When you care about something or somebody and it isn’t going well, it’s easy to become disheartened. When you have been mistreated and you’re looking for some semblance of justice and you don’t seem to get it, it’s easy to become disheartened. When you are trapped at work or at home in a situation that isn’t satisfying, even painful, it’s easy to lose heart. When you watch someone you love go down, it’s easy to lose heart. The gospel text for this Sunday, as much as it is set in the social-economic setting of a certain time and place, is about all people who are on the verge of losing their courage, their faith, their love of life, their spiritual stamina. It is a story that Jesus told his followers, because, guess what, they were losing heart. It’s a story that Jesus tells the church today because, guess what, in a lot of places today church is losing heart.
Jesus is calling all his disciples, all people of faith back to the drawing board, back to the beginning, back to faith. This story is about developing a nasty edge in our spiritual life, in our prayer life, in our faith. How do we sharpen our spiritual tools? How do we become persistent, as persistent as the pesky widow in the parable Jesus told? I think it has a lot to do with our every day practices. It has a lot to do with the question of how often we dare to bother God.
Somewhere, the biblical scholar William Barclay tells the story of a faithful servant girl. It comes from the days when a domestic servant was expected to work all day and that really meant a good part of the night as well. The young woman said that because of her work she had little time to practice her faith between Sundays. So, she said, she took the used morning newspaper to bed with her. She turned to the family notices columns and read the birth notices. She prayed for the babies that had just come into the world. Then she turned to the marriages column and prayed for true happiness for the couples mentioned. Then finally she read the death notices and prayed God’s comfort for all who mourned and were sad. Barclay concluded, ‘No one in this world will ever know what blessing to unknown people came from an attic bedroom from one who prayed.’
The parable for today can be interpreted on a few different levels but the most important one is its message about prayer, even though the parable itseelf says absolutely nothing about the widow engaging in prayer. Quite the opposite, in fact. It seems that she was just a very assertive and aggressive persona, not your typical church going person, maybe a little bit grumpy and cranky, down to earth, sarcastic, with plenty of bad things to say about all the injustices in this world. She was the kind of lady you may not want meet too often. But Jesus still mentions her as a role model for our prayer lives, which is very interesting, isn’t it?
On the surface this is a worldly, non-spiritual tale about people’s need to not accept injustices from those in power. I don’t know about you, but I have read a few stories in recent months about inmates who were unjustly locked up in prison and then released. In some cases they spent twenty or thirty years innocently behind bars, the better part of their lives. Now That’s injustice! Can you imagine spending time behind bars knowing that you are innocent and all you can do is wait and pray and plead and hope that someone reopens your case and looks at it again? All the while your life withers away in an environment that allows you little freedom, exposes you to all kinds of criminal minds and you might just feel that you are forgotten – by God, by justice, by society, by your lawyers, by just about everybody. These stories of people who are not found guilty after many years in prison pop up several times a year. In one particularly harrowing case, two men spent 39 years in prison innocently. Ricky Jackson was 57 and Wiley Bridgman 60 years when they were released from jail in the Cleveland area in November of 2014. By the time they got out it must have felt like life had passed them by.
This parable could be read as an encouragement to never lose heart in the face of injustice, to never give up because justice is one of the highest goods of any civilized society, its value deeply engrained in our faith tradition. And even as imperfect and flawed as our system is, we should never take for granted that we have a justice system that is intended to be independent and fair and keep pestering those in charge to produce justice.
That’s one way of looking at this parable. The other way is where I began my meditation, by reading this story from the question that stirred it in the first place. Luke introduces the parable by saying, “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” And most of us know, it’s easy to lose heart in prayer, to stop praying, to just nominally pray, or to say “I keep you in my prayers,“ and then forget, not for a lack of good will and intention, but perhaps for a lack of discipline and persistence. It is not by chance that the words “disciple” and “discipline” come from the same word root. It takes discipline to be a disciple. It takes discipline to persist in prayer.
Early in my Sabbatical I was looking for spiritual guidance and wondered where to go. A colleague pointed me toward the Jesuit Center in Wernersville near Reading. I was hoping to receive some spiritual counseling from one of their brothers over a period of time since being accountable to someone in your spiritual practices can be of enormous benefit. We all have that nasty tendency to deceive ourselves. And so I finally met with my spiritual guide last Wednesday and we talked about prayer practices. He encouraged me to spend 30-45 minutes every day intentionally seeking God’s presence – without even praying for anyone else, – time alone with God and Scripture and myself. And, super-spiritual as I am, I said: “How about 20 minutes?” And he said, “Hmm, how about half an hour?” So I am trying to practice my quiet time, God- time, listening time, in a whole new way and it helps to be accountable to someone and hopefully it helps me to not lose heart in times when it would be easy to get discouraged.
I think I said this a few weeks ago and I will have to say it again: we need to practice faith. Faith is not something that drops from heaven. It comes from practice and persistent practice, even routines. The widow in this parable, cranky as she may have been, is Jesus role model for praying: persistent with an edge to her. Keep pestering God and expect great things from your encounters with the most-high! Pray, and do not lose heart!
Amen.