forest hill 
July 27, 2025
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
“Asking and Receiving”
“Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.” (Luke 11:9)
It’s a lovely sentiment. It’s the sort of saying I want to post on my fridge door, so I can be reassured by it every time I’m hungry. A quick Google image search will display all sorts of memes with calm pictures and extravagant fonts. I could post a different version in every room of my house!
But is it true? Is that how the world works?
Does that ring true in your own experience?
What about the times when we pray and pray and pray, and what we really want just doesn’t happen? What about when we pray for healing, and the cancer just gets bigger? What about when we pray for peace, and the drones keep delivering more bombs? What about when we pray for friendship with our neighbours, and the tariffs keep rising?
Is it God’s job simply to give us what we want? Is God nothing more than a cosmic vending machine, delivering candy to the people who ask properly?
When we imagine that this is what God is for, it does cruel things to the people whose deepest desires aren’t answered. It makes them feel like the reason they are suffering is because they’ve done something wrong: they haven’t asked properly; they haven’t paid in the right coin; they haven’t done what it takes to keep up their side of the bargain. If God always rewards the faithful, then the people who don’t get rewarded must be unfaithful! Is that what we believe?
People who imagine God as a vending machine use this passage to encourage “persistence.” They say that if God doesn’t give you what you ask for right away, you should just keep nagging until it happens! I always hated it when my kids behaved that way. Why would we imagine God rewards nagging, when good parents don’t?
We sometimes try to wiggle out of this simplistic view of God by saying that God's job is to give us what we NEED, but not always what we WANT. There’s some sense to that. After all, our “wants” can be superficial and trivial, and often harmful to others. There’s a big difference between what I want and what I truly need! But even that distinction doesn’t ring true to me, when it comes to interpreting this passage. I’ve seen too many people who prayed faithfully for something that they truly truly needed, and never got it. There are people dying in Gaza and Kiev today who are as faithful as I am, and asking for peace with much more intensity and perseverance than I’ve ever mustered. I’m convinced that they NEED the peace they’re praying for, and it’s patently obvious that they’re not getting it.
What else could this passage be talking about, if it’s not describing a simple-minded vending machine God? Is there anything here that could be deeply hopeful, and not simply a pious lie?
I wonder what it would be like to live in a world where people really did get what they need. Always.
What would it be like to live in a world where hungry people never received snakes? Where hungry children always got eggs instead of scorpions? Where sick people found healing? Where everyone was able to live to their fullest potential, with none of the cares of the world holding them back?
In our broken world, almost everyone has something that holds them back – poor people, and people unlucky enough to live in conflict zones deal with more than the rest of us, but few of us live a charmed life! Frequently we assume God must be behind our misfortune – that the bad things that happen to us are because we’re being punished. Frequently we live as though God only backs the powerful, and that the rest of us don't matter in the cosmic scheme of things.
But what if those evil things are not God’s fault? What if God is the one trying to set things to rights, not the one keeping us back? What if this passage is about the world as God wants it to be, and an invitation to work WITH God to make it so?
Join us on Sunday as we wrestle with a much-loved passage, and seek to find something hopeful enough to leverage our deepest longings.