Nag, Nag, Nag

Scriptures:       Jeremiah 31:27-34,  Psalm 121

                        2 Timothy 3:14 -4:5, Luke 18:1-8         

Today’s Gospel reading comes from a teaching section late in Luke’s gospel, in which Jesus is teaching his disciples on the road to Jerusalem, using a series of parables, along with several encounters with other people along the road, as teaching moments.  

Here Luke is very explicit about Jesus’ reason for this parable:  “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not lose heart.”  This lesson would be crucial not only for Jesus’ original disciples, but for Luke’s readers.  On one level, within the context of the Gospel, Jesus would soon be in Jerusalem, would be betrayed, arrested, crucified.  If they were to be faithful through all this without losing heart, they would need to pray.  On another level, remember that Luke’s gospel was written decades after Jesus had last walked the earth, promising to return again soon.  And yet, 20, 30, 40, 50 years or more later, Jesus had still not returned.  Had the whole thing been a misunderstanding or a mistake?  And so Luke’s readers likewise would have been tempted to lose heart, and therefore needed to know how to pray always.  All of which is to say, for Jesus’ disciples, for Luke’s readers, and for us, even though we read this account in very different contexts, it has something important to say to us.

Jesus tells a story about a corrupt judge, one who, as Jesus puts it, neither fears God nor respects people.  Now, I know we in Philadelphia, we in Pennsylvania have never heard of judges like that……who am I kidding, we read about judges like this all the time!  In 1903, Lincoln Steffens famously titled an essay, “Philadelphia: Corrupt and Contented”.  At that time, Philly was a one-party Republican town, and sometime in the ‘50’s or ‘60’s Philly became a one-party Democratic town, and in 113 years later, under both major parties, Philadelphia is still corrupt and contented, and the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania is likewise awash in corruption.  We may remember Judge Willis Berry being charged in 2014 with theft of services and conflict of interest, because he was supposedly using his secretary and other staff to run his private property rental business.  There have been numerous arrests over the years for Philadelphia traffic court judges fixing tickets; the corruption of Philadelphia’s traffic courts is legendary.  On a much more heinous level, in Wilkes Barre, two judges, Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan, received bribes from the builder of two for-profit, private youth detention centers, in exchange for imposing long sentences on juvenile offenders in order to keep the for-profit prisons filled, and the money rolling in.  Dozens of children’s lives were ruined because these judges wanted a few extra bucks.  Google “Philadelphia” and “corrupt judges” and you’ll find enough reading to keep you up at night for a long long time.

So Jesus introduces us to a coin-operated judge, a real Philly special, who neither fears God nor respects people.  And then he introduces us to a widow who is seeking justice.  Jesus is not pretending to be a court reporter, and so we’re not given the details of her case.  What we do know is that, as a class, widows in that time were poor and powerless.  They were not allowed to inherit their husbands’ property, and so they had to depend on the goodwill of their other family members and the community.  Indeed, caring for widows was a key part of the mission both for Jewish faith communities and for the earliest followers of Jesus. 

Of course, a wealthier person would have found it more practical just to grease the judge’s palms, just to slide him a few bucks – but the widow had no bucks to slide, no grease for the judge’s palms.  And given the widow’s vulnerable position, we might expect her to act in a way so as to be seen but not heard – but not this widow!  She keeps coming to the judge’s courtroom, saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.”  She comes again and again, and the judge just keeps putting her off, telling her, “No lady, go away.  No, lady, I can’t help you today.  Hey lady, you caught me on my lunch hour, too bad, come again another time.  Hey lady, talk to the hand!  Hey lady, the line forms to the right, take a number.  Go away, lady, you bother me.”  But the widow just keeps showing up, perhaps even following him as he makes his way from his courtroom to his home, over and over again with the same words, “Grant me justice against my opponent!”.  Soon enough the judge finds he has a stalker on his hands, and says to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”  And actually this translation tames down the Greek a bit; we’re told the original Greek says something closer to “I will grant her justice so that she doesn’t give me a black eye.”  Whether that would have meant a literally black eye – the widow punching the judge in the face in front of his colleagues – or a metaphorical black eye in terms of embarrassment and loss of credibility – in any case, the widow finally gets what she wants.  It’s actually a funny story, the way Jesus has the judge talking to himself:  “Almighty God doesn’t scare me.  But this widow…that’s a different story.”

