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This Week's Sermon The Ninth Sunday after Pentecost 29 July 2007 "The Good Gift of the Holy Spirit" Luke 11:1-13 LSB Series C Vicar Hans W. Fiene Soli Deo Gloria!

In all the sermons that I've preached this year, I don't think I've ever told an actual joke. I've offered a few wisecracks here and there, I suppose. But, as far as I can recall, I haven't presented an old fashioned, straight up joke-until now. Now, before I tell this joke I should probably offer the disclaimer that the joke is just told in the first person. I didn't actually do this and it's not actually me speaking. Having said that, the joke goes like this:

When I was a boy, more than anything else in the world, I wanted a bicycle for my birthday. And so I prayed and I prayed and I prayed that God would give me a bike. But I didn't get one. That's when I realized that God just doesn't work that way. So I stole someone else's bike and asked for forgiveness later.

I think the reason people find this joke to be a bit funny is that it seems to ring true for them. If you were to look back at your life, there are probably plenty of things you prayed for that you didn't get-whether it was something trivial like a bike or something more substantial, like praying that someone you loved would be healed of a disease. When God doesn't seem to give us the specific things we want, it can become rather easy to conclude, as the narrator of the joke does, that God "doesn't work that way." And when that becomes our conclusion, it becomes rather difficult to take Jesus seriously when He promises through those famous words in today's text, "I tell you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you."

Jesus, however, doesn't lie. And while some in this day and age would claim that you're your prayers aren't answered, you just don't have enough faith. As the full context shows, Christ isn't promising us that good and faithful Christians will be rewarded with a life free of suffering. Rather, Christ promises us that, in this life of suffering, God will always answer the Christian's prayer for the good gift of the Holy Spirit.

As you heard just a few minutes ago, our Gospel text for today contains Luke's account of the Lord's Prayer. What's unique about Luke's account of this prayer that Christ teaches His followers to pray is that it's followed by a kind of theological commentary. After teaching us what to pray, Christ essentially teaches us why we should be confident in speaking this prayer. "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" Jesus says. In other words, if those people who are selfish and spiteful, hateful and malicious will still provide so much for their children, we can be absolutely certain that God will provide even more wonderful things for us because He is entirely good and entirely free of these evil vices. It's a tremendously simple teaching. And yet it's often very difficult for us to trust this simple promise of Christ. It's not always a rare occurrence for even faithful Christians to find themselves thinking that God just doesn't work that way.

Christ teaches us to ask that our Father's name be hallowed, that it be kept holy. But it can be pretty easy to doubt that God's name is still being kept holy among anyone with things going the way they are today. This isn't just the case with the growing, antireligious, secular part of our culture. It's also happening within Christian denominations. And not just among those troubled Episcopalians and the like. It's even happening among us in the Missouri Synod. In the LCMS, you'll find some pastors who claim that Muslims believe in the true God, we have pastors who are advocating open communion and things of that nature. And when all these lies about God, when all these false doctrines are lapped up and embraced by so many people around us, sin will often enter our hearts and cause us to doubt that God really cares, that He's actually doing anything to make sure that we keep His name holy.

And when we doubt that God hears our prayer that we would keep His name holy, the organic result is that you end up doubting that God will do anything else listed in the petitions of this prayer that Christ teaches us to pray. Christ teaches us to pray that God's kingdom will come, that He will give us the Holy Spirit to believe His word. But how are we going to believe that Word if no one has a love and fear of the One who gave us that Word in the first place?

Christ teaches us to pray that God would give us our daily bread. But if God doesn't care enough about us to preserve our souls with faith in His word, how can we trust that He cares enough about us to preserve our bodies with what they need?

Christ teaches us to pray that God would forgive our sins and lead us not into temptation. But it can be rather difficult to believe that God really will deliver us from sin and temptation when He seems to be letting those things run wild around us. Like the boy who stole the bike, it becomes easy to conclude that God doesn't work that way; that we're on our own to fill those needs ourselves. To echo language from today's text, it becomes difficult to believe that our Father in Heaven is really answering our requests for fish and eggs when we're surrounded by scorpions and serpents.

