William H. Willimon - "On Not Losing Heart" (October 18, 1998)
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Preacher | And the Gospel lesson appointed for this Sunday | 0:06 |
is from the 18th chapter of the Gospel of Luke. | 0:09 | |
Jesus told them a parable about their need | 0:17 | |
to pray always and not lose heart. | 0:20 | |
He said, "In a certain city there was a judge | 0:24 | |
"who neither feared God nor had respect for people. | 0:27 | |
"In that city was a widow, who kept coming to him | 0:31 | |
"and saying, 'Judge, grant me justice against my opponent.' | 0:35 | |
"For a while, the Judge refused, | 0:40 | |
"but later he said to himself, 'Though I have no fear of God | 0:41 | |
"nor respect for anybody, yet because this widow | 0:45 | |
"keeps bothering me I will grant her justice, | 0:48 | |
"so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'" | 0:50 | |
The Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says. | 0:54 | |
"And will not God grant justice | 1:00 | |
"to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? | 1:02 | |
"Will he delay long in helping them? | 1:05 | |
"I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. | 1:07 | |
"And yet, when the Son of Man comes, | 1:11 | |
"will he find faith on the Earth?" | 1:14 | |
This is the word of the Lord. | 1:19 | |
Congregation | Praise the Lord. | 1:22 |
Preacher | The parable begins with Jesus-- | 1:27 |
With Luke's comment that Jesus told them a parable, | 1:33 | |
so that they might always pray and not lose heart. | 1:37 | |
And yet, the parable ends with a question. | 1:45 | |
"And when the Son of Man comes, | 1:48 | |
"will he not find faith on the Earth?" | 1:50 | |
What is the parable about? | 1:54 | |
It's about prayer, it seems. | 1:58 | |
And we listen, because prayer is a problem for many of us. | 2:02 | |
Is anybody listening to my prayer? | 2:08 | |
Am I talking to God or am I only speaking to myself? | 2:11 | |
Some form of autosuggestion? | 2:15 | |
And the problem is not only that we are uncertain | 2:18 | |
about prayer, but I think we have the good sense to know | 2:23 | |
that when we pray, as in few other activities of faith, | 2:27 | |
we are really putting our faith on the line when we pray. | 2:33 | |
Is there a God? | 2:41 | |
And if there is a God, is it a God | 2:43 | |
who listens, who hears, who responds? | 2:46 | |
These are frightening questions. | 2:51 | |
Luke says Jesus told this parable of the unjust judge | 2:55 | |
and the persistent widow in order that | 3:01 | |
we might pray always and not lose heart. | 3:04 | |
And throughout Luke, there's a lot of talk | 3:08 | |
about prayer, which suggests prayer | 3:10 | |
is not just a problem for modern people. | 3:13 | |
Maybe prayer is always a problem for anybody | 3:17 | |
who claims to believe in a God who hears and who acts. | 3:24 | |
Prayer raises difficult, threatening questions. | 3:29 | |
Is there a God who hears? Is there a God who cares? | 3:34 | |
And maybe the problem beneath our problems | 3:41 | |
with prayer is the one Jesus addresses. | 3:45 | |
We just lose heart. | 3:49 | |
If we really believed in the power | 3:53 | |
of prayer, I suppose we would be-- | 3:54 | |
If we were truly convinced that prayer changes things, | 3:57 | |
we would be praying all the time; | 4:01 | |
you couldn't stop us from praying. | 4:03 | |
But maybe the problem is we just lose heart. | 4:07 | |
And so Jesus tells a funny story about a disgusting judge. | 4:12 | |
He is a sleazy jurist, probably put into his position | 4:18 | |
through some political shenanigans. | 4:22 | |
And this poor widow, she is without protection; | 4:25 | |
she is without any power. | 4:28 | |
What hope does she have before this judge's bench? | 4:31 | |
She has one thing; she has the ability to pester. | 4:36 | |
Leaving messages on his answering machine, | 4:40 | |
constantly banging on his door, | 4:43 | |
giving him no peace, she is persistent. | 4:44 | |
Finally this judge says to himself, | 4:47 | |
"Look, I don't fear God and I could care less | 4:49 | |
"about the voters, but I will give this woman | 4:53 | |
"what she wants just to get her out of my hair." | 4:56 | |