And Jesus closes the parable out by saying, “Listen to what the unjust judge says.  And won’t 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?  And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

A caution:  Jesus is not saying that God is like the unjust judge.  Rather, he’s saying that if even a cranky, corrupt judge can be nagged into doing the right thing, our loving heavenly Father is that much more eager to do so.

“Won’t God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?”  Elsewhere Jesus tells his listeners, “If you child asks for bread, would you offer a stone?  If your child asks for an egg, would you hand over a scorpion?  If you, as bad as you are, can give good things to your children, won’t God give the Holy Spirit to those who ask?”  These words of Jesus had always been a little bit abstract to me, because I don’t have children, and so children really aren’t a part of my life except here at church.  But Elijah taught me something about persistence in prayer last Sunday after church. Yes, Elijah taught the pastor a lesson.  I was driving Jay’s family home after church last week, and at a point Elijah asked me to buy him a pretzel.  And I said no – Jay didn’t seem to want me to buy Elijah a pretzel, he said they had pretzels at home.  And after I said no to Elijah, the next sound I heard was the most unearthly blood-curdling high-pitched shrieking I’d ever heard in all my life, bar none.  And it went on and on and on and on as I was driving, block after block, traffic light after traffic light.  Pouting and crying I was prepared for.  Shrieking, not so much.  I stared at Elijah in abject horror…..what on earth was that sound coming out of his mouth?  Was he having a seizure?  No, he was just throwing a tantrum, because he really wanted a pretzel.  Again, remember that I don’t have kids, so toddlers having total meltdowns aren’t part of my experience…..and I don’t remember my own long ago tantrums, though I’ve always been high-strung as long as I can remember – achieving some degree of inner peace by age 55 is sheer grace from God - and I know I must have had plenty of meltdowns at Elijah’s age.   I must say, Elijah has an amazing set of lungs, and possibly a bright future as an opera singer.  I’m also proud to say that, after all that noise, Elijah still didn’t get a pretzel.  (See, I actually can say no occasionally.)  And by the time we got to Jay’s home, Elijah had calmed down, though he still wasn’t happy about not having a pretzel.   But I learned that when children ask adults for something they want, they can make a lot of noise, and they can keep asking over and over….just as the widow asked the judge.  And they’re not always polite about it. And so maybe Jesus is telling us that we don’t have to be quite so polite in our prayers to God, that it’s ok to be persistent, even to the point of nagging, of being a pest, if it comes to that.

It’s important to ask. But it’s also important to consider what we’re asking for.  In Jesus’ story, the widow was asking for what? – justice.  And Jesus said, “Won’t God grant justice to his chosen ones who ask day and night?”  Justice.  As I’ve said in sermons past, this isn’t Janis Joplin singing, “O Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz”.  This isn’t Eartha Kitt asking Santa Baby for “a ’54 convertible too, light blue.”  It isn’t even Elijah pleading for a pretzel.   Justice.  Mercy.  In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus taught us to pray “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”  And all of our individual prayers for justice, for mercy, for healing, for wholeness, for peace…..these all come under the heading of “Thy will be done” – because justice and mercy and healing and wholeness and peace are God’s will.   So when through prayer we put our will in alignment with God’s will, our prayers are heard.  Actually, all our prayers are heard, and all our prayers are answered….but while the answer is often “yes”, sometimes the answer is “no”, or “not yet”…or perhaps, “no, but here’s something even better.”

