Host: What is petition?
Rev. McCloskey: A petition, you know if I were tell you what petition was I have to be able to read your mind and to know what you most need. And last week when I was giving a retreat to teenagers, they are all praying for somebody who had cancer in their family or praying for a classmate that had cancer in their family. Or they were praying for some herpes that was part of their body who they were or something has happened to somebody that was special in their life, their friends, their loneliness, whatever. We all come to God with the most basic of all the needs and that's that we might know ourselves in the truth of the light of the sun.
So I’m asking for what I need in order that God might be special to me and the son Jesus Christ but he is only going to be special to me and the son Jesus Christ, if I am taking care of all the people around me. Matthew 25, the Last Judgment saying, "When I was hungry, you gave me to eat, when I was thirsty you gave me the drink. When was in prison you visited me. When I was sick you took care of me, when I was naked you clothe me". I always think about hope and think to do these shows for any religion at all, and he said, "Why you do that?"
I don't want to be held out of heaven on a technicality. That I have to laugh at myself because you know the reality of God's presence in our life is in terms of what we need most and the greatest of all of our needs is always going to be how can I really be my self? How much of myself am I willing to give to God? So I have a question I always ask everybody. Am I really willing to be who Christ would have been, if he had been lucky enough to be me?
So petition captures the reality of who of—no, the best petition would capture the reality of who Christ would have been if he was me because that we are all called to live our lives in imitation of Christ but to become if we want to be a Christian, real Christ. So you know I look at Jeremiah and where God promises that the Jewish people would be his people and what does it mean to be his people? He said," He will hear our needs and respond to themselves", the pray of petition, is prayer practical, it makes prayer down to earth. Hence, the parachutes that we're talking about are all usually in relationship to that need. That's what I mean when I say that that if you have one of the pieces you have the other piece. If I were to take the scene from Luke Chapter V, it was the scene that I described in the first tape of Jesus in the boat of Peter.
Well, I could try to—my first parachute would be Christ needing Peter and no one likes to be jounced by the crowd and I have been in crowd that was so large that I thought like I was like being hanged in. You know I just had to escape. If Christ would actually want the openness of the sea around him and the security of boats, so that he could see everybody without their getting behind him. So that my first P would be the boat or my first P would be Christ and the way he looked at Peter.
This is my first parachute. I usually work with three parachutes. I don't know if anyone has ever jumped from the plane, but with the back up parachute gives you a lot of confidence in the first one. But being that isn't me, I had three parachutes, three lined from scripture that I want to reflect or picked up three items that are important to me. The first would be Christ looking at Peter. My second could be Peter looking at Christ apart from the allurer simple person and then all the things that Peter heard Christ say, that touched his heart so deeply that he knew Christ was a special person. My third P would be Christ inviting Peter to be a fisherman of people and what am I willing to stop doing or to drop, or to give up because Christ is calling me.
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