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10/21/07: Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost (“C”) (8:30am only)

Rev. Karen S. Cook

Luke 18:1-8 (Pew Bible p.911)

BEING A BOTHER

Jesus tells us a story this morning. It’s a story about prayer. It’s a story about persistent prayer. It’s a story about not letting your heart be overwhelmed. And it’s another story about the character of faith.

For the last 2 weeks we’ve heard parables on the character of faith – faith the size of a mustard seed that simply believes God can change us; the faith of a leper that is overwhelmed with wholeness and thanksgiving. This week our lesson again ends with a question on faith. When the Son of Man comes, when Jesus comes to us, will He find faith here on earth?

It seems we are called to pray for the kind of faith that will pray for faith. All the way to the point of being a bother to God – Jesus calls us to pray for the kind of faith that will pray for faith, and pray for faith, and pray for faith, etc, etc, etc… This also is the kind of prayer that asks for God to come, and come soon. This is also the kind of prayer that begs for God’s presence, God’s justice, and God’s compassion – not for later, but for now.

As Barbara Brown Taylor says (Home by Another Way, p.200), “As some of you know, prayer like that can wear your heart right out, if you’re not careful – especially when there is no sign on earth that God has heard, much less answered, your prayer. You can only knock so long at a closed door before your hands hurt too much to go on. You can only listen to yourself speak into the silence so long before you start to wonder if anyone was ever there. When that happens – when the pain and the doubt gang up on you to the point that you start feeling dead inside – then it is time to get some help, because you are ‘losing heart.’”

That’s what Jesus tells his disciples. That’s what Jesus tells us. Jesus didn’t want his faithful to lose heart, so he tells us this story of a persistent widow who wants a non-believing judge to give her justice. The widow isn’t going to a member of the synagogue. She appears before a civil judge – a Greek-Roman judge. The Bible tells us that this judge respected no one – not God and not people. But even this judge will listen eventually. How much more so will God listen to us, Jesus asks.

I believe that part of the purpose of prayer is to come close to God. God is always very close to us, but we don’t always feel it. We can sometimes feel God when we are in a time of prayer. It’s so easy to lose heart. It seems like there will always be war no matter how long or often we pray for peace. How many of you have prayed for someone to be cured, only to find that God was going to make them whole in heaven? And yet, we have prayed for many people who have been cleansed, or cured, or made whole here in this life. Sometimes I feel like Professor Marvel yelling from his hot air balloon at the end of the Wizard of Oz. “I don’t know how it works!” I know prayer works, I just don’t always know how.

Today, after pondering this Scripture all week, I believe that prayer keeps us from losing heart. In fact, I think prayer helps us find our heart. Maybe the widow in today’s lesson prays so that she could find her heart – the heart that is not whole until it finds God. We pray to remember who we are. We pray to remember the shape of our heart.

So I wonder if Jesus didn’t know people with the kind of faith to keep on keeping on – forever. Sometimes we pray like we brush our teeth – once in the morning and once at night, and if we’re good we floss too. Maybe Jesus says that our spiritual hygiene takes a different kind of persistence. When our prayers take on the character of superficiality, then we won’t have to be disappointed when they don’t come true. If we don’t seek, then we don’t care if we don’t find. But what happens when those prayers leave us with a dead feeling deep inside our hearts? Do we just get used to it?

Maybe prayer is a part of the process of getting to know God. Maybe it’s that prayer changes us. And in changing us, the world is changed. Prayer gives us the courage to face ridicule or illness because we come to know that God is close to us. Prayer gives us the heart to deal with the death of loved ones because we know that God is close to us. And prayer gives God the opportunity to speak to us – to put a spark in our hearts to be mercy and justice. We can always know that God is close to us. Prayer is our opportunity to find our heart in God. Prayer keeps our hearts chasing after God’s heart. It’s how we bother God, and it’s how God bothers us back.

Amen.