Here is the sermon from Sunday, October 17 - on Luke 18:1-8:

I can’t help thinking of the Chilean miners as we all watched in awe this past week as all 33 of them … against almost impossible odds … emerged safely from the mine. People around the world watched and cheered … and prayed for their safety… as we did last Sunday in worship and on Tuesday night at the Session meeting.
Was it the prayers that made the difference?
If that’s so, then what about the 20 Chinese miners who died on Friday in an underground explosion?
Or what about one friend who is declared cancer-free … and someone else we know and love who is not?
Does God really answer all our prayers this way?
For many of us, prayer is not like drawing answers out of a hat any time we want them. Instead it is more often a lifetime of asking, seeking, knocking, waiting for an answer and growing impatient … even sometimes angry … with the silence.
An elderly black minister read this parable and gave a one-sentence interpretation: “Until you have stood for years knocking at a locked door, your knuckles bleeding, you do not really know what prayer is.”[1]
So when the Gospel tells us not to lose heart, that God will answer our prayers and bring justice quickly … sometimes our own experience tells us: well, maybe that’s true … but maybe not.
There is a dissonance here for people of faith – and there always has been as prophets like Habbakuk and voices like that of Job wonder why it is that the unjust prosper and the righteous suffer.
The answer was … and still is: I don’t know. But be patient and trust and be faithful.
Which is never a very satisfying answer … at least for those of us, and I count myself among them, who want to have all our questions answered and problems fixed – as quickly as possible.
Which is why I’ve always liked this parable of the “persistent” widow. She knows how to get things done – and won’t give up until it happens. She is the Erin Brockovich of the 1st century … she could be the lobbyist for hungry children or unemployed workers or widows on pensions pounding on every door in Congress until she’s heard and justice is done.
There’s a great little story of Mother Theresa visiting Edward Bennett Williams – a Washington lawyer who at one time was the lawyer for Frank Sinatra and Richard Nixon (among other notable … and sometimes notorious people) and for a time he was the owner of the Washington Redskins and the Baltimore Orioles. Mother Theresa was coming to ask for a donation for her hospice in India – and Williams was not inclined to give it to her. So before she got there, he agreed with his partner that they would hear her out, then politely refuse.
Which they did – hear her, that is, then decline to give a donation … whereupon Mother Theresa said simply, “let us pray.” After she had prayed, she started over and gave her pitch for the hospice once again – word for word as before. And again Williams said no … whereupon Mother Theresa said again, “let us pray.” And Williams, exasperated, looked up at the ceiling and said, “all right, all right. Get me my checkbook.”[2]
Maybe that’s the widow in our parable. Someone who should be insignificant, yet who by her faithful persistence can change the mind of even those who are more powerful than she.
Even this judge. There is not a lot to like about this judge. He makes no secret of the fact that he has no time for God and basically doesn’t like people. By refusing to hear her case he violates every command in the Jewish Law where judges were charged with the responsibility of hearing all complaints fairly and impartially. Let alone there is in Scripture a clear expectation that special regard and protection should be given to widows, orphans and foreigners.
But our judge seems to have had no regard for any of that.
And by the end of the parable, he hasn’t changed his mind either. He has no more regard for God than he did before and he could still care less about anyone else – and he doesn’t mind saying so. He has simply gotten tired of this woman coming to his court every day demanding justice.
Now, Luke tells us this parable is meant to show the disciples they should always pray and not give up, which might lead us to think that if we simply pester God long enough and hard enough, our prayers will be answered.
But parables … and life … are never as simple as that.
Several weeks ago on the Fox Network’s hit series “Glee,” which is all about a high school glee club, they actually tackled the topic of prayer. The series loves a good satire – and they had great fun poking at our idea of God as a god who gives us whatever we want. The high school football star creates his own theology of prayer when he thinks he sees the face of Jesus in his grilled cheese sandwich and then imagines that Jesus magically grants his every wish. It was all very silly and had to make you laugh at ourselves and our own expectations of prayer sometimes.
