Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
Luke 18.1-8
2 Timothy 3.14-4.5
Preached Canberra Baptist Church 21st October 2007
“JS loves TM” carved within a heart on the trunk of a tree, or a park bench. In various forms this little message attests young love. It is sometimes the first testimony of budding love with all its sweetness and that first fine careless rapture. Are your initials quietly sitting in a forest somewhere? But how many of those testimonials have been lived out in true love, extending down the decades in faithfulness and tenderness and patience? Time and tensions often throw such young love off line, and life does not always work out as the earnest declarations of young lovers intend.
As in love, so also in work. At the start of one’s working life the grand project often stands with startling and majestic grandeur. Chatting with the waitress who had delivered my coffee in Civic last year I asked why she wanted to do a post graduate degree at the Sydney Peace Centre. Was there a project that she was considering, something she wanted to achieve in her life? With total conviction and disarming confidence she replied – “We’re going to abolish racism”. How many at the outset of their careers plan great things, dream of changing the world? Yet the rigours of the workplace, the difficulties of the career path, the financial demands of family mean that we settle into conformity and getting ahead, and the vision and idealism of the opening of the journey are gradually leached out of us.
As in love, and in work, so it often goes in the life of faith. In the joy and excitement of discovering that Jesus is alive, and present in the world, that God loves us with an astonishing and transforming love, we are drawn into the sweep of the gospel, that great proclamation which announces not only that we are a new person through the liberating presence of the Spirit within us, but that the whole creation is renewed. We read our Bibles, sense this tremendous reality of HOPE that has seized us and look to the world with expectation, sometimes even impatience, knowing that God is about to do great things.
It doesn’t always work out that way. We become acclimatised to the church. Our faith grows and our knowledge grows, but the world does not change as we expect it to. Sometimes the past habits, the little quirks of personality that we felt had been transformed begin to recur. We settle into the long road of Christian discipleship, a road of victories and disappointments, of sweet days on the mountaintop and long weeks and months in the valley.
Particularly in the matter of prayer can this road be long and frustrating. We are people who pray, but our prayers are not like emails that find quick replies shooting back, sometimes within minutes of our sending them out. What do we pray for, and how do we understand prayer? Does prayer remain an important part of our faith? Does that sense of the presence of God when we first encountered the living Jesus still reverberate in our experience of prayer?
As we try to bring prayer into all of life, the life of prayer can become trivialized. I was introduced just a few weeks ago to the idea of the ‘Parking Angel’. When my daughter first told me about ‘Parking Angels’ I must admit my first thought was of a smiling young woman in brief swimsuit with a leather bag full of 20c and $1coins feeding expired meters to stop motorist being booked. “Dad, you are so 1970’s!” I was told. No, the parking angel is a cute little religious doll that you carry on your dashboard and when you need a parking space you stroke it and say a quick prayer and behold, verily, a parking space shall appear! I am assured it works, but if that is what God is doing in a world of poverty, war and climate crisis, what does that say about God?
Sometimes people look for novelty in their faith, newness, a sense of something happening. They can look for new forms, new expressions of faith. That can be new music. It can be a new community. It can be an attempt to make faith more connected with experience, so that faith and our everyday lives become more closely linked. Now that may be a good thing, if our attention is more focused on God and attuned to the Spirit of God, if our lives are lifted into the yearning and passion of God for the world. Too often this hunger for relevance drags God into the banal values and objectives that society says are important to us. Our sense of faith gets focused on our concerns and diverted to serve our interests.
Years ago Janis Joplin parodied such travesties of the Christian gospel with her song "Mercedes Benz"
Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a color TV ?
Dialing For Dollars is trying to find me.
I wait for delivery each day until three,
So oh Lord, won’t you buy me a color TV ?
Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a night on the town ?
I’m counting on you, Lord, please don’t let me down.
Prove that you love me and buy the next round,
Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a night on the town ?
(Everybody!)
Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends,
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
Parking spaces and prosperity: is this what the gospel has become? How do we pray when prayer doesn’t bring swift, immediate, unmistakable ‘answers’? How do we walk the long of discipleship, and what do we look for as the fruit of our faith?
Well, if these questions trouble you, be encouraged. Because they troubled the readers of Luke’s gospel, and they troubled Paul as he write to young Timothy. Luke tells a story of Jesus, a story that Luke says is about persisting in prayer and not losing heart. The story we know is of a nagging old woman who is held up to us as a model for prayer.
This text has developed (as clearly as we can tell) in three stages:-
After affirming the importance of prayer, and reassuring the disciples that God’s answer will come speedily, this passage asks the haunting question of whether faith can stand the long haul, whether at the final coming of the kingdom there will be anyone watching and waiting in faith.
But the story tells us more than just about persistence in prayer. It tells us deeply about the substance and essence of prayer. What does God grant to the persistent and praying ones who call to him day and night? “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones …?” (v.6) We cry out to God day and night – and what will God give us? Not a Mercedes Benz. Not colour TV’s. Not a night on the town. No not even something as simple as a parking space. What we are promised is Justice!
That’s what the preaching of Jesus is about. That’s what the expectation and longing and prayerfulness of his people should be directed to. ‘Justice’. The Kingdom of God. The reign of God in Peace and wholeness and shalom for all humankind.
Paul knows the temptations too: the ease with which our first commitments and clear understanding of what God intends for us and the world get gradually sidetracked into our own subtle spiritual and material interests. Timothy is reminded to hold fast to the original teaching and to be persistent in his ministry, for the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves, teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. Hold fast, be persistent.
The life of faith calls for great persistence. Not just the persistence that we keep ‘doing it’ – believing, praying, learning – but the persistence to stay focused, to keep Jesus in clear view as the object of faith and the Kingdom of God in sight as the end of faith. Yes, Luke 8 calls us to be persistent in prayer, especially in face of the abiding brokenness of the world which seems so immune to the power of prayers, but our prayer must not be diverted from the justice of God, the hope of the Kingdom, so that faith might be found on earth when the Son of Man returns.
And that is not easy. Leonard Ragaz, the Jewish theologian writes “To believe in God is easy. But to believe that one day this world will be God’s world; to believe this in a faith so firm and resolute as to mold one’s life according to it – this requires faithfulness until death.”
I opened with the metaphor of a tree on which was written a simple message of love. There is of course another tree on which is written (as the hymn says) ‘in shining letters “God is Love”’. It has persisted down through the ages. It is the great declaration of God’s love for the world, and the inauguration in power of his kingdom. The call of Christ is that we follow in the way of the Cross, hold true to his teaching, and look for his coming in glory.
In the 1980’s I corresponded with a pastor working in the Philippines in the dying days of the Marcos dictatorship. He was at risk, and poor, and ministering amid violence and repression. His salutation at the end of each letter was not “Yours sincerely” or “Best wishes” or “Yours in Christ” or “Grace and peace”. It was the same final exhortation in every letter which he simply signed off: “Keep the faith”, a sign of resistance and a call to courage and faithfulness. It is much harder for us where the great questions are not so clear, and the ears have time to itch amid all the whispers of a celebrity and consumer culture. The only answer: be persistent, watch and pray for the kingdom and keep on the path of faith, the upward way that is modeled always, only on Jesus.