Ask, search, knock

“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

A middle-aged man was in the hospital for the fifth time in as many months. Each time he felt weaker. Each time there was more pain. He prayed for healing. But God seemed silent. The man knew the Bible, and he said to a hospital chaplain, “I’ve asked, but I sure haven’t received any help. I’m searching, but I haven’t found anything. I’ve been knocking. God knows I keep knocking. But nobody’s there.”

What would you say to that man? What do you say to yourself when it’s 2 o’clock in the morning and your own desperate prayers seem to go unanswered?

It’s a hard question. Maybe one of the hardest questions of a life of faith.

We probably all have different explanations, different understandings of how God acts in the world. But I can tell you a couple of common explanations for seemingly unanswered prayer that just don’t work for me.

One explanation that people will sometimes give goes something like this: “God has something better in mind for you. Everything happens for a reason.” That idea has never worked for me. Yes, our vision is imperfect and incomplete. Yes, God is God and we are not. And yes, God can and does make use of all sorts of horrible experiences and turn them to good. But it’s also true that sometimes terrible, unfair, unreasonable things happen, and I personally can’t bring myself to believe that God deliberately causes them.

Another explanation I’ve heard for unanswered prayer is this: “You must not be praying enough, you must not have enough faith, or you must have done something that’s stopping God from answering.” In other words, “it must be your fault somehow.”

Many years ago, a woman I knew died from cancer at a young age. A preacher at her funeral said that if she’d only had more faith, she would have lived. The woman’s sister heard the preacher and, on the spot, turned her planned eulogy into an angry denunciation of the idea that her kind and beloved sister was in any way to blame for her own death. I think she was right, and the preacher was wrong.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus says that we should love even our enemies because by doing so we’re imitating God – the God who “makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” That doesn’t sound to me like a God who would withhold healing from a young woman because her faith wasn’t perfect.

If you look at the full record of scripture, if you look at the history of the church, and if you look at the lives of the people around you, you’ll see that we simply aren’t promised a life free from suffering.

Look at Jesus’s life. In the Gospel passage we read today, he teaches his followers to pray the Lord’s Prayer. “Do not bring us to the time of trial,” he says. But Jesus himself came to a time of trial. On the night before his crucifixion, he prayed that the cup might be taken from him. Did Jesus’s prayers go unanswered?

We should certainly pray for the things we want and need. Jesus says to ask, to search, to knock. He even seems to say that it’s faithful to nag God, to be persistent, to come back again and again. The psalms are full of prayers like that, prayers full of desperate hope.

But when prayers seem unanswered, it can be hard to understand. Why won’t God answer? Why wouldn’t God answer?

That very question shows up in today’s Gospel: “If you…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.” If limited, sinful, fallible human beings can figure this stuff out, why can’t God?

But listen again to the exact words of the scripture. “How much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.”

The Holy Spirit. For me that’s the key.

We’re not promised a life free from suffering. But we are promised the Holy Spirit.

What does that mean in the middle of the night when you're lying awake worried? What does the Holy Spirit’s presence look like when you're sitting in a hospital room?

Sometimes it's the unexpected phone call from a friend who somehow knew you needed to hear their voice. Sometimes it's the strength you didn't know you had to face another day. Sometimes it's a moment of inexplicable peace in the midst of chaos, or the ability to forgive when forgiveness seemed impossible.

The Holy Spirit doesn't always change our circumstances, but the Spirit changes us. The Spirit gives us what we need to endure, to hope, to love even when life is hard. The Spirit connects us to God and to each other in ways that transcend our immediate troubles. The Spirit works through ordinary things, through gathered community, through scripture, and through sacrament.

Some ancient manuscripts of the Gospel of Luke actually invoked the Holy Spirit in the Lord’s Prayer. “Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us,” some old manuscripts read.

What would it be like if that were our daily prayer? How might praying every day for the presence of the Holy Spirit change what we expect from prayer?

God does answer prayers. But sometimes the answer God gives us is God’s presence. And that presence, while not always what we hoped for, is never less than what we need.

So, yes, “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.”

You might not get all the things you ask for. But you will find God. And God will be enough.

So what would I say to that man in the hospital, the one who felt that God seemed silent? I would say this: God hears your prayers. God is present with you in your pain, in your fear. You're not alone. The Spirit who sustained Jesus through his own suffering is with you now. Keep asking, keep searching, keep knocking. What you'll find behind the door you’re knocking on might not be exactly what you expect, but it will be what you need most: the presence of the God who loves you more than you can imagine.

That promise is enough to carry us through even the darkest nights.