sermons
Summer at Reservoir
When God Answers Our Prayers Differently Than We Expected
Osheta Moore
Aug 24, 2025
A Sermon on Prayer, Presence, and the Soul Formation of Holding Our Needs to God
Scripture Reading: John 11:17-35
All Shall Be Well?
Friends, it is such a gift to be here with you this morning. This community has been instrumental in my own spiritual formation in ways you probably don’t even know. I was part of a moms group here that helped me navigate the beautiful chaos of early motherhood. My husband and I attended a marriage retreat weekend that quite literally saved our relationship at a time when we needed it most. And I’ll never forget taking that spiritual healing course—something about living water and streams in the wilderness—that opened my heart to God’s healing in ways I’m still discovering.
I have prayed some of the most deeply heartfelt and important prayers of my life within these walls. Prayers of desperation, prayers of gratitude, prayers of confusion, prayers of wonder. So standing here today feels like coming home in the most sacred way.
And I want to begin this morning with a phrase that has been echoing in my heart as I’ve prepared for today. I’m going to say it, and I want you to just notice what happens in your body, in your spirit, when you hear these words:
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.”
Take a moment.
- What does that feel like when I say that?
- Does it feel comforting?
- Does it feel patronizing?
- Does it feel enigmatic—like spiritual bypassing that ignores real suffering?
- Does it feel like empty optimism from someone who doesn’t understand your life?
These words come from Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century mystic who lived through the Black Death, church corruption, and massive social upheaval. Julian experienced a series of intense visions of Christ while seriously ill, and then spent the next 20 years reflecting on what those revelations meant. Her words weren’t born from a life of ease—they were forged in an era of immense suffering.
Here’s what I love about Julian: she never offers us cheap comfort. The Bishop of Norwich puts it beautifully:
“All shall be well doesn’t deny present experience but roots it deep in the faithfulness of God, whose will and gift is life.”
Julian’s optimism isn’t denial—it’s courage that endures.
But here’s what’s fascinating: even Julian understood that “all shall be well” can sound different depending on what we need in the moment. Sometimes we need to understand why all shall be well—we need reasons, frameworks, theological grounding. Sometimes we simply need to feel that we’re not alone in our fear that nothing will ever be well again.
Jesus’s Own Version of “All Shall Be Well”
This brings me to our passage today, because I think Jesus offered his own version of “all shall be well” to two women who were grieving—but he offered it in two completely different ways, depending on what each sister needed to hear.
Martha and Mary prayed that prayer. They sent word to Jesus when Lazarus got sick:
“Lord, he whom you love is ill.”
That’s prayer language, friends. That’s them holding their biggest need up to God and saying,
“We need you to show up.”
But Jesus didn’t come. Not right away. And Lazarus died.
So when Jesus finally arrives, both sisters meet him with the same words—words that sound less like a greeting and more like a prayer that got answered too late:
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve prayed prayers like that.
“God, if you had just…” “Jesus, if you would have only…”
Sometimes our prayers feel more like negotiations or magic formulas than conversations with the Divine. Sometimes we turn prayer into this transactional thing where we believe if we just pray hard enough, believe strong enough, use the right words, God will give us what we want when we want it.
But what if prayer isn’t about getting God to do what we want? What if prayer is about soul formation—about allowing our hearts to be shaped by bringing our deepest needs into conversation with the God who loves us?
The Two Ways God Responds to Our Hearts
Here’s what absolutely fascinates me about this passage: Martha and Mary say the exact same words to Jesus, but he responds to each of them completely differently. And I think this shows us something beautiful about how God responds to our prayers.
Martha’s Prayer Gets a Theological Response
Martha approaches Jesus first, and she’s clearly wrestling, processing, trying to make sense of what feels like an unanswered prayer. So Jesus meets her there with teaching. He engages her mind:
“Your brother will rise again.”
When she responds with her theological understanding—
“I know that he will rise in the resurrection on the last day”
—Jesus goes deeper:
“I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me will live, even though they die.”
This is God responding to prayer with clarity, with framework, with understanding. Sometimes when we bring our needs to God, the response comes through insight, through Scripture that suddenly makes sense, through conversations that give us perspective, through practical wisdom that helps us navigate our situation.
Martha needed to understand. Her soul was being formed through wrestling with big theological questions:
- What does it mean to trust God when prayers seem unanswered?
- What does resurrection really mean?
- How do we hold hope when everything feels hopeless?
Mary’s Prayer Gets a Relational Response
But then Mary comes to Jesus with those same words—
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother wouldn’t have died”—
and Jesus responds completely differently. No teaching. No theology lesson. Instead, the text says he saw her crying and was
“deeply disturbed and troubled.”
