Luke 18:1-8
I looked around and couldn’t find
her. “Where’s Momma?” I asked to my sister as we were all sitting around eating
macaroni-and-cheese, fried chicken, butter beans and other random spoonsful of
other casseroles on cheap Styrofoam plates. “I don’t know; she probably went
outside to smoke.” She couldn’t smoke inside here.
My
aunt and her husband had just bought a brand-new double-wide trailer and they
had invited us all over to show it off, to have a sort of house-warming party,
so all of us gathered at her new house, bringing covered dishes and cake plates
for dinner. My aunt showed us around the trailer: the open kitchen with its
new, matching appliances including a dishwasher and a refrigerator with ice and
water in the door, the large living room, with (what my uncle was sure to point
out to us) actual 2”x4” stud walls and a fireplace with gas logs, the dining
room, the three, big bedrooms, and the master bedroom with a jacuzzi tub. They
talked about how nice the central heat pump was and their plans to build a big
front porch and a back deck that would surround a pool. It all seemed so nice,
so new. It even smelled new. It was the nicest, newest thing I can remember
anyone in our family having like that.
So,
after we had all gotten the gran tour, we were sitting around eating, when I
noticed I hadn’t seen my mom. When my sister said she was probably outside, I
got up from my seat, walked out the back door, and sure enough, there was
Momma, looking out into the yard, arms crossed, a lit cigarette in her mouth,
and tears in her eyes. I asked her what was wrong; she looked at me and said,
“We’ll never have anything like this.” We had lived in the same rental house on
North Hill Street in Enterprise for seven years. It was an inexpensive,
3-bedroom, 1.5 bath house with old hardwood floors and cable we never paid for
because the cable company either forgot to cut it off from the previous tenant
or my stepdad figure out how to “borrow” cable from the neighbors. You can
still drive by where the house sat. The lot is just an overgrown patch of
Catawba trees and kudzu now; the house was taken by the tornado that hit the
high school back in 2007, and the owners never bothered to rebuild. I suppose
Momma thought we would live there for the foreseeable future, never having a
place that was actually ours.
I was
fourteen-years-old, could count the number of times I had been to church—the
number of times I had actually prayed—on both hands with fingers left over, but
I remember that night, as we drove back to Hill Street in our blistered Ford
Taurus station wagon, watching the moon follow us home, and praying, “God, if
you’re there, could you find a way to get Momma a house?” Well, as it turned
out, a few months later my mom came home from work at the nursing home and told
us that we were going to be moving to our own trailer, on our own land, across
town. A retiring nurse had decided to help Momma finance the purchase on the
nurse’s home she was leaving. My mom and stepdad still live on that land, just
in a newer trailer.
I bet
you’ve heard other stories like that, right? Maybe you’ve got your own story
about praying for something, something you know is just out of your reach,
something you know you just couldn’t get on your own, so you turned to God,
praying as earnest as you knew how, maybe even bargaining with God? I know I’ve
been there: “God if you’ll do this, I promise I’ll go to church every Sunday,
sing in the choir, give my tithe…most of the time, when I can, you know, when I
don’t have to save up for...” I’m willing to bet most, if not all, of us have
prayed that sort of prayer before. Why do we do that? Why do we treat prayer as
a last resort? Why do we only turn to prayer when it’s time for some sort of
intervention that we can’t provide or afford ourselves? Why do we have this
tendency to retreat to prayer in those tense moments of life, those times when
literally all we can do is pray? Is prayer more than that? Is it more than the recitation
of a list of names, the offering of thanks for supper, the bedside courtesy? Is
prayer to be kept behind glass, only to be broken in case of an emergency, or
is it more like a pair of boots, well-worn from miles of trails and pavement?
I
suppose with parables like the one in front of us this morning, we may get the
idea that prayer is this incessant nagging, this constant petitioning to God
for those things that are just out of our reach, those things that we so
desperately need yet are powerless to bring about. But to follow that logic, we
have to assume that if we constantly pray, that if we spend all our time on our
knees, begging and pleading with God, that God will give us all that we ask
for. After all, “will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and
night?” But you know…you know just as well as I do, that there are those times
when you plead, when your eyes won’t stop flowing with tears, when you’ve
begged, bargained, and shouted at heaven for God to grant you that one thing—that one thing, only
to hear nothing back, to have the cancer spread, to not get the job, to have
your heart broken and your soul torn. So, is this a parable about those
desperate times in our lives when we can’t do it ourselves, to take our concerns
to God, banging on the proverbial front door of heaven until God answers?
