The protagonist of James Runcie’s novel The Great Passion is Stefan Silbermann, a thirteen-year old German boy who comes from a family of well-known organ builders. Silbermann has been sent to the famous choir school of the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where Johann Sebastian Bach was the Cantor. Silbermann is a vulnerable young chorister with bright red hair, who is teased mercilessly by other students. Because of this, but primarily because of Silbermann’s musical gifts, J.S. Bach becomes a mentor to him.
Bach assumes that because Silbermann comes from a musical family he will, accordingly, be a good musician and that he will have profound knowledge of the construction, mechanics, and tonal constitution of organs. At one point, Bach is discussing the quality of various organs in Leipzig with young Stefan, and Bach suggests that he might benefit from Silbermann’s expertise. The teenage Silbermann modestly defers to the elder Bach. But Bach replies:
“[Y]ou have grown up with the organ, Monsieur Silbermann. It is in your blood. What is it your family say?”
“There’s blood and skin in all our instruments,” Silbermann replies.
“Exactly that,” Bach replies. “We give our lives to our music. There can be no half-measures. Remember that!”[1]
There’s blood and skin in all our instruments. You can’t see or hear the blood and skin, but they are there. Every sound from the organ pipe echoes the hard-won labor of the organ builder, who has likely cut fingers on pipe metal and whose hands bear the scrapes of difficult manual labor. All is done to enable exquisite craftmanship. All is done for music. We could also say, all is done for the glory of God. The organ builder, like any artist or artisan, has skin in the game.
Christian discipleship is not a game nor is it an artistic project, but it undoubtedly demands that each one of us has skin in the game. This is at the root of Jesus’s numerous injunctions in Scripture: Take up your cross and follow me. Whoever does not leave family for Jesus’s sake cannot be his disciple. One cannot even bury one’s father or bid family goodbye before following Jesus. There’s blood and skin in what we do as Christians. There’s no room for half measures. We give our lives to be in relationship with God. The martyrs of the Church are testimony to this cost of discipleship.
If, then, the Christian life necessitates more than half-measures, then in our prayer, shouldn’t there be blood and skin? In our prayer, we give every fiber of our being to God. And yet, it’s easy to approach God in prayer as one would a candy machine. We ask, and God dispenses something pleasing to us. When the machine offers bitter candy, we blame the machine.
And this is where so many people find themselves unable to move on in their relationship with God. Why does God seem not to answer prayers at times? If God really wants what is best for us, why are people gunned down at parades or in schools or in their places of worship? Why do good and faithful people get sick and never recover? Why does the answer to prayer seem to be only silence?
The truth is that when we pray, most of us probably want only the sweet candy. And Jesus knew that his disciples, like us, would misunderstand prayer. When they asked him how to pray, they asked for a model. They asked about technique. They were looking for a formula. They wanted to know how to do it correctly. But Jesus offered more than a model. He went on to deepen his disciples’ understanding of prayer. He suggested that prayer requires some skin in the game.
To illustrate this, Jesus told a parable. Imagine going to a friend in the middle of the night to ask for three loaves of bread because an unexpected visitor had arrived. Jesus said that even if the friend was annoyed at being disturbed in the middle of the night, he would still give his friend the three loaves of bread simply because of his importunity.
But the word “importunity” or “persistence” does not quite fit the bill in the original Greek. Jesus was really suggesting that the person knocking on a friend’s door in the middle of the night is not merely importunate or persistent. He is shameless. He is shameless because he doesn’t care that it’s midnight and the door is locked and his friend and his children are in bed. He is shameless because despite every reason not to ask something of this friend, he does so anyway. And the reason he does so is because he has a relationship with his friend. He knows that his friend will give him what he asks, because he senses in his heart that his friend could do nothing less. Both friends have skin in the game.
This parable doesn’t demonstrate how we pray or what technique we should employ to get what we want. It unmasks the spirit of shamelessness and profound investment that is at the heart of prayer. Jesus was clear: ask and you will receive. Search and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. It doesn’t mean that when we put money in the machine, we always get sweet candy. It doesn’t mean that we always get what we want or think we need. But it does mean that God is always acting in favor of us, even when it doesn’t seem like it. And we see this most clearly when we have some skin in the game.
Treating God like a dispenser of favors, as if he is no more than a machine, reduces our relationship with God to something perfunctory or transactional. God sits in heaven. From down below, we ask, and God gives us what we want, if we’re lucky.
Some of us have been led to believe that with God, the door is always locked. It’s always midnight, and God is always in bed. We dare to knock for fear of annoying God. Perhaps, somewhere inside, we really do believe that God can be a cruel trickster. If we ask for an egg, we’ll receive a scorpion because we can never measure up to what God demands of us.
Some of us worry about getting the formula or the technique right. If we pray in a certain way, we can win God’s favor. And if we heed the poor translation in some renderings of today’s Gospel passage, we could believe that persistence in and of itself is a value.
But true prayer is less about persistence and more about having skin in the game. If we are vulnerable, then there’s skin and blood in all our prayers. Mere faithfulness in prayer is worth something, but true prayer is so much more than that. Having skin in the game is being shameless in our prayer and bold in what we ask for. We are not to ask for frivolous things. Praying is not asking for a snow day so we can stay home from school or for our favorite team to win the game. Having skin in the game means that we are willing to face whatever God hands us, however difficult it may be, knowing that in the mystery of God, what we sometimes receive cannot be understood as good, knowing that in a world that also contains evil and sin, the answers to our prayers often seem hidden. Having skin in the game means trusting that, in spite of our doubts, God has our best interests in mind.
The skin we have in this game is a willingness to say, like Jesus on the cross, not my will but thine be done. God himself has already had skin in the game. We do not need to beg him or curry his favor. There’s blood and skin in all my children, God says. Aching sinews on a hard cross and blood poured out for the salvation of the human race, that is having skin in the game. Jesus Christ is proof that God has skin in the game. There is nothing God has not given for our salvation. What, then, will we not give for God?
So we, like those disciples, can ask Jesus to teach us to pray. Teach us, Lord, to sweat blood in our prayers when we are in agony. Teach us to seek thy will alone, knowing that it is best for us. Teach us, Lord, when we desire only sweetness, to receive any bitterness with patience and humble gratitude. Teach us, O God, that when we have skin in the game, we are closest to you. Help us to trust that the door is never locked to us. And if we only ask, search, and knock, our hearts will be opened to you.
Sermon by Father Kyle Babin
The Seventh Sunday after Pentecost
July 24, 2022
[1] James Runcie, The Great Passion (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 28, Kindle edition.