Ask and it shall be given

Sermon at St. John the Evangelist 7/27/25

Hello, everyone! Sorry to be away for so long.

I have recently been “licensed to preach” (a phrase than never fails to set off some giggling inside me) by the Diocese of Oregon. No badge to flourish, I’m afraid — I don’t even get any theme music. But thanks to the generosity of the congregation of St. John the Evangelist in Milwaukie, OR (and in particular, their rector, the Reverend Jeanne Kaliszewski), I made my debut in their pulpit this Sunday, with this meditation on asking and receiving.

(Readings: Hosea 1:2-10, Colossians 2:6-15, Luke 11:1-13)

When I was a little girl, I desperately wanted an old-fashioned porcelain-headed doll. (We were reading a lot of Laura Ingalls Wilder at the time.) Never mind that I would have broken it within ten minutes. I pined. I longed. I moped. And my mother noticed.

In December, she gave me a choice. For Christmas, I could get one very special gift (no, she wasn’t going to tell me what it was: gifts need to be surprises), or I could get the usual pile of loot. Being a materialistic and greedy child, I chose the loot. When I asked, she told me that the special gift would have been a porcelain-headed doll.

Nooooooo! Oh Mom, PLEASE let me change my mind! PLEASE let me choose the doll! I wailed and begged, but she stood firm. I’d made my choice, and I had to live with it.

But she didn’t stop thinking about a way to satisfy my longing. She was learning ceramics, so her next project was to make two dolls’ heads – not porcelain, but clay. Since the clay heads were so much heavier than porcelain would have been, she could never get the cotton-filled bodies she sewed to attach properly. But those two dolls’ heads are among my most beloved possessions.

Because my mother died when I was eleven.

I don’t remember a thing that was in the pile of loot I had chosen.

When Jesus encounters someone in search of healing, he often asks them a question – “What do you want?” And then he doesn’t give quite a one-to-one response to their answer. To the perplexed person who says, “Well, I’m BLIND. Obviously, I want to SEE…” Jesus might say, “Go, your sins are forgiven.” The person in authority who wants Jesus to come to his home and heal his child is told the trip is unnecessary – the child is already well. Jesus asks seekers what they desire, and then immediately darts past that articulated desire, past how people think their need is going to be fulfilled, and into the mysterious territory of their heart’s true rest. The asking is important, but it’s only the starting place.

Myth and folklore from around the world testify to the power (and perils) of naming. Names and the knowing of them change how beings relate to one another: sometimes binding, sometimes empowering. Then there’s that extra layer of vulnerability invoked by naming what we long for or what we lack. Naming what we want admits that we aren’t capable of satisfying ourselves without help, without involvement, that we aren’t in control of the make-believe spigot that turns on – and off – what we need.

So it’s a curious assertion that our gospel reading makes today – that everyone who asks receives, everyone who searches finds. That’s a direct contradiction of a lot of our lived experience. Every day, we encounter closed doors and brusque dismissals. And that’s not even getting into whether we even know what we want. I don’t know about you, but I have asked for more than a few scorpions in my day. Looking in the rear-view mirror, I am profoundly grateful for the times that God firmly handed me an egg instead.

I need to face that my ability to understand the full implications of what I’m asking for is always going to be crude and limited. That phrase, “as may be best for us” tacked onto the end of prayer seems more and more important to me, the longer I live.

But, Carol, what about the prayers that are so clearly and obviously “best for us”: the halt of blind, devouring disease, the turning of hearts enslaved by hatred and greed, the raining down of peace and plenty on innocents parched by war and famine? Why does God delay in answering those prayers?

Wouldn’t it be great if I had an answer to that question? I don’t. I pray and I wait, just like all of us. And as the great prophet Mr. Rogers has bidden us, I look for the helpers. To support them and to emulate them, as I strengthen myself to join them.

And what I do know is that the more I allow my longings to be a dowsing rod, the closer I get to what God longs for in me. My heart can be used as a compass, can lead me to all kinds of unknown, even unimagined journeys. That dowsing rod of desire can lead me to living water – as long as I can avoid getting distracted by a koi pond or a dog’s water bowl – useful enough in their own way, but not my true destination: the ocean of God’s love.

We don’t know a ton about the specific pressures and conflicts within the church at Colossae that Paul is addressing in this morning’s epistle reading. Perhaps people were getting distracted by teachings that promised them more control over their lives – more eggs, less scorpions – or that could explain the remaining scorpions in a more satisfying way. Paul is trying to assure a small and vulnerable community that it doesn’t have to be complicated. Jesus has got everything under control, even if it doesn’t look like it this exact second. This set of rules or that set of rules isn’t going to make everything all better.

Jesus himself shows his great knowledge of and compassion for the complexities of being human by continuing to ask us what we want, a simple question that invites us to examine our expectations, assumptions and priorities. (It turns out that God does not place anywhere near as much value on my comfort and security as I do.) The prayer that Jesus teaches us to pray – which we’ll be saying together in a few minutes – is also deceptively straightforward… but if we examine it closely, we see how deeply it is grounded in right relationship.

The right relationship in balance between heaven and earth. Our own citizenship in God’s kingdom, without exception. The balance of our relationships with each other, not a scale weighing and judging, tit for tat, but potentially a beautiful flywheel powered by the momentum of mutual forgiveness and forbearance. Our right relationship with the powers within ourselves, the signs that we are indeed made in God’s image and sharers in God’s work – to experience them not as a burden or an obligation, but as an ever-growing capacity to be a giver, not only a receiver of grace.

And crucially, our right relationship with our own needs – today’s bread, not a shimmering illusion of endless satiety, nor a rejection of ourselves as creatures needing care and nourishment. Our needs are part of the Kingdom as much as our powers.

I once heard a heartbreaking story about palliative care for desperately ill children… which had been under a code of silence in the medical profession for many years. In their final days, children were undergoing painful and risky Hail Mary treatments that no one in their right mind would have inflicted on an adult, because no one wanted to be seen as “giving up on a child.”

One doctor decided to change this. His calling emerged from an everyday encounter – he had to tell a teenage patient that her stomach cancer had returned. Normally he would have launched into all the available treatment options and what to expect next… but this time, he chose to listen. “What do you want?” he asked the young woman.

She sighed and thought. Then she said, “Well, what I really want is to not have stomach cancer. But since that can’t happen, here’s what I’d like… I want to go home as soon as possible. I want to be able to eat Thanksgiving dinner…” And as she continued to tell him what she wanted, the doctor realized with an upswelling of heart, that a lot of what she wanted was possible… and they built her treatment plan around those longings.

“What I realized,” he said later, “was that even if I couldn’t fulfill the great hope, there was still a banquet of hopes that we could offer.” That phrase has stayed with me. Banquet of hopes.

Ask and it will be given, search and you will find, our good brother Jesus tells us. He does not guarantee anything about what and where and when, but he does not ask us to be silent about what we desire and cherish, or to be ashamed of what we need. There is always a banquet of hopes laid in the Kingdom of God, and there is not a single living thing that is not invited to that feast, both to partake and to serve. May our hearts lead us more deeply into prayer, and the Holy One lead us into the joys beyond it.