One of my favorite authors is Father Andrew Greeley, who, when he is not writing newspaper columns, popular (and somewhat racy) novels, and technical sociological treatises, somehow finds time to write passable books on theology.  Greeley is so prolific that some have suggested that he is a committee rather than one individual man.  Some critics say that he has never had an unpublished thought; but perhaps some of the criticism leveled against him might come under the heading of jealousy...from folks who cannot get their thoughts published at all. 

In any case, what originally attracted me to Father Greeley’s writings was a book written over twenty years ago titled The Jesus Myth.  I found it to be just about the most interesting one-volume introduction to the Christian Faith I have ever read.  What I like especially about Greeley is that he has a knack for summarizing the good news of the Gospel in a succinct way.  But I have some problems with him when he says that Jesus said “God’s love and mercy are so generous that similar generosity in human affairs would be a sign that a man had become irrevocably demented.  It is not merely that (God) has set up an accounting system in which a considerable amount of credit is deposited on our side of the ledger; it is also that he has in a moment of insane generosity thrown away the account book entirely and provided us with a checkbook full of blank checks!  (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1971, p.46)

Now, if Greeley is referring to the lavish love of God, I could not agree more; but I must confess that his metaphor of God’s giving us a checkbook full of blank checks bothers me.  And that gave me the title for this chapter: “Does God Give Out Blank Checks?” Obviously, I don’t think so.  At least, not according to the fifteenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel.  There Jesus did not say, “Ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” No, he said, “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, (then) ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.” (John 15:7) That is a pretty big “if.” It seems to me that if the spirit of Jesus Christ truly abides in us, there are some things for which we will not ask.  Remember that the Greek word translated “abide” here means “mutual indwelling.” It refers to our being close to Christ and His being close to us.  Jesus is saying that if we live close to Him, then some of His love and power will flow through us, and then we will pray for, work for, live for, the same things and causes for which He lived and died and rose again.  It is not a blank check.  There is the conditional clause “if.” St.  Augustine once said that for the Christian there was but one commandment: “Love God and do as you please.” We like the latter half of those words, but often forget the former.  If we truly love God, then we will want to do what pleases God.  That makes all of the difference in the world.  There is a conditional clause when Jesus says “If you abide in me...then whatever you ask for, you will receive.”

This is somewhat akin to what it means when Jesus teaches us to pray “in His name.” In the Gospels it is recorded that he said, “Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you.” (John 16:23b) We often misunderstand those words to mean some sort of magical formula, thinking that to merely mention the name of Jesus in our prayers will guarantee results.  But in the Bible, “name” stands for a person’s character.  When Moses met God on Mt. Sinai, he asked the question “What is your name?” Name, in the Bible, represents character.  When our Lord tells us that we should pray in His name, He means that we should pray according to His character.  We should pray as He prayed, and for the kind of things for which he prayed.  As the Biblical commentator William Barclay put it, this means that “We cannot pray for things of which we know that Jesus would disapprove.” As Christians, we end our prayers with the phrase, “through Jesus Christ our Lord.” That is not simply a pious incantation to guarantee that we will get what we ask for; nor is it some sort of “sign off” like the Citizens’ Band radio jargon, “10-4, good buddy.” To pray through Jesus Christ our Lord is to pass our prayers through the prism of His personality.  To pray in Jesus’ name automatically rules out purely selfish intercessions.  In his book “The Christian Agnostic,” Leslie Weatherhead said, “I find that hardly ever do I pray for myself.  This is not humility, it is just that He knows already.  What I want to do is to strain my desires as through a sieving bring what He sees is best or wise or desirable.  (Many of my early desires were inherently impossible.) This is what I mean by the phrase through Jesus Christ our Lord: not that a lofty, remote God will not listen unless I persuade Christ to carry my wishes to a higher court, but that I wish to cleanse my own desires by passing them through the mesh of the Master’s mind.” (New York and Nashville: The Abingdon Press, 1965, p.  221)

