Sermons

“Persisting in Faith”

Psalm 146; Luke 18:1-8 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – November 17, 2019

 Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words, that our hearts might be filled with the power of your hope.  In Jesus’ name we pray, Amen.

There is a skill necessary for reading the Bible that is equally vital for making sense of the times we’re living in.  If we want to see what is really going on, beyond the surface level of the story we’re being told, we need to learn how to recognize the agenda of the editor.  If you don’t have it open already, I invite you to get those red pew Bibles out and turn to page 81 in the New Testament.

Now consider, if you will, how different this passage would land if I had started reading at verse 2 and stopped at verse 5.  If we had just heard the parable itself, what would we assume it was about?  Jesus said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.  In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’  For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’ ”

If you had just heard it like that, would you have guessed that it was a parable about prayer?  Persistence maybe, or the need to persevere in the quest for justice, even perhaps encouragement to be willing to make a scene when necessary.  But prayer?  Fortunately for us, there was an editor around to clarify the situation by introducing verses 2-5 with this sentence:  Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.  So in case you were wondering, this parable is about prayer.  Like I said, it’s important to be able to identify the agenda of the editor.  And it might be hiding out in place sight.

Once we’ve noticed it, we can decide what to do with that agenda.  We could question it:  Why does this editor want to take a story about a widow making a nuisance of herself to a public official and have us believe it’s really just a metaphor for our (presumably quiet, private) relationship with God?  Was this editor responsible for a community that was getting dangerously mouthy about the repression they were undergoing?  Did they need calming down?  Was the way of Jesus a bit too radical for those actually trying to survive the Roman Empire?  It is good to consider why the editors who frame the stories we hear make the choices they do.  It helps us see the bigger picture and understand better what is really happening.

But once we’ve identified that agenda and interrogated its motives, we’re not required to discard it.  We can now see the story in its own right better, but that’s no reason to assume we couldn’t also learn something from the framing.  Now that we’ve clarified all the pieces, we can make good, creative use of the whole of the passage.  That is what prods me to suggest that perhaps the question here isn’t one of public persistence in justice-seeking versus prayer, but public persistence in justice-seeking asprayer.  We don’t have to let the framing re-direct us from public witness to private piety; we can instead let it expand our understanding of prayer to include the sort of public nuisance advocacy the widow was carrying out as a form of prayer – indeed, the kind of prayer that gets results!  With this enlarged and savvy approach to the story and its framing, we can find lessons in both parts and in the dialogue set up between the two.

There are many lessons to be drawn from the story itself.  The most obvious, of course, is simply “try, try again.”  It is a story about persistence.  Keep going.  Don’t give up.  Ask again – and again, and again, until the right answer is given.  Some days, this may be all we need from this passage.  But not giving up is often one of the hardest things we’re called to do, so sometimes we may need more.

One way to find deeper lessons is to notice what is missing: in this story, the details of the case.  The widow simply says, “Grant me justice against my opponent.”  We don’t know who the opponent is, or what they did to her, or how powerful they are, or whether they were likely to have bribed the judge.  We don’t even know for sure if she’s in the right or not.  Except that we do, because of what we know about biblical justice and what we’ve been told about these two characters.  If we’d been given the details of the case, we might have gotten distracted by mitigating factors.  But what the Bible wants us to recognize is that it is most often the people in power who “neither fear God nor respect people.”  And the Bible is also continually reminding us that God “upholds the orphan and the widow,” as Psalm 146 puts it.  The fact that she is a widow is all we need to know to be clear that God is on her side.  The Bible doesn’t instruct us to enter into any situation of judgment with a supposedly “neutral” perspective.  The Bible wants us to come in with eyes wide open, recognizing who already has more power than is holy and who is coming in at a disadvantage.  It is the situation that is unjust, the story seems to imply, not the details of what was done to this woman.  “The Lord has told us, O mortals, what is good.”  We would just confuse things if we had more details, whereas the Bible is very clear about what righteousness looks like.

Keeping the opponent unknown is also a way to invite us into the story more personally.  It can become an encouragement to us to persist in the face of addiction, or the disability judge, or the detention of children at the border, or unemployment, or the coup in Bolivia, or homelessness, or the utter lack of political will among our elected leaders to address gun violence.  Whatever it is in your life that is not right, whatever it is in our broken world that is weighing your heart down, this story invites you to persist, to hold on, to keep crying out – to God, to yourself, to the world, to whomever will hear you – that this is not right and needs fixing.

