Curate’s sermon 27.7.25 Luke 11.1-13

Do you remember the book called ‘The Secret’? Or the documentary? Or the feature film? About 20 years ago, ‘The Secret’ seems to have been everywhere. I still remember its logo with the red seal and the claims that a secret to a good happy life had been hidden for years and has now come out. And if only you pay for the book or the film you will know it and your life will never be the same! The core idea of ‘The Secret’ was something called ‘the law of attraction’ – the belief that everything one wants or needs can be satisfied by visualising a wish, repeatedly thinking about it, and maintaining a positive emotional state to ‘attract’ the desired outcome. The author, Rhonda Byrne, who by now surely must be a millionaire, based the approach to success promoted in the book and the documentary on a three-step process: ask, believe and receive. And at this point you may start to hear echoes of today’s Gospel reading in this approach: ‘ask, seek, knock, and it will be given to you’. ‘The Secret’ was very present in the media and you can still buy the book in Waterstones if you are not put off by bad reviews. The simple message – imagine whatever you like and it will happen – was and remains very attractive, but anyone with any portion of life experience is likely to say that it’s not that simple. Positive thinking is most certainly a good thing and has been demonstrated to produce amazing results, including recovery from serious illness, but we don’t always get what we want and terrible things can happen to good people. ‘The Secret’, sadly, sounds like wishful thinking. But what about the Gospel reading? The two ideas don’t seem too different on the surface: ask, or imagine, and you will get what you want.
In Luke 11 Jesus teaches the disciples how to pray, introduces them to what we now know as the Lord’s prayer and tells them to be persistent in prayer and know that if something has not been granted straight away eventually it will be, if you keep asking. He concludes with an illustration of a child asking for a fish and an egg and saying that of course the child’s father will not give him a snake or a scorpion instead, so God won’t do this to us either. Except it sometimes feels like he does. How many of you have prayed for one thing and received the opposite? How many have prayed for healing for a loved one or an end to war but the loved one died and the wars go on? Also, the evil parents who give their children equivalents or snakes and scorpions do exist. A friend of mine was only telling me about one such father yesterday.
This is one of those passages in the Bible that I find really challenging. It is also capable of making me angry. Surely Jesus should know better than Rhonda Byrne and not mislead us, making us believe that something is true when in practice it is not. In my frustration and looking for answers, I turned to two minds that are infinitely greater than my own and might just help – St Augustine and C.S. Lewis.
In sermon 55 on Luke 11, Augustine emphasises the Trinitarian imagery in this passage: the person knocking on the friend’s door asks for three loaves of bread. Further to this example, Jesus tells the disciples to do three things: ask, seek and knock. These actions are paralleled by three responses: ‘it will be given to you’, ‘you will find’, ‘the door will be opened’. Augustine also conflates this passage from Luke with its parallel in Matthew 7 to end up with three things the child is asking the father for: a loaf of bread, a fish and an egg. Using a fair share of imagination but also very logical reasoning, Augustine maps this passage onto 1 Corinthians 13 and interprets the bread, the fish and the egg as love, faith and hope. I will tell you how it works in a moment.
For Augustine, the three loaves that are asked for in Luke 11.5 are the gift of understanding the Trinity and our responsibility not only to seek this understanding ourselves but to share it with others. In the example Jesus uses, the loaves are needed to feed a friend who has come late and must have walked in darkness. The darkness can be interpreted as spiritual, the friend stepping out of it into light and needing to be fed with the bread from the Lord himself or else he may end up hungry and in the darkness of disbelief again.
Now let me tell you about the ‘trinity’ of the bread, the fish and the egg. Here is Augustine’s reasoning. Just like love is greater than faith and hope, according to Paul, so bread is the greatest of the foods, hence the parallel. Faith lives in the troubled world just like fish lives in the troubled sea and is not destroyed by it. The contents of an egg are concealed from us and yet, life emerges from it, signifying hope. In Augustine’s interpretation, the child is not in fact asking for physical food but for spiritual sustenance. As a result, the whole passage is talking about our desire to know God and to ask for his spiritual gifts in order to live a good life. To support this interpretation, Luke concludes by explicitly saying that the Father will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask. For comparison, in the similar passage in Matthew the Father gives us slightly more abstract ‘good gifts’.
This is good, but in our prayers, we do not only ask for spiritual gifts or the knowledge of God. We pray for all sorts of things. How can we be certain that these things are granted? The short answer is we cannot. In his essay ‘Can prayer be proven to work?’ C.S. Lewis points out the most cruel Biblical contradiction to Luke 11: the man who promises that God will grant all our requests is met with silence when he prays in desperation in the garden of Gethsemane asking the Father to take away the cup he does not want to drink from. The thing is, any prayer is a request. And any request comes with an uncertain outcome. I may ask a friend to collect me from the train station and they may or may not do it, but I have to ask and hope that they do. Our assurance comes from our knowledge of the person we are asking. If we know them well, we will have a pretty clear idea how likely they are to do what we ask. For C.S. Lewis, our prayers to God are akin to the requests we make of those we know and our confidence in prayer is informed by our knowledge of God. We cannot test any of it and have to trust but if we know who God is, we will have a better idea what to ask of him and we may just learn that asking for hope, or strength, or courage is more in tune with who God is than asking for a new car. The latter is the sort of request ‘The Secret’ may (or may not) help with.
I think the biggest difference between prayer and the law of attraction, promoted by ‘The Secret’ and lots of other similar sources, is in the fact that the latter is seeking control, in addition to teaching to attract largely material things. With this mindset, we want to be certain that we will have what we want. By contrast, in prayer, we must approach God in humility. The control is his, we are merely the recipients of his mercy and his gifts, if we ask in faith, with hope and in love. God has given us the dignity of voicing our requests and effecting change by calling on His power. As C.S. Lewis rightly says, God could have made the world in which everything is controlled by him. Instead, he has given us the privilege to participate in His purposes and to share in His creation through our prayers. I think we should remember this privilege and retain this dignity as we dare to pray. Amen.