Dearest family,

CONTRARY TO MY REPEATED REFERENCES ON SUNDAY TO WHAT I WOULD BE COVERING ‘NEXT WEEK’ (I WAS WAY TOO EAGER!) MY NEXT MESSAGE ON ‘UNANSWERED ASKING’ WILL BE ON JUNE 14TH. NEXT WEEK, AS YOU ALL KNEW, IS THE WOMEN’S RETREAT AND OUR SERVICE LED BY THE MEN’S MINISTRY TEAM. SORRY ABOUT THAT!

Anyway, back to the matter in hand. There is no disagreement, either in scripture or in the historic testimony of the church, its teachers, and its congregants that there is much asking that is not answered. But there are divided opinions about how this should be perceived and understood. The trite truism that there are no unanswered prayers, because the answer is always ‘yes, no or maybe’ is a somewhat facile sounding and unhelpful place to start. No jaunty jingle will serve to provide healing balm or resolution for an unanswered asker who feels caught in the no-man’s land between the request and the response. The longer the answer is in coming, the more that space is marked out by emotional and theological barbed wire and spiritual land mines. Although silence is at first the mark of a good listener, the protracted silence to asking raises some questions: was the phone off the hook, was the phone picked up, was it just a recorded message, was it heard, did it register, will there be a return call, is the line cut?

Precisely because of the nature of the challenges, it is tempting to avoid them altogether and refuse to admit there are any possible problems. Or one can adopt the approach of the happy sloganeers whose platitudinous, ‘bumper-sticker’ style theology shouts things like ‘Let go and let God’ – peppy cheers that are always delivered from the sidelines of another’s pain. If you are hanging on to every word, when there is not even a word, then ‘letting go’ is not good advice. The other temptation is to try to impose a fool-proof, fear-proof, mystery-proof template on all the inchoate thoughts and feelings that arise, and come up with a one-stop explanation. When things do not make sense to us, it is our wont to try and rationalize what is happening as best we may, in the hope that some coherence will emerge from our confusion that will make us feel better about ourselves and more pointedly, about God. We want a system that will provide some order, that will be comforting enough to distract our attention from the irregular shaped thoughts and concerns that cannot be accommodated. It is not that the scriptures are short on counsel, but we have to resist the temptation to take all that they do say, and force it into a construct that rationalizes everything to our satisfaction. The bottom line is that there are going to be some things missing that we just do not know and some things present that we just do not understand. “A determination to know what cannot be known always works harm in the Christian heart…We dislike to admit that we do not know what is going on, so we torture our minds trying to fathom the mysterious ways of the Omniscient one. It’s hard to conceive of a more fruitless task.” (Tozer) This does not mean that we do not try at all to seek understanding - we should do so. But it does mean we are not going to be tortuous in trying to explain everything that seems to be torturing us. We are not going to call something a ‘mystery’ as a convenient cover-up for not engaging the truths and realities of a situation, nor are we going to try and rationalize what is indeed a ‘mystery’. In all our asking, there will be times when we need to discern the boundaries of our questioning an un-answering God. Others would put it more strongly: “Our insistence on being answered means we are always off track…The purpose of prayer is that we get ahold of God not the answer.” (E.M.Bounds) But as Spurgeon said: “There is no fanaticism in expecting God to answer prayer… There can be no reason for praying if there be no expectation of the Lord’s answering.” Can we have a godly expectation that does not become a fleshly insistence?

For now, “What do you define as unanswered?” is a reasonable question. The most obvious unanswered asking is simply that which was never asked in the first place – sadly. The way we most generally define ‘unanswered’ is the silence of God, the absence of His apparent response to something that has been asked to be effected on our terms and our timing, according to the needs of ourselves or others, as we perceive them best. By ‘our terms and our timing’ I am not suggesting a selfish view of things but simply the nature of the need as best understood by us. Indeed, our perceptions are not necessarily complete or even fully accurate, but our asking is unanswered to the extent that the fullest presentation of our request, with the strongest expectation possible, remains unfulfilled. Reasons why our presentation may have been inadequate or why our expectations were possibly unfounded are open for discussion, with the proviso that such an exchange is conducted with neither an offensive posture towards God, nor a defensive posture towards oneself.