We think of prayer as a way to change God’s will….and we are told in Scripture of times when God has responded to prayer…..but prayer also changes us.  Prayer is not about us handing a shopping list to God.  Prayer is not using God as some sort of heavenly concierge or butler.  Done well, prayer is not a monologue, but a conversation, with us listening at least as much as we’re talking. Over time, as we mature in faith, our prayers will become less self-centered, less about pretzels for ourselves, and more in tune with God’s will.

The widow prayed for justice…and we are also called to pray for justice, and to work for justice – which is really just a different way of praying.  Sometimes we pray with bowed heads and folded hands, and sometimes we pray with legs that march and arms that embrace and fingers holding food and clothing to be distributed to others.  Pope Francis is quoted as saying, “You pray for the hungry. Then you feed them.  That’s how prayer works.”  We look on all the brokenness of our world, and we pray, “God, fix all this” – as Habakkuk did in a section of his book we read a few weeks ago.  But sometimes God’s answer to prayer is…..us.  Or each other.  As the saying goes, at least sometimes, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”  And sometimes our prayers are answered, not by God sending people we’ve never met from the outside, but by God’s preparing us to respond to our own prayers.  And it takes persistence.  As Dr. Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”  These days, it’s a major act of faith for me to believe that – in recent years, the arc of the universe seems to be pointing toward injustice, and as a species it sometimes seems to me that humankind is throwing a collective temper tantrum, doing horrible things to one another and to the earth even though we know better, just out of spite.   But as a Christian, I still have to believe that, for all the ugliness and brokenness around us and among us and within us, God is still in charge – despite all the evidence to the contrary - and God still desires justice.  “And yet”, Jesus said, “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”  Good question.

“Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”  May we pray always, and may we be willing to let God use us to answer the prayers of others.  Amen.

 

A Future With Hope

Scriptures:       Jeremiah 28:10-17, 29:1-11, Psalm 66:1-12

                        2 Timothy 2:8-15, Luke 17:11-19        

Roughly 20 years ago, in business consultant circles, there was a popular book called “Who Moved My Cheese”.  It’s a sort of allegory about a pair of mice and a pair of mouse-sized people who live in a maze, and go out every day in search of cheese, which is provided for them in cheese stations along the route of the maze.  The mice and the mini-people are used to going each day to a certain cheese station and finding it stocked with enough cheese that they can eat to their hearts’ content.  But eventually, no more cheese is stocked at that particular station.  The mice, using their superior sense of smell and their instincts, quickly start bounding down the maze in search of another cheese station.  The miniature people, however, become irate, using the phrase from the title of the book:  “Who moved my cheese?”  At first, they keep coming back to the cheese station, thinking that if they wait long enough, the cheese will come back.  Eventually, after many cheeseless days (and after losing some weight from hunger) one of the miniature people realizes the cheese isn’t coming back, and goes out in search of new cheese, leaving messages of encouragement along the way so that the other miniature person will eventually follow.  Of course, the point of the book, which is addressed to business types, is that market conditions and financial trends change, and that businesses need either to adapt or go out of business.

In our reading from Jeremiah, for the Jews exiled in Babylon, their cheese has been moved in a big way.  In fact, both the cheese and they themselves have been moved.  Truth to tell, their lives in Babylon weren’t that terrible.  Babylon allowed them to live together as families and practice their faith – though without the Temple in Jerusalem as the focal point of their worship, they had to make adjustments.  But they didn’t want to be in Babylon.  They desperately wanted to be home in Judah.  And they were willing to listen to anyone who could give them hope of returning home soon.

And so, in our reading, we have a contest between a false prophet, Hananiah, and a true prophet, Jeremiah.  Jeremiah had been preparing the people for the reality that they were going to be in Babylon for a long, long time, in bondage to Babylon.  To illustrate this, Jeremiah wore a wooden yoke, such as would be used to keep cattle in harness.  By contrast, Hananiah falsely states that God had spoken to him, and said that the exiles would be liberated to return to Judah in two years.  And he dramatically broke the yoke that Jeremiah wore.

