far less visible than what I expected. When I realized that I felt called to ordination and not a PhD, I initially assumed that I’d go back for that degree later. Now, it’s been nearly a decade since I gave any real thought to that path, which I had assumed was “the” plan for my life.
In some ways, this is really scary. God gives us real free will and real free choice. We get to decide how to use our gifts. When there’s no single answer to find, we’re faced with much more of an ongoing assessment of how we’re called. Our faith has to stay awake, and alive, and alert … like those bridesmaids waiting for Jesus with lamps that need constant filling up with new oil. Rather than anchoring in a safe bay and sitting out the days of our lives there, we’re called into an ocean that changes and leads to unknown places. There’s mystery ahead, and new things that are not yet known. Not the answer I was looking for, when I prayed for God to show me the plan, and instead found the way of planning itself.
Friends, in the depths of all of this is, to my mind, the reality that prayer is a journey, and praying shapes us. The tough luck of that is that there’s no special prayer (even in our very-rich tradition of special prayers!) that we can learn as the end-all-be-all. There’s no way of holding our relationship with God that we can place on autopilot once we’ve discovered the “right” way to do it.
Instead, there’s a dance with the almighty and with the human family … with God and neighbor, as Jesus reminds us in the lesson of the Greatest Commandments. And God has given us the invitation to dance, and learn and grow as we do. In moments of great joy and great disappointment, in moments where our prayers may move the needle on healing or strength in this world and in moments when our hopes seem unanswered – God is with us, and we are learning and growing. In prayer itself there is always an answer, even if we arrive somewhere wholly different than where we thought our prayer might take us.
And let me there offer one more bit of “Good News” … and that is that we largely get to go together. The journey of our lifetimes is one that we get to make in community, and often those near us can spot the wisdom or growth that has appeared in our blind spots, and help us lay claim to it. Often, we get to answer the prayers together.
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