The readings are Genesis 18:20-32, Colossians 2:6-15, Luke 11:1-13

I love the story of Abraham and God we heard today. You can almost imagine the Lord and the three angels standing around talking to Abraham. The Lord says, “There’s been complaints about Sodom and Gomorrah. I hear that they are really bad places.” And here the Lord turns to the angles and says, “Go down and investigate these complaints, I want to know what’s going on.”

Abraham knows very well that the people of Sodom and Gomorrah are as bad as the rumours suggest. He watches the angels until they are out of sight, then he comes up to God and says. “It’s not like you to kill the good people as well as the bad ones. What if there are fifty righteous people in the city, will you still destroy it?”

The Lord thinks for a moment and says to Abraham, “You’re right, that would be unjust. If I find fifty righteous people, then I will spare the city.”

Abraham, now, is the ancestor of the Jewish people, and the Jewish people are known to be very shrewd in business. So Abraham starts haggling with the Lord, as if the Lord was a trader in the market place. Abraham brings the number of righteous down and down hoping that the Lord will spare the city for the sake of just one righteous person.

In the end, there were no righteous people in the cities and they were destroyed with fire from heaven.

The story is amusing if you think of Abraham and the Lord haggling over the price of sparing a city, just like traders in the marketplace.

The serious side of the story is about prayer. The story teaches us to persist in prayer, never giving up. This is the message that Jesus wants to get across, as well. Jesus story is just as amusing. “Imagine that you want to borrow some bread from a neighbour in the middle of the night. How do you do it? The answer is that you keep banging on the door until your friend comes down and gives you what you want.”

“You must ask,” says Jesus “if you want to receive, and you must keep knocking until the door is opened. God will give you what you need. Even human beings will give good gifts to their children. How much more generous will God be?”

I guess that we have all seen films about Tibet and Nepal and other places where there are Buddhist temples. In some of these there are prayer wheels or prayer flags. You might see people giving the wheel a turn as they walk past, and the flags flap in the wind. In this way the prayers are repeated again and again until God hears the message and acts.

The Christian understanding of prayer is that it must be persistent and heartfelt. Abraham’s concern for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah was heartfelt. His prayer to God was serious and passionate. He really wanted even the wicked people to be saved, for the sake of a few righteous ones. we can make jokes about Abraham and the Lord haggling in the market, but we must learn the lesson that prayer is persistent and from the heart. In the same way, Jesus’ funny story about the hungry man banging on his friend’s door at midnight shows us the importance of passionate prayer.

I want to use these readings to start a series of sermons about our worship. Our worship and prayer is vitally important to our lives. If we want to benefit from our faith, then we need do work at it, we need to be persistent and we need to pray and worship from our hearts. Jesus taught his disciples a simple prayer to be a pattern for them. We call it the Lord’s Prayer, and we use it at every service of worship here at St Luke’s. Our work of prayer has a pattern to it, a pattern that allows us to keep praying week after week and day after day, as Abraham and Jesus teach us.

The church calls our pattern of worship, the liturgy. Liturgy is a Greek word meaning, the work of the people. So if builders build, fisherfolk fish and administrators administer, then the work of Christians is the liturgy, and it is important to get it right. This is not about the right number of candles, or who does what task; it is about persistence (which is another way of saying, paying attention) and sincerity (which means from the heart).

I have included a little note in the pew bulletin, which you’ve probably been reading during the sermon, but it points out our difficulties. Last week we had an accident during communion. A wafer was dropped on the floor and trodden on. This was not good, the consecrated wafer is, for us, the body of Christ and needs to be treated with the utmost respect. So let us learn from this accident and do better. I will never refuse communion to anyone. Our Lord Jesus died for all people, the good and the bad. Jesus turns no one away from his table. So then, let’s quietly, persistently, patiently and lovingly learn to respect the sacrament. The best way to do this is to eat it immediately and to make sure our children do as well. If they are too young for a whole wafer, then break a piece off and put it in their mouths. I myself promise to be more careful.

In the same way, many of us prefer to intinct, that is, we touch the wine in the chalice with corner of the Host. In this way we receive both bread and wine. But let’s be careful and reverent. The tiniest touch is all that is needed. A deep dip risks splashing the wine, or worse still, dipping our fingers as well, and that’s unhealthy. A tiny touch means there are no drips to shake off. The wine is Christ’s blood and it is too precious to waste or splash.

I have mentioned these two things because they needed to be said, but mostly because I want to draw our attention to the fact that our worship and our prayer will give most honour to God and be most effective if we do our work, the liturgy, carefully and lovingly.