Also: You don’t get what you pray for by badgering God until God gives in. See also: You don’t don’t get what you pray for if you rub a lucky rabbit’s foot, or if you cross your fingers, if you find a four leaf clover, or if you say the same prayer for a week or even a month.
Yet I have known people who believed all these things. I imagine many of you have too. I mean, that would be a sweet system if it worked, right? Just act like a spoiled toddler and God, the weary parent, will eventually give in.
Except that’s not how prayer works. That’s also not how God works.
So then, how can we understand this parable?
Let’s start with prayer. Jesus tells this parable, he says, to encourage us. That is literally what the phrase “not lose heart” means. To stay steadfast and faithful.
The communication link that is prayer goes two ways: from God to us and from us to God. As much as we may think that prayer originates with us, that is not so. The times in our lives when we have fallen away from the habit of regular prayer is not filled with nothingness or a vacuum. There is God, still in our lives, knocking at the doors of our hearts, placing obstacles in our path to inspire us to take up the conversation again.
To be clear, the entire span of scripture is the story, again and again, of God pursuing these reckless humans God has made, seeking us out of love when we have gone astray, from calling to us when we are hiding in the bushes in the Garden of Eden to the extreme step of sending angels and prophets and talking donkeys and even God’s own Son to try to encourage us to walk in the ways of love, hope, justice, and reconciliation—God’s dream for our flourishing.
In giving human beings both the privilege of being made in God’s image and also bearing the responsibility of free will, God necessarily cedes God’s total claim to power. Just as even when sitting in God’s chair, Bruce Almighty can’t make his girlfriend love him again by sheer will, God allows us the freedom to respond to God’s abundant love and grace—or not. We know this to be true.
With these basic assumptions laid down, we can now take up first who the judge represents. This judge is guided by self-interest and self-preservation. His actions do not reveal a concern for anything but his own status. His focus is on the short-term, on taking advantage of his position for self-benefit and profit. He considers those who get hurt by his actions to be mere collateral damage, and acts out of pure profit motive to himself.
What if the unjust judge is the world’s systems of greed, casual cruelty, contempt, and inhumanity? The systems all over the world that excuse injustices and unethical practices with the claims that “the law” that they themselves have written do not forbid actions which expand inequality, poverty, and defenselessness before the gears of power? What if the unjust judge is the tendency we have to claim “that’s just the way it is” with a shrug when we encounter tragedy or injustice? Our tendency to claim helplessness in correcting human systems that we tend to treat as sacrosanct? Our tendency to claim there is no money to improve our commitment to the general welfare of our most vulnerable citizens while expanding corporate welfare and the ability to manipulate scarcity of resources so that they end up in the hands of the few?
God sent God’s son into the world not as a prince or a potentate but as a humble little baby born to an unwed, teenaged, peasant mother and her bewildered carpenter of a fiancé. Jesus grew up in a duty backwater of empire in a no-account town in a no-account region on the very margins of influence from any sort of human calculation. So how hard is it, really, to imagine God as the widow, relentlessly knocking on the doors of our hearts and consciences?
Trappist priest and theologian Thomas Keating makes this observation about this parable:
That kind of surrender is the bravest and therefore scariest thing we can do. It means living life with wide-open eyes and a wide-open heart. It mean not just worshiping Jesus as a distant figure sitting up on a heavenly throne, but actually following him in his humble carpenter’s attire our into the world, in attending to the aches and pains and needs we see all around us, even if we have to do it one person or situation at a time. It means our obligation lies not in just performing human rituals every week for the benefit of our own souls, but instead our obligation is to those we encounter in the world. To BE the loving, healing hands and heart of Christ not just within these walls but out beyond these doors in our secular lives. By doing so, our lives become less secular, yes, but more holy.
