Homily Proper 12c
Proper 12c
July 26, 2025
Opening
As a child I remember being a fair facsimile of a first child. I felt in my gut the expectation that I needed to succeed. I got the message that I was supposed to be like my father, whose name I carried. I took it for granted that I would follow the rules. When given the assignment in kindergarten to color pictures, I thought the number one rule was to stay within the lines.
Around about puberty I began to reject that persona. Slowly at first. Then with more and more purpose I began to discover that going against the grain of the expectations placed on me, at the very least, opened up new possibilities. Where I had once been a good first born son, I was now becoming something of an imp. “A mischievous fairy or demon.”
It is with that sort of outlook that every time today’s lessons would come around – I preached every 3 years for over 30 years on them – I would get a bit of a smile – an impish smile you might say.
Here, after all, was:
- A version of the Lord’s Prayer that was different from the one everyone knew.
- Jesus’ own words that all we have to do is ask and God will provide what we ask. Seek and you’ll find. I don’t know about you, but that has not been my general experience of God. Perhaps with a different perspective? An impish one?
- Sodom and Gomorrah! That was rich enough. Of course Fr. Agostino gave us a bit of a heads up last week about the lesson in hospitality that it offers us.
- But the Sodom and Gomorrah story came with story of Abraham bargaining with God. (When was the last time you had a conversation with God along the lines of, “If I do such and such I want you to do this other thing.” And God responded! And so you kept it up.) It’s just so outrageous that it begs for some explanation.
- The reading from Paul’s letter to the Colossians is chocked full of intricate and extended metaphors and arguments, and it begs for an hour or two lecture to unpack its interwoven meanings.
“Surely there is fun to be had somewhere in all that,” has been my general approach on first reading these lessons.
Today, there is one little piece of those readings that speaks especially loud to me. Not surprisingly it’s really a question that rings in my ear. In these texts, what is the image of God that is conjured up for us? What do we project onto God in the form of expectations? How is our relationship to God affected by the image we have inherited?
Goal today
These texts are worthy of those classic questions: wait! what? I wonder why? I wonder if?” As I listen to these texts, particularly the Genesis and the Lucan text, I ask myself, “What image of God do these texts conjure up? If that’s at all relevant to me, I wonder, then what picture do I have of God when I pray?”
As I listen to Abraham bartering with God – as if God was just a drinking buddy – I wonder, what relevance does that have for me since I don’t even like to barter over the simplest thing. Buying cars is for me an awful experience.
But consider. I suspect that many of you know well the very human response when someone experiences a cancer diagnosis. The stages of grief, for example. Anger. Denial. Barter. “If you’ll just make the chemo work, I’ll be a good … (fill in the blank)”
And really, should we be so friendly with God that he is like the person we sit next to down at the pub? Wait! What?
The disciples say to Jesus in today’s reading from Luke: “Teach us to pray.” And then he gives them a very simple formula. Not much more than, “God is great, God is good, let us thank him for this food.”
But Jesus doesn’t end with just the simple form of prayer. He tells them parables. Jesus’ preferred method of teaching is, after all, to tell stories. As a parenthesis, I’ve thought for a long time that we don’t take that point seriously enough.
He tells stories that his followers can take in. (Like God, people and children love stories.)
If you have a friend who comes to you with a request, are you going to turn him away? I had a friend send a text to me the other day, asking if I had time to talk. He had just got out of the hospital with a fairly complicated cancer surgery. Of course I had time to talk. I’m not gonna blow that off. Of course not.
So God is like me because I respond to my friend who needs to talk? Or am I the friend with a great need? What do I make of this?
Jesus goes on, “In the land of Abba, when you ask for something it will be provided you. Something like, “it’s a place where people are provided with what they need, not a place where some are privileged and others will just have to drop by the wayside.”
That’s not like the world I live in.
The God Jesus knows is a loving parent, a parent who loves us beyond measure.
So, for example, I didn’t provide for my children everything they asked for. I tried to provide for them what they needed, what they would need in the time to come, what they didn’t even know they needed. That line of thinking seems to provoke as many questions as it answers.
It’s enough to ask: Wait! What is the image of God I set before myself?
Challenge to our images of God
There’s a fun book, almost a children’s book, that came out about 30 years ago with the title Good Goats; healing our image of God. Perhaps I liked it because I like goats, having raised them for a while in my twenties. 1
This simple book seeks to illustrate that when we are able to change our image of God from a judgmental one – even a punishing one – to an image of a God who loves us, the result will be healing.
For example some different images of God that we carry with us might be:
- Good old Uncle George. Living in a mansion, bearded, gruff and threatening.
- A vengeful, punishing God?
- A judge?
- Prosecuting attorney?
- A defense attorney?
- A drinking buddy?
- A daddy who gives his children candy whenever they ask?
What these authors propose is that if we change our image of God to a loving God, one who, in their words, loves us at least as much as the person who loves us the most, the result will be a dramatic healing into well-being for us.
