When Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray
always and not to lose heart. He 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.'" And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust
judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and
night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to
them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"
- Luke 18: 1-8
The parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge is short and simple. There are
just three characters in the tale. There's the widow, the judge and God. Throw in you and
me and we've got five.
The first two characters are quite a pair. The little old lady wears combat boots as we
used to say on the schoolyard. With her pit bull jaws she won't let go until she gets what
she wants. Hiding in black robes is the unjust judge. He's in the back room taking bribes
and dealing with people's lives like they were chips in a poker game.
Enter the courtroom. Here comes the widow marching up the center aisle. We don't know
specifically what her complaint is, but we know she's one determined lady. The widow
pounds on the door of justice interrupting the magistrate's game. She pounds and pounds
and pounds. The determined nag won't go away. The judge sets his highball down and says,
"Later boys, I'll be right back." He bursts into the courtroom demanding to know
who in hades is causing all the ruckus.
"Oh no. Not her again," he says. He tries to escape her clutches but she's
grabbed him and the nagging grows louder. "Order in the court!" he demands. The
only order is her demand for justice. "Grant me justice against my opponent."
What does she want? Her just due? Or does she want more? Vengeance? A pound of flesh?
Vanquishing her opponent? Maybe she wants to be heard. Maybe she simply wants to be
listened to.
Luke tells us that the story is about the need to be constant in prayer. It seems that
Luke was preaching to a church that was on the verge of giving up. "Losing
heart," is how he describes it.
It had been two generations since Jesus' walked the earth, maybe 40 or 50 years. The
church had its successes. The Word had spread but so too had hardship. The dream for a
time when shalom would permeate the land was only a dream. Wars were still fought.
Children still died young. Old people were hungry. Caesar still ruled. In the early years
of the movement, hope was thick. The earliest disciples thought Jesus would return in
their lifetime - what we call the second coming. But Jesus hadn't come back. They were
giving up on his return. "Losing heart," as Luke puts it.
Sermons on the second coming are hard to come by from this pulpit, although I did
preach on Revelation last week Second-coming sermons are hard to preach in the the third
millennium when the big issues are genetic engineering, bio-terrorism and globalization.
The whole idea of a literal second coming strains credulity. The picture of Jesus
returning on a fluffy strato-cumulus to transport the elect to a palace in the sky sounds
kind of silly. Its right up there with walking on water and going through walls.
Luke's crowd was dealing with the same problem. The myth of the second coming was
fading fast. The church was losing heart and on the verge of giving up. So he told the
story of this feisty lady.
Her life was hard. Years ago Scott Peck told us that life is hard. We don't disagree.
Life is hard. Children die young. Old people are forgotten. Marriages and relationships
are hard work. Some fail. People are lonely. Racism poisons. Churches divide. Towers fall.
Bombs blow up. Evil persists. You know the list.
Luke tells us that the disciples were losing heart. They were on the verge of chucking
the whole Christian enterprise. It hurt too much between their hopes and their reality.
God seemed some where else, far away, safe in heaven and all was not well.
Luke remembered Jesus' story about the widow and the judge so that in the struggle
between giving up and keeping the faith, the church of his age would choose faith, hope
and love. And if and when Christ returned someday in the fullness of time, Jesus would
find faith in them and in us.
The tension between giving up the faith and keeping and living it defines the Christian
journey. Now there are some among us whose faith never wavers. There are some among us
whose faith is never shaken, tested or questioned. I envy you. You quicken my resolve. You
fortify my courage. I respect you but there is a part of me that cannot imagine what it
must be like to have no doubts. For me, faith and doubt are wrapped up together in a
symbiotic relationship. They are friends not enemies of one another. Out of doubt comes
depth. Out of the depths comes new life, faith and courage. My faith is a hot tempered
faith. I have a lover's quarrel with God. I wax and wane. I fight and I bend and I turn
with God.
In my faith quest, I want to know why life is so hard. Particularly in the silence, I
want to know. Some days I want to go right up to God and pound on heaven's door to ask
"Why?"
You know the why questions. Why do thugs fly planes into towers? What made them thugs?
Why are there youth gangs? Why Auschwitz and Rwanda and the killing fields of Cambodia?
Why do some experience atrocity and turn to evil? Why do some experience atrocity and turn
to good? I want to pound on heaven's door until the gate opens and I can walk inside. I
want to head right up to the throne, evict the tenant and sit God down in a little chair
in the corner and get a good explanation. Why?