And Jeremiah walked away from Hananiah with some uncertainty.  Maybe Hananiah was right.  Maybe God had spoken to Hananiah.  Maybe God was going to give the Jews a reprieve.

But no.  God spoke to Jeremiah, telling him to say to Hananiah, “You have broken a wooden yoke, but it will be replaced by an iron yoke.  The Lord has not sent you, and you made the people trust in a lie. And for that, you will be punished” – and we’re told Hananiah was dead within a year.

Then Jeremiah sent a letter to the exiles in Babylon:  “Build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat from them.  Have children and grandchildren in Babylon.  But seek the welfare of Babylon where you have been exiled, and pray to God on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.  Only when 70 years have been completed will you be brought back to Judah.  But I will bring you back, because I will fulfill my promise.  My plans are for your good and not for your harm, so that you may have a future with hope.”  Even in a strange land, God had not abandoned them.

I began my sermon with a summary of the book “Who Moved My Cheese”, which describes change in a fairly unemotional way.  Of course businesses have to adapt to changing conditions if they are to survive.  End one line of business and start another; close one store and open another.  It’s a process driven by rational self-interest, without room for sentiment.  But from a pastoral perspective, adapting to change is not just like going in search of new cheese, but more like the grieving process described by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, which comes in five stages:  denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.  These stages of grief play out not only on an individual level, but on a group level, even a national level.  In our Old Testament readings from last week and this week, we see the Jewish exiles in different stages of grief over the destruction of Jerusalem and their temple, which for them was quite literally the end of the world as they’d known it.  In the prophet Hananiah, we see denial and bargaining:  “No, we don’t want to be here, but we won’t be here long.  In two years we’ll be back in Judah. We can hold out that long, right? It’ll be over before we know it.”  In Psalm 137 from last week, which ended with a wish that the children of Babylon be dashed against rocks, we see anger, fury, rage.  The book of Lamentations, found in the Bible immediately after the book of Jeremiah, begins with the words, “How lonely sits the city that was once full of people! How like a widow she has become, she that was great among the nations! She that was a princess among the provinces has become a vassal….Judah has gone into exile with suffering and hard servitude; she lives now among the nations and finds no resting place.”  The whole book is a heart-rending expression of incredible sadness and depression at what has happened to Judah.  And in Jeremiah’s letter to the exiles, we see the final stage of grief, acceptance:  “You exiles are going to be in Babylon for 70 years.   You will live in Babylon long enough to see your children and grandchildren.  Make the best of it: build houses and plant gardens.  More than that, pray for Babylon, because your prosperity is tied to Babylon’s prosperity.”  What a contrast to the rage expressed in last week’s reading from Psalm 137, where the writer wanted to attack the Babylonians – here, Jeremiah is telling the people to pray for the good of Babylon, to pray for the enemies who had enslaved them.  And then Jeremiah reminded them that at the end of the 70 years in Babylon they – or their grandchildren anyway - would return to Judah.  In the end, there was, as Jeremiah said, “a future with hope”.

We generally think of grief as something that happens when a loved one dies, but life brings many occasions for grief.  In fact, Kubler-Ross’s description of the stages of grief also describes how we adapt to any kind of unwanted change – the loss of a job, the loss of a home, the end of a relationship.   We may begin with denial – insisting that our employment or home is secure, that our relationship is strong, even though in fact the boss may have given us 2 weeks’ notice, our landlord may have handed us an eviction notice, or we come home from work to find our spouse or partner packing their things into a moving van.  We may move to anger: how dare the company fire me after all the hard work I’ve done?  How dare the bank foreclose on me or the landlord evict me? How dare my spouse or partner desert me?  How could they be so unreasonable, after all I’ve done for them?  We may move to bargaining: asking the boss/the bank/the partner “I’ll do better next time. I’ll change.  Really. Please give me another chance”.  And then reality sets in – that the situation has changed and there’s no going back – and we’re depressed, because the new situation stinks.  But eventually the sadness lifts and we take steps to move forward, looking for another job or living space or companion.  We can’t go back to the way things were, but we can live with a new version of normal.  Of course, the process isn’t as neat and tidy as that; sometimes we move forward only to circle back to an earlier stage of grief, and sometimes we may become stuck in our grief and never come out on the other side without some sort of intervention from others.

