Advent Lutheran Church

"Pray ... and not lose heart""

            Grace and peace to you from God the Creator and the Lord Jesus.  Amen.

            Leonard Bernstein was the longtime director of the New York Philharmonic, but he was probably best known to most Americans as the composer of the musical score for “West Side Story,” a piece overflowing with excitement, drama, and vitality.  Bernstein had no time for pretense or falsehood; he wanted his music to be vibrant, engaging, and real.  So when he was commissioned to take a worship service – the traditional Latin mass – and produce a piece of musical theater, he wanted it too to be exciting and relevant, to speak to the everyday concerns and experiences of everyday people.

            When Bernstein set out to write what would become known simply as The Mass, his contemporary jazz, blues and rock Mass, he knew that one component would be especially troublesome.  It would be, he knew, when it came time to say the prayers.  Because when we enter into prayer, we come directly into intentional, one-to-one conversation with God; and when we do that, things can become difficult.

So, when it comes time for the Prayers in the Mass, the chorus starts singing a fairly traditional song of confession.  All of a sudden, a lone voice, a tenor, arches up and over the chorus and sings these words:

“If I could, I’d confess, good and loud, nice and slow,

get this load off my chest; yes, but how, Lord, I don’t know.

What I say, I don’t feel; what I feel, I don’t show; what I show, isn’t real. 

What is real, Lord?  I don’t know.  No, I don’t know … .”

 

Problems with prayer certainly aren’t a modern phenomenon.  Apparently, even Jesus’ first disciples had troubles with it.  And let’s be honest; there are times when we have trouble with prayer, too. 

Sometimes our problems are logistical: We’d like to pray more, but we just don’t have the time; prayer just seems to get crowded out of our schedules by all the other activities and responsibilities that fill our days. 

Some of our problems with prayer can be ethical: I know of a pastor who wonders, “If I have a parishioner in the hospital who really needs to die, is it all right to pray for death?” 

Then, some of our problems can be theological: If I pray for my sick child to get better and he doesn’t, does that mean that the prayer wasn’t good enough, or that God didn’t hear my prayer?  And if I pray for him to get better and he does, well, that’s great; but does that mean that if I hadn’t prayed for him that he wouldn’t have gotten better, and what does that say about the nature and the character of God?  And the questions and issues and problems keep mounting up.

But Jesus knew that underneath all of our other issues with prayer is one fundamental issue: sometimes, we lose heart.  We just lose heart.  Over the long haul, in the face of what we think to be unanswered prayer, we lose hope and confidence that our prayers are heard by God at all.

So “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”  One of the characters in this parable is a judge.  He is an absolutely despicable man.  He is corrupt.  He is dishonest.  He doesn’t care a thing about God, doesn’t care at all about people.  He doesn’t go to church – not even on Christmas and Easter – and he’s never given a nickel to United Way.  He is a bad man.

The other character in this parable is a poor widow.  She has, literally, nothing.  She has no money, no political clout, no social standing in her community.  But she needs justice.  For what, we don’t know; it’s almost as if the particular circumstances are irrelevant.  We’re supposed to see that in this matchup between the poor, powerless widow and the unprincipled judge, she doesn’t have a prayer of getting the justice she so needs. 

She does have one resource, however.  She has the capacity to annoy.  That’s her only weapon, and when you have only one weapon, you use it to the max.  And so she goes to work on the judge.

In that day, legal cases were often heard at the entrance to a city, at the city’s gates.  Petitioners would show up there in the morning, ready to plead their cases.  The judge, usually someone appointed to that position by the king, and his assistants would appear, and the petitioners would shout out to have their cases heard.  Money often would change hands; bribery usually helped to elevate one’s case to the attention of the judge.  But this poor widow had no money, so she would show up along with the others, shouting out, “Give me justice!  Give me justice!” and to no avail.  Day after day after day. 

At the end of the day, however, the widow would follow the judge and continue to shout after him.  She would trail him into the marketplace where he bought his food for supper: “Give me justice!  Give me justice!”  She plastered the door to his apartment with sticky notes.  On his day off, she followed him to the country club and badgered him when was trying to tee off and when he was trying to putt: “Give me justice!  Give me justice!”  Until finally he said to himself, “Look, I don’t care about justice, I don’t care about God, I don’t care about people, and I sure don’t care about this woman, but I’m going to give her the justice she wants just to get her off my back!”

And that’s the story Jesus told his disciples – more or less – about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.  So what’s the point?  Jesus tells us to pay attention to the unjust judge.  And when we pay attention to him, we see that this judge, despite being as dishonest as the day is long, finally does grant justice.  Which just might mean that even though we might experience the world as harsh and unforgiving, a place where the deck is stacked in favor of the powerful and against the powerless, still, underneath all of our human maneuvering, there is a force for justice that swirls and which will finally prevail.  At the end of the day, there is justice.  That’s one lesson from this parable.