But Jesus doesn't lie. And though it's true that the scorpions and serpents do continue to surround us, it's also true that the scorpions and serpents will not destroy us. As Luther says in his brilliant hymn A Mighty Fortress Is Our God, "though devils all the world should fill, all eager to devour us, we tremble not, we fear no ill; they shall not overpower us." When Christ took our sins away through His crucifixion, our lips were opened to pray to our Father in Heaven. And for the sake of His beloved Son Christ, God hears every petition of Christ's prayer and answers them all through the gift of the Holy Spirit.

We pray that God's name would be kept Holy among us. And, through the Holy Spirit, our Father in heaven has answered that prayer. To see evidence of this, just listen to what you hear in this sanctuary on Sunday morning. In the liturgy and the readings, you hear the word of God, where the Holy Spirit proclaims the holiness of God's name to you. In the hymns that we sing, we don't sing that God is holy because He's big and huge and powerful and can do whatever He wants. We sing a true Christian confession of God's holiness-that His holiness and goodness has been revealed to us through Christ, that God shows us His holiness through our salvation won by Christ. And in the sermons that you hear, the Holy Spirit speaks that confession to us over and over again-that the image of God's holy name is found in the image of Christ crucified.

We pray that God's Kingdom would come to us. And, through the Holy Spirit, our Father has answered that prayer. To see evidence of this, just look at your fellow Christians here at Immanuel-in particular those who have been struggling with hardships such as illness and disease. Throughout this past year, I've visited many members here when they've been hospitalized. And, so many times, I was blessed to see that God has answered that prayer, through the gift of a strong, undying faith given through the Holy Spirit to congregation.

And this isn't just a generic faith that "well, God is good, so I'm sure that God will make me better eventually." It's a faith and hope that clings to the cross of Christ and sees His glory in our own suffering. It's a hope that says, "I know that, even though I'm still sick, God has already answered my prayer and that His kingdom has already come. And because I was made a child of my Father in Heaven in my baptism, I have been grafted onto God's love. And I can echo Saint Paul's words from Romans 8 by saying, 'for I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.'"

We also pray that God would give us our daily bread. And, through the Holy Spirit, our Father has answered that prayer. And not only has our prayer been answered through the food on our tables and the clothes on our backs. We also see that it's been answered when the Holy Spirit continues to give us what we need as Christians, when He surrounds us with faithful fellow Christians to encourage and nurture us in the faith. Husbands and wives, when you love each other and submit to one another out of faithful Christian love, the Holy Spirit showers your daily bread upon you. Parents, when you teach your children about Jesus, through the faith given to them by the Holy Spirit, God answers our prayers for daily bread.

Finally, we pray that God would forgive us our sins and that He would lead us not into temptation. And, through the Holy Spirit, our Father has answered that prayer. Just looking again at the Divine Service, you'll see that our deliverance from sin and temptation is everywhere. What Christ won for us on the Cross is poured out by the Holy Spirit everywhere you look. From the moment you walk into the sanctuary, you are greeted by forgiveness. Because there, at the font, is a reminder that your life as a Christian began in the forgiving waters of baptism. When your pastor speaks the absolution at the beginning of the service, the Holy Spirit allows Christ to speak through that pastor's lips. And because of this, the Holy Spirit once more gives us the gift of forgiveness.

Later in the service, we pray the Our Father from Matthew's Gospel in the communion liturgy. And in that prayer, when we ask that God would forgive us, we can be assured that the prayer has already be answered in the absolution before we even spoke those words. But we can also be assured that God will once again answer this prayer because that's precisely what happens when He forgives us, renews us and strengthens us through the body and blood of Christ in the Sacrament of the Altar.

Throughout the entire Divine Service, and, in fact, throughout our entire lives as Christians, the forgiveness won through Christ's blood pours out upon us. And whenever forgiveness is present among us, the good gift of the Holy Spirit is also present. And whenever the Holy Spirit is present, we can be certain that God has answered our prayers and will continue to answer our prayers. So go ahead-ask, seek and knock as much as you want. Because every time we pray for the Holy Spirit, our Father will always answer our prayer and give us this gift. And we can always be sure of this, quite simply, because God just does work that way.