Bill Cosby and Prayer: Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Today’s readings deal with prayer, and as I’ve been following the events of World Youth Day this past week, I came across a video by one of my favorite authors, Jesuit Fr. Jim Martin, editor-at-large for America Magazine on the topic of prayer. The U.S. Bishops asked Fr. Martin to make a few short videos to show to the pilgrims at World Youth Day this past week, and one of them happened to be about prayer.

In this video, Fr. Martin says that whenever he gives a talk on prayer he always begins by asking his audience how many of them pray daily. He says about three-fourths of the audience usually raise their hands. Then he asks them to leave their hands up if they think they pray well, and he says about half of them put their hands down. Then he asks them to leave their hands up if they think they pray very well, and almost everyone’s hand goes down.

I imagine if we asked ourselves those questions, we would probably get the same results.

Prayer is at the heart of what it means to be a disciple, and yet at the same time we struggle in knowing what it is to really pray.

And we’re not alone. It seems Jesus’ disciples have the same feelings about prayer. Or at least one them does. He asks Jesus, “Teach us to pray.”

And in response, Jesus offers three simple qualities of prayer.

The first is nearness. “When you pray, say: Father.” Not Mighty Lord, not Great God of the Universe, but Father. Abba, Daddy.

The way we address someone helps define our relationship to them.

And calling God “Father” was a radical idea for the Jewish community at that time.

In a way it’s hard for us to understand how radical that was, because we’ve been raised with the idea of God being our father. About the closest I can come to trying to capture what that must have been like is thinking about when we come across a teacher we haven’t seen in years. I’m always bumping in to former students, and I’ve been teaching long enough that many of them have gotten married and have children of their own. And they still call me Mr. Senger, even though I’ve invited them to call me Nick.

I have a hard time myself calling my own former teachers by their first name. It just doesn’t seem right. It’s too informal, to intimate.

And yet that’s exactly what Jesus is asking us to do when it comes to prayer. Draw near to God, call him Daddy. God desires that kind of intimacy, that parent-child relationship.

Abraham demonstrates this nearness for us. In the first reading–we might remember the first reading last week as Abraham and Sarah are visited by three people and they promise to come back in a year and as they’re moving off to Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord remains standing with Abraham, just as the Lord remains standing with us. And Abraham wants to have a conversation with the Lord about Sodom and Gomorrah and about justice. And so what does Abraham do? He draws near to the Lord. Just as Jesus tells his disciples to draw near to the father.

And so our first lesson is about nearness. When we pray, what is our image of God? How do we call God when we pray?

And secondly Jesus talks about the importance of persistence. He sets up an evening scene in which a family has gone to bed. Now the houses in those days were probably just one-room buildings. There was a raised platform in the rear of the house, and when the family went to bed, the parents and the children would all sleep on a mat in the same area. The big wooden bolt was drawn across the door, and  to get up at midnight to answer the pounding knock of a neighbor would have meant disturbing the entire household. It wouldn’t be like in our homes where we could sneak quietly down the hall while the kids stay snug in their beds. It would have meant waking everybody up. Of course the household would get up and give the friend food if for no other reason than to get him to go away.

We might call this the Bill Cosby effect. In one of his routines, Cosby describes a 3-year-old who has taken an older brother’s toy, and when the older brother tries to get it back, the two of them fight, yelling, “Mine!” “No, you took it from my room!” Bill Cosby talks about the sound of their yelling penetrating the parent’s spinal cord, moving up into the brain, until the parent has to get up to find out where that noise is coming from, and finally telling the older child, “Why don’t you let her have it, don’t you hear her yelling?” Because, he says, parents aren’t interested in justice. They want quiet.

So if parents are willing to give in to 3-year-olds for the sake of quiet, and if friends get out of bed in the middle of the night to stop their neighbor from waking the whole family, then how much more willing is our loving God–who is interested in justice, who does truly care for his people–how more willing is God to answer the persistent prayers of his Church.

And we can believe this because of the third quality of prayer Jesus teaches: confidence. Jesus tells his disciples to pray with confidence: “…ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened.”

But sometimes we doubt that because of our experience with prayer. Maybe there are some things we’ve prayed for that we didn’t receive. And we wonder how can we have confidence in praying if we’re not sure our prayers are going to be answered?

One reason our prayer may not seem to be answered is that it’s not answered right away. As Cardinal Dolan said this week at World Youth Day, “God’s time is not our time. We prefer the microwave, He prefers the crockpot. The food is usually better.”

So perhaps it is that our prayers get answered, just not at the time we want them.

But I wonder if there’s another reason that we don’t get the answers that we’re looking for. I wonder if when we pray we don’t really know what it is we’re praying for. We think we do, but I wonder if God is answering what we’re really praying for, rather than what we think we’re praying for.

For instance, suppose we pray for good weather at a picnic. Are we really praying for good weather? Or are we praying for a good time for everybody and we feel that bad weather would ruin it. What we really want is for everyone to have a good time and maybe it’s that God answers that prayer, that deeper desire we have.

Or maybe we pray for someone to be healed from a particular illness. We’re praying for something deeper. What is it we really want for them? We want them to be relieved of pain, but why? Because pain can be so debilitating that it takes away our freedom. We can’t think, we can’t go anywhere, we’re paralyzed. So we aren’t really praying for them to be pain free so much as we are praying for them to be free, to be the person they want to be. And maybe it is that God’s answering that prayer.

And so this week, as we look at our prayer life, if Fr. Martin were to come and speak to us, would we raise our hand that yes, we pray daily? If not, maybe it’s persistence that we need to work on–pray, pray, pray. Would we keep our hand up and say we pray well, but we could pray better? Then maybe we need to look at how near we are to God. Do we call God Abba, Father, Daddy? Do we, like Abraham, take that step toward the one who’s already standing beside us? And even if we pray really well, but we feel that God is not answering our prayers, maybe we can ask ourselves, why am I praying for this particular intention? What is the prayer behind my prayer?

Bonus: Fr. James Martin’s World Youth Day Talk on Prayer

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS