Asking For Directions

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Seventh Sunday After Pentecost by the Very Rev. Tyler Doherty, Dean and Rector.

Perhaps with the advent of GPS and Google Maps, the experience of being in a car totally lost and having to stop and ask a perfect stranger for directions is a thing of the past. But it used to be a regular feature of family road trips in my house. We drove everywhere–usually fleeing the frigid Toronto winters with its snow piled over the mailboxes, sun tipping its cap over the leaden horizon for a few stingy hours. Inevitably, we would get lost. Miss an exit. Get detoured off the interstate onto some back road and we’d wind up passing the same landmark–usually a billboard since this is America–three or four times. By the fifth time, the gentle pleading from the backseat began–“Don’t you think we should just stop and ask for directions? Look there’s a gas station right there!”

On a very rare occasion we would pull over. And my exceedingly polite and apologetic father would humbly ask directions–“Right at the Hardee’s, left after the old dairy farm that’s now a Go-Kart ranch with old tractor tires ringing the track. Straight where you believe in your heart you need to go right, and then after a little ways– the time takes to hum Dolly Parton’s “Working Nine to Five”--you’ll be right as rain, mister!” But most of the time we figured it out for ourselves. Muddling through to the great misery of all involved.They are fond memories of shared trial ruefully recalled with the stoic wistfulness of a soldier after battle. But it was also totally insane. Why? Because it highlights the stubborn self-sufficiency of our go-it-alone picture of life impervious to aid, help, direction at nearly every turn.

A couple different times in Luke’s Gospel we get a version of those lines: “those who try to make their life secure will lose it, but those who lose their life will keep it.” Sometimes “secure'' is translated “preserve”—“those who try to grasp, cling to, keep, preserve, control and secure life on their own terms according to how they think it should be will lose it.” And our reading from Colossians reminds us that we have been “buried with him in baptism and raised with him… [we] were dead in our trespasses and God made [us] alive together with [Christ].” We follow a crucified and risen Lord–and being rooted and built up in him means something has to fall away. Something that has “taken us captive”–empty, deceitful, philosophy and mere human tradition–has to fall away so that the love of Christ might live in and through the unique, unrepeatable and immeasurably precious limits and conditions of our life. So what is this something, I wonder?

I’m pretty sure it’s got to do with being able to ask for directions at the filling station outside of Beckley, West Virginia with three screaming kids in the back seat of the station wagon. Come to think of it, admitting that you’re lost (perhaps even with handy aid of Google Maps whose only advice at this point is, “Recalculating…. Recalculating…. Recalculating,” in derisive, Oxonian-inflected English) might just be the name of the game. Knocking on your neighbor’s door—to God—at midnight, shamelessly presenting yourself just as you are in the hour of our need, might just be the kind of death that is the narrow gate to eternal life.

In the parable of the Friend at Midnight, we hear of someone going to their neighbor having had a hungry, out-of-town guest arrive unannounced in the middle of night. Now suppose this person is like how most of us like to think we are–together, prepared, self-sufficient, and able to handle anything on our own. Think of the kind of death the shattering of this image represents for the person who has to slink over to their neighbor’s house, bang on their door, rouse them from sleep, and ask for help. Our translation of the parable says, “ because of his persistence,” but other translations put it more baldly, and more boldly–because of his “shamelessness.” It’s a huge difference with vast implications for our lives. 

Persistence entails a lot of effort on our part and a picture of God granting our wishes if we just ask enough starts to emerge. That child with leukemia who died not yet 10 years old? We weren’t, or worse they weren’t persistent enough in prayer. That billionaire? He was persistent, faithful, and knocked enough times to get what he wanted. Persistence equals faithfulness equals prosperity. Those poor folks? Clearly they lack persistence. 

