Persevering in Prayer

Proper 24                                                                        Luke 18: 1-8

Trinity 20                                                                 17 October 2010

I was thinking for a while this week—when I had time to think at all—ever had a week like that?—that I ought to skip the lessons today and preach something suitable for our anniversary year as a parish, since that is the focus of our parish life today.  But then, as Iooked through some old writing and research, I discovered that the parable Jesus tells us this morning is exactly suited to our present parochial as well as to our present personal situations.   The Gospel lesson helps us confront an issue which is crucial to our life of faith, but which has nothing to do with pestering God to give us what we want.

Notice that little phrase in the middle of our lesson: we are called God’s chosen ones, his elect.  If we are so dear to God as to be called his very own chosen, then it would be odd indeed if the point of the story was to tell us to act as if God wasn’t really concerned about us at all.  We are told right from the beginning that the parable is about encouraging God’s chosen ones not to give up, but to keep on praying.  But I wonder if the praying being talked about here is not praying for the things one needs or for the needs of others, but refers to persistence in the life of prayer, especially during those times when it looks as if you are not getting anywhere.  Jesus knows that in the future, there will be times when his disciples will long for a sense of his personal presence and it will be difficult for them to find it.  They will find themselves in a complicated world where their religion doesn’t always seem to provide what they think they need to get along.  Then they might become discouraged and begin to think that their religion was all for nothing.  They might grow weary of the spiritual life altogether and begin to think that God, for all his promises, will never act decisively in this world to bring his kingdom to pass.  They might even begin to think that God doesn’t care much for their struggles at all, nor about the injustice of this world.  In conditions like these Jesus’ followers must continue to persevere in prayer, that is, in the whole life of prayer and spiritual discipline.  And at that time it matters very much what kind of picture they have of the God who is the center of that life of prayer.

In order to couteract this false idea of God, Jesus offers the picture of an unjust judge.  He is a thoroughly unsavoury character.  He neither fears God nor cares much about people.  His idea of justice is whatever advantage he can wring out of a situation.  Into his court comes a widow who has been defrauded of her rights.  Probably her husband left her money to live on at his death and some other relative has managed to get control of the estate.  Given the ambiguous position of women in society in those days, it would not have been very difficult to defraud a widow.  The judge doesn’t care anything for the widow and her case, especially as she cannot bribe him to hear it.  Yet, the woman is persistent, persistant to the point of threatening to publicly humiliate the judge.  Even he, alas, has to be concerned to some extent about his public image.  It has to be possible for him to pose as a defender of justice.  If his lack of concern for justice becomes too blatant—as it would if this widow did not shut up and kept blabbing about him everywhere—then he will lose that veneer of respectability which is necessary to his judicial pretentions.  

Now it is very neccesary for us as we try to live the Christian life, to be clear about the God with whom we are dealing.  It is possible when the struggle to be faithful is difficult, to slip into thinking about God as if he were unjust, uncaring, and remote—as if we had to bring him something costly or pretentious in terms of personal worthiness or special devotion or heroic faith in order for him to hear and respond to us.  If we are very much aware of our own poverty—like the woman was—we may feel as if we have to keep nagging God in order for him to listen to us.  Jesus says an absolute “No!” to that kind of thinking.  If the unjust judge is finally shamed into acting, can we think of God in those terms?  Certainly not!  God is the one who has chosen us!  We are His elect in Christ!  Elsewhere Jesus said that if we who are parents, sinful as we are, delight in giving good things to our children, will not God give us as many good things as it is possible for us to receive, especially the good things of the Kingdom?  Here Jesus says that what God longs to grant his chosen ones is vindication.  Our translation reads justice, but it is not justice so much as vindication that God promises his elect.  What does that mean? 

To be vindicated means to be proved right.  In fact, the very idea of being God’s chosen ones involves us in a great act of faith.  It may not often look like we are God’s elect—not to ourselves, and not to other people.  Responding in faith to God’s calling in Christ opens us up to a great risk.  What if we are wrong?  What a man or woman of faith often longs for is some sign of vindication, some sign that this life of faith is really going somewhere.  Why does God delay in vindicating his chosen ones?  The word used in this verse for delay is the word which means long-suffering.  Most of the places in the Bible where that is used it is a positive word.  It means that God delays with good intentions, he is patient with his people because they are not ready yet for him to act decisively in judgement.  There is much for them to get in order in their own lives before he can vindicate them.  There are also others who are not yet of his elect whom he wants to reach.  The delay is a matter of grace, of mercy, because he wills all to have a chance to come to repentance.