How does this story keep us praying without losing heart? | 5:02 | |
Maybe Jesus tells us this story because he wants us | 5:08 | |
to understand that even though the world may look broken | 5:12 | |
and unjust and unresponsive, if you just keep at it, | 5:18 | |
things will work out, you know? | 5:23 | |
If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. | 5:25 | |
But if that were the parable's point, | 5:32 | |
this wouldn't be, "Pray always and don't lose heart," | 5:34 | |
but merely, "Keep at it, be persistent, | 5:39 | |
"and things will eventually work out for the best." | 5:42 | |
Go ahead, harass God until you get what you want. | 5:45 | |
No, Luke says Jesus told us this parable in order that | 5:50 | |
we might pray always without ceasing and not lose heart. | 5:55 | |
Maybe it's not a story about | 6:02 | |
the potential rewards of persistent prayer. | 6:05 | |
Maybe it's not even a parable about prayer. | 6:09 | |
Tom Long says he thinks this is a parable | 6:13 | |
about the nature of God, about the character of God. | 6:18 | |
In this parable, we meet a judge | 6:24 | |
and we're told something about his character. | 6:27 | |
He doesn't fear God and he cares nothing for other people. | 6:31 | |
But he is a judge who, it is revealed through his actions, | 6:36 | |
he does seem to care about getting a good night's sleep. | 6:39 | |
He does care about being left alone. | 6:43 | |
And so he responds on the basis of who he is. | 6:47 | |
You might not particularly care for who he is, | 6:51 | |
but at least he acts consistently with who he is. | 6:53 | |
If this sleazy judge will open up his hand | 6:59 | |
to those who seek justice, if he opens up to this widow | 7:03 | |
for all the wrong reasons, how much more so will God | 7:08 | |
be open to you, for all the right reasons? | 7:12 | |
Today I want you to think about prayer, | 7:18 | |
but not as asking God for things, | 7:20 | |
but rather prayer as asking God to be God. | 7:23 | |
Prayer is the persistent day-in day-out attempt | 7:31 | |
to let God go ahead and be God. | 7:38 | |
When you were a little child and you suffered some injustice | 7:45 | |
or you received some pain, what did your mother say? | 7:48 | |
She attempted to comfort you. | 7:53 | |
And she would say something like, | 7:54 | |
"There there now, it's all right." | 7:56 | |
What did she mean when she said that? | 8:00 | |
She surely did not mean that your pain was inconsequential. | 8:03 | |
That wouldn't have made sense; obviously your pain was real. | 8:06 | |
That was why she was attempting to comfort you. | 8:11 | |
She did not mean that everything was going to | 8:15 | |
immediately be all right in that moment. | 8:17 | |
She surely knows enough about life to know | 8:21 | |
that things don't always work out right. | 8:23 | |
Maybe what she was saying was that finally, | 8:29 | |
ultimately, though you had only lived in the world, | 8:33 | |
say, four or five years, she had learned from her life | 8:36 | |
that finally, ultimately, in the larger picture, | 8:41 | |
the world really is structured in such a way | 8:45 | |
that all shall be well; pain doesn't last forever. | 8:48 | |
Even the worse setbacks of life | 8:56 | |
are integrated into life and you go on. | 8:58 | |
In other words, when she said, "There there now, | 9:00 | |
"everything is going to be all right," | 9:02 | |
she was making a kind of statement of faith | 9:04 | |
about the ultimate character of the world. | 9:09 | |
This parable is a story. | 9:13 | |
And it's not so much a story about the useful technique | 9:16 | |
of using prayer to get what you want. | 9:20 | |
I think it's a story about the character of God, | 9:22 | |
the trustworthiness of God. | 9:26 | |
The judge cares neither for God nor the widow, but God cares | 9:29 | |
And I love those wonderful moments in scripture, | 9:39 | |
often in the Old Testament, | 9:41 | |
where people dare to call God to be God. | 9:44 | |
I think of a lot of the prayers of Moses, | 9:50 | |
where Moses is out on the Exodus and things are bad | 9:52 | |
and he says to the people of Israel, | 9:55 | |
"Let me go up on the mountain; I'll talk to him." | 9:57 | |
And Moses gets up there and he says to God, | 9:59 | |
