But in a sense the deeper problem of Job is that he couldn't get any answer. All the suffering was bad enough, but there was no answer as to why, and so he seeks an answer from God. Listen again to the words of Job as he voiced his complaint.

Why are times not kept by the Almighty? Why doesn’t He keep office hours? Why doesn’t God answer his e-mail? God doesn’t seem to be responsive. Sometimes we can tell why God doesn’t answer because our requests are so trivial or self-centered, a little like some of those long lists that children can have at Christmas time and their parents aren’t able to fulfill all of those requests. It wouldn’t be good for the children if the parents did. And sometimes we can understand the fact that prayers are not answered in that way.

Do you recall the time in Huckleberry Finn when Huckleberry Finn was introduced to prayer? It is one of the engaging little vignettes in that book by Mark Twain. Let me read to you what Huckleberry Finn said about prayer:

Well, some of the things we ask for are trivial or self-centered or impossible. Suppose you pray for a job or for a promotion. You need work and you need the promotion and there’s nothing wrong with that kind of prayer. But do you really want God to single you out against the seventy or so other applicants for the job? Or you pray for victory. What about the other team? To pray for things that pit you against other people is asking God to take sides. That’s not a level at which God can answer prayer. I think we all understand that.

But what about the deeper prayers? The ones that involve pouring out all of the anguish of one’s heart, all of the concern for health and well being, that which you know that God wants us to be—healthy; the things that we can believe that God wants for us. And still we don’t have an answer to the prayers. I think this is the more serious level at which we struggle with the question of unanswered prayer.

I came upon an interesting piece of writing in Russell Baker’s book, Growing Up. You recall in that autobiography, if you’ve read the book, that Baker speaks about his childhood and the fact that he lost his father when he was a very young person, about five years of age. It was a traumatic thing for him as it would be for anybody. He had been very close to his father and his father died very suddenly of a heart attack. Somebody was trying to be helpful to him and he records in his book that for the first time he seriously considered God and what God might mean. This is what Russell Baker had to say as he spoke of this terrible moment:

Poor Bessie Scott (that was his friend who was trying to help him). All afternoon she listened patiently as a saint while I sat in her kitchen and cried myself out. For the first time, I thought seriously about God. Between sobs I told Bessie that if God could do things like this to people, then God was hateful and I had no more use for Him. Bessie told me about the peace of heaven and the joy of being among the angels and the happiness of my father who was already there. This argument failed to quiet my rage. "God loves us all just like His own children," Bessie said. "Well," I thought, "if God loves me, why did He make my father die?" Bessie said I would understand someday. But she was only partly right. That afternoon, though I wouldn’t have phrased it in this way then, I decided that God was a lot less interested in people than anybody in Morrisonville was ready to admit. That day I decided that God was not entirely to be trusted.

How do we deal with that kind of pain? I think of people who have lost their children, one I think of whom I knew, whose son was killed in an airplane crash just before his thirtieth birthday. Another who was murdered in the heart of a great city. I have know people who have struggled with cancer that suddenly appeared, including a mother with small children. How is she to cope with that? One would never say that prayers about such things are trivial. They are deep and they are heart-felt, and still we know that the answers sometimes don’t come.

All of this sounds very much like the old problem of evil. How can there be evil in the world? We pray: deliver us from evil. That is a prayer that our Lord has taught us to pray and yet evil comes. And it just doesn’t come to bad people. Bad things can happen to good people.

I suppose at one level one could say that if bad things couldn’t happen, then good things couldn’t either. God respects us in our freedom, and that means people are free to do bad things and to do bad things to each other. It also means that in a world like ours, in order to experience the good things with our senses, with our physical bodies, there is always the possibility of pain, and in the end, for each of us, the reality of death. We pray about these things. We must pray about these things. Still it may appear to us that the prayers are not answered. I think we still should pray. But, you know, prayer is really praying to God to draw us in to God’s deeper purposes; to be a part of the life of God and God’s caring. And when we pray in that vein, we can be received into God’s eternal scheme of things.

I have a friend who once said that he wished somehow that God would send somebody to deal with a problem that he told me about. And then he said, "You know, the funny thing is, the answer came to me and the answer came from God and God said, ‘Yes, I’m sending somebody. It’s you!’ And I can tell you this, if you pray to God, "Oh, God, help me to be your servant helping other people, your channel of love to other people," I can guarantee you God will answer that prayer. God will use you to help others. That is a deeper prayer of the spirit.

There is a sense in which the Gospel is all about that. There is a wonderful passage in Romans 8, that deals with the issues of prayer that we’ve been speaking of. It goes like this:

As we are drawn into the life of the spirit, we discover that God’s answers are there for us and we discover that God has also been praying to us, seeking to get through to us. It is not just our prayers to God, it is God’s communication to us. This isn’t easy. We will all, probably all of our lives, have to struggle with this question. But know that in our struggle, God is there for us.

