Staying Connected
Luke 18:1-8
Then
Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose
heart. 2He said, “In a certain city there
was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3In that city there was a widow who
kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ 4For a while he refused; but later
he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5yet because this widow keeps
bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by
continually coming.’” 6And the Lord said, “Listen to what
the unjust judge says. 7And will not God grant justice to
his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping
them? 8I tell you, he will quickly grant
justice to them. And yet, when the
Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Jesus’ parables can occasionally frustrate me beyond belief,
but these quirky stories are still my favorite texts in the Bible. And I don’t know if it has something to
do with the way my mind works, but every time we get to a parable, I am almost
always fascinated-bordering-on-obsessed by the supposed villains in the story. Perhaps I am just being deliberately
contrary, but I’ve spent enough time wrestling with these characters in the
parables to know that they can bear multiple interpretations in which a reading
that seems sort of obvious suddenly isn’t.
Because parables aren’t about revealing a single, simple
moral statement that can be slapped on a bumper sticker. Parables are about truth –
hidden, unyielding disruptive truth. It is as if the gospel writers have deliberately constructed
an open space in these stories so that readers are pretty much forced to grapple
with the mystery of what it means to be in relationship with Jesus and in
relationship with other human beings.
And the human part of that equation is what always trips us up when
reading the parables.
For example… in today’s parable from the gospel of Luke, we
just KNOW that we’re supposed to be more like that persistent widow, right? We just know when we read
this parable that we are supposed to model our faith on the example of that
plucky, scrappy little widow who keeps going and going at that judge like an
Energizer bunny. We are supposed
to be tireless advocates for justice, railing against powers and principalities
to receive vindication for our cause. We
are to pray every single minute of every day and keep the faith and never
lose hope that through our single-minded tenacious dedication to prayer, we’ll
somehow wheedle our way into a reluctant God’s super-good graces and get exactly what
we want.
But we know better.
You know better. Faithful
people have worked and worked for justice for centuries, yet there is still so
much brokenness in the world.
Saints and mystics and other good people have prayed faithfully and
well, bugging God on an hourly basis to bring justice to a situation or a
person or a group of people and despite all of it, justice remains out of reach. When bad things in our lives drag on
and on despite a whole lot of patient, passionate prayer, we begin, in our
heart of hearts, to feel a little bit resentful, a wee bit cheesed with God, and sometimes
we just give up.
If we cannot bear to blame God, we blame ourselves. We feel guilty and obsess about that
one hour or that one day when we were distracted by something else and forgot
to be a good prayer warrior. And now everything is falling apart and we’re pretty
sure it’s all our fault, which we know is complete nonsense, but we still carry
the awful burden of feeling like we didn’t do enough. We didn’t pray hard
enough. We weren’t as plucky and
persistent as that widow, so our prayers have failed and everything is ruined.
This is a rare parable in that for once, Jesus tells his
followers right upfront what it’s about.
Luke writes, “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray
always and not to lose heart.” I
think we need to take Jesus’ statement seriously. But what we also need to do is imagine what the purpose of
“praying always” actually is. Is
it to get what we want? To get the
justice we think we or another person needs?
One of the strange and wonderful things about being a
minister is that people ask me to pray for them all the time. All sorts of people, many of whom
seldom or never set foot in a church. Some of the people who ask me to pray for them are
very much like the judge described in the parable – they do not have a
particularly close relationship with God and their human relationships are fractured. I think of them
as sort of “disconnected” people.
In fact, I often imagine the world not as “saved” and “unsaved,” but
rather “connected” or “disconnected” people, and many of us can drift back and
forth between those two categories on any given day. I know I do and I can identify it when it is
happening. When I am living as a connected person, I can find beauty in
difficult people, grace in terrible situations and patience in frustrating
circumstances. When I am in period
of disconnection, I am angry, irritable, lethargic and prone to despair.
When I receive a prayer request from a “disconnected”
person, it is almost always because their back is up against a wall and they
don’t know what else to do. But I
always honor their request and pray on their behalf. And I have realized what prayer does is connect
that person to me through God, and connects that person to God through my prayer,
even if that person has lost heart and cannot pray for themselves. Prayer creates this holy connection,
stronger than Super Glue, more powerful than the most souped up Energizer
Bunny.
The person who asks me to pray for them may imagine I
will hold them up to God and say, “Fix this!” And in a sense, I am doing that. But that’s not all that’s going on when we pray.
Praying creates a holy connection and I am forced to pay
attention to and become involved in what God is already doing. That is not to say that my prayer will
get anyone a job or cure the cancer or fix someone’s marriage. The church is not an employment agency
or a hospital or a counseling center.
It is a sacred space, a sacred gathering where we connect with one
another and connect to God through prayer. The more we pray for one another, the more connected we
become to the suffering of one another, and the more connected we become to
suffering, the more connected we become to the living Christ among us through
the power of the Holy Spirit.
Maybe this parable is not about our persistence
and that’s a good thing. You don’t
have to live very long to realize that counting on inconstant human beings is
always a gamble, even on a good day.
Maybe we are all disconnected judges who walk around without a clue, and
perhaps the persistent one who keeps bothering us with cries to pay attention
to a broken world is God. Maybe we
are finally worn down by a persistent God who longs for justice and won’t ever
give up on getting us into the hard work of being connected to the persistent
longing of our Creator and the deep needs of one another.
