Over Thy Kingdom Come 2025, our senior team are sharing reflections on prayer. Today’s video was recorded by Archdeacon Jean Burgess, Archdeacon of Bournemouth – watch the video or read the transcript below.
In Luke 11 Jesus is teaching his disciples about prayer: “ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened”.
Over the years, I have often wondered if these verses have created in many Christians imaginations a vending machine image of prayer,
We put in the correct change, make our selection, and get what we want!
Sounds fine until it isnt!
Until we put our coins in and just when the can or the bag of crisps is about to drop – nothing! stuck in mid air!
You can see where comedy sketch shows get material, as we rant and rave, push buttons again and again, occasionally hit or kick the machine, or is that just me?
It’s not so different with prayer – when the answers we want, do not arrive or arrive slowly, feelings of angry, frustration, hurt even betrayal, can overwhelm us. “Where are you God!”, is a common cry!
I don’t have many people coming to me to ask, “Why was my prayer answered?” Sometimes we do ask and receive, seek and find, knock and the door is opened.
But it is at the times, when we do all that we believe is expected of us, and we still do not receive or find and the door remains firmly shut.
I don’t know why some prayers are seemingly answered and some not?
I don’t have any good answers but I’ve heard some bad ones – “you didn’t pray hard enough!” You didn’t have enough faith!” You were not asking for the right thing!”
I don’t know about you but I cannot believe or accept any of that – this strikes me as an attempt to reinforce the vending machine image of prayer.
When I reflect on such comments, I can’t help but be drawn to another time and place when a man praying on a Thursday evening, with blood, sweat and tears called upon his Father and they crucified him the following day.
Prayer is not about the coins, not about the mechanical process, not about the transaction nor the transmission of information to God.
This passage in Luke also contains the wonderful words of the Lords prayer, which begins with Our Father; the heart of prayer is not transaction but presence and relationship.
God is the one who sustains and nourishes our life, which means that God gives God’s self as the answer to our every prayer– “how much more will the Heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him”.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty of prayer is that sometimes we just want to offer our coins and push the button. We don’t want God, we want something from God. We want God to change our circumstances – sometimes that change occurs but I am increasingly convinced that God, more often than not changes us, strengthens, empowers and enables us to face the circumstances of life and we do so at times filled with joy and gratitude and other times with pain and sorrow. But always with God.
On my better days I know this and that’s enough. On other days – I’m back with the disciples asking “Lord teach me to pray!”
Pete Greig wrote a book called God on Mute and he says this: “The Church need to be as honest as the Bible about the struggle of faith, the pain of life and the fact that wrestling with the silence of unanswered prayer is not an act of unbelief but of defiant and deepening faith.”