But while they never really resolved the issues of prayer (how could they, really in a 1-hour episode of a comedy show?) – still I have to give them credit: …they did not hesitate to raise the questions that youth and adults have every day:
what happens when our prayers are not answered,
and what happens when they are?
What difference does it make when we believe in the power of prayer …
and even when we don’t?
We pray for peace … but the world hasn’t changed very much.
We pray for healing … but sometimes there is no cure.
We pray for direction … but find no clear answers.
We pray for our children … but that doesn’t guarantee we can protect them or that they will make good decisions.
Is it simply a matter of pestering God long enough and hard enough … or is there something more?
This is where I think it helps to hear again the message throughout the gospels: that we are to ask and seek and knock, we are to remember that if God’s eye is on the sparrow then it is also on each one of us. For the parable is not comparing God to the unjust judge. God doesn’t need to be pestered into paying attention to us. After all, Jesus has taught us to pray asking each day for what we need … for daily bread and forgiveness and for God’s will to be done.
If that is so, then Jesus here is simply reminding us that if even such a man as that judge will see that the widow gets justice, then how much more will God hear us and care for us and see that justice is done … even if the answer is long in coming … even if it is not what we asked for.
It’s not about having the right prayers, or praying for the right things … it’s not always even about asking for anything. But over time, prayer is about building a relationship with the living God, who created us and sustains us in love and who cares for every details of our lives.
In the end, all of our prayers – our complaints, our requests, our praise, our thanksgiving, our confession … all of it is part of our relationship with God.
Like the widow we keep asking, seeking, knocking until prayer becomes the ongoing conversation between us and the One who made us.
“Then,” someone said, when we have that ongoing conversation with God … “we will never come away empty-handed from prayer, because even if we wind up with none of the things we thought we needed, we will always wind up with God listening, attending and answering our prayers in ways we hadn’t [even] imagined.”[3]
When the author Madeline L’Engle was waiting for results from a biopsy, she says that she kept praying: “please, don’t let it be cancer. Don’t let it be cancer.” And she says her friends kept telling her that was the wrong prayer – it was either cancer or it was not and praying would not make it otherwise.
But she insisted that praying for it not to be cancer was what was in her heart, therefore it could not be a “wrong prayer.” She needed to pray as her heart needed to pray – nothing more and nothing less.
When the biopsy results came back and she learned her cancer was terminal, she wondered if her prayers had been wasted, but she decided:
“Prayer is love, and love is never wasted…. Perhaps there will be unexpected answers to these prayers, answers I may not even be aware of for years. But they are not wasted. They are not lost. I do not know where they have gone, but [she goes on to say] I believe that God holds them, hands outstretched to receive them like precious pearls.”[4]
I find great courage in believing that prayer is never wasted and I have come to trust in the fact that throughout our lives there are times we will struggle with faith and with God … because it is in our nature to wonder, to doubt, to believe, to question, to hope even when we know only long periods of silence and to trust even when we see only in part.
Maybe Jesus is telling us this parable not to show us how God answers prayer, but rather to show us how we are to live … in faith … like the widow, faithful enough to keep:
- praying
- to keep asking, seeking, knocking … and doing it with boldness
- never giving up, never losing heart
- and trusting that each and every day, in every circumstance – God is there, persistently seeking us. Always desiring goodness, wholeness, and justice for all creation.
Even for us. Even for you. Even now.
May it be so. Amen.


[1] Cited by Fred Craddock, Luke (Interpretation Commentary – Louisville, KY: John Knox Press), p. 210.
[2] Cited by Rev. Dr. Thomas Long in “Praying Without Losing Heart,” found at the website: http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/long_5101.htm
[3] “On God’s Case,” by Stephanie Frey, The Christian Century, July 13, 2004, p. 17.
[4] James C. Howell, The Beautiful Work of Learning to Pray (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2003), p. 31.