Knocking at the Door
Today’s scriptures offer us a series of compelling perspectives of how we can live in right relationship with God. A recurring theme woven into these texts centers on walking close enough that we ask God for help as we need it. Our Gospel says “ask and you shall be answered.” Yet this thread begins much earlier with Abraham after he has “entertained angles unawares.” Now, as God is about to depart, God says:
“I’m going to Sodom and if they are as bad as I hear I’m going to wipe them off the face of the earth.” How does Abraham respond? Does he cheer the omniscient, all-knowing deity on? Does he ask for ringside seats to watch as the city is destroyed? Does he congratulate God for “getting it right?”
Abraham does none of this. Instead he thinks of the people of Sodom and asks God, “would you destroy that city if you find 50 good men?” God answers: “No for 50 good men I will not destroy the city.”
Abraham does some quick math and realizes he has a problem, he can’t think of 50 good men in all of Sodom. So Abraham asks: “What if there were 40 good men?” God answers: “No for 40 good men I will not destroy the city.” Abraham is still thinking of people he knows in the city and asks:”what if there are 30 good men? God answers: “No for 30 good men I will not destroy the city.” Still wracking his mental address book, Abraham asks: “What about 20 good men?” God answers: “No for 20 good men I will not destroy the city.” Now reduced to counting on his fingers, Abraham starts with the little finger on his left hand and ends at the same finger of his right hand. “What about 10 good men?” he asks. God answers: “No for 10 good men I will not destroy the city.”
What does this story tell us about Abraham’s way of relating to God? This encounter is unlike the myths many of us know about the Greek and Roman gods. Can you see Zeus patiently enduring this series of questions? Zeus most likely would have lost patience and hurled a thunder bolt at Abraham half way through the process.
For Abraham, God is approachable, a divine being Abraham can ask for help.
The psalmist concurs, writing “On the day I called, you answered me, you increased my strength of soul.” The psalmist continues “Though I walk in the midst of trouble, you preserve me against the wrath of my enemies; you stretch out your hand, and your right hand delivers me.”
From the first two segments of scripture we see a developing pattern: we can call out to God for help. God will hear and help us. Prayer requests are welcome.
St. Paul’s letter to the Colossians tells us not to worry about meeting the expectations of society. Instead our task is to follow Christ. Through the spiritual “circumcision” of baptism we have been saved, Paul says, now we must follow Christ. Our prayers should be that we follow Christ’s way and not the standards of this world.
St. Luke focuses on instructing us how to pray, how we ask God for help. In what we now know as the Lord’s Prayer, Luke tells us to ask for our daily bread, ask for forgiveness of our sins, and to ask for deliverance from temptation. Sounds line more prayer requests.
Luke also tells us that God will hear and answer our prayers. God will be like the friend who gets up out of bed in the middle of the night to help us. God will be like a father who would not answer a child’s request for bread with stones or a mother who would not give her child a deadly scorpion. Then Luke works in one of my most favorites parts of his Gospel. I’d like to be able to say my affinity for these lines stems from Sunday School or seminary. Truth is, l learned this long ago when Pete Seeger repurposed this chorus from an old gospel song. The chorus is:
The Insistent Friend
Seek and you shall find
Knock and the door shall be opened
Ask, and you shall be answered
When the love comes tumblin’ down
This chorus neatly summarizes my theology of prayer and life. Not that I expect that God will answer all my prayer requests. God doesn’t work that way. By “prayer requests” I mean those times when we ask God for help. Sometimes our prayers are made silently, sometimes aloud, sometimes through our actions, sometimes while we are at rest. Sometimes we may not see God’s involvement until we are well along with a new chapter in our life.
So how does God work with our prayers? God knows that sometimes our prayers are wrapped up in language from the Book of Common Prayer and sometimes they are reflected in our daily life and sometimes they are part of our internal dialogue about who we want to be when we grow up. A story from a man I knew back east may help.
Ages ago, I hired Catherine Liddell to work part time in our office. She was – and is – a virtuoso musician who plays the lute and theorobo. I suspect her music would sound especially nice here in St. Bede’s.
Cathy only wanted to work part time and I could only hire someone part time so we helped each other for many years. Each spring Cathy would invite us to see the daffodils at her father’s house in the next town. Initially, I wasn’t much interested: I figured you’ve see one daffodil, you’ve seen ‘em all. But one spring day I loaded the family into our old yellow Subaru and chugged across town to her dad’s place. She was right: as we lumbered up the hill we saw more and more daffodils. Hundreds of daffodils, thousands of daffodils, many different variations of daffodils, all blooming on that hill side farm. It was an amazing sight. And it was all the work of one man, Cathy’s dad, Bill Liddell.
While working on his doctorate in American History at Yale Bill planted a fateful few spinach seeds out in back of his apartment. After graduation he began writing the catalogues for the Asgrow Seed Company. Back in those days, the seed catalogue was a big deal. I remember anxiously waiting for ours to arrive so I could plan and plant a small city garden of tomatoes, eggplant and broccoli.
Now people don’t seem to plant seeds, we just go buy flats of young plants. Seeds are the antithesis of instant gratification, flats and potted plants offer a quicker, lower risk result.
I suspect Bill was a very effective in his job, for he had an infectious enthusiasm that made it seem perfectly reasonable to believe that if one bag of big boy tomatoes seeds was good, two bags was better and three would be best. Cathy thinks her Dad’s gardening began so he could know more about the seeds he described in the catalogues.
