1 Then 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 I want to start this morning by introducing you to a neighborhood. In the driveways and triple garages are cars with names like Lexus, Mercedes, and BMW. This is the kind of place you might see on MTV s Cribs, it is a nice, quiet neighborhood, with lawns that are kept manicured by the professional landscapers who can t afford to live there, streetlights to give it an old-timey feel, though none of the houses are more than a few years old, it s meant to feel like a neighborhood from simpler times, even though no one really talks to each other. It is quiet, the sun has set, televisions are glowing through the bay windows, the children have all left their bikes in the front yard and headed in, since it s a school night. The doctors and lawyers and politicians are all reclining in leather chairs with remote in hand. Whatever it is that these folks do during the day, high-stakes business decisions, hiring and firing, power lunches, buying and selling, they leave it behind as soon as they pass through the neighborhood gate. Things are all as they should be in the land of suburbia. Except for one house, at the end of the street. One of the larger floor plan models, the Manchester as the architects call it, it belongs to a wealthy judge who tends to keep to himself, other than the occasional scathing attack on the paperboy for tossing the Sunday news onto his begonias or on the neighborhood kids for riding their skateboards on his driveway. He is not at any risk to win any Mr. Nice Guy awards, but all it takes to live on this street is to keep your grass cut and your trim painted a neutral color nice is optional. And so most days, the stately, neutral colored Manchester doesn t stick out at all. But tonight, when all the other houses are quiet, there is a loud banging sound coming from the judge s front door, and in between thuds you can hear the raised voice of a woman and the cries of a baby. And sure enough, there in front of 505 Suburbia Drive, is an old beat-up 1978 Chevy Nova, which fits into the neighborhood about as well as its driver does, which is to say like a three year old at an opera.
2 At the judge s front door, stands a woman in her late thirties, a crying baby in one arm, and a large purse in the other, which she is repeatedly swinging at the door. Her hair is frazzled, as is the rest of her wardrobe, and she looks as if she has not eaten or slept in days. Two other young children sit in the back seat of the Nova, watching their crying mother yell at the top of her lungs for the judge to come out of the house. Now, those of you whose worldview is deeply informed by Ricki Lake or Jerry Springer might think that this was the result of some torrid affair, that maybe the judge and this woman share some romantic history. But nothing could be further from the truth. In between her banging the door down with her purse, she sobs and calls out for the judge to do his job. He is the only one who can settle her court case, and give her the judgment she is due, her late husband s inheritance, which the insurance companies have tried to deny her. She has been turned away at every step, discouraged by everyone she meets, abandoned by the rest of her family, and this is the last place she can go. Inside the house, the judge turns up his surround sound and pretends he cannot hear her. When this doesn t work, he hides in the kitchen, specifically in one of the cabinets, thinking she might sneak around back and see him through the window. As he crouches in between his Tupperware and his George Foreman grill, scraping his head on the bottom of the silverware drawer, he wonders how long she will last. A more religious judge, who maybe had read the Hebrew Bible s commands to care for widows, might feel some obligation at this point, but this fellow is not that sort. He is the type that responds better to cash than scripture, and the insurance companies are more than happy to pay him off instead of her. But her crying and screaming of course only feed the infant s crying and screaming, and so, once he is convinced that the woman is not going anywhere, and other neighbors start to peak out from behind their dining room curtains, the porch lights come on at the judge s house and he shuffles her in. When she leaves that night, she finally has justice for her family not because it s the right thing, not because the judge suddenly has a conscience she leaves that night with justice because she wouldn t leave without it. In the face of frustration, embarrassment, bullying, and tragedy, this woman kept swinging. The next day, when the court clerk asks the judge what made him change his mind, he mumbles back that if he hadn t done it, that woman would ve driven him crazy, not to mention pummeling him to death with her handbag. Jesus has invited us onto this street, into the lives of this widow and judge, to tell us something about prayer. We are supposed to act like the widow, Jesus says.