On Sunday, we looked at a number of different images that have been used to capture the feelings and frustrations, the pains and problems of unanswered asking. One of these was in Lamentations.“You have covered yourself with a cloud so that no prayer can get through.” (Lam. 3:44) In the previous chapter these people described themselves as being “covered…with the cloud of his anger.” (Lam. 2:1) They are sitting alone “in the silence” of unanswered asking. “Even when I call out or cry for help, he shuts out my prayer. He has barred my way with blocks of stone.” (Lam. 3:8-9) Clouds sound more hopeful. It is a catalogue of woe. In fact, outside the crucifixion of Christ, there is no darker presentation of dereliction in scripture. This is unanswered asking of a kind that is second only to the unanswered asking of Jesus on the cross.

However, there is something for us to learn here. The silence of unanswered asking elicited some responses that many can identify with: “He has walled me in…He has weighed me down…I have been deprived of peace…my soul is downcast...” The lack of an answer that wears you down becomes the loss of much else: “My splendor is gone and all that I had hoped for from the Lord.” (3:19) All this asker can do is “remember my affliction.” The challenges of unanswered asking are not in question. However, there are three things here that teach us how to hold on and be held up.

We do not have to succumb to accusing God sinfully, even though we feel that we are somehow being sinned against by the silence. They do not accuse God of being deaf, dumb and blind to their unanswered state. They know that He hears their asking: “Do not close your ear to my cry for relief.” (3:56). They know He can still speak other things to them and is not mute: “You said, Do not fear.” (3:57) They know He can see their situation: “See O Lord how distressed I am…Look O Lord…You have seen the wrong done to me…” (1:20; 2:20; 3:59) The answer they want may not have appeared but God is not absent. He is very much present.
When he remembers the affliction concomitant with the silence, he chooses not to limit his remembrance to the immediate only: “Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope.” What makes the difference in what has already been described as a hopeless circumstance? “Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for His compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness.” (3:22) The well-known hymn that we sing inspired by these words is not the confession of worshipers at joyful ease with their lovely lives. It is a classic example of the kind of praise that is forged in the furnace of affliction, in the prison cell made with those “blocks of stone” he was talking about. There is no unanswered asking that can keep out the truth about the character and nature of our God, unless we choose to refuse their remembrance, and in the process of dealing with what seem to be God’s apparent denials of us, we become deniers of Him.
These acts of remembrance have a knock-on effect. They renew their asking by inviting God to join the remembrance review: “Remember O Lord what has happened to us; look and see our disgrace.” (5:1) There then follows an iteration of all the terrible things that require an answer, but this time, it does not end with a focus on their unanswered plight. It is not that they are suppressing anything because in the middle of their Godward affirmation (“You O lord reign forever”) the pained frustration unashamedly breaks through again without mincing the words: “Why do you always forget us? Why do you forsake us for so long?” (5:20) But here is the point. Despite the awful facts of their predicament, they are not asking for all the things on the unanswered asking list to be taken care of so much as for the relationship to be recovered with the unanswering Answerer: “Restore us to yourself, O Lord…renew our days as of old.” (5:21) Precisely because it is the sense of relational intimacy that is affected by unanswered asking, especially the longer it drags out, it is what becomes the greater subject of renewed asking. They were clear what they were after but was this what God was really after all this time? Their desire for Him was now more than their need for their answer. The things they wanted had been trumped by the Person they needed, even though they are still struggling with the fear that they may have been rejected.

Thus in these times of unanswered asking, closed doors are not necessarily the final word when the lubricating oil of the Holy Spirit is applied to their hinges. It is not inevitable that the sky will be as iron; cloudy, almost certainly, but as Lamentations shows us, they ultimately cannot stop us getting through, or shafts of God’s light getting through to us. But we still remain ‘unanswered.’ Is it possible to close the gap between our asking and His answering; between our actual speaking and His assumed hearing; between our wanting and the waiting; between what we expect and what we experience; between what we are hoping for and what is actually happening? What bridged that gap between Abraham’s childlessness and the sight of Pleiades and Orion? On starry nights was he tempted to stop looking up. It seems that he found a way to keep staring at stars. “Against all hope Abraham in hope believed.” (Rom. 4:18) Does that settle everything for us? We do not want to accept specious rationalizations as to why our asking is in the pending tray, if in fact it made it even that far. But is it not reasonable to at least ask about some possible explanations for the “gap” that might help close it somewhat? Can we look for some reasons? More about this next time….

Pastorally yours,

Stuart