I would suggest that this concept of prayer in Jesus’ name changes our whole concept of what prayer is all about.   In the popular mind, prayer is a sort of gimmick designed to get the Almighty over into our “corner,” over to our side, on to our team.  It has been thought of as a device for overcoming the indifference and/or reluctance of the Almighty; for getting God to perform special favors for us, even sensational tricks on our behalf.  But that is not prayer, that is magic.  In a delightful little novel titled Heaven help Us written by Herbert Tarr, a rabbi is asked by his minister friend if he will pray for him prior to the minister’s undergoing a serious operation.  The rabbi ponders the request in his mind, and his thinking expresses itself in these words: “Intellectually, I’m offended by the notion that God must be bribed with prayers before deigning to heal the sick and relieve the oppressed.  (The movie) The Song of Bernadette always infuriated me with its implication that the Lord couldn’t care less for those who didn’t acknowledge Him as King of the hill.  Yet I replied instinctively, Sure, Vernon...Of course.’ But then the rabbi said softly to himself, God doesn’t need our prayers.  We do.’ “ (New York: Random House, 1968, p.  151)

Leslie Weatherhead said an interesting thing in the quotation I just used.  “I find that I hardly ever pray for myself.  This is not humility, it is just that He knows already.” This is one of the first questions children ask their ministers and Sunday School teachers: “If God knows what we need, knows what we are going to pray for before we pray, then why pray?” This question assumes that prayer is for God’s benefit.  But it isn’t.  It is for our benefit.  When we pray we are not giving God new information.  The purpose of prayer is not to inform the Almighty of something that He does not already know, like the preacher during the First World War who began an invocation by saying, “O Lord, have you seen the morning papers?” We may be sure that God knows all about it, and understands what is needed far more than we do.  What, then, are we doing when we pray?  I believe that we are opening ourselves to the God who is always open to us.  As a wise person once said, “Prayer is not overcoming God’s reluctance, it is laying hold of God’s willingness.” Prayer does not change God’s mind, it releases God’s power. 

Now, I have to admit that there are some parables of Jesus which seem to give a different impression.  In Luke 11 He tells of a man who goes next door to borrow a loaf of bread from his neighbor.  Actually, he goes not to borrow one loaf, but three!  And to make matters worse, it is in the middle of the night!  The friend tells him, in effect, to “drop dead,” but the fellow keeps on knocking anyway until the friend finally gives up and gives in and gives him the three loaves so that he can go back to bed and get a good night’s sleep.  Then there is that strange story in Luke 18 about the crooked judge who refuses to hear the case of a poor widow, presumably because he knows that there isn’t much in it for him.  But she keeps hounding him until he finally hears her case just to get her out of his hair.  These are puzzling stories, and I wonder what to do with them.  I also wonder if the fact that these stories have a touch of the comic about them, whether Jesus might not have told them with a twinkle in His eye...as though he had to explain prayer all over again to His dull-witted students.  In Matthew 7 we have a clue to their meaning, when Jesus says that even the most terrible father you can imagine wouldn’t give a child a black eye when he asks for peanut butter and jelly (I’m translating loosely), and if that is so, then just think of how much more a loving heavenly Parent is willing to give us.  I have a hunch that something like that is the meaning of these strange stories.  Not that we must overcome God’s reluctance toward us, but if, on the human level, even lazy neighbors and unjust judges and lousy parents can be persuaded to give to those who ask, how much more will God, who is total Love, do for us?  Frederick Buechner suggests that Jesus told these stories “Not because you have to beat a path to God’s door before He’ll open it, but because until you beat the path perhaps there is no way of (God’s) getting to your door!” (Wishful Thinking, New York: Harper & Bros., 1973, p.  71) In what is perhaps Leslie Weatherhead’s magnum opus, Psychology, Religion, and Healing, a great pioneering work dealing with the relationship between the three disciplines, written in 1951, he wrote: “It is clear that in a great many matters Augustine’s dictum is illustrated, Without God, we cannot; without us, God will not.’ It seems that God waits for man’s co-operation before certain things can be accomplished.  The mistake often made is that while man clearly sees that he must co-operate with God on the physical level, and thus sees the need for medicine, surgery, nursing, and other means of co-operation, he does not understand that he must also co-operate on physical and spiritual levels.”

