As you may know, there are
three years in the lectionary cycle: A, B, and C. (If you don’t know this, then
sometime when the sermon is going long you can check out pages 888-920 in The Book of Common Prayer. But not today...)
Year C has us focused on Luke’s
Gospel. In November, on the first Sunday of Advent, we’ll turn to Matthew’s
year and then we’ll rotate to Mark thirteen months later. Your patron, St. John,
doesn’t get his own year because we mix John in along the way, especially in
Year B since Mark is the shortest of the four gospels. All of this is inside
baseball – trivia so that if you ever end up in Final Jeopardy and the answer
is “The year that liturgical Christians read Luke’s Gospel” you can write down,
“what is Year C?”
The larger point is that we have
spent the past eleven months or so with Luke, and especially since the Feast of
Pentecost (which was twenty-two weeks ago) we have been moving slowly and
methodically through Luke’s telling of the good news of Jesus Christ. Even for
those who have been in church every single Sunday since May, however, you may
find it difficult (as I do) to maintain the flow of the narrative. So a quick review
is in order. Over the past five months we have been “on the move” with Jesus
and his followers making that long journey from Galilee to Jerusalem toward the
Cross, a distance of about 120 miles or so at a walking pace. Recently, the
conversation has turned to prayer.
Now I’ll get to that, but let
me just take a short detour and say a word about this “people of the Way.” I
think the Church in our day is beginning to rediscover the power of this
metaphor, of our roots, of what it means to be a people who not only sit in
beautiful church buildings like this one to worship Jesus, but who take up our
cross to follow him into the world beyond these walls and into our homes, our
schools, our workplaces, and our streets. Our new Presiding Bishop talks about
this being the Episcopal branch of the Jesus Movement – that notion of being a
part of a movement is what it means to be people of the way, a people on the
move. And our own bishop – the “ordinary” for whom I work – likes to be out there
walking the diocese. This Saturday we’ll be walking with the Bishop of the
eastern diocese from Northboro to Southboro, about an eight-mile journey.
Context matters and one size
will not fit all. But part of what I am learning in this work as Canon to the Ordinary
that takes me all over this diocese is that there is way more that binds us
together than keeps us in our silos. We face similar challenges in a
secularized consumer driven postmodern world, which means we need to be a
people who are on the Way together. Whatever else our challenges and our
differences may be, we are called to share this work in the name of the risen,
living Christ. And to keep on moving…
So back to this conversation
that Jesus is having with his disciples about prayer. If you were in church
last Sunday (or even if you were visiting with Roman Catholic or United
Methodist or Lutheran friends someplace else) we all heard the story about the
healing of ten lepers in the region between Samaria and Galilee. Only one of
those ten returned to say, “thank you.” And
he was a Samaritan, Luke tells us with some incredulity! This encounter
reminds us that gratitude takes us
to the very heart of what Christian prayer is all about. As Meister Eckhardt once put it: “if the only
prayer you ever say is thank you it will be enough.”
So if last week Jesus was
focused on gratitude, today he is speaking about persistence in prayer. He sets before us this parable of a
persistent widow who wears out a corrupt judge in her pursuit of justice. This
is a parable, not an allegory. Sometimes people get confused.
In an allegory, the
characters are meant to stand in for something else. So if this was an allegory,
then the unjust judge would be like God. If God is like the unjust judge, then God just answers our prayers to get rid of us, because we have been so annoying.
But that gets confusing and unhelpful and as I said this is not an allegory,
it’s a parable. The God who hears our prayers created us in love and has
claimed us in love. God wants to
spend time with us in prayer.
A parable is meant to help us
think in new ways by breaking through our defenses and challenging our
theological certitudes. Very often parables are meant to leave us scratching
our heads and wondering what just happened. Or laughing out loud.
As for this widow, I suspect
that most of us, when we hear about widows, tend to think of little old ladies.
I have known my fair share of them, but none more influential on my own faith journey
than my maternal grandmother, a woman who outlived her husband by decades. In
fact I never knew my grandfather, who died when my mother was still a child. So
my grandmother cut it very close financially, literally living from social
security check to social security check. Yet never did I hear her complain
about money. She was a strong and wise woman who counted her blessings every
day. So maybe we picture someone like her.
