July 27, 2025

Pentecost 7 Lectionary 17

Genesis 18:20-32; Luke 11:1-13

Epiphany, Winnipeg

After the sermon we’ll sing on old time gospely piece called Sweet Hour of Prayer. It’s kind of a lovely piece that might well warm some of our hearts as we sing something familiar from way back, and it might confuse some of us who have never heard it before. There’s one line in it that might likely confuse most of us, though, and it goes like this:

Sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer,

may I thy consolation share,

till from Mount Pisgah’s lofty height

I view my home and take my flight.

Mount Pisgah? Anybody know where Mount Pisgah is? There are Mount Pisgahs in Quebec and Maine and Masschusetts, there’s one in New York and another in North Carolina, and there are more in Oregon, Pennsylvania, Vermont, Australia and Antarctica. None of these will be the Mount Pisgah that we sing about, although I’m sure they are lovely.

The one we’ll sing about is in what is today called Jordan, just east of what we today call Israel, and Palestine, just across the Jordan River. Here’s the story of Pisgah:

The people of Israel had been slaves in Egypt for four hundred years. Through the leadership of Moses and through a series of plagues and tragedies and wonders God freed the people from slavery and then went with them as they tried to find their way to a new land that was promised to them hundreds of years before.

Once they were set free they wandered in the desert for forty years, trying to find the right time and place to go into the new land. For a variety of reasons that are the topic for another day, none but two of the ones who had been liberated from slavery survived to see the time when they would finally move into this land of their dreams. The other hundreds of thousands who had dreamed the dream the longest were not going to see it come true. Only their descendants will see it.

Just as the forty years of wandering was about to end, God led Moses up a mountain that some traditions call Nebo and some traditions call…you guessed it: Mount Pisgah. At the summit of the mountain, God said, “Look out over all that land. That’s the land I’ve promised to all of you all this time. Your descendants will get there, but you will not. But look at it. See it with your own eyes. It’s real. See that I am keeping my promises.” And Moses, who had grown so old, looked out over that land, saw it with his own eyes, and died there on the top of that mountain, satisfied that the dreams and the hopes were finally coming true.

It's where Martin Luther King drew inspiration for that speech the night before he was killed: “God has allowed me to go up to the mountain, and I’ve seen the promised land. I might not get to go there with you, but I want you to know that we will get to the promised land….My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

Sweet hour of prayer, sweet hour of prayer,

may I thy consolation share,

till from Mount Pisgah’s lofty height

I view my home and take my flight.

Jesus teaches his disciples how to pray, and then makes up a few “What if?” scenes that we just heard. There’s a neighbour who asks a neighbour for bread to feed his guests, and finally the bread is given. There’s a child asking for good gifts of food that any parent would be happy to give and those gifts are given…so it is with God, who gives gifts of life. Then Jesus says, “Ask, search, knock, and it will be given, it will be found, the door will be opened.” Maybe Jesus was digging into his toolbox of stories there and thinking of countless generations of his ancestors who had asked, and sought, and knocked on the door of the promised land. Even if they wouldn’t see it, they kept learning to trust the promise, and they kept learning to trust the one who made the promise. So they asked, and they searched, and they knocked on the door.

He wasn’t saying that if you ask you’ll get whatever you want and if you try hard enough things will go your way. He was just answering a simple request: “Teach us how to pray.” So he taught his disciples to remember the goodness of God, and for God’s realm of peace and life and goodness and justice and kindness and welcome would come to us here. He taught them and us to ask the one who gives life to give us, all of us everywhere, whatever we need for the day. We asked to be forgiven, as we ourselves forgive (or are learning to forgive). We ask not to be overcome by trying times.

He taught his disciples, as he teaches us, to keep praying when answers seem so far away.

It’s a bit like planting a tree. You plant the seedling, care for it with water and fertilizer and hopes for sun and rain. The tree doesn’t grow overnight, so you might never get to enjoy its shade, but you plant it knowing that some day, someone will find some pleasure in seeing this tree and resting under its branches. We say our prayers, we plant a seed, and trust in what will become.

We pray for so much, don’t we? For three and a half years we’ve prayed for an end to the war that began when Russia invaded Ukraine. For three and a half years we’ve prayed, and sometimes it’s seemed like we’re on Mount Pisgah, looking out and seeing that peaceful land we’ve prayed for, but for much more of the time, it feels like the world is wandering lost in the desert with no sign of an end to the travels.

But we ask, we seek, we knock.

We’ve prayed for an end to the destruction of Gaza. Little breaks in all the awful news open up now and then, and we can sometimes see signs of a promised land of peace. Then the view clouds over and it’s back to the wilderness.

At the same time we’ve prayed for an end to anti-semitism, and an end to that awful hatred that moves people to vandalize synagogues and threaten Jewish neighbours, yet that hatred keeps hanging on.

But still, we ask, we seek, we knock.

We pray for right relationships in our own country, and we know that whatever we mean by reconciliation will take generations to come fully true.

But we ask, we seek, we knock.

We prayed for healing of bodies and minds and relationships, and sometimes we experience it, sometimes it’s like we’re standing on the heights and we can see it coming, and much too often we can’t see that promised gift that has been in our prayers all along.

And on a day like today we can say that we've prayed for rain, and here's the rain.

We ask, we seek, we knock, and we trust that the one we pray to listens; we trust that the one we pray to will give good gifts for all.

One of Jesus’ disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us how to pray.” One of Jesus’ disciples, it could have been John or James, maybe Bartholomew, maybe Mary or Joanna, it could have been you, it could have been me, it could have been someone any of us passed on the street the other day.

It’s a curious question: “How do you do that? Could you teach me how to pray?”

Or it’s a frightened question or a helpless question: “I don’t know what’s happening, I’m afraid of what’s going in around me or inside me. We can’t seem to clean up the mess, in here, out there….Lord, what do I do? Teach us how to pray.”

It’s like a question an eager student asks - someone who just wants to learn. Or it’s like a question you might ask if you’re just tired and don’t know how to muster the words, or if you stopped praying long ago and don’t know how to start again. “Jesus. Teach us how to pray.”

Then Jesus answers, not with a formula that needs to be spoken just the right way. There’s no new version or old version. And he doesn’t say anything like, “Pray from your heart and come up with something that sounds good.” He just gives a few simple words that amount to praying for God’s good gifts. And then he just calls us to trust the one we pray to, and not to be afraid to keep on asking, seeking, and knocking. Even if we don’t see the things we pray for coming true. They will, for the generations yet to come.

So we ask, we seek, we knock.

Then something happens to us as we pray. We pray for peace, and the Holy Spirit works on us, shaping us into a people who live for peace. We pray for daily bread and become people who care about our neighbour’s daily bread. We pray to be forgiven and the Spirit begins to shape us into people who forgive, and who seek the healing of relationships. We pray to be saved from times of trial, and we become people who care about our neighbour in their times of trial.

So we ask, we seek, we knock.

We have these hopes and dreams, these prayers for us and for all creation, and then God takes us to the top of a hill, maybe a hill with a few crosses, and then a few steps away to a hillside tomb where someone rolled the stone away, and we look out over all that God has made and see a land where promises of life really are coming true.