"Didn't you say when you brought us out of slavery, | 10:01 | |
"don't you remember that earlier you had said, remember?" | 10:05 | |
These prayers are not just pestering God, | 10:11 | |
but they are in a way defending God's good name. | 10:13 | |
They are saying in their speeches to God, | 10:18 | |
"I believe you are a righteous God, | 10:21 | |
"whose will is ever for the good of your children." | 10:24 | |
A few Sundays ago, we prayed a prayer. | 10:29 | |
It was a Psalm, actually; many of the Psalms are prayers. | 10:34 | |
And it was Psalm 137, which John Wesley said, | 10:38 | |
upon reading it, "There are some Psalms | 10:43 | |
"that just aren't fit for Christian ears." | 10:45 | |
But it's that Psalm which begins well enough | 10:48 | |
about by the waters of Babylon we hung up our harps | 10:50 | |
and they said, "Sing us one of those songs out of Zion," | 10:53 | |
and we said, "We're not gonna sing, | 10:55 | |
"because we're Jews in exile," and then it says, | 10:57 | |
"Babylon, you avenger, happy are those who would take | 11:00 | |
"your little ones and dash their heads against rocks." | 11:04 | |
And sure enough, just as I predicted, some attentive person | 11:07 | |
came out and said, "I don't think that was appropriate | 11:11 | |
"to pray in a service of Christian worship." | 11:14 | |
I noted to the person, "You notice it doesn't say | 11:17 | |
"we ought to go out and bash somebody's head against a rock. | 11:22 | |
"The Psalm is sort of saying, | 11:26 | |
"'God, if you are just and you believed | 11:28 | |
"in setting things right, you would go out | 11:31 | |
"and do to their children what they did to our children.' | 11:33 | |
"It's saying, 'God, go ahead and be just, | 11:36 | |
"the way we would like you to be just.'" | 11:39 | |
That response didn't seem to help | 11:41 | |
the person who was raising the question, but-- | 11:43 | |
The main function of prayer is to let God be God. | 11:47 | |
Later in this service, we're gonna pray the Lord's Prayer. | 11:52 | |
How does it begin? | 11:55 | |
"Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name, | 11:56 | |
"Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done." | 11:59 | |
See, the Lord's Prayer spends most of the Lord's Prayer | 12:01 | |
saying things about God, before it ever gets around | 12:05 | |
to asking for anything like bread | 12:09 | |
or forgiveness of our trespasses. | 12:11 | |
We wouldn't bother God about bread, or about our sin, | 12:14 | |
if it were not for our prior abiding conviction | 12:20 | |
that we are God's creatures and that our creator cares. | 12:23 | |
In praying, we show risky, courageous confidence | 12:28 | |
that God does care and hear and act. | 12:34 | |
When you pray for something as mundane as daily bread, | 12:38 | |
you're making a rather amazing statement | 12:42 | |
about faith in the goodness of God. | 12:45 | |
Each year, on the first Sunday of Lent, | 12:49 | |
it has been our custom to pray | 12:53 | |
something called The Great Litany. | 12:55 | |
And it's chanted between the choir and the congregation. | 12:57 | |
And it's a long prayer, comes out of the Anglican tradition. | 13:00 | |
It's one of the longest prayers in the church. | 13:04 | |
It takes about 15 minutes to pray it. | 13:06 | |
And by the time we've finished praying it, | 13:09 | |
we have prayed for sailors and we've prayed | 13:10 | |
for people on journeys, for pregnant women, | 13:14 | |
for women who would like to be pregnant; | 13:16 | |
we have prayed for bread, young children, | 13:19 | |
people with various kinds of illnesses. | 13:22 | |
And a student said one year, after we had prayed | 13:28 | |
this prayer, at the end of the service, | 13:31 | |
and I said, "How'd you like that long prayer | 13:34 | |
"we prayed, The Great Litany?" | 13:37 | |
And he said, "I just kept standing there, thinking, | 13:40 | |
"'It's amazing that God cares about all this, isn't it?'" | 13:45 | |
And that's a good-- | 13:50 | |
I mean, what kind of God have we got | 13:51 | |
that would get involved in stuff like pregnancy | 13:53 | |
and pain and people alone and traveling? | 13:57 | |
Prayer is not primarily asking God | 14:05 | |