Another lesson comes from the widow herself: persistence.  After all, persistence got her what she wanted; she simply refused to quit. 

Years ago there was a powerful Washington, D.C., criminal defense attorney named Edward Bennett Williams.  He was also a very sharp businessman; he owned the Washington Redskins and the Baltimore Orioles. He was in business with a man named Paul Dietrich.  One day, Williams and Dietrich were to be visited by Mother Teresa; she was in the United States to raise money for an AIDS hospice that she was building.  Just before the meeting, Williams walked into Dietrich’s office and said, “Paul, AIDS is not my favorite disease, I want nothing to do with anything that deals with it.  But we’ve got this saint of the church about to visit us to ask for money, and I don’t know what to do.”

“I’ll tell you what we’ll do,” Dietrich said.  “We’ll listen to her spiel, then tell her ‘no.’  How’s that?”

“Sounds like a plan,” Williams said.

So Mother Teresa came, and there they were: these two powerful Washington businessmen in their perfectly tailored suits, sitting on one side of a huge, polished mahogany desk; and on the other side sat shriveled, diminutive Mother Teresa.  And Mother Teresa spoke for about 20 minutes about her vision for an AIDS hospice, after which both Williams and Dietrich rose and said, “Mother Teresa, it’s clear that you have much passion for this issue, but, unfortunately, we just don’t have any resources we can spare at this time.”

To which Mother Teresa smiled and said, “Let us pray.”

Williams looked at Dietrich, rolled his eyes, and both men sat back down, folded their hands and bowed their heads, while Mother Teresa prayed.  When she finished praying, Mother Teresa simply began talking again, in fact, making the very same appeal she had made just minutes before.  When she was finished, Williams said, “Look, Mother Teresa, you obviously have a great passion for this cause, but we just don’t have any resources to share with you.”

To which Mother Teresa again smiled and said, “Let us pray.”

Williams finally threw up his hands and said, “All right, all right!  I’ll get my checkbook!”

Persistence: that’s one lesson we can draw from this parable.  It certainly comes to the surface in our First Lesson, about Jacob wrestling with the angel of God.  He finally got what he wanted – a blessing – because of his persistence.  It cost him – he walked with a limp for the rest of his life – but his persistence paid off.  And persistence comes through in our second lesson as well, as we are encouraged to be persistent in our Christian witness.  So human persistence is one lesson we can gain from this parable.  But it is not the main lesson, otherwise this story would be only about us, about our strength, our confidence, our persistence.  But stories in the Bible are never simply about us; they are first about God, then they are about us.

This story says that if a poor widow can get justice from an unprincipled judge who cares nothing for her, how much more will the God who formed you in your mother’s womb, who knew you before you were born, who loved you before you took your first breath – how much more will this God hear your every prayer and respond.  But he will respond in his time and in his way.  And that’s the problem we have with God’s plan, that it’s often carried out on a timetable that’s different than our own and in a way that's different from what we desire.  It is, however, what we pray for when we pray, "Thy will be done."  It's for us to trust that that will comes from One who ultimately loves us the most. 

There’s a great old story about a boy named Frank who lived on the banks of the Mississippi River.  One day Frank was walking along the riverbank when he saw a boy about to get on a raft at the river’s edge.  “Hey, where are you going with that raft?” Frank called out to the boy.  “I’m going out to that island in the middle of the river.  I dare you to come along!”

Frank couldn’t resist the dare; he scrambled down the bank and onto the raft and off they went.  Just as they were about to reach the island, the current picked up and became rough, and the raft broke up and sank.  The two boys safely swam to the island, but there they were – stuck, late afternoon, no way off the island, no communication with the rest of the world.

Just then, a paddlewheel boat came into view.  Frank ran down to the river’s edge and began jumping up and down, waving his arms and yelling like crazy.

“Save your breath,” the other boy said, “they can’t hear you.  And even if they could, they’d never come for a couple of boys like us.”

No sooner were those words out of his mouth than the paddlewheeler changed course and came to the island.  Frank turned to the other boy and said, “I know something that you don’t.  I know that the captain of the paddleboat is my father.”

The captain of this universe is the God who hears your every cry and will respond in his own time and in his own way.  And if you can grasp that fact in faith, you also might be open to another interpretation of this parable.  It’s the interpretation that says that this woman – this insistent, persistent woman – is actually God. This persistent, insistent God wants justice, and he wants it from you and from me.

The truth is: this world is not the way God intended it to be.  God does not intend his people to live in economic hardship because of the greedy decisions of other people.  God does not intend his people to live in a culture of dependency that saps us of creativity and energy.  God does not intend for nations to be at war.  These are all issues of justice.  God wants justice, and he uses us to bring it about.  And the only way we can have energy and confidence and persistence for that work is if we first allow ourselves to be held in the eternal security of God’s loving embrace.

This is, after all, the God who makes it possible for you to pray always and to not lose heart.  Amen.