Shamelessness–approaching “the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews: 4:16)--is an entirely different picture. It’s an invitation to come as you are to party that’s been in full swing since the foundation of the world. Fr. Robert Capon–whose maddeningly grace-centered readings of the parables always challenge our programs to turn the Christian life into another ego-trip hamster-wheel of self-improvement—writes: 

What is this shamelessness but death to self? People who lead reasonable, respectable lives–who are preoccupied first and foremost with the endless struggle to think well of themselves–do not obtrude upon their friends’ privacy at midnight. And why don’t they? Because that would display them as thoughtless beggars and make them look bad. But if someone were dead to all that–if [s]he could come to [her] friend’s house with nothing more than the confession that [she] was a total loss as a host (or anything else)–then precisely because of [her] shamelessness, [her] total lack of a self-regarding life, [she] would be raised out of that death by [her] rising friend (223-224).

Ask! Seek! Knock! Approach the throne of grace with boldness just as you are! Die to your self-enclosure and the human tradition of the self-reliant individual heroically navigating the hostile wilderness by their own wit and wiles! For it is in the very shamelessness of that furtive knock, in the very asking for help outside of ourselves, that we discover an abundant provision, bread enough, a loving care, that has nothing to do without our efforts at persistence. If there is anything like what we know as persistence at work here, it’s the faithful willingness to continually dispose ourselves to the love that’s always on offer, the willingness to watchfully notice our stubborn, stiff-necked, Atlas-like tendencies and open to the childlike littleness of Thérèse of Liseux and her graced elevator to God. Capon continues with his characteristic forcefulness:

…the temptation is to think that it is by further, better, and more aggressive living that we can have life. But that will never work. If the world could have lived its way to salvation, it would have, long ago. The fact is that it can only die its way there, lose its way there. The precise temptation, therefore, into which we pray we will not be led is the temptation to reject our saving death and to proceed living on our own (222).

Some of you might recall that invitation to the Lord’s Prayer in traditional language before the fraction goes, “And now, as our Savior Christ has taught we are bold to say.” My priest used to emphasize that… we are bold to say. What’s so bold about a prayer we’ve probably heard and prayed tens of thousands of times? Part of it is that we share, participate in, Jesus’ Abba, Poppa, Daddy intimacy with the Father. We are friends, not strangers, invited into union and communion with the one who is closer to us than we are to ourselves—that inextinguishable, indissoluble bond of love from which  nothing can separate us. Our real situation is that we stand with Jesus and pray in the Spirit to the Father as surprised insiders in the effervescent life of God. Pretty bold if you ask me!

But it’s also bold to pray the Our Father because it is the mirror image of go-it-alone propriety, and ducks-in-a row self-sufficiency. We might not realize it consciously, but every time we pray the Our Father we are expressing our dependence (give us), how we miss the mark (forgive us), our lostness and vulnerability (lead us, deliver us). If you think back over the past month or so here is the picture you get: foxes have their holes, birds of the air have their nests, but Jesus rests only in God and finds that homey, many-mansioned intimacy everywhere–even in the midst of death on the cross. We can, too, when we rest our head on Jesus. We are sent off without cloak or bag or staff or sandals in order that we might discover an upwelling abundance and provision that our normal hankering after security and preservation obscure. We are to recognize ourselves as lost, left half-dead in a ditch, our best laid plans gone horribly (but, predictably, awry). We are to stop our frantic and busy distractedness and know the better part of simply being with Jesus and then let our compassionate, responsive action arise from that place of deep abiding. And today we are asked to die to that picture of having to do it alone. We knock at the door, bathrobe askew, stubbly,  hair unkempt, the tag on our undies showing over the frayed elastic waistband. 

That asking–that furtive, sometimes desperate, sometimes joyful, but always with an unmistakably dying and rising shamelessly vulnerable courage–that asking makes a little space, cracks our self-sufficiency open just enough for God to enter in. It is the beginning of all prayer. What we open to is fish and eggs for all. A cup of water in the wilderness overflowing for a thirsty little one. That shadowy, scarce life of snakes and scorpions set aside… nailed to the cross once and for all. Under the chatter and beneath the stories, can you hear that persistently knocking voice? “Now, Dear One, will you please pull over and ask for directions? I know the way. I am  the way.”