Sermon preached at St Margaret of Antioch, Toxteth, 27 July 2025
If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
When I was five, I had no real idea of the value of anything, and certainly not money. We’d just moved into my grandmother’s house in Prescot, all the way from across the ocean in Canada, and ha’pennies and pennies and tuppences were brand new to me. I just knew they were shiny and could buy me things, and I had such a two-pence piece on the table next to my bed in my grandma’s.
One day I was napping, and I heard the ice cream van. In Canada we had what we called ‘Dickie boys,’ who would come round the neighbourhood on a sort of bicycle contraption with a freezer chest out front, full of various ice creams and popsicles and frozen treats; but I suppose by this time I was accustomed enough to English life that I recognised the call of the ice cream van.
I awoke from my nap, and immediately my mind turned to the two-pence piece. I grabbed it and ran out into the street and asked, ‘What can I get for this?’ It wasn’t going to get me a 99 or a Feast or my favourite, a screwball. So the ice cream man looks around and, feeling a bit sorry for me, finds a little chocolate flake that you stick in the top of a 99 ice-cream, and he says, ‘There you go. You can have that.’
I was pleased as punch.
If you don’t ask, you don’t get.
If an ice cream man trying to make a few quid on an estate in Prescot knows how to give a chocolate flake to a child with only a tuppence, how much more will a living, loving God grant us what we ask? Or as Jesus puts it in today’s gospel reading: ‘If you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?’ He draws a contrast between the earthly and the heavenly. If we know how to be generous, how much more generous shall we expect our loving Father in heaven to be? And so, in teaching us the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus tells us something very simple, something children know, and something I knew as a boy when I wanted something sweet and tasty: Just ask. Just ask.
‘Give us today our daily bread,’ he tells us to pray. We might ask, does Jesus mean actual bread, the things we need day to day for our physical sustenance? Or are we to spiritualise it and say that Jesus means spiritual bread, the word of God, perhaps, or Christ himself, the Bread of Life that we consume in the Eucharist? I don’t believe we can separate one from the other, and I don’t think either Jesus or the gospel author, St Luke, would make such a sharp distinction. Luke often refers to ‘the breaking of bread,’ and often there’s an ambiguity whether he’s alluding to the sacramental meal we share today in which we’re united with Christ in the bread and wine, or to the literal act of eating, of sharing a meal together, as a social occasion. He is, I think, speaking of both. In Acts 2, Luke describes the life of the first Christians, saying, ‘They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,’ and later, ‘Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts.’ Those first Christians, filled with the Holy Spirit, shared not just an hour together at the sacramental feast, but each day, sharing not just a part of themselves, but their whole lives and all they had, not just spiritually, but materially.
This, then, makes sense of the line ‘Forgive us our sins, as we forgive others their debts.’ Jesus walked the earth in a time and place where ordinary peasants—the poor of Galilee—lived under a constant, crushing burden of debt. They were under occupation by an oppressive empire. When Jesus set out his mission, in Luke 4, he read from the prophet Isaiah: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ He revealed that God’s heart is not simply to grant some purely spiritual sort of salvation, but to free those in poverty, to give real hope to those imprisoned by debt and cruelty, and to bring freedom to those who were oppressed in a time of massive inequality and injustice much greater than most of us will ever experience. We are seeing some of that injustice in the same part of the world now. Relieving hunger, lifting people out of poverty, and liberating them from the cycle of violence is as much a part of the gospel we proclaim as is the forgiveness of sins.
We must not hesitate to pray for bread or to forgive the debts that people owe us. As believers in Jesus, we are promised that same Spirit that anointed Jesus in his mission, and in the gospel this morning we are told to ask for that Holy Spirit. If, as sinful humans, we know how to give good gifts, how much more will a perfect God give us the Spirit when we ask?
The Son of God came to us in human flesh and empowered by the Spirit to proclaim liberty for the oppressed. This is God’s mission, and as followers of Jesus, we share in that mission. Do you know why we sometimes call the Eucharist the Mass? It comes from the Latin ‘missal,’ because at the end of the service we are ‘dismissed’—that is, we are sent out on a mission. In about 40 minutes’ time, I will announce the end of our Eucharist, and I will tell you to ‘Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.’ When we leave this place, having been nourished by the true Body and Blood of our Lord, we carry Christ with us into the world, through the power of the Holy Spirit, who lives in us. We continue Christ’s mission wherever we go—in our homes, our workplaces, among our families, our friends, our neighbours, those we like and those we don’t like so much, those we know and those we don’t know; those who are different, unfamiliar to us.
What will that mission look like? It’s nothing fancy, frankly, although it can be hard. It’s the day-to-day gospel work of loving others, forgiving them when they’ve offended you, cancelling a debt when you can see they’re struggling and need a break, calling in on them when they’re sick, offering an assuring prayer and the hand of friendship when they’re down, clothing them and feeding them in difficult times.
How are we to accomplish that? Ask God to give you his Spirit, and you’ll find the strength you need to overcome resentment and forgive; you’ll receive the compassion you need to part with something costly because the stranger at your door needs it more than you; you’ll have the confidence to say to your neighbour, ‘God loves you,’ or ‘Let’s pray together,’ or ‘Would you like to come to church with me?’
And why ought we do these things? Because God has done these things for us. Why forgive debts? Because in Christ, God has lifted the debt of sin from our shoulders. When we have experienced the loving kindness of God, we want to share it with others.
Teach us to pray, the disciples asked their Lord. In light of all this, how shall we pray? Just ask. Just ask. And let’s be bold, knowing that the mission of God in Christ is one of liberating, healing, raising up the weak in the face of oppression. What shall we ask God for? Look around you and don’t be afraid to ask for the big things, because, to riff on Jesus’ words a bit, if we, who are evil, are moved by injustice and suffering in the world, how much more is God moved?
Ask for justice and righteousness to triumph in the Middle East; ask for God to ignite politicians’ hearts with compassion so that our government will pay attention to the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable among us; ask for reconciliation in our communities, where there’s suspicion, hatred and sometimes violence because of racial differences; ask for a fairer world. And pursue these things, too, because words are always wedded to action. Jesus regularly retreated to pray, and his disciples saw that and wanted to learn for themselves how to pray; but Jesus demonstrated the kingdom in deeds, too. He healed the sick, liberating them from the shame that kept them excluded. He healed the possessed, breaking the forces that condemned them to lives of misery and suffering. Jesus was for people being restored to their communities, for communities standing strong in the face of unjust powers.
‘Ask, and it will be given to you,’ Jesus said, or as the parallel passage in Matthew says, ‘Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness,’ and we sang it before in that simple hymn we probably remember from our school assemblies. (I certainly do.)
As we go out into the world, sent by, nourished by and filled with Christ, what will we ask God to do in and through us and in and through those we meet? Ask boldly, and may his kingdom come in this city and in this world.