Between noon and three

Preached at St. Mark’s, Berkeley, on July 27, 2025, the Seventh Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 12).

Collect: O God, the protector of all who trust in you, without whom nothing is strong, nothing is holy: Increase and multiply upon us your mercy; that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may so pass through things temporal, that we lose not the things eternal; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Readings: Genesis 18:20-32, Colossians 2:6-19, Luke 11:1-13

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen:

“Yes, No, or Not Yet.” I don’t know about you, but when I was a kid we learned that God always answers every prayer that we make with Yes, No, or Not Yet. We might not like the answer, but God is faithful, and never just leaves us hanging. So if we don’t get the Yes we want, we have to start considering that the other two might be what’s on offer instead, and then try to consider what each might mean for us. Yes, No, Not Yet. In any case, once we receive our answer, we give thanks to God in return. In this way we grow in prayer and in faithfulness.

Today’s passage from the Gospel of Luke contains some extended reflection on prayer, and the passage from Genesis shows us Abraham bargaining with God. All these tactics are pretty familiar, aren’t they — bargaining with God, pleading our case as a child to a parent, repeated asking, insisting, banging on the door in the middle of the night, the quiet contemplation and trust commended in the Lord’s Prayer.

I’m sure I’ve tried every one of these tactics with God, and a lot more besides. If nothing else, seeing them here in the text of Holy Scripture gives us assurance that God is pleased to hear our requests, even though he already knows what we need, far better than we do ourselves. Or, put another way, our lessons assure us that God desires to hear and receive our own desires. In prayer, the desire I share with God is met by God’s desire for me, and this encounter, the church teaches, works both to heal and to elevate my own desiring, so that more and more I want what God wants, and I am satisfied with nothing less than God himself. This is the door that is opened to all who knock, that which is found by all who seek, the gift received by all who ask.

Do you ever stop to recall: what are some of the principal things you have prayed for in your life, and how did God respond? Speaking for myself, I’m often so caught up in the answers I want right at this minute that it’s easy to forget the fervent prayers I offered in the past. But at least once in a while it’s worth pausing to remember them, and to reflect on whether the answer was Yes, No, or Not Yet.

If you’re like me, the No answers, and maybe some of the Not Yets loom particularly large. Some of them still sting, either because I do not yet understand why the answer was No, or because I am now so relieved not to have gotten what I thought I wanted that today I am embarrassed to recall how fervently I prayed for it. Perhaps you fell in love with someone who didn’t love you back. Perhaps you were hoping for a loved one’s illness to be healed. Perhaps you went to great lengths pursuing a vocation or other pathway that never finally opened its door to you. 

There is nothing wrong with any of these desires or pursuits, and some of them no doubt reflect very noble personal qualities, deeply held convictions, and sincere loves, as well as overwhelming desires. When God says No to requests like these, it can feel like we ourselves are being rejected, or that God’s goodness has somehow failed or reached its limit. If we can muster the presence of mind, we want to know why; more often we simply suffer the loss and grieve. Parents of children lost in the Texas floods a few weeks ago know something of the grief of God’s No. But if you find God has said No to one of your most fervent prayers, I urge you not to consider it a personal rejection, or a failure of God’s goodness. I can’t pretend to open the mind of God to you. And I will not tell you that pain and suffering ever serves some larger, inscrutable, divine plan, because it doesn’t. But I will say that God does make good from ill, life from death, and that some day our eyes will be opened to see what he has made to grow from all the injuries and deaths we have suffered. In God nothing and no one is ever truly lost, and his power to restore is far greater than any power to destroy.

Of course it’s also true that in addition to noble virtues and deep pathos, our most fervent prayers also frequently spring from a poor and incomplete knowledge of what is good for us in the first place. As a child, if I asked my mother for ice cream for dinner every night, she would tell me no every night. Not because I didn’t ask nicely or frequently enough, but because ice cream wasn’t a meal, and no matter how much I wanted it to, it could not provide the nutrition I needed for dinner. God made me, God knows what I need better than I know it myself, and sometimes what I pray for simply isn’t good for me, and God’s No is a way of saving me from myself.

But if No is sometimes painful, at least the answer is definite. The Not Yet answer can be much worse, because it never seems to come with a clear timeline. Those with a heart for particular causes are frequently answered Not Yet: just treatment for immigrants and refugees, racial healing, renewed growth of social trust, a swift and effective response to the climate crisis, to name just a few. Not yet. We do see improvements here and there, but plenty of backsliding too, and sometimes it gets a lot worse before it gets better. So we wonder, why “Not Yet”? 

Again, there’s nothing wrong with any of these desires, they are all of them seriously good. It’s the same in our own lives. God, help me make the most out of the gifts you’ve given me. God, let my brother see his addiction for what it is. God, heal the relationship between my two neighbors. Not yet. Why not?

Remember, Not Yet isn’t a No — and, critically, it isn’t a Maybe, either. God doesn’t do conditions, “Yes if you do this, no if you don’t, maybe, we’ll see if you behave.” Grace is not conditional, if it were it wouldn’t be grace. No, a “Not Yet” from God is always really a Yes, but it’s a Yes with an unknown and perhaps unknowable horizon. Before we can properly receive some of the things we pray for, we need first to be ready, and Not Yet helps us to see where we might need to do some work ourselves, within ourselves and within our own communities. 

God wills to give us everything that is good. But if we were to possess it all now, it would tempt us, like Adam and Eve, to forget that it was given in the first place, and instead we would grasp at it, consume it, like the apple on the tree, and thereby corrupt it utterly. Not Yet teaches us to hold some prayers, some desires, taut perpetually, tight, like a bowstring, or like the great rope threads which ancient shipwrights used to tie boats together, in order to give shape and form the rest of our lives and to all our other desiring; or like the string of a violin, to be the means by which the Holy Spirit makes music upon our souls. As Bianca of Siena put it in her famous hymn, “And so the yearning strong / With which the soul will long / Shall far outpass the power of human telling; /  For none can guess its grace / Till love create a place / Wherein the Holy Spirit makes his dwelling.”

Prayer helps us see, the Nos, the Not Yets, and the Yeses all take place in God. There is nowhere we can go, no answer God can give, that sends us out from his presence, that closes our eyes to his love, though we can choose to turn our backs and stop our ears. Whether we understand the reasons or not, whether we are bowed down with grief or ecstatic with joy at God’s response to our prayers, we have not left his presence — in prayer we remain right in his very heart. 

So, when we go to pray, having sought and found, having asked and been answered, having knocked and the door opened, perhaps to the place we wanted to go, perhaps to somewhere else entirely, we can truly say, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

To conclude this morning, I simply repeat my invitation, to stop occasionally and take stock of your life’s most fervent prayers. Lay down for a time the overwhelming concern of the present, and consider the prayers that shaped your way here to this moment, whose ups and downs have created the landscape of your own spiritual life. Recall how God answered you in each of them, whether Yes, No, or Not Yet, and consider if your sense of that answer has changed over time. Then, give thanks: not for clarity, or even for satisfaction, because both are in short supply, even in prayer. Rather give thanks that your prayers offered to God are always met by God’s steadfast faithfulness to you, by God’s desire for your good and the healing of the world. 

His love makes a way through death itself to return to its source, prospering in that for which he sent it. So, in this Great Thanksgiving, this Eucharist, we find that the Nos and even the Yeses are all Not Yets: what has been affirmed or denied has been affirmed or denied only in part, and in the Eucharist of our Thanksgiving, both Yes and No find their restoration and their fulfillment in an endless communion of love, in God’s new and everlasting day.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit: Amen.