October 21, 2007

Proper 24 C

Genesis 32:22-31; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8 -- Never Give Up!

Did you pick up on the red thread that runs through the scripture readings for today?

At mid-life, a clan leader confronts his own passivity and emerges the winner of a late-night wrestling match with a stranger. A young preacher receives Paul's advice to keep on keeping on. And a widow whose only weapon against the wrong done to her by her neighbor is her nagging.

The three share a motto: "Never give up."

Persistence is something we know something about out there in the fast lane. We don't give up easily on the things we care most deeply about.

We're serious about our over-achieving. We're hard on ourselves and others, driven by high expectations, determined to succeed. We're relentless in our efforts to improve our performance - at home, at work, at school. This quality of perseverance is one reason for our community's high productivity and affluence. It's a big part of who we are and the choices we make.

We believe God calls us to excellence in whatever we undertake - to be effective in our work, genuine in our relationships, persistent in our discipleship. We are the best kind of scouts, dedicated to leaving this world a better place than we found it.

On the face of it - at least as far as Luke is concerned - Jesus' parable of the crooked judge and the relentless widow is about persistence in prayer. The writer lays out the simple lesson of the story from the very beginning: "Pray always and do not lose heart." Accustomed as we are to getting what we want either by asking for it or working for it - applying pressure to get the result we want -- Jesus' advice about keeping up the pressure through prayer doesn't come as a surprise. There is a popular theology out there that pictures the One who hears our prayers as a kind of cosmic vending machine - our personal prayers acting as coins activating the mechanism that drops the answers into our waiting hands.

But Jesus' parable with its comical character actors points to another kind of persistent prayer: The kind that storms heaven NOT with our individual wish lists, but with petitions on behalf of the poor and oppressed. Prayers that beg for God's help in fighting to establish justice, peace, and grace everywhere.

The beautiful surprise of this story in Luke's gospel is that justice triumphs! Whatever happens, God's way of justice will prevail.

In the story of the unjust judge and the persistent widow, an immovable object meets an irresistible force. Arrogant and heartless, corrupt and untrustworthy, the judge is the last hope of the widow who stands before him with a claim against someone who has cheated her. Without a husband or sons to advocate and provide for her, she is utterly alone, vulnerable, powerless; the very word in Hebrew used to describe her underclass means "one unable to speak." She has no money to offer the judge as a bribe; her only currency -- her only lever -- is her persistence.

If I were to cast this parable as a scene in a sitcom, I'd want Ruth Buzzi from the old Laugh In show for the nagging widow. Larry David from Curb Your Enthusiasm, maybe, for the self-centered judge.

There's only one line of dialog from the widow and a single balloon for the judge's inner monologue. But it isn't hard to imagine her needling whine and his sneering pomposity.

Though the judge stands fast against the demands of the widow when she shows up to annoy him at public hearings, he finally caves when he realizes that her continual appearances ARE exposing him to public scrutiny. The original Greek in Luke's text literally says, "I will grant her justice, so that she may not end up giving me a black eye by continually coming." Her embarrassing presence threatens to shame the Teflon judge -- which would ruin his career, so he gives her the settlement she is pleading for. Justice can sure be noisy...

Who are today's "widows" -- the lost, least, and last in our social order? Picture a single mom left in the lurch to care for her kids -- up against the brick wall of a system that remains impenetrable despite her efforts to break through. Disabled veterans who didn't serve quite enough time to qualify for much needed health and education benefits. Or a person of retirement age struggling to figure out how to heat his home, eat, AND afford his medicine.

About six years ago, I met Anastasia at the snug home that she built with her own hands in the Sparks colonia, a squatters' settlement in the desert on the outskirts of El Paso, Texas.

Anastasia's community had 70,000 residents and many neat, well-cared for, brightly-painted cement-block homes...but no electricity, running water, or sewage facilities. For years, Anastasia and her neighbors pleaded with the City of El Paso to provide these basic services, but their requests fell on deaf ears. That is, until a grass-roots organization called EPISO, the El Paso Interreligious Sponsoring Organization, was formed in 1981 by the religious community.

