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I have four sisters and two brothers. (That seems like too many.) I have never known life without a whole lot of peers. (For this reason, while seminary is not always easy, it is always, for me, deeply familiar.)
My favorite day of the year, even now, is Christmas Day. My father is generous and thoughtful, and he always made Christmas special. Every Christmas morning I would, like all sensible children, awaken at 4:30 a.m. to begin the Great Descent of the Stairs, to see what Santa and my parents brought me. And when, finally, at the mid-morning hour of 6:30 a.m., my parents would give us permission to run downstairs, I would hurry down to find a pile of treasures, some from Santa, some from my parents. My loot pile was flanked by a little banner my dad made, with my name on it. In all of this, I learned important life lessons from my father. I knew even then that the name banner was his idea, not Santa’s, a thoughtful way to make a child in a big sibling group feel unique, special. I learned that giving good gifts is a love language.
Today Jesus teaches us a lesson about gifts, and about asking for them. Jesus says that God is much better at gift-giving than even my dad. He also tells us that gifts aren’t just a Christmas-morning kind of thing. We might be hungry, angry, lonely, or tired, and when we turn to our neighbor and ask for help, sometimes we might have to ask more than once, but a parent, a friend, or a neighbor will usually be there for us. If we ask for bread and eggs, we won’t get snakes and scorpions.
Snakes and scorpions: these are creatures of the rainforest and the desert, creatures of the dangerous places on the earth—wilderness places. This is not what our human companions, let alone God, should give us when we ask them for good things. And God is much better than our human companions: God will always give us what we need. If we ask, we will receive. If we seek, we will find. If we knock, the door will open.
But as we know so well, this is not a cosmic cash machine, or an On Demand service that will simply blink my gift into existence. It doesn’t work that way. So how, then, does it work?
It works like this. First, God responds when we ask for things. Just before his words for us today, Jesus taught his followers what we call the Lord’s Prayer, and every single time we ask God for things in that prayer, we ask. We all ask. Give us daily bread, we say. Not “give me daily bread.” Forgive us our sins, as we forgive others. Save us from the time of trial. Deliver us from evil. And so, no, God doesn’t operate like Santa, or my dad. God’s gifts aren’t divided carefully into seven piles, one for me, and one for each of my six siblings. We ask God for things.
Second, God doesn’t give us everything we want, or solve all of our problems whenever we ask. If God did that, then we wouldn’t really live in such a splendid creation, and we wouldn’t ever really grow up, or grow wise, or (and this is most important) learn the ways of love. There would be no arena for us, no place where we can take risks, and be creative, and gain mastery, and care for the next generation, and care for our elders, and practice forgiveness, and live together as God’s loving people. God does not promise to give us anything and everything we ask for, but God does promise us the gifts of the Spirit, gifts we can receive and use to help bring about God’s kingdom.
And here’s one way to understand what the gifts of the Spirit are. When we ask God for things, God gives us these things: water, this book, bread and wine, and each other.
Water: the water of baptism, the water that names and marks us as God’s own, and sends us as Jesus followers into this world of stunning beauty and deep need. This book: the Word, opened up for us by Jesus, who, beginning with Moses and all the prophets, taught his friends everything about himself. Bread and wine: this is the meal of thanksgiving at God’s table, a meal that strengthens us as the baptized to do the work God has given us to do. And finally, each other. When I run downstairs with excitement to see what gift God has left for me, I find...you. You and I, all of us: we are God’s gift to one another. When we look into each other’s eyes in a few moments, at the sharing of peace, there we will see God’s answer to our prayers of deepest longing.
For all these good things, for water, this book, and this meal, I give thanks. But most especially I give thanks to God for you.
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Malachi 3:13-4:2a
Psalm 1
Luke 11:5-13
This sermon was preached at “Thursday Night Live,” a liturgy of Holy Eucharist at Virginia Theological Seminary, Alexandria, Virginia, that is designed expressly for an intergenerational congregation. This is not a children’s sermon, but it was written in the hope that it would appeal to listeners of all ages.