Such Things As Shall Please Thee

I’ll tell you what I catch myself praying. Not the prayers I say up here out of the book. The other ones, on the drive over on a Sunday morning. They’re almost always an inventory of what we haven’t got. A few more voices in the choir. A few more young families in the back rows. Somebody with a gift for the one thing nobody’s doing at the moment. I doubt I’m alone in it. Most of us pray some version of it, and it runs on the same engine every time. Lord, give me what I don’t have.

Then we stood up this morning and prayed a Collect that does something strange to that prayer. We asked God to hear us. “Let thy merciful ears, O Lord, be open to the prayers of thy humble servants.” And then, before the Amen, we asked Him for something else. “And, that they may obtain their petitions, make them to ask such things as shall please thee.” The condition of getting what we’ve asked for is that God change what we’re asking. He doesn’t take the petition as filed and grant it. He reaches behind it, into the wanting that produced it, and repairs that first. That’s the doctrine this morning rests on. Grace isn’t help offered to a healthy appetite. It’s the correction of a sick one. And until that correction comes, the very thing we most need to see stays hidden from us.

Joshua knew it, and said so with less tact than we’d have used. He’d gathered all Israel at Shechem at the end of his life and put it to them straight. “Choose you this day whom ye will serve.” They answered him the way we would have answered. “God forbid that we should forsake the Lord, to serve other gods.” It’s the right answer. And Joshua, who ought to be satisfied with it, says back to them one of the bluntest sentences in all of Scripture. “Ye cannot serve the Lord: for he is an holy God.” Not you shouldn’t. Not you’d better not. You can’t. He isn’t doubting they meant it. He’s telling them meaning it isn’t enough, because the trouble sits further down than their intentions reach.

And then he turns around and tells them to do it anyway. “Now therefore put away the strange gods which are among you, and incline your heart unto the Lord God of Israel.” Notice where those gods were. Not out in the land among the Amorites. Among them, in the baggage they’d carried out of Egypt and never once unpacked. The thing quietly competing for our hearts is never across town. It’s in the house.

So Joshua commands what he’s just said they haven’t the strength to perform, which is the shape of every commandment God ever gave, and exactly why our Collect turns the whole business into a petition. We can’t incline our own hearts. We can ask Him to. And the strange god for a church our size isn’t anything scandalous. It’s the church we wish we were, a respectable idol with a bigger choir and a fuller lot, and we can carry it for years without ever setting it down.

Which brings us to Paul, who opens this morning’s Epistle by refusing to leave us in the dark. “Now concerning spiritual gifts, brethren, I would not have you ignorant.” And the first thing he hands them isn’t a list of gifts. It’s a memory. “Ye know that ye were Gentiles, carried away unto these dumb idols, even as ye were led.” Carried. Led. Both passive, and worth remembering the next time we’re sure our wants are our own.

Then Paul sets the test outside us altogether. “No man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost.” Think about what that does to our inventory. The plainest thing that happens in this building, so ordinary that none of us counts it, is that a room full of people confesses that Jesus is Lord. Paul says nobody manages that under his own power. So before we’ve tallied a single gift, the Holy Ghost has already been at work in every pew, or there wouldn’t be a sound in here this morning.

And then comes the sentence I keep circling. “All these worketh that one and the selfsame Spirit, dividing to every man severally as he will.” Severally, as He will. Not as we’d have drawn it up, and not in the proportions we’d have ordered. And “the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal,” which means given to each one, and given for somebody else’s good.

So how does a congregation this size tell the gifts it has actually been given from the ones it wishes it had? The test isn’t complicated. The real ones are already at work on somebody. They don’t announce themselves. The woman who notices who wasn’t here last Sunday and picks up the phone. Whoever comes at seven to unlock the doors and set things out. The person who teaches our children and has never once mentioned it. Nobody applied for those. They were divided out severally, as He willed, and they’re being spent on us every week.

Now hold that up against the Gospel, the hardest thing Saint Luke ever shows us. Our Lord comes over the shoulder of the Mount of Olives, and the whole city opens up in front of Him. “And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it, saying, If thou hadst known, even thou, at least in this thy day, the things which belong unto thy peace! but now they are hid from thine eyes.”

Hid from thine eyes. And then He says why, the line I can’t get past. “Because thou knewest not the time of thy visitation.” God had come near. He was standing on the road looking straight at them. And the city was looking somewhere else.

Gregory the Great preached on these verses fourteen hundred years ago and wouldn’t let his people leave them safely in the past. What fell on Jerusalem for missing her visitation, every soul may suffer. A visitation can pass a man by while he’s busy, and he’ll never know it happened.

Notice what He does next, because we usually pull the two halves apart. He walks into the temple and begins throwing people out. “My house is the house of prayer: but ye have made it a den of thieves.” The tears and the cords belong to the same Lord in the same hour. It isn’t mercy first and anger after. It’s one mercy, and the second half of it looks like a cleared table. Then comes the line we skip. “And he taught daily in the temple.” He emptied the house, and then He stayed in it and taught. The cleansing wasn’t the end of the visitation. It was how the visitation began.

Which leaves us the Psalm, and the Psalm holds out the one thing the Gospel says Jerusalem couldn’t see. “The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him.” Nigh. Near. The same nearness that stood outside the walls and wept. And a few verses before it, this: “The eyes of all wait upon thee, O Lord; and thou givest them their meat in due season.”

There it is. Eyes again. Jerusalem’s eyes had peace hidden from them. The eyes of the Psalm wait, and are fed. The difference isn’t in how much has been given. It’s in where a man is looking. Eyes fixed on the inventory of what we lack will look straight past the meat set down in due season.

And in a few minutes it will be set down in front of us. We’ll say, with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, that we laud and magnify thy glorious Name, which is where our Psalm opened this morning: “I will magnify thee, O God, my King.” What comes to this altar is the gift no one in this room applied for, discerned, earned, or deserved. Christ Himself, given, into hands with nothing to bring but their emptiness.

So let me say it plainly, and let me say it as one of you rather than at you. We’re not a church waiting for its gifts to arrive. They came. They’re sitting in these pews right now, doing quiet work most of us haven’t thought to name. The Spirit divided them out severally, as He willed. He didn’t ask us first, and He didn’t consult the list I carry with me in the car. We have been visited, and we’re being visited again this morning at this rail.

That’s the confession this day asks of us, and it isn’t a confession of our competence, because Joshua ruled that out before we started. Nor of our discernment, because Paul says the discerning is His work too. It’s simply this: that God has come near a congregation which never learned to ask for Him properly, and has been patient enough to correct the asking on His way in.

So when that prayer starts up again this week, the low running inventory of everything we haven’t got, let it run all the way to the end of the Collect. Ask Him to hear it. Then ask Him to change it. He has been answering that second prayer among us far longer than most of us have noticed.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.