The Names of God
The Bible itself gives us a dramatic variety of ways to imagine God. Father and mother are both possibilities. God as creator of everything is the first image we get as we open the Hebrew scriptures. Some of the names attributed to God are: 2
- God Almighty
- I am – He who is
- Most high God
- Shepherd
- The Lord who sanctifies
- God the eternal
- The Lord who provides
- Lord of hosts, of the powers
- The beginning and the end (Alpha and Omega)
- Holy one
The active image we are using to engage God in prayer will be revealed by how we respond.
But if we imagine God to be a “prosecuting attorney” or “judge”, all God’s efforts to heal or sanctify us will not work – “we will fail to thrive”. We will relate to God with defensiveness, with arguments, with stonewalling when what God desires is for us is to melt into an embrace of love.
Prayer to change us
The image that has sustained me the most is that when we pray we are not trying to change God but to change ourselves. This understanding suggests an image of God as one who desires that we grow into who we are meant to be, to thrive, to get to the end of life and be able to say thank you.
A particularly powerful image for me is a God who desires what is best for me – best in the long run, not the short term. In other words:
“When I pray to God I do not pray to change God, change God’s mind, but rather to change me.”
if the child asks for an egg, will (they) give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!“*
Indeed, as a parent trying to love my child, I knew full well that what the child wanted might well not be what the child needed in order to thrive. I used to say that my goal as a parent was to prepare her to be able to cross the street without holding my hand. At the time I couldn’t imagine that little girl crossing the street without getting run over.
If it’s the case that God loves us as much as the person who loves us the most, it may equally be the case that when we pray to God we’re not asking God to change, but rather we’re saying, “God, I’m ready to be changed myself. God, I’m ready to be changed myself.”
It matters what our image of God is, because the image we bring to the relationship will determine the possibilities for growth in us. One learns quickly in gardening that much depends on the soil, the nutrients, the temperature, the moisture, the light we provide the plants. The difference is between a flourishing – whatever it is – and one that “fails to thrive.”
Meister Eckhart imagined God as putting the seed of life into us:
The seed of God is in us.
Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree and a hazel seed grows into a hazel tree;
a seed of God grows into God.
Citizens of the Kingdom
At this point in my homily I haven’t really said anything that I might have said in one of my previous sermons on these lessons. But along the way this past week, something happened. Maybe it was the Holy Spirit. I discovered something I hadn’t really known – or known to say out loud before. It came to me this way.
I thought, “The 2 phrases about God and prayer that resonate the most with me are:”
- That God loves us at least as much as the person who loves us the most.
- That when we pray we don’t do it to change God but rather to change us.
What I was dissatisfied with is that both of those phrases have to do with me and God. Nobody else. Nothing else. Just me and God.
My brother sent me a recording of Noel Paul Stookey (of Peter, Paul and Mary fame) doing a little monologue. He said it used to be that the big magazine of the day was TIME magazine. Everybody read it regularly. Then came LIFE magazine. Now time and life are very close concepts, to be sure; but life is a subset of time. Then after a while we had PEOPLE magazine. People, of course, are a specific subset of life; not everything that is alive is a person. Then came US magazine. US relates to people, of course; but not them, only US. Then we finally got to SELF. Never mind about the others, let’s just consider number one. He jokingly said something about the next big magazine would be called ME, (and the pages would consist of aluminum foil so you could look at yourself.)3
I’m not sure if it’s apparent to you, but that whole sequence is completely backward for what is good for us. What God wants for us is the reverse sequence:
- self
- us
- people
- life
- time … everything and always.
When God loves us. You know, “Jesus loves me this I know.” It’s not just between God and me. It’s not just for my benefit. It’s not like a child asking for an egg and getting an egg. It is for the sake of the whole world around me. God loves me. Yes. But God loves the whole creation. And God loves us so that we can become like him.
I am loved so that I can give it away in love. The fact is that I am surrounded by creatures (God’s creations) that are also loved.
I guess I knew that. But this past week I came to know it in a new way. Love, like all the best gifts, is not so much to be enjoyed as to give away.
A song that I used to play on the piano and sing to myself over and over again begins this way:
Open the eyes of my heart, Lord
Open the eyes of my heart
I want to see You …4
I want to see you so that I can grow into your likeness. You’ve planted a seed within me and I want to become the person who loves like you love.
When I let that music flow in and through me, it becomes a way to fertilize my budding relationship with God. I seek for that seed of Meister Eckhart to grow within me. The door I seek to open is the door to all of God’s creation and all God’s creatures.
When I sought to love my children with all that was within me, I was trying to nurture relationships. My relationship with my children to be sure, but equally the relationships of all that my child would encounter in life.
Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you
… means not the reward of one individual person. It means to be rewarded with a web of relationships, beginning with one person and reaching out to include the whole world. Love is inherently relational. Love connects people and things. It’s not a thing to be owned. It is only love when used up. On that neighbor, that stranger, the planet that sustains us, the one who perceives me as the enemy, the moon and the stars. In the end, everything.
Notes
- Linn, D., Linn, S. F., & Linn, M. (1994). Good goats: healing our image of God. Paulist Press.↩︎
- https://www.bartehrman.com/names-of-god/↩︎
- https://ceec.church/220211-2/↩︎
- Michael W. Smith↩︎
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