For the past year and half I have come to know that my wife, your co-pastor is a
survivor of horrific childhood sexual abuse at the hands of her uncle and aunt, her
mother's sister and brother in law. That makes me, your other co-pastor, a partner of a
survivor and it's the hardest thing I have ever gone through - not as hard as it has been
for Barbara, but harder than anything else I have ever gone through. We're going to be
okay. As she continues to tell her story, Barbara is getting stronger. She's tough. In the
providence of God, she's tougher than her perpetrators' evil. With the help of brilliant
and compassionate psychologists, good friends and our faith we are getting better. This is
being redeemed and good, much good is coming from it.
There have been times when my anger was so pervasive, my hurt so deep it was as if I
was an Allied soldier in World War II opening up the gates of Auschwitz, the gates of
hell, staring into the face of evil and holding on to the survivors and holding on with
the fragile thread of human courage and the will to keep love alive. To complicate the
matter, its not over there across the sea, or in some history book, it's my mate, the love
of my life.
One in four females in this country have experienced some form of domestic violence
and/or sexual abuse, one in eight males. It is pandemic.
Years ago when I was writing my Personnel Information Form - that bloated Presbyterian
minister's resume that is used to get another job - I said the preacher's faith should be
on his or her sleeve. Here's my sleeve: when Jesus tells this parable about the doggedly
determined widow, it is no theological abstraction for me. It's a matter of life and
justice and redemption in the face of immense personal evil and suffering.
The gutsy widow strides right up to the judge's face and stares him down. She stares
him down and demands justice.
You gotta understand the gutsiness of this woman. She's on the bottom of the food chain
in that patriarchal culture. She's treated no better than a dog. Widows were recipients of
social services from their clan. They were welfare cases. Oh for sure, Israel was supposed
to care for them, to never forget that they were once slaves, and so to care for the
stranger, the alien, and the widow all who were vulnerable. But for all the special
attention that the good book said they were supposed to receive, widows were still charity
cases. The safety net had holes. If there were no family members left, they would end up
picking garbage outside the walls of the city along with the dogs, the lepers and the
reviled. Widows couldn't own property. They had no bank account and they had no standing
in a court of law only their husbands. "Sorry, ma'am I forgot. He's dead. You'll have
to step outside."
Judges, on the other hand, were on the top of the food chain, serving as both judge and
jury in the justice system. Judges called the shots. "Go on your way little
lady." She's patted on the head and kicked in the rear and sent out to be a nice
lady. Keep silent. And the rage just simmers below the surface as she marches right up to
his face and says, "I want justice now!"
She pounds on heaven's door with her fists until the door opens and the judge enters
the courtroom. What does she want? What is justly due her or more? Vengeance? Or does she
want to be heard? To be really listened to? Finally the judge relents. Badgered and
bothered, he settles for justice not because he is just, but to get her off his back.
The story doesn't end there. This is not so much a story about an assertive woman and a
corrupt judge, but about God and you and me. The widow bangs on heaven's door, but we
don't have to. God is not an unjust judge. So we don't need to bang our fists to get God's
attention.
God is just, we believe, but our faith says far more than that. The Christian faith
says God is not up in heaven hiding behind some door, waiting for humans to send enough of
the right prayers to change God's mind. We don't have to bang on heaven's door. God is
already on the other side - on our side. Prayer isn't manipulating God to get God to do
what God otherwise wouldn't do. Prayer is a way of opening up our hearts, our lives and
our pain so that the God who became our pain, our suffering in Jesus of the cross; can be
grasped, apprehended, seen, believed and loved. That is what prayer is. Prayer is a way of
opening ourselves to the reality that God is already here among us and within, claiming
us, owning us, believing is us. Prayer is a way of coming to know more fully that we are
precious of ultimate worth children of a loving God. Prayer is a way of recommitting
ourselves to God and God's good and just and compassionate purposes. Prayer is a way of
staring into the gates of hell and saying "You are defeated. Evil is vanquished. Love
wins."
Luke tells his people not to lose heart. He tells his people, "Don't stand around
waiting for Jesus to arrive on the clouds. Pray. Pray both day and night." And even
when we don't or can't or won't; even when the why questions are as thick as the world's
suffering, God is not on the other side of heaven's door, but on our side: granting
courage, granting persistence, granting the faith that all things will be redeemed.
What a gutsy woman this persistent widow! What a gutsy God! This is the story of our
salvation. This is our faith. This is our story. Thanks be to God and to his Christ. Amen.