We may say that if God loves us, and we love God, then our needs are already known.  Why, then, should we pray?  But love is a living, active thing.  Love is not something to be taken for granted.  I read somewhere of a reserved, uptight Victorian husband, who, on his wedding day, said to his bride, “My darling, I love you more than anything or anyone else in the world.  Now, having gotten that out of the way, let’s speak no more of it again.” It is hard to see how much of a continuing mutual relationship can be sustained under those circumstances.  “If you abide in me, and my words abide in you,” said Jesus, “then you may ask what you will.” His words imply a continuing, active relationship of mutual love. 

I believe that our whole notion of what prayer is, depends upon our notion of who God is.  Jesus said that God is a loving, heavenly Parent, who could not possibly love us more.  God is total, unconditional, no-strings-attached Love.  Prayer, then, does not change God’s attitude toward us.  God’s attitude toward us is always and forever love.  Prayer, rather, opens up the avenues through which that love may be released in our lives.  But I want to come back to an earlier phrase of Weatherhead’s.  When he prays “through Jesus Christ our Lord,” he says, “What I want to do is to strain my desires as through a sieve, the sieve being what God sees as best or wise or possible.” Is it possible there are things which God cannot do?  Perhaps a story will help us to answer that question.  In a book I read many years ago titled A Touch of God, author Virginia Patterson told of a four-year-old girl named Cindy who wanted very much to go to school.  Her older sister went to school.  Her mother taught school.  And her father was the principal of the school.  Cindy like being with the other kids, but they were all in school.  Why couldn’t she go?  Her mother and father kept telling her that she could go...when she was six.  One morning when they were having family devotions, Cindy refused to join in.  When her parents asked her why, she replied, “I’m mad at God.” “Why?” her parents asked.  “Because I’ve asked Him and asked Him to make me six, and He won’t!”

Of course not.  There are some things even God cannot do.  That’s not a heretical notion, for across the centuries theologians have insisted that God cannot do something that is logically contradictory.  All sorts of dumb questions have been asked like, “Can God make a square circle?” or “Can God make a stone so heavy that even He cannot lift it?” Someone asked St.  Augustine what God was doing before He created the world.  The saint replied, “Making a hell for people who ask stupid questions.” And they are stupid questions.  God is not interested in doing parlor tricks.  There are far more important, more serious questions to be asked.  One of the most popular books of recent years is Rabbi Harold Kushner’s When Bad things Happen to Good People.  I heartily recommend it to anyone who is undergoing a crisis of faith as a result of personal tragedy or loss.  Rabbi Kushner says that as a young man he had come to understand God as a Father who rewarded people when they did what was right, and punished them when they did wrong.  Then his whole belief system came crashing down around his head when his three-year-old son was diagnosed as having “progeria,” a strange disease that causes the victim to age very rapidly.  His lovely son would die of old age in his early teens.  Rabbi Kushner’s first response was like that of many of us: “Why me?  Why is God doing this to me?  I am a good, religious person.  I don’t deserve this.  And my little boy, what could he have done to deserve such a horrible fate?” His questions were as old as the Book of Job and as new as the latest report from the hospital bed of someone we love.  I won’t tell you how Rabbi Kushner handled all of the questions.  You can read the book for yourself.  But he discovered one thing that was most helpful: God did not do it to him.  God did not do it to his little boy.  Whatever other answer we may come up with, to blame God for such tragedies seems to be the height of foolishness and unfaith.  Rabbi Kushner was driven back to his Bible, especially to the Psalms, and discovered there a God who does not send tragedy, but a God who does send help to get us through the tragedies of life.  He even goes so far as to say that we Christians have something additional to help us.  Because of our faith in Jesus Christ, we have a picture of a suffering God who meets us in all of our tragedies, and is able to bring triumph out of them!  (New York: Avon Books, 1981, p.85)