Maybe.
Or maybe there’s
something to the nature of the widow’s request in this parable: “Grant
me justice against my opponent.” This widow needs justice, to be set right, to
be made whole, and who is there to help her? There are none of those
oh-so-helpful billboard attorneys in ancient Judea, no social services for
those down on their luck, no family to support her, no non-profits with a
mission to advocate for the voiceless. She’s on her own. She could choose to
simply accept her fate, to live with whatever injustice, whatever cruelty,
whatever cruelty has been inflicted upon her, or she can choose the other
alternative, the harder thing, to fight for herself, to shout until her voice
is heard, to refuse to carry on as if her life doesn’t matter. Her voice does
matter. Her story does matter. Maybe there’s something in this parable for
those of us who have less to ask and more to give. Maybe there’s something in
here, in Jesus’ words, about praying for opportunities to hear the voices of
those who are pleading, begging, screaming for their voices to be heard, for
their prayers to be answered by those of us with the resources, power, and
privilege to help bring about justice. I mean, if an unjust
judge can hear the persistent leading of a first-century widow, a woman void
of value in his day, and grant her justice, how much more should those of us
living in the name of Christ today hear the prayers and pleading of those on
the margins, those in the shadows, those overlooked, ignored, displaced, and
forgotten and do everything we can to bring them the justice they deserve? Are
we better than the unjust judge?
Of course, Luke
introduces this parable from Jesus with these words: “Then
Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose
heart.”
Isn’t that interesting? Our “need to pray always and not
to lose heart…” Should we be praying this way always? That seems a bit
much right? Like, do we really need to always pray like a widow begging for
justice, like someone who’s on their last leg, with no other recourse? I mean,
we’ve got resources. We’ve got talents, abilities, money. We don’t really need
to pray always right? Do we? What I mean is, do we really have
all that we think we do? Are we really as self-sufficient as we think we
are?
I
used to think I was pretty independent, able to get around, make it through the
world all by myself, not really needing much. I thought that until I found
myself on the Dutch side of the Schiphol airport in Amsterdam. I had directions
for how to get to the Air BnB where I was going to stay during my time at the
International Baptist Theological Studies Centre, but I had no idea what the
real difference between the train, metro, or tram was. When I got off the
plane, I stumbled around until someone in the terminal directed me towards
customs; in the main airport, a kind airport employee explained how to get a
chipcard to use the public transportation system. Of course, when I went to
board the train a stranger in (of all things) an Auburn golf shirt asked if I
was lost. I told him I was going to Amsterdam; he smiled and said this train
was going to Germany, so I’d have to go back up and down the other way. When I
got off the train, I mistook the tram for the metro and wound up getting off on
the completely wrong end of the street where I was supposed to be. If it wasn’t
for a friendly, Muslim shop owner who let me use his phone to look up
directions and the explain them to me, I might still be wandering up and down
Postjeweg, the street my room and school were on. There were countless times on
that trip where I learned that I am really not as self-sufficient as I’d like
to believe, times when I was shown that asking for help just to get down the
street is an act of prayer, an act of relying on something outside of myself.
Maybe
that’s what prayer is, really. The very act of prayer is an act of confessing
our own real helplessness, our own real need for something outside of
ourselves, prayer is an act of confessing our need, our hope in God—and not
just when the going gets tough, not just when we’ve run out of options, but always.
Prayer is the constant reminder that we are not in this life alone, because we
are incapable of being in it alone, that the cry for justice is one that
comes persistently because we—all of us—have to hear it, to join it as
it rises to meet God’s ears. Prayer is the persistent presence of our
relationship with God, one that does not let us tune out God until we need God.
What
would happen to each of us if we truly lived each day praying as the widow in
Jesus’ parable, never letting up, always trusting that there’s something
greater than our smallness, something outside of our individual weakness? What
would happen to Christ’s Church if we truly understood prayer as the persistent
presence of God in and around us? What would the world look like if we—Christ’s
Church—heard the determined cries of those seeking justice and sought to be Christ’s
Body, acting to bring justice where we have the privilege and the power? What
would we look like if we joined in their suffering of injustice, if we joined
our voices with theirs to those unjust judges in this world? What would it look
like if we prayed, trusting God to be more than we are individually, confessing
by our actions that we are, in the end, helpless, hopeless, apart from God?
Amen.
