Prayer, Persistence, and Peace: Sermon Preached on 27th July 2025 (Sixth Sunday After Trinity)

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Colossians 1. 15-28; Luke 11. 1-13

“…everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds…” `

I always enjoy Matthew Syed’s programme on Radio 4 called Sideways, which often gives quirky, unusual, perspectives on quirky, interesting issues. It is currently running a three-part mini-series on ‘Chasing Peace’. Exploring different approaches to peace-making and peace-building, it doesn’t shy away from hard questions about human nature, and whether we are hard-wired for war.

I listened to the dedicated peacemakers he interviewed, some of whom had taken enormous risks with their personal safety in very dangerous environments to end conflicts, and I was full of admiration. Some interviewees also said things like that to prevent war we needed to train people to be more emotionally literate, I found myself muttering, “Good luck with that!”

Over this last decade or so, many of the things we’d previously taken for granted about the direction of humanity have broken down, and the idea of progress which animated us for so long has stalled. We seem a long way, for example, from the days when people really believed that the United Nations might ultimately bring an end to war.

One of the lessons I’ve learned from these years of gathering crisis is that too many of those dreams of progress thought they could change human nature, or flew entirely in the face of it. At their worst, especially in the darkest days of the Communist world, it was precisely the possibility of building a perfect society in the future that allowed people to justify to themselves their barbaric behaviour in the present.

Indeed, if we look at the world through the lens of Faith, then we know this world can never be made perfect, and that none of us can ever be all that good for all that long, or otherwise Jesus would not have needed to die on the Cross.

Is that it? No hope of things getting better? That can’t be quite true, either, for in today’s Gospel reading, where Jesus teaches His followers the Lord’s Prayer, this most important of Christian prayers asks for the Father’s kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. How do we hold these two things in tension—that the world can never be perfect but that we are to pray for God’s Kingdom to come on Earth?

Let’s turn to the first reading, part of a letter from St Paul to a group of Christians in a city called Colossae, to shed a little light on that.

Paul tells these Colossians that Jesus did two things on the Cross. Firstly, he tells them that under the law of Moses, they had accumulated many sins – and a central part of Paul’s thinking is that under the law we all accumulate many sins, because nobody every keeps the law all the time. But Jesus nailed those sins to the Cross, and those sins died along with Him, so that the Colossians and all who trust in Christ can rise again with Him. But Paul says that Jesus did something else: He “disarmed” the rulers of the world (that’s what set me off thinking about peace). He made a public example of them, says Paul, for in being executed as an innocent, Christ showed up the hypocrisy that always comes with power. Jesus could have summoned ten legions of angels in Jerusalem in Holy Week. He didn’t, because any earthly kingdom He could have established would soon have run aground on the same problems of hypocrisy, corruption, and lust for power that are simply part of human nature. There can be no perfect Kingdom on this Earth, at least not until Christ comes again.

That might sound depressing, but it also has positive implications. It means that you shouldn’t let anyone tell you aren’t good enough for Christ—because they aren’t good enough for Christ either, as nobody really is. That’s what all these references to circumcision in the first reading are about—we often ignore all this talk about circumcision in the Bible because it sounds embarrassing and weird, but this was the central dividing issue in the very early Church. Because these Christians in Colossae aren’t from Jewish backgrounds, they have never been circumcised, and many of the early Christians think they have to be circumcised as Jews if they are to genuinely follow Christ.

Paul rejects all this, telling the Colossians to allow nobody to tell them that because of human rules they are disqualified of what is theirs through receiving Christ as their Lord. God loves us in our imperfection, and saves us because of His love, not because we’ve somehow passed a test He set.

Absolutely 100% of people are imperfect. That’s why Jesus taught us in the Lord’s Prayer to ask God to forgive us our sins – because we all have sins that need forgiving. More than that, He taught us to ask God to forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us, and that part is sometimes very hard.

Yet in this imperfect world, watch for signs the Kingdom of God is breaking in, and help them to become real; to become signs of the redemption of creation that will take place when Christ returns and signs of our eternal home in Heaven.

And when the great problems of this imperfect world seem beyond your power to affect at all – something that seems quite overwhelming to many of us at present – remember what is often important to God is the small, and the local, and the humble; and remember that what seems insignificant in the eyes of the world might be the very thing that is most important to God.

Another thing that jumps out for me in our Gospel reading is the importance of persistence in prayer. Often real change takes much time, including real change within us. So don’t lose heart when problems seem overwhelming and answers slow.

One of the conclusions of Matthew Syed’s radio series was that peace-making needed persistence, just like prayer. It also concluded when institutions failed to secure the peace, it was often the moral courage of a single individual that started a change in circumstances that allowed peace to be re-established. Prayer should be school for moral courage.

Gratitude for your blessings should inform all of your prayer. All the secular self-help people say little transforms our lives like an attitude of thankfulness for what we have. Gratitude has long been central to the Christan worldview. Amid the troubles of this world, you have already been given a reward beyond anything this world can offer, and this wonderful world that we cannot save through our own efforts has already been saved by Christ on the Cross.

The last point that needs to be made is about what you ask for when you pray. Christ tells his hearers to pray to our heavenly Father with confidence, for who would give their child a snake when they asked for a fish? But do we always ask for things that are nourishing and wholesome? When you pray, do you always ask for metaphorical fish and eggs, or do you sometimes ask for snakes and scorpions? I mean, I sometimes ask God for a winning EuroMillions ticket, which would be great, although I don’t hold it against Him when He doesn’t give me one.

Perhaps I and all of us should more often do what Jesus suggests here, and ask for the Holy Spirit. The gifts of the Holy Spirit are wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. If we have those, so many other good things flow from them—for us, for those around us, and perhaps even for the world.

Pray that you might have the Holy Spirit and that He will lead you, full of thanks, to the best life you can live in this world and to your eternal reward in the life to come.

And now to God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, be ascribed all might, majesty, dominion, and power, as is most justly His due, now and forevermore. Amen.