Sermon by Rev Sydney Maitland for Sunday July 27 2025.
• First Reading: Hosea 1: 2-10 (Hosea’s wife and children)
• Second Reading: Colossians 2: 6-19 (Spiritual fullness in Christ; freedom from human rules)
• Gospel: Luke 11: 1-13 (Jesus’ teaching on prayer)
We have all been in times of great testing. A deep disappointment, a betrayal, a false accusation, a failed venture or relationship or ambition.
It could be the exposure and upending of a deeply-held loyalty or conviction or the exhaustion of every moral, mental, spiritual and emotional resource that we thought we had or could rely upon.
Whatever it was the world as we knew it had come to an end and the future held only what was cold and dark: utterly forsaken and abandoned.
As someone once said, when you get to the end of the rope, tie a knot and hang on.
This is perhaps the moment when we wonder what it is all for? What to do next and where to turn? It is also the moment when we may also reflect that either the world is totally random and arbitrary or that beyond our own distress, there is still a reason and a design and a purpose.
So look at Hosea, who married a woman of – shall we say, mixed loyalties and appetites. Certainly one who was unreliable. And yet, he was utterly devoted to her, despite the grief that he found in her. And yes, they did have children together.
But in the midst of his grief and distress, Hosea still looked to God for understanding and the will to go on. He still found that despite the unreliability of his wife that God was still sure and that his personal faith was well-founded.
In all the sadness, Hosea refused to let go and to abandon himself to fury, rage or resentment. He did not fall prey to cynicism or despair. He continued to look for the purposes of God even within his own time and place and situation.
Certainly within his own feelings of inadequacy as others looked on him, at best with pity and at worst with contempt. Certainly, some with amusement. A definite loser in the game of life.
But within all this, Hosea found a new kind of vision. If he could love his wayward and wilful wife, then how much more did God love His wayward, disobedient, self-directed and easily misled people?
Whatever Hosea felt and understood, the depth of feeling and the extent of understanding what is in the Lord is so much the greater. There is just no comparison.
Now look at Jesus’ teaching on prayer as He instructed His disciples on the ‘Lord’s Prayer’. Whereas Matthew stresses the place of forgiveness as he sets out the Lord’s Prayer, Luke is more interested in persistence and trust in prayer.
It is not as if these are contradictory – rather it is more likely that Jesus taught His disciples about prayer more than once and stressed different aspects when He did so.
But while Matthew was teaching in the context of human relationships, Luke was looking more at the life of faith of the believer as he or she approached God.
For Luke, prayer starts with God while for Matthew it results in more mature attitudes to other people.
And so yes, our starting point is with God. It means approaching Him without pretence and in utter realism about ourselves. This is the basis for us to treat Him as Father. Then comes our worship of Him and our commitment to His purposes.
And that applies regardless of our success or failure in life. Then come our personal needs and that includes forgiveness of our sins and the will to withstand temptation.
But Luke develops the theme of trust in God. Some prayers are answered immediately: ‘Ask and you will receive.’
Others need more persistence and patience. They demand more time reflecting and pondering the things of God, more time appraising ourselves.
These are the ‘Seek and you will find’ prayers.
Then there are the prayers when answers are slower to come and perhaps slower to be received and appreciated by us. They may be more deeply felt, the situations more intractable, the possible answers more difficult to accept and to live within.
They are also the more sacrificial prayers, more demanding not of God but of ourselves. ‘Knock and it will be opened to you.’
But the promise is given and the assurance is sure. He will never abandon us, yet He also looks to us not to abandon Him, whatever the times and circumstances of our lives.
And this is where Paul’s letter to the church in Colossae is so important. Having received Jesus as Lord, then we must continue in Him: rooted and grounded in Him, secure in His love and in His purposes even when the way ahead of us is unsure.
It means avoiding shallow but fashionable answers, the product of the latest surge of public interest or enthusiasm. Never mind the virtue signalling, the self-hating or the publicity-seeking postures of the rootless and self-serving.
They have their reward.
Rather, it is the Lord Jesus Christ who leads us through the thicket of tortuous attitudes and loyalties and all the complexities and contradictions of identity politics.
For it in Him that we live and move and have our being.