There is a line in a hymn that we often have sung. It goes like this:

Teach me the patience of unanswered prayer and to know that the One who is above all and in all and through all is there for us.

May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ be with you. Amen.

Lydia Talbot: Dr. Wogaman, that was a compelling message. In prayer, how does one discern that difference between authentic prayer and prayer that is generally designed by most people for self-interest?

Philip Wogaman: I don’t want to be too hard on people who pray out of their personal concerns. Obviously, we all do that and we are told to do that in the Lord’s Prayer. Give us this day our daily bread and all of that. I don’t want to be hard on that. But I tell you, the infallible test, the real test of that kind of prayer is: are you praying in love? Is love at the heart of the prayer? And if it isn’t, are you praying for love? For the ability to love? As one is drawn into the life of love, one is present to God.

Talbot: During times of intense loss, pain, tragedy, disasters, God can’t prevent these kinds of things. It doesn’t mean that God is absent from them. How did that understanding first become revealed to you?

Wogaman: I lost both of my parents when I was fairly young. My mother when I was a junior in high school. That was in a sense a searing experience and yet I kind of worked it through then. And my father, with whom I was very close, when I was around twenty-eight years old. I think that was a part of it. But then as a pastor, and I was a pastor before I served as pastor of a church.

Talbot: Your father was also a pastor.

Wogaman: He was a pastor. To experience the deep trauma that people experience with a loss, particularly the loss of somebody who is young. I referred in my sermon to somebody whose son was killed in a plane crash. That was a member of our church at Foundry who was on the Ron Brown plane that crashed in Croatia a couple of years ago. Wonderful parents and a vibrant young man who was giving himself to the life of the intercity and doing all sorts of interesting and good things, on a mission of good will in Croatia and suddenly his life is snuffed out. Well, one draws love into that because the grief is formed out of love. We don’t grieve over things that we don’t love and how to understand that that is also God’s love that is present.

Talbot: My brother was killed in a plane crash and my mother still wants to blame God. So what do you say to that kind of thinking?

Wogaman: You can’t give a cheap and easy answer to that. Of course, one feels the pain of that. And God has created us in a kind of world in which we all die and accidents occur and people die at different stages—we all will die. I don’t know your mother, I can’t speak to that, but I think if I were interacting with somebody pastorally, I would try to draw them into other forms of love for other people and there to encounter something of the love of God, also at work.

Talbot: Only a suffering God can help.

Wogaman: God cared as much and more about this situation.

Talbot: I must ask you now, when you accepted the call after thirty years as a veteran—a Christian ethicist—in the academic world, to Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, you did not know that a couple years later that among your parishioners would be the President of the United States.

Wogaman: Well, actually, it was only a few months later. No, I certainly did not know that and it’s been a challenging and wonderful experience.

Talbot: I understand that you are most discreet when it come to consultation with your parishioners, but can you tell us: Do you consult with the President? Do you provide spiritual guidance?

Wogaman: I don’t discuss pastoral interactions of a private sort. President Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton both have many councilors. They are both deeply religious. They have been a part of the church as long as they have lived almost and in each of their cases they have many people that they consult with. I think it’s through preaching that I mostly interact with them.

Talbot: Let me ask you then, what do you preach on Sunday mornings and what signals do you get that the President is paying attention to your message?

Wogaman: Well, that’s a good question.

Talbot: I’m talking about tough social and political issues.

Wogaman:  For anybody in the congregation, you always wonder: Are they really there? One reason I like to preach without a manuscript is I can see where people are and you get a feel for where people are. Obviously, in my preaching I don’t key the message to any particular person in the congregation. At the same time, I do deal often with issues of the day. I feel the Christian pulpit must deal with important public issues because we’re all citizens.

Talbot: What are some of the most critical social, political issues that you think you’d like to implement through Foundry United Methodist Church?

Wogaman: We are engaged in many mission projects of a more immediate sort in our immediate neighborhood. Beyond that, to be an advocate for a society in which all people—poor, rich, people of all colors, of all shapes and sizes—are accepted and valued. I want that to be the kind of society in which we are living. I think that’s the deep Hebrew-Christian-Muslim understanding of what a society should be. But also, we are concerned about the world. There is maybe a little window of opportunity just now with the leadership of the United States, the only remaining super-power, to help usher the world into a period of global community. Many dilemmas are involved with that. I remarked to the congregation one time when the President was there that I’m glad that I’m not the president. But this is an opportune time and our prayers are with him and with all those who are seeking to shape the world.