We will not finally be shown to be in the right as Christians until the Kingdom of God comes in all its fullness.  Our vindication will not arrive until Jesus returns and the kingdoms of this world become the Kingdom of our God and of His Christ and he begins his eternal reign in this world.  What we must do is persevere in the Christian life for the long haul.  We must endure to the end in order to be saved, trusting that God’s patience and delay are for our own good and for the good of the world around us.  In spite of the difficulties we must keep at the development and growth of our spiritual lives.  We must continue to pray, to pursue the life of prayer, so that when God acts we will be ready for Him.  

But I have a suspicion that our vindication, that is, our sense of confirmation that we are on the right way, that we are really after all God’s chosen ones, his beloved, his elect—this vindication not only comes to us at the end of our whole journey, but bits and pieces of it come to us in the middle, from time to time, as God wills and as He thinks it necessary and good for us.  How does this happen?  Well, every once in a while God does seem to grant a miracle to people—a healing, a guidance, a deliverance.  But these are always unpredictable and totally up to God in his wisdom.  I am thinking of several other ways.  We are vindicated in our Christian lives as we discover ourselves actually becoming more of what we know Jesus to be like.  From time to time it becomes evident to us that we are making progress in developing Christian character, more evident, perhaps, to others than to ourselves.  This means that when someone compliments us or expresses gratitude to us for a loving action or compassionate word, this is God’s vindication coming to us.  (That is such an important boost to our spiritual lives, that we all ought to be looking for ways to encourage each other by such complements.  Someone’s spiritual health and vitality may depend on us recognizing God at work in that person’s life.)  Another vindication is the realization that the sins we are fighting against are actually being defeated in our lives.  New temptations come, to be sure, but sometimes we realize that old ones come no more.  The grace of God in us has dealt with them and we can feel a proper sense of vindication.  Another way God vindicates our life of prayer is helping us to achieve real focus to our lives, a deep sense of order and meaning, and the attendant peace and joy which come with it.  God Himself sometimes seems especially close to us, and this brings a sense of vindication all its own—for me especially this happens at Mass when we all worship together.  Finally, at least in my short list, it can be tremendously vindicating when someone with whom we have shared our experience of Christ’s love and power actually encounters Jesus and we begin to see his or her life changed and re-ordered. 

In these ways the vindication of God comes to us, reassuring us that we are part of his elect, and strengthening us to endure in this Christian life until the end, the goal, that God has in mind for us, and not for us only as individuals, but for us as a Church, a witness to and outpost of the Kingdom, which one day will be swallowed up in its arrival.  Sometimes all we experience is the delay: “How long, O Lord, how long?”  At those times all we can do is persevere in prayer, in the life of faith, in active works of love, keeping the example and the Cross of Christ before us as we go about our duties.  We know that we shall not have really made it until we reach the end of the journey.  Yet, sometimes in the midst of the journey, we get special gifts sent on to us from ahead of us, from the end and goal of our faith into the midst of the mess we are currently living in.  And all along the journey, the Father is bearing us, Jesus is interceding for us, the Spirit is dwelling in us, because we are his elect, the ones who bear the secret of his purposes, the message of his good news for the world.

The parish of St Thomas’ Episcopal Church here in Plymouth has been at this program for 150 years now.  Sometimes there has been great excitement here—one thinks of the building of this church 100 years ago, or of the renewal that happened in the 1960’s, or of the mission work with Honduras that was so focused in the late 1990’s.  At other times there has been a quiet perseverance in the life of prayer and worship and teaching that has been solid but not particularly flashy.  Then there have been times of strain and wonderment—where will the future lie, how can we make it through, where can we find the energy to rebuild?  Life in the 1930’s, for example, was fairly difficult here. 

But our purpose has always been the same.  We have a mission statement which focuses that purpose for us: to share the wisdom of God in all its rich variety through our common life in the Body of Christ, so that the place where we live can be transformed and transfigured in God.  I learned just this last week that transformation often occurs during those times when we are thrown into confusion—certainties we had are upset, plans we made are disrupted, things we thought we knew become unclear.  In those times, if we hold on to our praying and trust in God, we can be shown a new way, gain fresh insight, experience God’s presence in a new way which transforms our present situation.  I resonate with that idea.  There is much to confuse a believer these days, especially in the Episcopal Church.  But we have a plan and a method of prayer and worship that keeps us focused on God. [ In fact, I have reprinted for you the Christian Life Model for your praying today—it is still the best thing I have ever seen to help you see where you need to work and where you are already strong. ] We have a long history which promises that when we persevere in the life of faith, God does not abandon us but blesses our faithfulness.  So we look with gratitude on our 150 years but also with hope toward the future.  God has some wonderful things in store for us here and we can discover them—as we “pray always and do not lose heart”.