Sermon for July 18, 2021 - The Eighth Sunday After Pentecost, Year B, The Rev. Isaac P. Martinez

Beloved, I have a confession to make to begin this sermon: I’m very bad at directly asking for something I’d like for myself. As my beloved partner Ben can tell you, I will often hint at something I’d like him to do for me or I will make an indirect statement about my desire. But he usually has to intervene so that I can make an honest and upfront request of him.

It’s a strange maneuver on my part, because in other contexts, I’m not afraid to ask things of people, as many of you have experienced over the last two years. But I’ve realized that the difference is who ultimately benefits from my requests. If I’m asking others to help with a project or an outcome that is bigger than just me, I can easily summon the courage and the words to ask and accept a yes or no with equanimity. But if I’m the immediate recipient of whatever aid or favor is given, I hesitate to ask directly. 

And I’ve realized I hesitate because I do not want to feel vulnerable. I don’t want to my request to be denied, sure, but even deeper than that, I don’t want to be dependent on anyone else, even if it’s the human being I love most in the world. Whether because of my personal psychology or the American myth of rugged individualism or a combination of reasons, I believe I should be capable of fulfilling all my own needs and desires.

But of course, such a belief runs smack into the truth of the Gospel, so beautifully captured by our collect of the day: Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of your Son Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Let me make a quick catechetical side note about collects. Collects are brief prayers primarily used in public liturgies like the Daily Office and our Sunday Eucharists. Like a sonnet or haiku, a collect has an identifiable structure. With long roots in the 6th and 7th centuries, many of the collects we find in our current Book of Common Prayer were either edited or authored by Archbishop Thomas Cranmer for the very first prayer book of the new Church of England in 1549. Collects also serve a few purposes. Although the collect of the day often gets lost in the bustle at the beginning of our Eucharistic worship, it often sums up our collective prayer for this hour. It also is one of the last remaining textual threads that binds together disparate expressions of Episcopal worship each week. And lastly, the collect can preview a common theme from the day’s readings. 

With our Gospel reading focused on Jesus and his disciples’ ceaseless ministry of teaching, healing, and deliverance wherever they find themselves, the theme of today’s collect is prayer, specifically prayers of petition. A petition is asking God for what you want or need for yourself personally.

Now our collect reminds us that we often don’t fully know our own needs and desires. But God does. God, the fountain of all wisdom, knows what we need before we can even think to ask for it. And in contrast to Their wisdom, we sometimes request things of God out of ignorance, or more specifically, our short-sightedness. In some cases, were God to answer our petition to the letter, the result would harm or diminish someone else unjustly. And yet, God knows that too.

The collect also speaks of our unworthiness in asking. There are things which we dare not ask God for because some part of us knows it is presumptuous do so. After all, who are we to ask the Creator of the universe for anything? Who are we—frail, sinful, and mortal humans—to ask an almighty, righteous, and immortal deity to pay any kind of attention to us?

But God is not just all-knowing and all-powerful. Our God is also full of compassion and mercy. Despite it all—our weakness, our ignorance, our unworthiness—God loves us abundantly, loves us enough to live and die as one of us, enough to overcome sin, death, and every barrier that keeps us from relationship with Her.

And so we are bold to ask: have compassion on us, on me; mercifully give to us, to me; through the worthiness of our sibling and Savior, Jesus,  God, hear our prayer, grant us our petitions, and above all, let your will be done.

Now, when we come to God praying for ourselves, we are in fact proving that we are vulnerable. This is why prayer is at the heart of a spiritual life. No matter our physical posture, whether we are on our knees or standing up, sitting at a desk or lying down in bed, prayers of petition make us hyper-aware that we cannot in fact meet all our needs or satisfy our own desires by ourselves. It humbles us. Despite the overwhelming cultural messages of self-reliance and independence, we ultimately need to rely first on God and then on our fellow human beings for all the things that truly matter: purpose, connection, and love.

So, my friends, let your requests be made known to God. Let us risk vulnerability before God and with each other. Let us pray on our own. Let us add our petitions in our common prayers each Sunday. Let us not be ashamed to add our names to our parish prayer list, which many of us, not just clergy, pray with daily. Like the crowds that followed Jesus wherever he went, God looks on us with such great compassion, and in His wisdom and power, He will answer us. Amen.