Thanks to the enviable genius of third grade teachers
and the proliferation of procrastination in the mind
of a nine year old, we have a new motto in our home.
First things first. Simple to remember. Easy to repeat.
Applicable to almost every situation. Oh, you want to
play with your friends? First things first—finish your
math homework. Planning some basketball watching
before bed? First things first—brush your teeth.
Interested in dessert after dinner? First things first—
eat what’s on your plate.
First things first. Not a bad summary of faith’s call on
our lives. Many times each day we make decisions,
and each of those decisions in its own way discloses
our priorities. The accumulation of those seemingly
small decisions over a vast span of time sets the
course of our lives. Following Jesus asks us to be
intentional in setting priorities and persisting in
following through on them.
Jesus told a parable so that his disciples would
remember to pray always. To pray repeatedly. To
pray without ceasing. It’s a story about putting first
things first.
But it’s also a story that might unsettle us. After all,
is Jesus really comparing God to a judge who is both
unjust and unfaithful? Are our prayers really being
equated with the desperate pleas of a powerless
petitioner who only receives justice because of her
persistent pestering? Is that really the picture of
prayer Jesus meant to paint?
Parables tell the truth, but they tell it slant. They
describe reality, but they turn it upside down. What is
being turned upside down in this provocative story?
Perhaps it would help if we begin at the end. Jesus
closes the encounter with a question. That question
hovers in the air as the text ends. The uncomfortable
query is left unanswered. “When the Son of Man
comes, will he find faith on earth?”
It seems to me that the parable’s answer to the
question is “yes, but...” God, whose own faithfulness
is steadfast, whose grace is unconditional, whose
responsiveness is both quick and steady, will
find a measure of faith among us, but it will be in
unexpected places. In fact, if you zoom out on the
Gospel of Luke, the theme is repeated throughout
the story. True faith is found over and over again, not
among the religious professionals and certainly not
those certain of their own righteousness, but among
the outsiders, the marginalized, the rejected, the
unclean, the ones certain of their sinfulness.
We see it in a widow who refuses to surrender in
her fight for justice from the powerful judge. Her
action demonstrates a truth confirmed in our own
experience. Faith is easy when life is good. It requires
little spiritual fortitude to pray when you hold all the
cards, when the world is arranged just right for you.
In fact, our prayers in such circumstances can easily
become lazy, self-righteous, and, perhaps worst of all,
performative. More on that next week.
True faith, according to this Sunday’s parable, is
persisting in prayer when you have reason to doubt
your words will have any impact at all. True faith,
displayed by our unnamed widow, looks like pouring
out your soul in honest petition before God. True
faith, in the words of this story, means praying for
justice over and over and over again. The widow
bothers the judge until he finally relents and gives
her what she asks, gives her what is right. Are we
instructed to bother God with our prayers?
The widow’s example is lifted as a model. What is
that model? Persistent prayer, yes. But there is more
to this parable. The persistent practice of prayer
changes us.
Yes, the time we spend in prayer, in the face of
promises delayed, long seasons of unsettling silence,
even exasperation bordering on hopelessness—that
is the time that transforms us so that we can hold our
prayer’s answer when it comes.
In recent years and even in recent days, I have been
troubled by the bifurcation of thoughts and prayers
on one side and action on the other side. Following
incidents of devastating loss, human depravity, and
unthinkable evil, a familiar pattern emerges. One set
of folks—often in the public eye—tweet, post, and
publish their thoughts and prayers for the suffering.
Another set—also often in the public eye—decry
those thoughts and prayers as ineffectual and
purely performative. Save your thoughts and prayers,
we don’t want them. How often have we seen this
collision in public discourse? Like so much of life in
our time, I’d suggest that we’ve created an either/
or when what is needed is a both/and. Prayer—if
it is true prayer—is never restricted to the realm of
thought or abstraction. True prayer is never restricted
to the realm of abstraction. Prayer, described and
modeled by Jesus, is itself an act of faith because it
drives us more deeply into the needs of those around
us. When we pray, we move our feet. People who
persist in prayer are also compelled to do something.
The story’s widow provides an embodied example of
discipleship. Her activism is her prayer. Her prayer
is activism. The faith she expresses isn’t a passive,
disengaged, ethereal wish that things may someday
be better.
Now, a confession. This morning’s sermon title
was chosen way back last summer when I planned
worship for the program year, and I thought it a
clever confluence of the judge who is bothered into
answering the widow and our call to pray without
ceasing. But all week long I’ve been wrestling with
another possibility.
What if God is bothered not by the abundance of our
prayers but by the emptiness of our words? What if
God is bothered by prayers that lack the conviction
that leads to action and impact?
One New Testament scholari
says, “To those who
have it in their power to relieve the distress of the
widow...the call to pray...is a command to let the
priorities of God’s compassion reorder the priorities
of our lives.”
In other words, first things first. Prayer helps us
with that.
First things first. Do your prayers equip you for
another way of life? Are we bold enough to pray for
a world turned upside down? Do we have enough
courage to pray that our lives might be rearranged
by God’s priorities? Can we together, can our
community, bear witness to the transformation that
persistent prayer makes possible? These are heavy
questions. They’re the consequential questions of
faith. How we answer them determines so much.
Every single week, in this space, we gather for
worship. And every single week, we offer prayers. We
pray out loud, and we pray silently. We pray together,
and we pray alone. We pray creative words we craft,
and we pray ancient words we repeat. It is, then, I
think, a worthy question to ask ourselves: How are
all those prayers changing us? What impact do they
have? Because it seems to me that if we are here
to go through motions, if we leave unchanged, we
are only bothering God. The Reformed theologian
Karl Barth wrote, “To clasp hands in prayer is the
beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the
world.” Can that be true here?
Of course it can. In a few moments we’ll do
something we do every single Sunday morning. We
will pray together these words, “Give us this day
our daily bread.” When we pray those words, we are
praying for sustenance. We are praying for ourselves,
yes. But it’s more than that. “Give us daily bread.” We
make that prayer on behalf of all who hunger. All who,
like the parable’s widow, hunger for righteousness.
All who lack daily nourishment. That prayer, if it is
true prayer, must not end when this service is over.
Once we have prayed, if we have really prayed for
daily bread, our awareness of the hunger in our
community must provoke a response. We can’t be
content with the world as it is when we pray “give
us this day our daily bread.” And so, each week, in
our building, neighbors are offered the sustenance
for which we have prayed in the form of bags of
groceries to meet their immediate needs. That’s
important. But the work of our prayers must not end
there either. We are called deeper. Over Christmas
break, a member of our congregation learned of a
need in our neighborhood, that there were families
struggling to afford school lunches for their children.
And so, on Thursday afternoon, on your behalf, I had
the privilege of delivering funds to cover the debt
of all students whose families had fallen behind on
lunch payments. You did that. Why? Because every
week you had prayed, “Give us this day our daily
bread” and you opened your hearts to make it so.
It’s important. It’s a start, but it’s not enough. Why
are our neighbors hungry? Why in God’s name
is a full-time job insufficient to pay rent and buy
groceries to feed your family? You see, our prayers
lead us more deeply into the needs that surround us.
They keep pushing us to put first things first, to live
the words we profess, to go further in our actions on
behalf of others.
When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith
among us?
The answer is in our hands.
So, Second Church, let’s stop bothering God and
pray for transformation. Amen.