Fred Craddock says that being pursued relentlessly by
God is a process by which a person is being hammered through long days and
nights of prayer into a vessel that will be able to hold the answer when it
comes. And if you think that
sounds way too painful, you may not want to hear this little tidbit of
information from folks who are much better translating the original Greek of
this text than I am. Those smart
people say that what the judge was really worried about was the widow punching
him in the face and giving him a black eye. Even if we wind up worn out and even a little bruised in our
spiritual hide and seek with God, the answer to prayer always comes, even if
it’s not the answer we wanted. And
that answer can hurt a little, or maybe a lot. But it is God’s answer for us and God will not leave us
alone until we get it.
For Luke’s community who received this parable, 50 years
after Jesus’ death and resurrection, this image of a persistent God and
constant prayer and not losing heart was crucial for a group of people who were,
frankly, feeling a little scared about this whole being a Christian thing. I can just imagine those poor souls
praying, day and night, for safety, security, protection from those who would
persecute them. Mostly they prayed
for Jesus to hurry up and come back to them. And if you know anything about those early Christian
communities, you know they didn’t receive any of those things.
But through their prayers, the early Christians stayed
connected – to God and to one another – and through those connections, they
received the strength and resilience and fortitude they needed to stay alive,
against considerable odds.
It’s easy for us to see how that all worked out in retrospect, but I’m
sure the point of praying always was not entirely clear to Luke’s community.
Jesus tells this parable knowing it is incredibly hard
to stay connected when things are falling apart. Jesus knows the anatomy of our stubborn human hearts well
enough to know that sometimes it takes the joys and sorrows of an entire
lifetime for the hardness to soften and melt. Jesus knows that we get scared, discouraged, tired and
stupid. Jesus knows that our human
experience includes crushing disappointments, crippling betrayals, unbearable
pain and grief. So it is small wonder that the parable ends with Jesus looking
around at the disciples and Pharisees and all the broken people following him around,
shaking his head and saying out loud: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find
faith on earth?” Given what we
know about human beings and looking at the wreckage of human history, the
answer I’d give Jesus right now is that it doesn’t look very likely that we
will be any further along when he finally gets back here than we were 2000
years ago.
But like the plucky, persistent widow, God doesn’t give
up pursuing justice and goodness.
God keeps God’s covenants with God’s people no matter how reckless and
feckless we become. God does grant
justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night. God will not delay long in helping
them. The evidence of God’s
unyielding truth are all around you.
These brothers and sisters in this community of faith are our answered
prayers. Those beautiful and
broken people we call our family, friends and co-workers are our connection to
divine grace. The ministries and
missions to whom we give Hungry Jack casseroles and chunky soups and money and time
are how we receive God’s mercy.
All of these are evidence of how God grants justice and mercy to us and
equips us to do justice and mercy for others. It is through ordinary experiences and people that God
pursues us and helps us, day in and day out, through connections that just
won’t let go of us no matter how hard we try to stay distant. The Holy Spirit practically shoves us
into places where we cannot stand aloof like the unjust judge and be unaffected
by the need for justice for those around us or uninvolved in God’s healing of
everything that is broken. Prayer
is the thread that connects us to one another and stitches our whole lives into
the crazy quilt of God’s tender love and mercy.
That is why, I think, Jesus says all those really
outrageous things like, “Pray for your enemies.” Because when you pray for the enemy, the prayer reminds you
that God created and loves that person you cannot stand, and you learn
something about grace in the process.
And it reminds you that you are someone else’s enemy – I guarantee that
you are -- and you are just as needy when it comes to forgiveness and
healing. If you can capture an
image in your mind of that person you’ve hurt in prayer for you, you can catch
a glimpse of what God’s grace really, really looks like.
This kind of connection in a world of western
individualism and alienation is really, really hard. I think that is part of the reason that there are so many
people who consider themselves “spiritual” but not “religious.” They sort of want the connection to
God, but they do not want to complete the circuit in dealing with the difficult
work of being in relationship with God’s people. Or the even more difficult work of praying always and going
to church and trying to be a good person, and still not having a shiny, happy
life.
I read about a pastor who conducted new member classes
in a way that made the leadership of her congregation really, really
nervous. In addition to telling
potential members that a healthy faith community requires a significant
commitment of people’s time, energy and money, she also said that although this
totally wonderful church seems so awesome to them right now, eventually
something will happen to completely disillusion them and they will lose heart. Sometime, somebody at church will say
something inappropriate, hurtful or offensive. A decision will be made by leadership, which they will find
unacceptable. Or they will begin
to feel spiritually bored or uninspired and begin to imagine the church down
the street has greener grass and nicer people. She said that her church is not shiny, perfect place, but as
broken and human as the people gathered there. The church is not God, but a messy and fully human place
where fully human people gather in expectation of God’s presence and where God
sometimes actually shows up.
Do not lose heart.
Pray always. Stay connected
to the source of all justice and mercy.
Jesus’ voice, filled with love and grace, reaches into our troubled
hearts and scattered brains. We
are called to do this work, and given all we need to do it for the sake of the
world.
When I am too beaten down to pray, I do not lose heart
because your prayers keep me connected.
And when you are falling apart, the prayers of your brothers and sisters
will your stitch your weary heart back together and lift you into the light of
all healing and mercy and justice.
Thanks be to God.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment