Foothills Congregational Church                                                                       The Rev.. Matthew Broadbent

United Church of Christ                                                                                         21st  Sunday after Pentecost

461 Orange Ave., Los Altos 94022                                                                                        October 21, 2007

 

DO NOT LOSE HEART

Psalm 121; Luke 18:1-8


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

 

 

By the time the Gospel of Luke was written, people were starting to feel discouraged.  They were tired of waiting for Jesus to return and bring all things to fulfillment, the deepest hope of their heart. They were tired of being persecuted as a tiny little minority in a great big, powerful empire. They were anxious and suffering. Today's passage is about that waiting and about not being discouraged, not losing heart.  Somehow, we've too often read it as an instruction to "nag" God with our repeated requests, so God will eventually give in and give us what we want.

 

The spiritual practice of waiting and not losing heart is needed more than ever in our day.   This was the message at our retreat this weekend.  My friend Don Eaton told of the  founding of his non-profit group Small-Change.org.  It was 13 year’s ago when he watched a documentary on the terrible famine in the Sudan that was made worse by the political struggle in Eastern Africa.  It was not that food wasn’t available but that food was being kept from populations for political reasons.

 

This documentary was of a relief agency that had brought food into the region to distribute.  The word had got out and thousands of people made their trek to the distribution site which was a circular stone corral in the middle of the desert.   What affected Don so deeply was a 360 degree pan-shot taken from the stone enclosure which showed people stretching out to the horizon in all directions, walking, carrying their starving children, stumbling forward.

 

The terrible thing was that the doctors had to make the decision who would receive the food and who would be left to die because they were too far gone and their bodies could not absorb the food and water.  The one thing the relief workers did not have was Oral Rehydration System packets (ORS) that would allow the starved and dehydrated people to absorb nutrients in the food.  These ORS packets were not expensive, only 10 cents, but they were not available. 

 

At his concerts Don started putting out a jar to collect people’s spare change.  This money was used to purchase the ORS packets and send the to relief agencies.  In the past 12 years he estimates that his non-profit as saved over 1,800,000 lives with spare change.   Though he felt powerless to affect change in this great disaster Don did not lose heart but found a way to reach those who are living at the margins of life.

 

Once again, Jesus uses a figure from the very edges of society to teach his followers a lesson.  John Pilch tells us that the "word for 'widow' in Hebrew means 'silent one' or 'one unable to speak.' In the patriarchal Mediterranean world males alone play a public role.  Women do not speak on their own behalf" (The Cultural World of Jesus).  So this "silent one" is acting outside the normal bounds when she finds her voice and speaks up for herself. 

 

Maybe the widow acts with such courage because she knows that there's a special place for her in the heart of God, as the Bible often says.  Widows, orphans, and aliens, who are all very close to the heart of God and the focus of God's concern. We might ask ourselves who "the widows" are in our time: the ones without a voice who speak up anyway in protest of injustice.

 

As usual, Barbara Brown Taylor gets inside this story and explores the heart of this woman.  Society may have told her she was a nobody without a voice, but she knew otherwise, and her persistence helped her hold onto that knowledge:  "She is willing to say what she wanted – out loud, day and night, over and over – whether she got it or not, because saying it was how she remembered who she was. It was how she remembered the shape of her heart…" (Home by Another Way). 

 

The shape of her heart: it makes us wonder about the shape of our own hearts and the health of our prayer life, doesn't it?   Does the word persistence characterize our prayers?  How about faithfulness, or trusting, or is it more like whining?  I hate it when I hear that tone in my prayers.  That’s when I become silent – which may not be a bad thing.  This weekend I shared a poem by 13th Century, Sufi mystic-poet, Jalaladin Rumi.  It was a dialogue between the poet and Love that had moved into the “whine zone,”

 

I said, please reveal this to me
I am dying in anticipation.
Love said to me,
that is where I want you:
Always on the edge,
be silent.

Prayer doesn’t change God.  It doesn’t change God’s mind or heart.  Prayer changes our heart and our minds.  Our prayer life shapes us, too, and helps us to remember who, and whose, we are. It helps to align us with the intentions of God.  This is the meaning of persistent prayer.

 

Deep within the news coverage of the terrible events in Myanmar (Burma), a BBC reporter shared the story of Ma Thida, a writer and doctor who was held in solitary confinement for six years after she wrote against the abuses in the government there. When asked how she survived those long years of waiting and suffering, she cited books, which were like "vitamins" to the prisoners, and then she described her spiritual life. The reporter said that, as a Buddhist, Ma Thida meditated 18-20 hours a day.  Can you imagine that?  The reporter cited her "deep engagement with Buddhism."  

 

Now think of this reading about the persistent widow.  I wonder how many of us Christians are "deeply engaged" with Christianity.  Jesus wanted his followers to do more than pray as a habit or a requirement: "Then, as now," Barbara Brown Taylor says, "most people prayed like they brushed their teeth – once in the morning and once at night, as part of their spiritual hygiene program."  Jesus wants much more from his followers.  As always, his teachings go right to the heart of the matter, to who we are.  Those 18-20 hours a day of meditating must have had an effect on Ma Thida, on shaping her; it must have helped her to remember who she was.  

 

So the Gospel  story isn’t really about the persistent widow or the corrupt judge who gave in rather than get “a black eye” (that’s what the word translated “wear me out” really means!).  The story is about God, and Jesus teaches us by contrasting the corrupt judge with God, or using the argument from less to more. If this corrupt judge responds, how much more will a loving God respond to the prayers of our heart? 

 

This is what the Bible teaches us.  This is our core value.  God is love (1 John 4:7-8).

 

7 Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. 8 Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love.

 

 Rumi, the mystic, believes it is not just our loving God, but God loving us that defines who we are.  He writes in one of his quatrains:

By day I praised you
and never knew it.
By night I stayed with you
and never knew it.
I always thought that
I was me--but no,
I was you
and never knew it.

 

Our prayer life sustains us even in the worst of times, and in the best of times it feels like love.  It keeps us close to God. “You are going to trust the process,” Barbara Brown Taylor writes, “regardless of what comes of it, because the process itself gives you life. The process keeps you engaged with what matters most to you, so you do not lose heart.” 

 

The reading is about God and about Jesus returning to find people who have held fast, through everything, and trusted in God. Rather than thinking it’s a matter of getting or not getting what we ask for, prayer “keeps our hearts chasing after God’s heart.  It’s how we bother God, and it’s how God bothers us back.  There’s nothing that works any better than that” (BBT). 

 

(This sermon is largely derived from Sermon Seeds: UCC.org)