Sermon: Humble Prayer

 1 Kings 2:10-12, 3:3-14
Humble Prayer
James Sledge                                                                                     August 15, 2021

Solomon's Prayer, illustration 
in the Luther Bible, 1522

 When you pray, what do you pray for? What do you ask of God? According to statistics I’ve seen, most of you likely pray. Surveys show that over half of Americans pray every day, and the vast majority pray occasionally. Prayer is quite popular, even among those with no religious affiliation. In fact, some who don’t believe in God report praying from time to time.

Prayer is considerably more popular than church participation, so presumably people find it helpful. Not surprisingly, most of those who pray report that God answers their prayers at least some of the time.

As to the content of those prayers, people’s needs and difficulties are popular topics, along with praying for friends and family. A fair number of people pray to win the lottery, and a smaller number pray to find a convenient parking space. But the surveys don’t say anything about what sort of prayers are more likely to get answered by God.[1]

I don’t know that our scripture reading this morning was written to provide general guidelines on prayer, but it does have a prayer that is favorably received by God. And so perhaps there are some pointers to be found here.

The whole episode comes about because Solomon has just become king over Israel. His father David has died, and, following a bit of palace intrigue, Solomon ascends to the throne. This is something new for Israel. There had only been two other kings prior to this, and neither of them inherited the job. In addition, David had united all the tribes, built a palace, and such. The whole royal business had grown a great deal under David, and there was a lot more for a king to do to keep things running.

Perhaps Solomon is feeling some of the weight of all this in our reading this morning. Or perhaps he is just being modest when he tells God, “I am only a little child; I do not know how to go out or come in.” Regardless, he asks God, “Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, able to discern between good and evil; for who can govern this your great people?"

God is pleased with Solomon’s prayer. After all, he might have asked for riches or a long life, but instead he has asked for what he needs to do a good job. Solomon seeks to live into the ideal of kingship, to be a good shepherd of the people, and God is happy to give him all he asked and more. The story doesn’t say how God would have reacted had Solomon asked for riches, but it gives the impression that God would have been displeased.

And so Solomon begins his reign, equipped with God’s promise of a wise and discerning mind. And before long, stories of Solomon’s great wisdom circulated far and wide.

However, this picture of Solomon as a wise and good shepherd over Israel doesn’t last. Solomon was the model of humility when he prayed to God for an understanding mind, but somewhere along the way, he seems to have lost that. Solomon undertook a massive building program, using forced labor by the Israelites to do the work. He amassed a huge harem and even built temples to foreign gods for some of his wives. Things were so bad by the time Solomon died that all the tribes except the king’s own tribe of Judah threatened to leave the kingdom if Solomon’s son didn’t end his father’s oppressive policies.

The son refused and the kingdom splintered. Jerusalem became the capital of a single tribe. All the other tribes formed their own kingdom to the north, and the unified kingdom formed by David was over, never to exist again.

I wonder what happened to Solomon between his prayer for wisdom and his wrecking the kingdom he inherited from his father. How did he go from a wise ruler who cared for his people to a grandiose despot who oppressed his people so he could live in lavish and regal splendor? Might it be as simple as the loss of humility?

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Jesus once said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Self-denial can sound harsh and even unhealthy. It can sound like Jesus is demanding we not care at all about ourselves. But Jesus himself often engaged in self-care and invited his disciples to join him. He withdrew from the crowds and the demands of ministry for rest and retreat, and he clearly enjoyed eating and drinking with his friends.

No, I think what Jesus means by self-denial is true humility, a letting go of our egos and the self-images that we construct for ourselves. In his book, Breathing Under Water, Richard Rohr says this about our ego driven selves. “Christians are usually sincere and well-intentioned people until you get to any real issues of ego, control, power, money, pleasure, and security. Then they tend to be pretty much like everybody else. We often gave them a bogus version of the Gospel, some fast-food religion, without any deep transformation of the self; and the result has been the spiritual disaster of ‘Christian’ countries that tend to be as consumer-oriented, proud, warlike, racist, class conscious, and addictive as everybody else—and often more so, I am afraid.”

I wonder if Rohr’s words might not accurately describe Solomon. He was sincere and well-intentioned at first, but somehow issues of ego, control, power, money, pleasure, and security took over. Solomon became captive to his own ego-driven pretensions of power, regal grandeur, and royal splendor, and he was no longer capable of a prayer like the one he uttered when he first became king.

And that brings me back around to my original question about what we pray for, what we ask of God. Might the content of our prayers be a helpful measure of our spiritual maturity, of the self-denial Jesus asks of us, of our humility.

Humility isn’t a very popular concept in our world. We live in a time of self-promotion and demanding individual rights. We live in an area where the lust for power at almost any cost is on constant display. We live in a time when people arrogantly trust their own opinions over the judgments of competent experts. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to say that we live in a spiritually immature society where people seek their own good with little thought to how it affects others, where those who disagree with them are enemies, where seeking the common good is more and more difficult.

It’s more than a little depressing watching politicians undermine efforts to battle the pandemic to score political brownie points or watching people act like toddlers as they flout mask requirements, insisting no one can tell them what to do. What are we to do in the face of such arrogance and immaturity?

Sometimes the best way to change things is to change ourselves, and one thing we can all do is to work on our own spiritual maturity, our own self-denial and humility. We as a congregation can treat each other with more humility. We can model humility as we interact with others. And we can become more humble before God, more humble in our prayers.

Very often prayer ends up us trying to convince God to do what we want. But wouldn’t we do better, wouldn’t our prayers be more pleasing to God, wouldn’t we be a better example to the world if we asked to know what God wants, as well as for the strength and ability to do what God wants? And who knows, if enough of us did this, it might even catch on.

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[1] Brandon Ambrosino, “48 percent of Americans pray every day” in Vox.com, October 6, 2014. See also https://www.pewforum.org/religious-landscape-study/frequency-of-prayer/