EPSIO began to organize the people of Sparks and the hundreds of other colonias in El Paso County, teaching them to advocate for themselves, training leaders to deal effectively with power and to collectively exercise their citizenship. The organization established itself by leveraging over $200 million in state and federal funds to bring water and sewer services to Sparks and the rest of the county's colonias. Since then, EPISO has leveraged more than $1 billion in new funds, changing the political landscape by bringing thousands of El Paso-ans into the decision-making process.

Two things stand out in my memory of that meeting with Anastasia. She asked us if we had ever lived without electricity or running water, toilets, a washing machine, garbage pick up. I knew camping didn't really count, or vacations in places where power and water are less than reliable. Had we ever lived without access to those basics? I was speechless. For me to live like that was unthinkable.

The other vivid memory was something the community organizer from EPISO told us. His words still ring in my ears. "The people of Sparks and the other colonias don't want your charity or your pity. They want your power."

This year in Great Britain, they are marking the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. On this side of the pond, we've been made somewhat aware of this milestone with the release of the movie Amazing Grace, in which Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce are celebrated for the justice they achieved. Theirs is a story of prayer and perseverance.

Wilberforce became a member of Parliament as a young adult, but initially had little interest in religion or social justice. Then one Easter when he was in his late 20's, he had a powerful experience that changed his perception of life's purpose, and he began to see his place in Parliament not so much as a career but as God's calling. He began to set his mind to various issues of social justice, and Clarkson persuaded him of the importance of taking on the cause of abolition.

Seeing the slave trade abolished was anything but a swift victory. Campaigning for 20 years, Wilberforce was repeatedly obstructed by members of Parliament who had money interests in slavery. The country went to war, interrupting his efforts, and he was dogged by frequent illnesses that kept him in bed for weeks at a time. Someone with less determination would have given up. But for Wilberforce, prayer generated a sense of purpose that carried him through these endless setbacks, sustaining his determination and his belief that change must eventually come.

Wilberforce's story is like an echo of Jesus' parable about the unjust judge and the nagging widow...which reminds us that there are power differentials in this world that perpetuate injustice - with the direct result that old people go to bed hungry, women and children are still bought and sold in the sex industry, families remain homeless even when the adults are wage-earners, that for some there is life-saving medical treatment available when we get very sick and for others there is not, that some in this world have all the clean water we could ever need and many more never have enough.

This parable reminds us, too, that God will never give up seeking to establish justice, peace, and grace everywhere in God's world. God calls on us to partner with God, to leverage the gifts we've been given to tip the scales towards justice for all, to change the system that keeps so many in poverty - even in our wealthy nation.

God invites us in to work with God, and to be in relationship as part of that. "Praying always" beats down a path for God to bring us himself.

God is seeking to establish justice by the work of our hands...and to engage us as conversation partners along the way. But we aren't called to pray only...praying passively, hoping that God will do all the heavy lifting required to change the world.

As the African proverb says, "When you pray, move your feet."

Here at Family of Christ, ever since we learned that the food shelves at the CAP agency and at People Reaching Out to People have been growing emptier, we've been praying and we've been moving our feet. We collected a couple of carloads of groceries at the all-church picnic and hundreds of pounds of food since then.

Last week, I challenged the youngest among us to build a great tower of donations such as macaroni and cheese and peanut butter and tomato soup to see what a difference we could make if we worked together to help fill those empty shelves. Our tower won't eliminate the deepening poverty in our community. But as it grows higher, we'll see a picture start to come into focus of the power we control, power we can leverage for good, the power of our persistence and our faithfulness -- of God's persistent love and faithfulness.

For God is not like a rotten judge who has to be screamed at before he will listen to the cries of the troubled. And God won't give his child a black eye when the child asks for macaroni and cheese. I'm here to tell you that God isn't like that.

God is more like a nagging widow, when you think about it -- knocking, knocking at the doors of our lives with a driving desire for relationship and a plea for justice...refusing to give up, relentlessly pursuing us, beating down a path to our door, then leading us by the hand...to work for justice in God's world.

Thanks be to God!

The Rev. Kristie Hennig
Chanhassen, Minnesota

Seasons of the Spirit Congregational Life/Pentecost 2 - 2007, p. 74. Beuchner
Frederick Buechner, Wishful Thinking: A Seeker's ABC, p. 86.
Barbara Brown Taylor explores this idea in a sermon "Bothering God," Home By Another Way.