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.