And then—this is the part that gets me every time—
“Jesus began to cry.”
This is God responding to prayer with presence, with emotion, with shared tears. Sometimes when we bring our needs to God, the response isn’t an explanation or a solution—it’s the sense that we’re not alone in our pain. It’s that moment in worship when you feel held by something bigger than yourself. It’s the friend who shows up and just sits with you. It’s the inexplicable peace that comes not from understanding but from being loved.
Mary needed presence. Her soul was being formed through the experience of being seen in her grief, of having her pain witnessed and shared by the God of the universe.
Julian of Norwich: A Mystic for This Moment
This made me think about Julian of Norwich, a 14th-century mystic who understood something profound about how God responds to human need. Julian lived through the Black Death, church corruption, and massive social upheaval—not unlike our own times of pandemic, institutional failures, and cultural shifts.
At age 30, while seriously ill, Julian experienced a series of intense visions of Christ’s love. But here’s what makes her so relevant for us: she spent the next 20 years reflecting on and interpreting those visions. Her book “Revelations of Divine Love” shows us someone who received both immediate spiritual experience AND years of theological reflection—both the Mary response of felt presence and the Martha response of understanding.
Julian’s approach to God was revolutionary for her time. She presents
“a God who is not angry or punitive but endlessly loving and merciful.”
She experienced God as both mother and father, both the one who gives practical wisdom and the one who offers tender comfort. Her famous words—
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well”
—came not from naive optimism but from someone who had received both God’s presence in suffering and God’s practical assurance about the ultimate nature of reality.
What if this is exactly how God responds to our prayers? Sometimes our souls need the Martha response—clarity, understanding, theological framework, practical wisdom. Sometimes our souls need the Mary response—presence, comfort, the assurance that our pain is seen and shared.
Julian knew both. And here’s the beautiful thing: both are answers to prayer. Both are God showing up. Both are forms of divine love meeting us exactly where we are.
When We Turn Prayer into Magic
But here’s where I think we sometimes mess this up. We want to turn prayer into a formula. We want to figure out the right combination of words, the right amount of faith, the right posture that will get God to respond the way we want.
Some of you came from traditions—maybe even this community in its earlier days—where there were very specific expectations about prayer. Pray with enough faith and God will heal. Declare the right promises over your situation. If your prayer didn’t get “answered” the way you wanted, well, maybe you didn’t have enough faith. Maybe there was hidden sin blocking your breakthrough. Maybe you needed to pray longer, louder, with more people agreeing.
And listen, I’m not dismissing the beautiful things that came from that tradition—the expectation that God is active and present, the belief that prayer matters, the experiences of genuine healing and breakthrough that many of you witnessed. Those are real and beautiful.
But when prayer becomes a formula—when we start believing we can manipulate God into responding the way we want—that’s not prayer. That’s spiritual manipulation. That’s turning the God of the universe into a cosmic vending machine.
Prayer as Soul Formation
But what if prayer isn’t about getting God to do what we want? What if prayer is about soul formation—about allowing our hearts to be shaped and formed through the process of bringing our deepest needs into conversation with Divine Love?
When Martha brought her confusion and disappointment to Jesus, she wasn’t just asking for her brother back. She was wrestling with fundamental questions about who God is and how God works in the world. Her soul was being formed through that wrestling.
When Mary brought her grief to Jesus, she wasn’t just asking for comfort. She was learning something profound about a God who sees our pain and shares it. Her soul was being formed through the experience of being fully seen and loved in her brokenness.
The Both/And of Answered Prayer
Friends, what if both the practical miracles and the tender presence are answered prayers? What if God sometimes responds with the Martha answer—clarity, wisdom, practical solutions, even miraculous healing—and sometimes responds with the Mary response—presence, comfort, the assurance that we’re not alone?
I know many of you have experienced both in your journey as a community. Some of you remember prayers for healing that resulted in genuine, documented miracles. You’ve seen God show up in power in ways that can’t be explained away. That’s the Martha response, and it’s beautiful and worth celebrating—it’s part of your story as a community and shouldn’t be diminished as you’ve grown and changed.
Others of you have prayed for healing and didn’t receive it in the way you hoped, but you found an inexplicable peace in the midst of suffering. You found community that held you through the hardest season. You discovered that God’s presence was enough even when the miracle didn’t come. That’s the Mary response, and it’s equally beautiful and worth celebrating.