By doing so, persevering in prayer means raising our voices and our political will in advocating for justice for the oppressed. Prayer can be prayed with our feet, walking alongside those in need. Prayer can be prayed as we provide the hungry with food and the unhoused with shelter. It means sitting in love and faithfulness with the sick and the grieving. I give thanks that this is where I see you all being most faithfully engaged in prayer—not just sitting here on Sundays, although that is important because it gives us fellowship and strength for our true prayer lives, out in the world, sustained by each other, by your commitment to this place, and always, always, by God, who honors us by calling us into partnership in bringing about God’s kingdom.
As Rabbi Rami Shapiro reminds us:
We walk alongside God, and we walk alongside each other. Let us bravely persist in prayer—and sometimes even use words. And the most important word of all is yes. Yes to God. Yes to community. Yes to following Jesus.
Amen.
In giving human beings both the privilege of being made in God’s image and also bearing the responsibility of free will, God necessarily cedes God’s total claim to power. Just as even when sitting in God’s chair, Bruce Almighty can’t make his girlfriend love him again by sheer will, God allows us the freedom to respond to God’s abundant love and grace—or not. We know this to be true.
With these basic assumptions laid down, we can now take up first who the judge represents. This judge is guided by self-interest and self-preservation. His actions do not reveal a concern for anything but his own status. His focus is on the short-term, on taking advantage of his position for self-benefit and profit. He considers those who get hurt by his actions to be mere collateral damage, and acts out of pure profit motive to himself.
What if the unjust judge is the world’s systems of greed, casual cruelty, contempt, and inhumanity? The systems all over the world that excuse injustices and unethical practices with the claims that “the law” that they themselves have written do not forbid actions which expand inequality, poverty, and defenselessness before the gears of power? What if the unjust judge is the tendency we have to claim “that’s just the way it is” with a shrug when we encounter tragedy or injustice? Our tendency to claim helplessness in correcting human systems that we tend to treat as sacrosanct? Our tendency to claim there is no money to improve our commitment to the general welfare of our most vulnerable citizens while expanding corporate welfare and the ability to manipulate scarcity of resources so that they end up in the hands of the few?
Trappist priest and theologian Thomas Keating makes this observation about this parable:
God approaches us all day long, coming to meet us morning, noon, and night through people, events and our own thoughts, feeling, memories, and reactions. We accept the kingdom finally, not because we are just or deserve it, but because at some point like the unjust judge, we cannot stand the importunities of grace anymore and are forced to give in, saying, ‘Okay, take my life. I am in your hands.’”
That kind of surrender is the bravest and therefore scariest thing we can do. It means living life with wide-open eyes and a wide-open heart. It mean not just worshiping Jesus as a distant figure sitting up on a heavenly throne, but actually following him in his humble carpenter’s attire our into the world, in attending to the aches and pains and needs we see all around us, even if we have to do it one person or situation at a time. It means our obligation lies not in just performing human rituals every week for the benefit of our own souls, but instead our obligation is to those we encounter in the world. To BE the loving, healing hands and heart of Christ not just within these walls but out beyond these doors in our secular lives. By doing so, our lives become less secular, yes, but more holy.
By doing so, persevering in prayer means raising our voices and our political will in advocating for justice for the oppressed. Prayer can be prayed with our feet, walking alongside those in need. Prayer can be prayed as we provide the hungry with food and the unhoused with shelter. It means sitting in love and faithfulness with the sick and the grieving. I give thanks that this is where I see you all being most faithfully engaged in prayer—not just sitting here on Sundays, although that is important because it gives us fellowship and strength for our true prayer lives, out in the world, sustained by each other, by your commitment to this place, and always, always, by God, who honors us by calling us into partnership in bringing about God’s kingdom.
As Rabbi Rami Shapiro reminds us:
Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief.
Do justly now, love mercy now, walk humbly now.
You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.
We walk alongside God, and we walk alongside each other. Let us bravely persist in prayer—and sometimes even use words. And the most important word of all is yes. Yes to God. Yes to community. Yes to following Jesus.
Amen.
Preached at the 505 on October 15 and the 10:30 am Holy Eucharist on October 16, 2022 at St. Martin's Episcopal Church in Ellisville, MO.
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