Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
October 17, 2004

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

Let me let you in on some secrets about preaching. Sometimes the most difficult, and the most important, part of the preaching art is selecting a topic on which to preach. That decision often requires as much time, prayer, and discernment as the actual composition of the sermon. Using the lectionary, that ecumenical schedule of scripture texts for use in worship each Sunday, helps--sometimes. At least, the preacher who uses the lectionary has a starting point--sometimes. Using the lectionary, however, hardly solves all the problems of topic selection. Some weeks none of the lectionary texts seems very promising or helpful. In other weeks, the texts offer a rich and diverse range of possible topics. That was the case this week. Sometimes there are so many things I want to preach on that it’s hard to pare the list down to one. Then there are weeks like this one. The texts offer many important topics for preaching, and I don’t want to preach on a single one of them. This week, while I recognized many important topics in the texts, there wasn’t a one that actually appealed to me.

Of course, I always have the option of going off lectionary and preaching on something else; but the experts on such things tell me that one of the virtues of preaching from the lectionary is precisely that it makes you preach on things you don’t want to preach on. So I asked: Which of these texts do I not want to preach on the most? Which of them am I rejecting because I personally have the most trouble with it? I thought: Maybe the fact that I’m having the most trouble with it is telling me that that is precisely the one I should preach on. When I looked at it that way, it was obvious which text that was: Luke’s parable of the persistent plaintiff. I’ve never liked that parable. I’ve never liked what most preachers to with that parable. I’ve never believed that parable. I desperately did not want to preach on that parable; and that is precisely why I am preaching on that parable.

Now, maybe some of you share my dislike of the parable, but I imagine others of you are wondering: What’s Sorenson’s problem? After all, it’s just a parable about praying, and certainly praying is a good thing and a big part of the Christian life. Indeed, prayer is all that, but my problem is that the parable so often is taken to say more than that. People take it to mean essentially what a license plate frame I saw this past week said: "God answers knee-mail." That is, the parable is taken to mean, in a very simplistic, mechanistic way, that if you pray persistently for something, God will give it to you.

Well, I have a big problem with that. I could, I suppose, like a lot of pastors, give you a nice, reassuring, feel good sermon that claimed that God will in fact give you whatever you want if you pray for it long and hard enough. Problem is, I don’t believe that. It corresponds neither with my experience of prayer nor with my understanding and experience of God. Friends, God is not the cosmic Santa Claus. God is not just sitting around waiting to do our bidding. God in fact does not always answer even fervent and persistent prayer, at least not in the way we are expecting or even demanding. So, if the parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge really means what people usually take it to mean, I don’t want to have anything to do with it.

But is that in fact what it means? Can we really reduce it to a silly license plate saying? To answer that question, we have to take a closer look at it. It begins with Luke giving us his interpretation of what the parable is about. He says: "Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart." Luke interprets the parable before he even relates it. He tells us first of all that the parable is about the Disciples’ need. That tells us right up front that the parable isn’t about God, or even about prayer. It is about them and their need. It is about us and our need. Moreover, Luke tells us what need of ours it is about, and it isn’t the need to get whatever we ask for. Luke says that "to pray always" is an actual need of ours; and he connects that need to our need "not to lose heart." We make a big mistake, I think, if we interpret this parable without remembering Luke’s interpretation, an interpretation that he thought was so important that he wanted to give it to us before he gave us the parable itself, probably because he knew the parable could so easily be misinterpreted.

After that interpretation, we get to the parable itself. It starts with the familiar story that gives the parable its name. An unjust, ungodly judge at first refuses to do justice for a widow who comes to him seeking legal relief of some sort. In the story the widow won’t take no for an answer, or perhaps she won’t take no answer for an answer. Either way, she keeps pestering the unjust judge until he finally grants her request just to get her out of his hair. Then Luke switches from having Jesus tell the story to having him draw a moral from it: "Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them."

People always take this passage as saying that God will grant persistent prayers, the "God answers knee-mail" exegesis. The God as Santa Claus exegesis. Problem is, that’s not what it says! It does not say God will grant any prayer that is made with persistence. It says that God will grant justice to the chosen ones who cry out to God day and night. Not grant the prayer. Grant justice. The problem of course is: What does the passage means by "grant justice?" To be honest, I’m not sure what Luke meant by "grant justice." Still, I think we need to keep wrestling with this story if we are going to wring any meaning out of it.

Not coincidentally, the lectionary pairs this parable with the story from Genesis about Jacob wrestling with God. Yes, I know it says "a man wrestled with him until daybreak." Still, it’s clear that it is really God that Jacob was wrestling with. The "man" changes Jacob’s name to one meaning "strives with God," and the "man" tells Jacob/Israel that he has beheld the face of God and survived. This image of Jacob wrestling with God, I believe, sheds light on the meaning of the parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge.

The pairing of the Jacob story with the parable about persistent prayer suggests, I think, that we should focus not on the granting of prayer in the parable but on the persistence, just as Jacob was persistent in his wrestling with God. That, after all, is what Luke tells us to focus on when, as we have seen, he says the parable is about our need to pray always and not to lose heart. The point of the parable is not that by prayer we get what we want. That isn’t even what the parable says. Rather, the parable is telling us, I think, two things, one negative and one positive. The first is that the life of faith is not about getting what we want. The second is that the life of faith is about staying in relationship with God. Luke’s parable images that relationship as praying always and crying to God day and night. The Genesis story images that relationship as wrestling with God. Both are images of persistence. Both tell us we can lose our relationship with God if we give up. Not stated but implied are two corollaries: First that God will not give up on us, and second, that we can stay in a productive, rewarding relationship with God if we’ll just keep at it and, as Luke says, not lose heart.

These images tell us that our life with God is precisely not about God doing things for us. It is about us staying in the relationship, staying in the struggle, the wrestling match, the crying day and night. The life of faith consists of that engagement, that struggle. Neither passage tells us that staying in that struggle will get us what we want or pray for. We may get a dislocated hip for our trouble. We may get our name changed to "strives with God," which is what Israel means, and it may get us something, as Luke suggests; but it likely will not get us the petty things for which we so often pray.

Luke’s Jesus says that it will get us "justice." Whatever Luke may have understood that to mean, I understand it to mean that if we stay engaged in our life with God, if we stay in the struggle, God will give us what we need most. Luke calls that justice. We get justice from God when we get what we need most. And what is that? Precisely to stay in the relationship, to stay in the struggle. That’s how we keep God in our lives. That’s how we keep God’s blessing in our lives, not by trying to manipulate God by prayer into doing our bidding, but by continuing to wrestle, continuing to cry out, continuing to pray. That makes God alive in our lives, and that is indeed what we truly need. Amen.