There is another lesson tucked into this story, hidden not by what isn’t there, but by cultural distance and a weak translation.  It is hard for us to imagine just how shocking this widow’s behavior really was.  Who was she in relation to this judge?  She was nothing; she was nobody.  She was the unnamed peasant who was supposed to shut up, take her punishment, and go home happy it wasn’t worse.  But she refused.  She made a fuss.  She didn’t let it go.  She didn’t accept her fate.  And that judge could not even.  He didn’t know what to make of her.  He’d never had this happen before.  In truth, he was terrified.  Her behavior was so unusual, it seemed to him completely unpredictable, so he figured anything could happen next.  You may notice that there’s a text note on verse 5 in the NRSV, saying that where it states that he relented “so that she may not wear me out by continually coming,” it really ought to say, “so that she may not finally come and slap me in the face”!

He was afraid.  Not because she had shown any signs of violence; we have no indication that she had.  Her refusal to accept things as they were was simply so shocking, he assumed the worst.  If she had been emboldened to go this far, what else might she be capable of?  Here we see an echo of the skepticism of earthly power we read about in Psalm 146:  Do not put your trust in princes, in mortals, in whom there is no help.  When their breath departs, they return to the earth; on that very day their plans perish.  The judge’s fear and giving in reveal just how fragile the seemingly unbreachable structures of power in our societies really are.

And if we find the widow’s successful boldness unconvincing, we have only to recall that we celebrated the 30^th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall this month, crumbling in the face of people singing in the streets.  Whoever thought those protests would come to anything?  A wall that seemed to so many a simple fact of life – an immovable, unchangeable reality – suddenly transformed into trophies of the resistance and souvenirs to be sold to tourists.  Not to trivialize the work of hundreds of activists, but at one level you could say it’s almost as if it fell out of sheer surprise.

And yet, these stories of triumph over evil seem few and far between when we look at the broad scope of history.  How do we reconcile that with Jesus’ promise in verse 8 that God “will quickly grant justice to them”?  What do we do with that promise when we know there are so many who die waiting, whether trapped in addiction in our own streets, or beaten by government thugs in the streets of Bolivia or Iraq?  Is there some abstract notion of “God’s time” that must be invoked here to avoid making Jesus a liar?  Are we to blame ourselves or the victims of history for not praying hard enough?

This is where the framing of this story leads us into difficult terrain.  By bringing up the unjust judge, and then saying God is more merciful than that and will quickly grant justice, when we can plainly see the unmitigated suffering of so many in our world, the editor risks losing our confidence.  We could hardly be blamed for wondering if God is not much different than the unjust judge.  What does faithfulness look like in the face of this conundrum?  Will the Son of Man find faith on earth when he comes?  What will it look like?

It seems to me that this story is telling us that, in our world of unjust power structures and unimaginable suffering, faithfulness may look like seemingly pointless protests, the ones that make people say “Why bother?  It’s not going to change anything.”  Did the widow really think she was going to get justice?  Or was she continuing to harangue the judge simply because there wasn’t anything else she could do?  Did it make sense?  No.  But what other option did she have? Faithfulness, the story implies, is refusal to acquiesce.  When we can’t do anything else, we can still insist that the situation is wrong.  And that insistence, that accusation of injustice, is itself a form of faithfulness.  It is a way of proclaiming that the vision God has for our world remains incomplete, unfinished, actively violated even.

When we aren’t there yet, when the suffering and injustice continues seemingly unabated and there’s nothing else we can do to stop it, we can still lift up our voices and declare the wrongness of it.  We can proclaim that our hope is in the Lord, who made heaven and earth, and not in earthly princes.  And while some will label us foolish, others will take heart and join us.  This is how we keep hope alive, by refusing to accept the world the way it is and continuing to insist it can be more like God intends it to be.  And some are heartened, and some are inspired to act, and some are shamed into granting justice they once withheld.

Such foolishness, this story and its framing tell us, is a form of prayer, a way of communing with the God of justice who desires wholeness for all creation.  God loves a good surprise, especially the kind that lead to healing and redemption, causing walls to crumble and wicked ways to come to ruin.

Whatever our opponent is, Jesus calls us to persist, perhaps because we will eventually win, but more importantly because such persistence itself is an act of faith, a declaration of hope and trust God.  May our lives be testaments to such faithfulness.  Alleluia and Amen!