I think that in our troubled times, we as a country are going through a similar grieving process.  We recognize that our country faces a lot of problems – and rightly so.  But then we want to return to the way things were, when the streets were safe, when neighbors looked out for each other, when the factories were humming and there were plenty of jobs and a high school graduate could get a well-paying union job for life, when public officials and the police were respected, when the churches were full every Sunday, and I could go on.  Recalling the lyrics from the theme from the old TV show “All In The Family” “Mister we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again…..Didn’t need no welfare state/everybody pulled his weight/ gee our old LaSalle ran great / those were the days……”

It’s understandable.  We remember what the past was – even though we may be a little selective in our memory, hanging on to the good parts and editing out the bad parts.  (For example, if I get sick, I surely don’t want to go to a hospital with 1950’s medical technology.)  We don’t know what the future holds.  And the present is deeply unsettling.  In a sense, we may feel like we’re in exile in our own country, cut off from a world that was familiar and thrown into a world with different priorities from ours, a world that at times seems to have gone mad.  And certainly, here in the church, we may feel in exile.  Many of a certain age remember when everybody went to church on Sunday – it was just the thing to do, and all the stores were closed on Sunday anyway - and when the teachings of the church carried weight in the broader society.  Once, when the Pope or the Archbishop of Canterbury or other prominent clergy spoke, people listened.  Now, most ignore, and quite a few laugh. As it’s been said, once upon a time, the churches were on the main line.  Now we’re on the sidelines.

Our reading from Jeremiah gives us contrasting pictures of a false prophet and a true prophet, of false hope and true hope, both offering visions of the future.  Remember Hananiah, the false prophet, told the people that they’d be back home in two years.  And we have many Hananiahs, many false prophets, in our country, offering false hope connected to easy answers, and often connected to scapegoating.  “Our problems are caused by those people over there.  If we get rid of them, our problems will go away. If we just round up this group and deport them or round up that group and lock them up – and if we don’t let anyone else in – our worries are over.”  

Jeremiah shows us a different way forward.  Jeremiah told his readers – and tells us – to beware of false prophets offering easy solutions.  He tells us that rather than holding out hope for a return to the past, we should live in the present:  build houses, plant gardens, have children and grandchildren - in a word, live our lives.  Not only that, but we are called to seek the good of our society and pray for our society.  So we should pray for those in authority, and work for stronger schools and safer neighborhoods, for a healthy environment and for peace - not to return to the past, but to make things better in the present – and not just for a few, but for all.

At the same time, Jeremiah reminds us that we should hold out hope for better days – God also holds out for us a future with hope - but on God’s time, not our own.  Jeremiah told the exiles that they would not be in Babylon forever, and that after 70 years their grandchildren would return home.  Similarly, we as Christians hold the vision of the coming of the reign of God – holding that vision and living into that vision is the mission of the church -  but the reign of God in its fullness will come on God’s schedule, not our own.   In the meantime, as Christians, we are to live in the world without getting caught up in the world’s priorities. We are to live in Babylon without becoming Babylonians.  We may recall that along the same lines, Jesus called his followers to be in the world but not of the world.  And just as Jeremiah told the exiles to pray for Babylon, Jesus told his followers to pray for their enemies.

Jeremiah, speaking for God, told his readers – and tells us, “My plans are for your good and not for your harm, so that you may have a future with hope.”  In our unsettling days, may we recall these words from Paul’s letter to Timothy:

If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
   if we endure, we will also reign with him;
   if we deny him, he will also deny us;
   if we are faithless, he remains faithful--
   for he cannot deny himself.

God remains faithful.  May we be faithful as well. Amen.