One of my favourite Disney films is Aladdin. Here, of course, we learn that if you find a lamp you have to rub it and out will pop a genie. The genie will give you three wishes, no more, no less. So the big question is, what would you ask for? Money … car … someone to be well … world peace … justice? Now, please don’t waste too much time thinking what you would ask the genie for because we all know that we don’t actually live in Disney film. But what do we pray for? This should be of much greater significance and relevance to us as we strive to be faithful. 

Prayer is a fundamental aspect of our character, that we are to desire God. In the words of James Montgomerie in a hymn I’ve not ever actually sung: “Prayer is the soul’s sincere desire, uttered or unexpressed; the motion of a hiddden fire that trembles in the breast.” Prayer is from deep within us because our desires say something of who we truly are; prayer is at the heart of God because through it we know more of His will, His purposes. Hence we make prayer through Jesus the Lord, filled with the Holy Spirit and directed to our Heavenly Father.

Through that journey between us and God prayer takes on the form of words. Hence when the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to do it, He says, When you pray, say: “Our Father, hallowed by thy name …” and so on (St Luke 11). Our Lord doesn’t give principles or breathing exercises or advice just to be silent; rather, the desires of our heart are to be expressed in words. This is how we human beings are: we need bodies, we communicate, and this being so here on earth it will also be thus in Heaven. There is something too about saying those words out loud and I would encourage you when you pray not just to think words and sentences but to say out loud, even if it is quietly and without making much sound, to say out loud the words we use in prayer. For by this we have to own them, make them our own.

Indeed when we say things out loud I think we will sometimes even surprise ourselves by what we say. We heard about Solomon in our first reading. He was young when he acceded to the throne and quickly and pretty brutally secures his place as King, even making an alliance with the Pharaoh of Egypt. And the author of I Kings is perhaps struggling in these verses because on the one hand it needs to be recorded and explained how Solomon receives this wisdom which will mean the Temple can be built in Jerusalem, but on the other hand it needs to be recognised that Solomon was sacrificing in the “High Places,” at Gibeon, in other words the wrong places (I Kings 3:3-4). So it might be that the reader is meant to be surprised when we hear of Solomon recognising the limits of his capabilities – “I am a very young man, unskilled in leadership,” – and so asks for “a heart to understand how to discern between good and evil.” God notes that this is a worthy request, perhaps even a surprising request, and so He gives him a “heart wise and shrewd as none before you has had.” 

Solomon has asked for the right thing, God asserts: “not for long life for yourself or riches or the lives of your enemies.” This is an important reminder to us that we can be asking for the wrong thing. As St James writes in his letter to the Church: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures,” (4:3). Asking wrongly is not a failure to conform to particular externals of the practise of prayer but it is asserting that prayer won’t work when the intentions of the heart are misguided. There isn’t in some ways a correct posture for prayer but nor can we believe that the mind and soul can function if the body properly is telling them something else. The soul won’t know God is beautiful if the eye gazes on a lump of concrete when praying. The soul won’t be inclined to be humble and devotional if we’re sitting in the same posture when praying as we are when having a jolly old drink with our friends or indeed when we’re watching the cricket at home. The good practise of kneeling or standing to pray, with hands together is an attempt to express a stillness, a humility and the shared endeavour which defines prayer.

We will know whether we are asking for the right thing when we ask ourselves whether that is what God wants? So, does God want us to get top marks in our exams? Well if we’re not that bright and haven’t done the work and still are not sure what this theory is or how algebra or whatever works then it seems pretty obvious that God won’t want us to have full marks, it would be unfair, a failure of justice. “Thy will be done, thy kingdom come on earth as it is in Heaven.” If we ask to win the lottery, if we ask to find Mr or Miss Right, if we ask for the impossible to happen we need to ask ourselves does God want that to be the case? And some of the time the answer will be no. And in that no we still have to find peace, because that is God’s gift to us, even when the answer to something we think we want is ‘no.’

And it should not surprise us that it is not always obvious what the answer to particular questions are or that we make mistakes along the way. St Paul reflects on the problems of knowing what is right when he writes to the Romans: “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” And he goes on, “I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind,” (Romans 7:15, 22). This indecision is a sign of the clash of wills, what God wants versus what our sinful self wants. This sinful self is a consequence of the Fall of Adam and Eve, as the psalmist pleads before God, “That you may be justified when you give sentence … O see, in guilt I was born, a sinner was I conceived,” (Psalm 51:4-5). This is the Church’s doctrine of Original Sin.

That Original Sin is remedied through Baptism and part of the reason for baptising infants is to forgive those sins which they are born with. As Paul writes to the Ephesians, “we were by nature children of wrath, like everyone else,” (2:3). But he contrasts this with the life of the redeemed: “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which He loved us, … made us alive together with Christ,” (2:4,6). Baptism gives us the identity so as to make prayer and entreaty in union with Christ, united to His will, so that everything we pray for we will receive not because we set the agenda but because we have already made God’s agenda our own. This is the life of those whom Paul describes in that second reading we heard: “He called those he intended for this [a better translation might be ‘predestined’]; those he called he justified, and with those he justified he shared his glory.”

And so this person in Christ who has been reborn by the water and the Spirit is the one  in our Lord’s parable today who will find the treasure hidden in the field and buy the whole field because he or she knows that’s all that matters. Notice, there’s no scrimping in this, no “Oh I’ll just buy the square foot which the treasure is in,” the whole field needs to be bought. Notice in the accompanying parable there’s no sense in which the merchant has to work out whether he can afford the expensive pearl, he sells everything he owns and just does it. We are to determinedly propel ourselves forward as we seek to know God’s will and then live it out. This will never be a reason to forget our obligations of charity to others, but it will mean those cares of this world and the pressures others or we ourselves place upon us will be put in their proper place, lower down the priorities list. 

In this great yearning, this great quest for what God’s will truly is we can be assured of God’s generosity in helping us always. Pray for that support, my friends. But hear what that support will look like in the image our Lord gives at the end of today’s Gospel: “bringing out from [our] storeroom things both new and old.” While there has always been the temptation to theologise this image and see it refer to the Old and New Testaments it surely refers to the basic truth that as we try to discern God’s will some old, ancient truths will be needed and some fresh, new encounters too. We must’t fetishise either the old or the new. Sunday School songs we learnt long ago, the simplicity of life when we were young or whatever it might be : there are old things in the storeroom still useful. Fresh experiences of our faith, such as maybe coming to Morning Prayer or Evening Prayer even if you’ve never done so before, a fresh poignancy of a particular Scriptural passage, some new understanding of how we sin. These new things too fortify us as we energetically seek out the Lord and His ways. 

So, pray, my friends, pray earnestly but consider carefully what you pray for, for it is indeed powerful requests we make. We are to pray for the coming of God’s kingdom, in my life, in your life, in their life. Prayer is about God’s will becoming a reality in our life, not us getting what we want because we’ve made a bargain with God. Prayer will be easier when we know what we lack, where we’re going wrong, how our relationships fall short of those we’re called to form in Heaven. And finally, brothers and sisters, be excited always about the great blessings of prayer as we speak to our Heavenly Father and He speaks to us. Amen.