3 So does that mean prayer is about annoying God? That we are supposed to pray until we drive God crazy enough to answer our requests? Prayer is one of those things we all assume everyone else knows how to do. There are several spots in this worship service where we say let s pray and no one ever raises their hand and says, More instruction, please. This is supposed to be more like tying your shoes, and less like riding a unicycle balancing chinaware on your nose. It s just one of those things we assume will work out. The church I worked at in Atlanta gave out Bibles to third graders, assuming that even though they couldn t see PG-13 movies yet, they were ready to tackle the Word of God. We sing songs and stand at certain times and sit at others and proclaim this executed criminal as somehow the hope of the world, and act as if this behavior is as normal and natural as sneezing. So when Jesus pulls us aside and tells us this story about the widow and the judge, and says it s about prayer, we re a little confused. We thought we knew what prayer was about. His explanation is that since even the apathetic and corrupt judge responds with mercy, imagine how God will respond, God being love and all. But is the message here that the way to pray is to bang our handbags against the door to heaven until God crawls out of the cabinet? That s at least how a lot of folks read this passage, and how a lot of churches treat prayer. One imagines what it would be like if God had a house in suburbia, all the cars that would be parked out in the front lawn, millions of people with megaphones shouting what they need. A chorus of hurt and desire and desperation, trying to get God to come out and fix a thing or two. I think of the movie Bruce Almighty and how quickly overwhelmed Jim Carrey s character is by the sheer volume of requests. In fact, if you were to use that movie as the sole basis for your theology, which I am not recommending, you would think that God s only job is dealing with the prayer pipeline. Frankly, the longer I live, the more complex I find prayer to be. This week a class on campus hosted one of my favorite people in town, a Franciscan nun who works at St. Mary s hospital. I met her while doing some Chaplaincy work at Deaconess hospital, and I immediately recognized her as a deeply spiritual person. I am good at recognizing those kinds of people, because I am not one of them.
4 You know the type, people who seem more like they are visiting this life than really planning on setting up permanent residence here. In her work as a Chaplain, she was called on to respond every time a family lost a child, whether to miscarriage or stillbirth. She describes this work as sitting in the puddle with people. I remember asking her once how she kept her faith while spending her days with people on the fringes of life and death, in the most hopeless moments of their existence. As spiritual people often do, she looked surprised by my question, as if she had never thought of such a thing, and then told me, God never tells us that life will not happen. Faith is meant for moments like these, not negated by them. And nobody knows that better than Jesus, which is why he tells his disciples in chapter 17, verse 22 right before he tells them this story that There are days coming when you will wish with all your heart to see me, to have things make sense, to put an end to all the uncertainty and doubt and fear, to have answers, but you won t get it. When you need me most, it will seem like I m not there. People will try and sell you false hope, but the pain will be real. Of course, he was trying to prepare them for the cross, for which of course, there was no way to prepare them. But he was also trying to prepare us, to teach us something of the mystery of faithful living, that there are times when the door seems closed, that no one is home, that nothing is right. Times when it feels as if God is invisible or too quiet or missing altogether. Times when not even the loudest megaphone feels like enough to reach the ear of God. It s times like those, Jesus says, when prayer matters most. It is times like those that the faithful few will separate themselves from the rest of the crowd, whose prayers are not about God, but about results. Look again at the beginning of the Gospel reading, the clue Luke gives you to what this story is really about Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. The ones most at risk for losing heart in the world are the ones who believe the most. Because to pray, to open up not just your mouth but your heart and your ears and your eyes to God, is to risk everything. To believe is to put everything on the line in the crazy hope that there is something, someone on the other end. Who hears. Who knows. Who loves. It is much more challenging than riding a unicycle. This is not so much a story of how to pray, but why we pray. Imagine asking that widow, her baby in her arms, her life destroyed, no future and nothing to fall back on imagine asking her to just turn around and go home. To give up. To drop the case.
5 Her pestering of the judge was not some hobby, or some weekend activity, it was not something she thought she should do to be a good person, it was her life. She prays not just to get something she wants, but because she still believes in justice. And our prayers our praying should be the same. Not just to-do lists for God, but a posture of constant awareness a relentless commitment to our belief in the good. A willingness to sit in the puddle of life but not let the puddle become your life. I think that s what Paul was talking about when he spoke of praying without ceasing not that we quit our day jobs and go sit in a sanctuary with the Psalms all day, but that we hand our lives over to God, so that every action, every moment, is connected to the One behind the door. Our work is prayer, our love is prayer, our breath is prayer, our lives become prayer. On the wall at Shishu Bhavan, one of Mother Teresa s orphanages in Calcutta, is a poem written by Kent Keith, called Anyway. People are unreasonable, illogical, and self-centered; LOVE THEM ANYWAY. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; DO GOOD ANYWAY. If you are successful you win false friends and true enemies; SUCCEED ANYWAY. The good you do will be forgotten tomorrow; DO GOOD ANYWAY. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable; BE FRANK AND HONEST ANYWAY. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight; BUILD ANYWAY. People really need help but attack you if you help them; HELP PEOPLE ANYWAY. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth; GIVE THE WORLD THE BEST YOU'VE GOT ANYWAY. To pray is to see the world through God s eyes, to see the brokenness of it all and believe in resurrection anyway. Jesus knows the risk in praying. It s his prayers that brought him here, and they will lead him down this road to a cross. And that s why his last line to the disciples is so telling when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? Another way of saying it might be, when God opens the door, will there be anyone be left on the front porch? May we have the courage to stay out here, to be faithful, to be prayerful, to hold onto our hearts, to wait for that door to swing wide.