to do things, even things so basic as bread. | 14:08 | |
Rather, prayer is a courageous determination | 14:13 | |
to let God be who God is. | 14:17 | |
People say, "I always get answers to my prayer." | 14:21 | |
But if you've done much praying, you know that | 14:24 | |
a lot of the answers you get to prayer are, "No." | 14:27 | |
And in those times, we're left with a mystery | 14:33 | |
of why doesn't God want for us what we want for us? | 14:35 | |
And why is God different | 14:39 | |
from the way we would want God to be? | 14:41 | |
Reynolds Price, Duke writer, in his book, | 14:46 | |
A Whole New Life, tells of when he was | 14:50 | |
in the very depths of his illness with cancer. | 14:52 | |
He one night, in a tortured night, encountered Christ | 14:56 | |
in a vision, in a dream, and in this dream | 15:02 | |
he says he is there in the Holy Land and Christ is there | 15:07 | |
and Christ turns around and addresses him. | 15:12 | |
And he looks at him and he says, | 15:15 | |
"My son, your sin is forgiven." | 15:16 | |
Ever typical of Reynolds, he replies to Jesus, | 15:21 | |
"Wait a minute, who said I was worried about my sin? | 15:25 | |
"The main thing is, am I going to be healed?" | 15:29 | |
And he said the Christ looks aggravated at that point | 15:32 | |
and said, "Yeah, and that too," and walks off. | 15:36 | |
(laughter) | 15:39 | |
And so we say in daily speech, we'll say things like, | 15:40 | |
"Take heart," and we mean by that take courage. | 15:45 | |
Go ahead and take courage. | 15:49 | |
Sometimes it's tough to pray because we lack the guts | 15:52 | |
to risk an encounter with the true God | 15:55 | |
and all of God's free, stunning, untamed-ness. | 15:59 | |
And yet, that's prayer; that's why you're here this morning. | 16:07 | |
And you might think of every act of worship | 16:11 | |
we do this morning as just an attempt | 16:13 | |
to be with God and to let God be God. | 16:17 | |
How is it possible to pray always, | 16:24 | |
I mean to pray constantly? | 16:28 | |
I think that's only possible because of | 16:31 | |
the nature of God and our relationship. | 16:33 | |
I know someone, for instance, | 16:36 | |
who calls her mom nearly every night. | 16:38 | |
Now, you're saying to yourself, | 16:42 | |
"She must really be dependent on her old lady," | 16:44 | |
or, "That mother ought to get out of her daughter's life," | 16:46 | |
or, "That girl needs to learn to call her parents | 16:50 | |
"only when she's low on cash or for important things." | 16:53 | |
But, when I asked this sophomore, | 16:57 | |
"Why do you call your mother every night?" | 17:00 | |
She replied, "Well, my mom is the only person I know | 17:04 | |
"who actually cares about what kind of day I've had. | 17:11 | |
"And it's really wonderful to know throughout the day | 17:18 | |
"that there's someone, somewhere, who actually cares." | 17:23 | |
And that is why we keep praying. | 17:31 | |
And that is why we don't lose heart. | 17:35 | |
We persist, not to get things out of God. | 17:40 | |
But we keep at it, and you keep coming back, | 17:45 | |
Sunday after Sunday, and we keep singing, | 17:49 | |
and we keep praying, and we keep praising, | 17:51 | |
out of a determination to be | 17:53 | |
with the true and the living God. | 17:59 | |
As we move in the service of worship, we reach a crescendo | 18:05 | |
this Sunday, called the Prayer of Thanksgiving. | 18:08 | |
And you may note in that Prayer of Thanksgiving, we start | 18:12 | |
with Genesis and work our way through the whole Bible. | 18:15 | |
And we say that God created the world | 18:18 | |
and we say that God sent the Prophets | 18:20 | |
and we say that in the fullness of time, | 18:22 | |
Jesus was sent, and then God gave us bread, and you know, | 18:24 | |
we spend the whole prayer, before we get around | 18:28 | |
toward the end, to ask God for anything. | 18:31 | |
And then when we ask God for something, | 18:33 | |
we ask God for something like The Holy Spirit. | 18:35 | |
We ask God to go ahead and be God. | 18:39 | |
And that is why we keep at prayer. | 18:46 | |
And that is why we never lose heart. | 18:53 | |
Amen. | 19:00 |
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