“Throughout our lives on the hill the garden just got bigger and bigger, ostensibly to feed the ever growing family. What we didn’t eat right off got frozen or canned, by him,” Cathy remembers.
After 39 years of writing seed catalogues, Bill retired. And I can almost hear him knocking around his hillside house wondering what he was going to do. I can almost hear him say: “Good God, what I am I going to do now?” Sounds like a prayer request to me. I can almost hear God whispering in Bill’s ear: “You like to grow things, right? So go ahead: keep the garden the same size as always.” And that is what Bill did, he put into practice his motto about is one is good, two are better and three is best. Only this time, his children were grown and he was alone in the house.
One of the lasting truths about home vegetable gardens is that there are only so many tomatoes or beans or peppers or corn or zucchini squash that one person can eat. After a very short period of time, when the home farmer starts up the walk to his neighbor’s house bearing gifts from earth’s bounty, they find the blinds are drawn down and begin to suspect their neighbors are hiding in the bedroom, pretending they can’t hear the doorbell.
Likewise after a very few weeks, when the home farmer walks into coffee hour at their church with a bushel of tomatoes people seem to disappear.
Bill had a problem: lots of well cared for, very happy tomato plants producing more fruit then he could handle. I can almost hear him say: “Good God, what am I going to do with all these tomatoes?” And I suspect that God helped Bill remember right about then the solution to his difficulty: the Connecticut Food Bank. Bill brought his produce to the Connecticut Food bank so they could pass it on to hungry people. The food bank folks though Bill’s first bushel was good, his second bushel was better and his third bushel was best of all. They weren’t really astounded until he said “See you again later this week.” That was how Bill Liddell spent his first summer of “retirement,” growing 7,000 pounds of produce for the Connecticut Food Bank.
Once the snow was too deep to garden, Bill started planning his next garden. Working with a degree of precision not seen since preparations for the D-Day invasion of Normandy, Bill mapped out his plan. He started seeds under sun lamps in the basement before moving them on schedule to different rooms of the house and then out into the garden. The peas that went in by St. Patrick’s Day were replaced with a second crop and then a third as Bill planned to gain maximum production from less than an acre of land. He added kale and mustard greens to the mix because that is what his “customers” wanted.
Soon Bill came to a realization: this was took much work for one person. He could have scaled back, he could have given up. I can almost hear him say: “Good God, what am I going to do to get the help I need to make this work?” And I can almost hear God answering: “Ask and it shall be given.” People like Bill and me, we don’t like to ask for help. Somehow, asking for help seems like an admission of defeat or failure. But Bill may have remembered today’s Gospel:
So Bill started to seek for help. He started asking his friends and they answered by lending a hand. But it wasn’t enough.
Now Bill wasn’t a member of any church. But he knew his Bible. So he decided to put “Seek and you shall find” to the test, and thought of The Spring Glen United Church of Christ, perhaps from playing music there. So he decided to put “Knock and the door shall be opened” to the test. Out of the blue he contacted their minister and asked if he could make an appeal. The pastor said yes, so Bill put “Ask, and you shall be answered” to the test. He asked, and the people helped. They didn’t just help: they did yeoman service, becoming Bill’s “Volunteer Migrants.” And that’s “When the love comes tumblin’ down.”
How much produce do you think Bill Liddell and his “Volunteer Migrants” grew per season in a three-quarters acre garden? Do you think they grew 9,000 pounds – lettuce doesn’t weigh much, does it? Do you think they grew 13,000 pounds – cucumbers aren’t that heavy? Do you think in a good year they grew 18,000 pounds – even tomatoes don’t weigh that much.
Here’s the truth: on a lean year they grew 30,000 pounds of produce. On a good year they grew 50,000 pounds. That is a lot of food for hungry people. All possible because one man liked to grow vegetables and he wasn’t afraid to seek for a new answer, knock on doors and ask for help.
After many years as a “gentle man farmer,” Bill Liddell was forced by health problems to really retire. He died a few years ago. Last I heard his “farm” grows Christmas trees. But that isn’t what’s important to us here today.
For now, through our telling of his story, Bill may be still planting seeds, but in a different way.
Bill’s story shows what can happen if we live by this gospel. So I wonder. I wonder what would happen if people who like to growing things gathered friends from churches across America and planted gardens to feed the hungry. I wonder what would happen if home gardens across the Episcopal Diocese of California helped feed the Bay Area’s hungry.
I wonder what would happen here at St. Bede’s if we started to grow food for the food bank. What would it say about us and t he way we live out our faith?
Across the years, that chorus comes back to me:
Seek and you shall find
Knock and the door shall be opened
Ask, and you shall be answered
When the love comes tumblin’ down
None of us who ever held a tomato from Bill’s garden ever doubted that love had come tumbling down into our hands. I wonder if we can do as well here on our coast as we each strive to find our way of live in right relationship with God. Let’s ask and find out.
Let the church say Amen.
Today’s scriptures are:
The artwork at the top of this post is titled Knocking at the Door by Dr. He Qi. He is a professor at the Nanjing Union Theological Seminary and a tutor for master candidate students in the Philosophy Department of Nanjing University. He is also a member of the China Art Association and a council member of the Asian Christian Art Association. The second illustration is titled The Insistent Friend and comes form JESUS MAFA is a response to the New Testament readings from the Lectionary by a Christian community in Cameroon, Africa. Each of the readings were selected and adapted to dramatic interpretation by the community members. Photographs of their interpretations were made, and these were then transcribed to paintings. See: www.jesusmafa.com and www.SocialTheology.com. Our use of this art is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike 3.0 License and are from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville.
