BLEEDING KNUCKLES

29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

            It’s true.  Every now and then I have to take some time off from current events.  I know this is a kind of heresy for a preacher, who is supposed to have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.  Even so, I get weary of the constant barrage of news of man’s inhumanity to man.  There are tyrants and wars.  There are those endeavors on the part of one people to eradicate another people—“ethnic cleansing.”  There are terrorists.  Our lives have changed since 9/11.  Whether we enter an airport or the ballpark, we go through screening.  There is a kind of constant uneasiness that accompanies our vigilance, an anxiety we cannot ignore.  There is crime, everything from shoplifting to powerful executives making themselves rich while their employees lose their investments; everything from local brawls to mass murder.  There is child abuse.  Adults inflict violence on helpless children.  There are drive-by shootings.  Drivers worry about surviving their daily commute, fearing that some crazed motorist may gun them down on Central Expressway.  No, I can’t watch all this without a break from time to time.

            How do we cope with such things?  Being responsible people, we can’t long hide from the world around us.  So we muster our courage.  How?  By praying to God.  Prayer is our faith spoken out loud or spoken from the heart and mind.  Prayer is the combination of language and emotions offered to God with trust upon the one praying first that God is there to hear.  The one who prays operates out of a trust that God is both gracious to care and powerful to act.  “Let there be peace on earth,” we pray.  “Give wisdom to our leaders,” we ask God.  We pray that our loved ones will be kept safe in war zones.  Sometimes we pray for all the innocent people in such places, that they may also be kept from harm.  For people of faith, we cope with the troubling news of the world by taking it to God in prayer.

            But look!  Much remains the same.  How long before our prayers will be answered?  When we see no change in the world, when wars continue to be waged, when crime increases in its scope and violence, when another suicide bomber kills more innocent people, we wonder if God hears us.  Or if God hears us, what is keeping God from taking action?  We wonder.  But so did the early Christians as time passed and expectations for Jesus’ immediate return to earth remained unfulfilled.  These early Christians lived in a time of oppression.  The Romans occupied their land, the full force of which is difficult for us to contemplate.  It was a time when not even their fellow countrymen could be trusted.  Some became turncoats and collected taxes for the Romans, lining their own pockets as they extorted their fellow Jews.  Where was Jesus?  Wasn’t he going to return to bring justice on earth?  Where was the kingdom of God he talked about?  These were the questions that posed a constant threat to the faith of a Christian struggling to remain faithful in the long haul.  Now it’s our turn to ask:  How long should I pray for justice if God’s justice is delayed?

            To this very concern, our gospel writer offers a parable of Jesus.  “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart,” Luke says.  Then he recounts Jesus’ well-known story.  “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.  In that city there was a widow.”  And now you have the two characters:  an uncaring judge and a helpless widow.  In Jesus’ time, it would be unnecessary to say “helpless” widow, because that would be recognized as redundant.  Widows were nearly nonpersons back then in a male-dominant society.  There was no Social Security.  No pension plan.  They could live on their late husband’s property, but not inherit it, for they were not men.  Getting justice could be tricky at best, and impossible at worst.  So there was this uncaring judge and this widow.  She kept coming to that judge for justice.  But the judge didn’t care, and he refused.  Then it came to him, “Okay, I don’t really care about this person, nor do I fear God, yet because she keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she might not give me a black eye.”  That’s the sense of the phrase in the Greek.  “I’ll give her justice so that she won’t punch me in the eye.”  And there you have Jesus’ little parable on prayer.

            Wait!  Anyone confused?  Is Jesus telling us to pester God the way we used to pester our parents?  Small children are good at that.  “Aw, Mom!  But I want it.  Why can’t I have it?  Everybody else has got one.  I’m the only one who doesn’t have one.  Please, Mom, please.  Please, please, please, please.  Mom, can I?  Please!”  Did that ever work for you?  Kids are good at pestering parents.  Some of us have grandkids that are skilled in this art.  “Ah!  Here come the grandparents.  Now we can hit them up for all sorts of stuff,” their little minds conclude.  “Can we have this?  Can we have that?  Please!”  Is this how our prayer life is to be fashioned?  Is this how Jesus wants us to relate to God?  In a way, yes.

