Trinity Episcopal Church

“And Jesus told a parable about the need to pray always and not to lose heart”  Seems pretty clear to me.  In this parable Luke tells us right up front what the parable is about and why Jesus chose to tell it.  It is a story about being persistent in praying to God and about the inevitability of God’s response to us when we pray.  Right?  Maybe......

Imagine you are one of Jesus’ followers, sitting on a hillside, sun beating down.  Jesus begins with “there was a judge”  Remember now that these men and women hearing this story were for the most part, the peasants of the land.  They were not wealthy and each one of them - mostly likely - had experienced an encounter with a judge such as the one that Jesus describes.  This judge, Jesus says, was no God-fearing man.  In fact he was something of a scoundrel.  He cared not a whit for God or for the people he was assigned to protect from discrimination or bias.

And then Jesus says there was this widow.  Doinggggggggg!  Widow!  Those disciple’s minds immediately jump to the Torah and the admonitions to the people of Israel to protect the strangers in the land, the orphans and the widows.  In other words the Law of God is clear – those who are weak and helpless with no power are to be given special deference.  Apparently that was not what was happening in this city. 

The widow had a grievance – someone had cheated her and she came to the judge seeking justice.  Unfortunately, the judge did not want to be bothered.  He stubbornly refused to hear her plea or to rule favorably for her.  But this widow is the Energizer Bunny and just kept coming and coming asking for justice, until at some point the judge has a conversation with himself.  He says “self, you can keep up this stone-walling for just so long.  Sooner or later this widow’s incessant nagging is going to wear me out.  So I am going to give her what she keeps asking for so that she will stop bothering me. 

Interestingly, Jesus does not comment on the validity of the widow’s claim.  I think there is a reason for that.    This parable is not about a case before a court, nor about a widow or a judge.  This parable is about God and our relationship with God.  The next line makes that clear, “Because God does care about the needs of those who come to him in prayer, he will quickly grant justice to them.”  And then there is the catch line that asks....  but will the people of God be willing and able to maintain their faith through the lean years.

This gospel was written toward the end of the 1^st century and they were indeed lean years for the small band of Christians.  Persecution, alienation, poverty, war all of these came down on their heads.  Was it any harder for them to persist in prayer than for us.  The parable implies that the  corrupt judge will begrudgingly grant a little justice, but God will do oh so much more.  It is so easy to take this parable and a couple of other passages of scripture and get the idea that if I pray hard enough and often enough that God will grant my requests. 

I don’t have to tell anyone here that such reasoning is a slippery slope to despair because my “Please God Please Please Please” prayers do not always get answered at all and hardly ever in the manner in which I expected.  More often than not our prayers seem to fall on divine deaf ears and as a result persistence in prayer can become very difficult.  Fact is the church has been praying for justice for 2000 years and today justice is still a rare commodity for the voiceless, powerless “widows” of our community.  If you don’t believe me just look at the number of homeless families in the richest nation on earth.  Look at Somalia, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Honduras, Guatemala, Haiti, Dorchester, Roxbury, Chelsea, Lawrence, and Haverhill.  Look out the window....

Almost every year the Exodus is taught to our children (last night even) because it is the foundational study of God’s intervention in our bondage, of setting us free from injustice and suffering, of opening the way for our faithful commitment to God.  The Bible talks a lot about justice and about how God expects you and me to respond in the face of injustice.  I was listening to an old sermon on the internet the other day and the preacher quoted a New Testament scholar, Alan Culpepper, as saying “To those who have it in their power to relieve the distress of the widow, the orphan and the stranger but do not do so, the call to pray day and night is a command to let the priorities of God’s compassion reorder the priorities of their lives.”[i]  That persistent prayer of the widow is God knocking on our door and asking for our help.  Those who are privileged to be able to relieve suffering, and do not do so – that widow’s prayer is the call from God to step up and change our ways.  As Christians we are commanded by scripture, tradition and reason to shape our actions and our decisions and yes our votes, by our understanding of our place in God’s Kingdom and by God’s persistent call to us..  Let the church say amen!  Whether it is on a soapbox, in a pulpit or at the voting booth, God expects us to speak out against greed and oppression and defend the human rights of those who are too weak to defend themselves.

The reason we pray is not because we want to change God’s mind.  Prayer is important and persistent prayer is critical to the life of the people of God, but its value is in how it changes us and our relationship to God that is the crux of the matter.  That prolific author of great sermon starter’s, Frederick Buechner, said that persistence in prayer is important, "not because you have to beat a path to God's door before [God will] open it, but because until you beat the path, maybe there's no way of getting to your door."[ii]  (emphasis mine)

I said before that this parable is about God and our relationship with God.  If persistent prayer is the way that we clear the path so that God can get to us, then this parable speaks to the importance of living a life of mindfulness, so that when God touches us - we will recognize the voice and be ready to respond.  Our prayer life shapes us and helps us to remember who, and whose, we are. When I was in college my mother used to tell me that I needed to come home and get my “perspectives straightened out”.  What she meant was that she wanted to have a conversation with me about values and priorities – mine and hers - and bring me back to the center of who I was and where I was going.   Prayer is like that.  God seeks to get our intentions - our priorities - on the page with hers.  And there is another piece of that process. 

Prayer, the daily conversations with God, - as repetitive as they are sometimes -  sustain us.  No, prayers are not always answered in the way we expect or want, but it is my experience that when I pay attention, when I stop talking in my head long enough for God to get a word in edge wise - that God does respond.  Those are not divine deaf ears.  It is how we go about searching for God and for God’s desires for us.  If we rub up against God’s heart often enough we are bound to catch some love.  Amen?  Amen!

 Remember last week when we talked about thanksgiving and how we come here week after week to offer our thanks.   We say “It is right to give God thanks and praise”  Well it is also right to stop and to ask, to seek, to knock and to expect God to respond.  Jesus told that Samaritan last week, your faith has made you well.  Persistent prayer is an expression of faith because if we have no faith in God’s present reality in our lives then we have no reason to seek God out.    And if we don’t have that – if we can’t name the reasons that we seek to be in relationship with God then we are in the wrong place and we are lost for sure. 

God wants to know us and we NEED to know God and the only way that will happen is if we daily, persistently, passionately, get down on our knees and pray.  Pray for forgiveness for our sins, pray for relief from our suffering, pray for guidance in our daily lives, pray in thanks for our blessings, and pray that God’s Kingdom will come on this earth and that the widows and the orphans and the strangers of this world will know justice.  These are lean years and we are in need of support if our faith is to endure.  There is a great old familiar hymn – Faith of our fathers.  The second verse of that hymn names the tie between our prayer life and justice.  It goes like this.  Faith of our fathers, faith and prayer, shall win all nations unto thee.  And through the truth that comes from God, mankind shall then indeed be free.  Amen