Does God give out blank checks?  I doubt it.  A saint of God whom I was once privileged to know said that God always answers prayers, but not always in the manner we want or expect.  She said that sometimes God says “yes.” Sometimes God says, “No”...and “No” is an answer, though it may not be the answer we want to hear.  And God sometimes says, “Wait.” Perhaps the latter answer is the most difficult for us, because we live in a world where we are used to instantaneous gratification.  We want instant answers to our questions, instant solutions to our problems.  But life doesn’t work that way.  God doesn’t work that way.  In a cartoon a small boy is shown down on his knees, praying, out of patience with God.  He prays, “Aunt Stella isn’t married yet.  Uncle Herbert hasn’t got a job.  Daddy’s hair is still falling out.  I’m tired of saying prayers for this family without getting results!” We may smile, but I have a hunch that his words strike a little too close to home for most of us. 

But what if prayer is something more than simply asking for things?  What if prayer is, as Jesus said, simply abiding in Him and allowing Him to abide in us?  What if prayer is primarily allowing God to work in and through us, putting ourselves in right relationship with God and with each other, not so God can “rear back and pass a miracle,” but so that, instead, we ourselves can become that miracle.  What if that is what prayer is all about?  If prayer is a blank check, then evidently St.  Paul didn’t get one of them.  In his second Letter to the Church at Corinth he complains that he had prayed to be relieved of some sort of ailment not once, but three times...all to no avail.  Nobody is sure what Paul’s problem was.  John Calvin thought it was the temptation to doubt.  Luther felt that it was the opposition of his enemies.  The Roman Catholic Church over the years has identified it with carnal temptations.  Others have suggested malaria, migraines, epilepsy, tuberculosis and glaucoma.  He did complain about having to write in such “large letters.” (Galatians 6:11) A male chauvinist years ago suggested that Paul’s thorn in the flesh was a nagging wife!  Whatever it was, Paul says that he prayed to be released from it three times, but the problem never left him.  But there did come the still, small voice of God within, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.  So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me.”  (II Corinthians 12:9) God did not answer the prayer in the way Paul wanted, but God did answer the person, and that is far more important.  Harry Emerson Fosdick, that controversial pastor of Riverside Church in New York many years ago said some wise words about prayer.  Among the wisest are these: “God always answers true prayer in one of two ways—either he changes the circumstances or he supplies sufficient power to overcome them.  Martin Luther once said, “A Christian knows that he is not refused what he has prayed for, and finds, in fact, that he is helped in all troubles...and that God gives him power to bear his troubles and to overcome them: which is just the same as taking his trouble away from him, and making it no longer misfortune or distress, seeing it has been overcome.”

Commenting on our Scripture lesson, William Barclay says these wise words, with which I conclude:

Here...we are face to face with one of these great sayings about prayer which we must understand.  If we come to this saying thoughtlessly, it sounds as if the Christian, the chosen one of Christ, will receive everything for which he prays.  (But) prayer must be in the name of Christ.  We cannot pray for things of which we know Jesus would disapprove.  We cannot pray that we should be given possession of some forbidden person or some forbidden thing; we cannot pray that some personal ambition should be realized, if that ambition means that someone else must be hurt and wounded in the fulfilling of it.  We cannot pray in the name of Him who is Love for vengeance on our enemies.  Whenever we try to turn prayer into something to enable us to realize our own ambitions and satisfy our own desires, prayer must be ineffective, for it is not real prayer at all!  (Daily Study Bible: Phila.: The Westminster Press, 1956, pp.  209-210)

One day, according to the Gospel, the disciples asked Jesus, “Lord, teach us to pray.” It seems that is a question which we must ask in every generation.  “Lord, teach us to pray.”