            Let’s be clear.  If we think that we have to pester God to make God change, we totally miss the point of Jesus’ parable.  God doesn’t need to change.  God is gracious.  God is loving.  God wants what is best for us, even before we pray our first syllable.  How did the psalmist put it?  “Even before a word is on my tongue, O LORD, you know it completely.”  And didn’t Jesus say about prayer that God knows what we need before we ask God?  Yes.  So, we don’t need to pester God to make God care.  God already cares.  The point of Jesus’ parable is argued from the lesser to the greater.  It works like this:  If a widow can get justice from an uncaring judge by pestering him, how much more can you count on justice from our God who cares.  While we don’t need to pester God, Jesus invites us to pray expectantly, saying, “. . . Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.”  Our prayers aren’t necessary to make God change, like pestering an uncaring judge to get justice.  No!  God already cares.

            Now we begin to see that prayer isn’t about changing God.  Prayer has to do with us remaining in a relationship with God.  Prayer helps us to stay connected with God, and to grow closer to God.  In this sense, prayer may include lovingly “pestering” God.  I came to this conclusion after reading a piece by Barbara Brown Taylor where she talks about her seven-year-old granddaughter, Madeline.  She said, “What I want Madeline to know is that the best thing about prayer is the relationship itself.”  She said, “Whether or not she gets what she asks for, I want her to keep asking.”  She said, “I want her to pester God the same way she pesters her mother, thinking of twelve different ways to plead her case.  I want her to long for God the same way she longs for her father, holding fast to him even when his chair is empty.  When she complains that none of this does any good, I am going to ask her to tell me the difference between how she feels while she is praying versus how she feels when she thinks about giving up.”  She said, “If I am lucky, she is going to tell me that she feels more alive when she is praying, and that is when I will tell her the story about the persistent widow.”  I like the images Barbara Brown Taylor evokes.  Pestering by the little girl here is more than simply saying, “Gimmie, gimmie, gimmie.”  It is engaging in a relationship, if in a childish way.  Bev and I have grandkids who, when they were younger, pestered us.  While they were doing that, they were at least engaging in a relationship with us.  We hadn’t seen them for a while, so the first stage in our getting reacquainted was their being somewhat aloof.  They warmed up by going to the next stage, pestering.  From there the relationship became nurtured by the give and take of ourselves in conversation and fun activities.  They became their own rewards, so the pestering stopped.  On our way to trusting completely in the goodness of God, pestering is far better than being aloof.  Prayer has to do with our staying in a close relationship with God.  Prayer isn’t about changing God.

            Then who needs to change?  We do.  Through prayer, God can fashion us into the kind of disciples who have what it takes to remain faithful in the long haul.  The question Jesus’ parable and Luke’s commentary pose gives the whole picture a twist.  After reassurance that God is always faithful, the tables are turned.  The question becomes:  will we remain faithful to God through adversity and uncertainty?  So we pray, not to change God, but to allow God to mold us, little by little, until we begin to understand God’s will.  In our praying, we may learn to trust that God’s will for us will be revealed in God’s good time.  Gardner C. Taylor urges us to knock on the door of prayer “until knuckles are sore and bleeding.”  “Don’t quit!” he says.  “Such prayer has the power to prevail because repeated siege of the divine mercy helps to refine and to distill what we seek until it is something far clearer, far dearer, far sweeter than whimsy.”  He’s right.  Prayers that have begun with asking that a burden be removed may, with God’s grace, be transformed into a prayer that asks for the strength to carry that burden.  Prayers that once prayed for peace may evolve into prayers that ask God to make us instruments of peace.  Prayers that once implored a change in someone else may be transformed into a prayer that asks God to change us.  Prayers that take a Jobian stance—as if we knew how the universe ought to be run—may be transformed into prayers that admit we do not see the larger picture, prayers that speak of our trust in God.  Prayer helps us remain in a close relationship with God while we wait for God’s justice to come.  If it is delayed—or seems to be—our prayers can take on the form of a hymn of confidence that God’s will will be done.