But I wonder if it helps us
to hear that parable in new ways by picturing “the widow” as someone more like,
say, Erin Brockovich—who takes on a
corrupt legal system because she’s is out of options. Or perhaps Sally Field’s
character in Places of the Heart, a
young widow desperate to save her farm and get the crop in against all odds. Or
even my own grandmother decades before I knew her, when my mother was still a
little girl and she was raising her on her own. All of them embody
determination and tenacity, perseverance and courage, and hope.
Or maybe we need to picture
the mother of Trayvon Martin or Philando Castile or Eric Gardner or Michael
Brown or Alton Sterling – mothers who insist that black lives matter and have
to matter, too, if this nation is ever going to live into our vocation to make
all lives matter. Mothers who also, time and again, stand before the cameras
asking for protests to be non-violent. Mothers who cry out again and again for
justice and embody determination, tenacity, perseverance, courage, and hope.
The widow in our parable keeps
coming to the judge to plead her case to plead for justice, day after day after
day, because she has no other recourse. That woman will do whatever it takes,
like a young widow raising her children alone or trying to hold onto the family
farm or fighting against a corporation that is polluting this good earth or
fighting for young black men’s lives. Until finally she does just plain wear
that old judge out, who decides the case in her favor simply because she was
such a pain in the neck.
Jesus asks: what would happen
if people prayed with that same kind of determination and intensity and persistence?
What if we prayed as if our lives depended on it?
It seems to me that much of
what passes for prayer in the church is just plain anemic. Sometimes we pray as
functional atheists, praying because we know that is what Christians are supposed to do. But deep down we aren’t
really sure we expect much to happen, either in the heart of God or in our own
hearts. But Jesus invites us to take note of this persistent widow and then
says: pray like her. Pray always, and do not lose heart.
That doesn’t mean we will
always get exactly what we asked for. I sometimes joke when I am asked to pray
for good weather or a Red Sox victory that I’m in sales, not management. But
underneath the joke lies a more serious point. We are all in sales; not management. Ultimately God gets to be God. We can and should offer prayers of
intercession and petition with persistence. But there is always a shadow side
to such prayers, because if we aren’t careful we can start to be like we are
telling God how to do God’s job!
So we can and should keep
praying for that friend who has inoperable cancer. But the answer to that
prayer may not be a miraculous cure. It might be that our friend finds the
courage and trust to die well and with fewer regrets after reconciling with an
estranged family member. We may be praying that God would send an angel to
guard over our friend in her time of need. But the answer to that prayer may be
that God means for us to go knock on
her door and hold her hand so that she will know the love of God through us. Even
if we don’t have our wings yet.
Such answers to prayer are
not always the ones we want, but they may well be the ones we need. They are
not evidence that God wasn’t listening but rather raise the question: are we? The
catechism of the Book of Common Prayer
says that prayer is “responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with or
without words.” (BCP 856) That’s a pretty expansive definition of prayer. Many
of us carry around an unexamined view of prayer that is passive: like being
seated on the lap of a Santa-Claus God with our wish lists. So I think Jesus
invites us to rethink this by putting this persistent widow before us today. Pray like her. Pray always, and do not lose heart. Even in an election year.
Next weekend we will continue
to be “on the way” with Jesus – part of this Episcopal branch of the Jesus
Movement. I’ll be with the good people at St. Paul’s in Gardner. I’ll leave
that text for your rector, but here is a preview of that coming attraction:
there will be these two men praying in the temple, one a Pharisee and one a tax
collector. The Pharisee prays in a way that isolates him from his neighbor. (He
even has the audacity to say out loud, “thanks that I’m not like that guy!”) In contrast, the tax collector offers a
humble prayer that neatly summarizes the first three steps of twelve-step
programs: Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.
As this week unfolds, I
invite you to reflect on your own prayer life. There is not one right way to
pray. But we can all improve our prayer lives if we link these three gospel
readings together like beads on a prayer chain. Taken together, last week, this
week, and next week we are invited to do three things toward that end.
First, cultivate gratitude. On the worst of days, waking up in the morning
is better than not. There is so much to be thankful for, so make a list, and
count your blessings. Second, be
persistent in prayer. Even when it feels like nothing is happening, keep at
it. Be like that widow. Third, be
humble. Remember that you are dust – and more importantly that God
remembers that as well. All of us fall short of the glory of God, and yet God’s
grace is bigger than our failings.
Pray without ceasing, by thought and by deed, with or
without words. But keep praying—and do not lose heart.
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