Praying Through Delay
Genesis 32:22-31, Luke 18:1-8
October 21, 2007
Rochelle A. Stackhouse
I read a wonderful story this week about a middle school teacher who asked his class to share their earliest memory. As they went around the room and students shared stories of puppies or baby sisters or beloved toys or stuffed animals, the teacher heard a boy named Mark Shapiro say, simply, “Abraham.” As the other students began saying, “Abraham who?” the teacher realized that Mark meant the great patriarch of Israel, Abraham. Mark, who was Jewish, understood himself to be part of a bigger story, a community of people, and so his earliest memory was their earliest memory. Abraham. “A wandering Aramean was my father,” is how the foundational story goes in the liturgical tradition of the people.
In order for us to fully engage both of the scripture readings today, we need to try to put ourselves into the mindset of young Mark Shapiro, which was the mindset of both Jacob and Jesus. Both of these stories have a scope far beyond that of the individuals involved in them, and definitely far beyond us trying to take them and make a one-to-one connection to our own individual stories, as has too often been done. For example, the moral of the story to this little parable Jesus tells of the woman and the judge is NOT that God is a hard nut to crack so we need to whine and pester in prayer if we want God to do want we want. And, on a similar theme, the moral of the story about Jacob wrestling in the night is also NOT that we need to struggle with God in order to force God to bless us. Indeed neither story is really about us as individuals in our relationship either with God or with each other at all. Rather, these stories are about all of us together and God’s vision and need for all of us.
Both stories are set at the very edge of life, the place where not only individual people may rise or fall, but where whole peoples are at similarly at risk. Jacob was posed on the edge of either reconciliation with the brother he had so wronged so often or a war that would destroy not only their families, but the covenant God had made with them. The blessing he received, the change of his name to Israel, (the name of the nation), spoke God’s promise that the covenant would continue, implying what indeed happened the next day, the deep reconciliation of the brothers and the hope that this reconciliation might mark the nations they both led.
Sadly, that hope was not fulfilled, still has not been. Read the news from the Middle East daily. That’s where the story of the widow and the judge comes in. Jesus has just been talking at some length about God’s realm in answer to a question by the Pharisees. When will the kingdom come, they ask, and what will it look like and where will it be? Jesus says, “You’re asking the wrong questions. God’s realm is not some place you can go or some thing you can see. God’s kingdom is YOU. (17:21). Then Jesus went on to talk about the end times when God’s kingdom is revealed clearly. And as Luke goes on, he begins the next sentence, introducing the parable, with the word, “then.” This conversation about God’s realm is not over, but it is continuing in the parable.
Remember that when Jesus taught the disciples to pray, the example he gave them, which we still pray every week, begins with a yearning that God’s “kingdom come and will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” What will that kingdom be like? When people who have been enemies from birth, like Jacob and Esau, believe that reconciliation is more important than nursing grudges or gaining wealth or power over the other. When widows (always in the Bible the symbol for people who are totally powerless: legally, economically, socially) are given the justice they deserve. When we won’t be arguing about which children deserve to have health insurance and which don’t or the fine points of what is torture and what is only making people suffer enough to tell us whatever we want to hear. When people discern other ways of resolving disputes than strapping on suicide bombs or pulling a gun. When we couldn’t imagine a scenario where someone slashed a stranger on the throat because they were taking too long to order at Dunkin Donuts, which happened this week in New Haven.
“Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven.” “The kingdom of God is among you.” But we can’t see it yet. We can’t see it in our world, and, too often, we can’t see it in ourselves. “So Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” So Jacob wrestled both with his own inner demons and with God, and even though he was wounded in the battle, he persisted until both he and his people could live into the blessing God wanted to give them from the very beginning.
And the question Jesus asks after telling this little parable about the need to persist in seeking justice, both from human powers and from God, is “will there still be faith on earth at those end times?”
There is a sociological term for losing that faith and the persistence of hope that goes with it. They call it, “compassion fatigue.” It happens to folk who have a passion for doing good in the world, but they get tired because what they can do seems so little and the problems of the world seem so great and nothing ever seems to change or make a difference. So they withdraw from all the good things they have done, sometimes for a short while and sometimes for the rest of their lives. When you feel like you are alone in the struggle, it can be tempting to give up.
That’s where young Mark Shapiro reminds us of how important it is to know deep in our beings that we are part of something much bigger. Luke wrote his gospel to people in the early churches who had expected Jesus to return rather quickly and who faced the daily threat of persecution for their faith. Under such difficult circumstances, how did any of those young churches survive, some of them to this day? How could they find the strength of faith to tell this story to others when it seemed so hard to believe and live into it themselves? They could because they understood themselves to be part of the great community of believers, carrying within them the seeds of God’s kingdom which could only find nurture for growth within a community of persistent prayers, of believers beyond hope, of fools for Christ. The theologian Renita Weems says that “faith is what you do between the last time you experienced God and the next time you experience God.” In community, people are at all different places in their experience of the presence of God. In the choir, when Maggie has asked us to sustain what seems an impossibly long time of singing between breaths, we know that we can sneak a breath here and there when it seems we can go on no longer because others who are singing with us keep singing, and when they need to breathe, we will sing for them. We have the strength to persist because others are persisting with us.
Ultimately, of course, we have the promise repeated here by Jesus that God also persists with us. One Biblical scholar I read this week invited us to consider what this parable might look like if we imagined God, not as the judge, but as the widow, a legitimate reading since Jesus never identifies the judge with God. Imagine God as the widow constantly coming to the people of the earth who are so like the unjust judge, respecting neither other people nor God. For, as Jesus says, God yearns for the people who cry out day and night to receive justice. Sometimes God needs to wrestle with us to get us to see what can be in the world if we let our wills flow into God’s will and don’t give up.
Both of these stories leave us with the strong call not to let go. Sometimes, like Jacob, we may be wounded in the struggle. Sometimes we may feel like we need to step aside because we can’t breathe. Sometimes situations in our individual lives threaten to overwhelm us and obscure the presence of both the community of faithful people and the God who offers blessing. Sometimes the evil of the world seems so pervasive and the presence of God so hidden. But don’t let go. Hold on. Pray. Even if you can’t find the words. Somewhere, someone is praying for the same things you are. Somewhere God is pushing, prodding, wrestling, and bothering justice and goodness into being. Sometimes being stubborn is a good thing. Amen.