As you’ve journeyed toward a more progressive theology, you haven’t lost the God who shows up in power—you’ve discovered a God whose power sometimes looks like miracles and sometimes looks like presence. Both are divine love meeting us exactly where we are.
The Ongoing Miracle of Lazarus
And here’s the thing—Jesus does eventually raise Lazarus from the dead. The Martha response and the Mary response both lead to resurrection. But notice that the resurrection isn’t the only miracle in this story. The miracle is also Jesus paying attention to what each person needed and responding accordingly. The miracle is also the way their souls were being formed through the process of bringing their needs to God.
The big, flashy miracle gets the attention, but the soul formation that happens through prayer—that’s the ongoing miracle that changes us from the inside out.
Prayer as Abiding
In my last sermon, I talked about Jesus’s invitation to “abide”—to maintain ongoing connection with divine love. Prayer is one of the primary ways we abide. Not because we’re trying to talk God into doing what we want, but because we’re allowing our hearts to be shaped by ongoing conversation with the source of all love.
We abide when we bring our confusion to God like Martha and wrestle with the big questions. We abide when we bring our grief to God like Mary and trust that our pain is seen and shared. We abide when we hold our needs—both practical and emotional—before the God who responds sometimes with clarity and sometimes with presence, but always with love.
When Prayer Changes Us
Here’s what I’ve discovered in my own prayer life: the prayers that have formed my soul the most haven’t been the ones that got answered exactly how I wanted. They’ve been the prayers that changed me.
The prayer I prayed for months about a difficult relationship—God didn’t change the other person, but God changed my heart toward them. The prayer I prayed about a job situation—I didn’t get the promotion I wanted, but I discovered gifts I didn’t know I had. The prayer I prayed when my mama was dying—she wasn’t healed in the way I begged for, but I experienced the presence of God in ways that sustain me still.
That’s soul formation. That’s the ongoing work of prayer shaping us into people who can hold both the practical miracles and the tender presence as gifts from a God who loves us too much to leave us unchanged.
The Community of Both/And Prayer
And isn’t this what you’ve discovered as a community in your journey? You’ve learned to hold space for both kinds of answered prayer. You celebrate the Martha moments—when prayers get answered in clear, practical ways, when healing happens, when breakthrough comes. And you’ve learned to honor the Mary moments—when prayers get answered through presence and comfort and the mysterious ways love shows up, especially for those who’ve been marginalized or wounded by the church.
You’ve learned that prayer isn’t about having the right theology or the right formula, but about ongoing conversation that forms our souls. You’ve made space for the messiness of real prayer—the questions, the disappointments, the unexpected ways God shows up, even for people who don’t fit the traditional molds of who deserves God’s attention.
This is beautiful, and it’s faithful, and it’s exactly what Martha and Mary show us—that Jesus meets us where we are, not where we think we should be.
A Julian of Norwich Body Prayer
Before we close, I want to lead you in a prayer practice that Julian herself might have used. Julian understood that we encounter God not just in our minds but in our whole beings—body, heart, mind, and spirit.
Let’s begin by placing our hands over our hearts. Julian spoke of God as mother, the one who nurtures and holds us close. Feel your heartbeat under your hands. This is the rhythm of life that God has given you.
Now extend your hands out in front of you, palms up. This is the posture of receiving—receiving both God’s presence and God’s presents, both comfort and clarity, both the Mary response and the Martha response to your prayers.
Breathe in deeply, and as you do, pray with Julian:
“All shall be well.”
Breathe out, releasing your need to control how God responds:
“All shall be well.”
Breathe in again, trusting that God meets you exactly where you are:
“All manner of things shall be well.”
Now place one hand on your forehead—for all the ways you need God to meet your mind, your questions, your need for understanding like Martha.
Place your other hand back on your heart—for all the ways you need God to meet your emotions, your grief, your need for presence like Mary.
And pray with me:
“God of Martha and Mary, meet us where we are. When we need wisdom, grant us wisdom. When we need presence, grant us presence. When we need both, help us receive both. Form our souls through the beautiful, messy process of prayer. All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well. Amen.”
Benediction
May you go from this place knowing that your prayers are heard—not because you pray with the right words or the right posture, but because you are beloved by the God who created you.
May you find comfort in both the Martha responses and the Mary responses to your prayers—in the practical wisdom and the tender presence, in the miraculous healings and the mysterious peace.
Like Julian of Norwich, may your soul be formed through the beautiful, messy process of bringing your deepest needs into conversation with Divine Love.
And may you discover that prayer isn’t about getting God to do what you want, but about allowing your heart to be shaped by ongoing relationship with the source of all life.
Go in peace, beloved. All shall be well.
Amen.