Sermons

The Gospel reading this morning is often given the title The Persistent Widow. Widows were considered used goods, worth only whatever their closest male relative decided they were worth. The unjust Judge can’t be bothered by her, until he is bothered by her, because of her persistence, and he eventually gives in.

If we were a Pentecostal church we might interpret that the judge is supposed to be God and we are the widow. And the message might be about having to persist in order to get what we want from God. The more faithful, the more prayerful, the more we persist, the more likely God will listen and hear our pleas. If we follow that theology logically, when bad things happen to you it’s because you fell out of faith. Ive heard preachers explain away job loss and illness as a result of the believer not being faithful enough. You will never hear anything resembling that from me and it breaks my heart when I hear it from others.

Certainly, Jesus teaches persistence in prayer is good-I’m not arguing that, but if we step back, we notice more. First of all the judge in this parable in unjust. We know the same is not true for God. And so right off the bat, their is an important distinction. God is not an unjust judge who is bothered by our persistence; so bothered that he gives in just to get rid of us like a mosquito or annoying gnat that won’t give up.

 And yet just this past week I was asked by a friend if I thought God is bothered by her repetition of prayer. If I thought that their prayer was bothering God because it was repetitive, and perhaps not important enough because “God must have better things to do.”

If there is one thing I can stress in the hope that you will hear it and trust it with all your being, it’s this. God wants nothing more than for you to be in a relationship with God. In prayer, in dialogue, in thoughts and in feelings, all of you. That includes your love, your fear, your anger, your frustration, every emotion known to God, God wants you to engage with God unceasingly. How can you bother a God who wants all of you all of the time?

That is my belief that I believe not with my head, but with my whole being. If you recall a few weeks ago, I preached about faith. Do the doing. I talked about faith not as a belief but as a verb, an acting out, and that in the doing of your faith, you will find it grow by experiencing it from the outside in. Start with the behavior and the feeling will follow, rather than waiting for the feeling to kickstart the behavior. You remember, if we wait to feel kind in order to be kind, we may go through the day quite cranky. But if “act as if” we feel kind, if we behave kindly even though we don’t feel it, we may find that in the doing, we find our kindness, we find grace, we find a deeper expression of faith, in the doing.

Now with all of that said, in light of today’s scripture, I am asking for you to accept a belief, not with your head, like a creed, but with your heart, a covenant given to us, a covenant written on our hearts. That’s the Jeremiah reading….which is an amendment to the original covenant made in Deuteronomy 6. Listen to what changes in these two covenants. In Deuteronomy 6 we hear what’s called The Shema,  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.  Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.

But Jeremiah brings these words from God-“I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. … I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” That sounds like unconditional love to me.

I will write it on their hearts, I will be their Good and they will be my people, chosen. Like adopted children loved and held,  a covenant, a promise, with no conditions.

I am asking that you know this, with your heart, the kind of knowledge that you just know, trust, and accept so that you never have to ask again whether you are bothering God.

“Pray always and do not lose heart.”

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The dictionary defines persistence and perseverance as synonyms, but I would argue that perseverance holds a depth of character to it, that is far greater than persistence. When I think about persistence, I think of Charlotte asking me a million different ways, up, down and sideways, if she can stay overnight at an unsupervised party. Mom, I’m about to turn 18, Mom I”ll be in college in a year, I thought we had trust mom, don’t you trust me? That’s persistence. Perseverance, on the other hand, is cultivated through failure. A trying and failing and trying again. A character building quality that is not the same as succeeding. One does not have to succeed to persevere. Perseverance is an accomplishment of character that develops afterlife has kicked you around a bit.

And if anyone knew about perseverance, it was Jesus, who kept going, knowing that soon he would willingly walk to the cross, knowing that thousands would reject him, that even some closest to him would deny knowing him, but  he kept teaching, kept loving, kept forgiving, right till the end from the cross, forgive them, Father, they know not what they do.

When Jesus told us to not lose heart it’s not because he’s never grown weary. One doesn’t develop perseverance with smooth sailing. When we fail, when we are ignored, questioned, doubted and misunderstood, we also know what it means to lose heart. Surely Jesus knew, but only long enough to say (perhaps literally) to hell with that, to hell with fear, self-doubt, self-loathing, ego and all the other things that get in the way.

There is a Haitian prayer that says-

Lord,
There is a big devil called
Discouragement.
We ask you to send him away because he is bothering us.

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Finally, I’ll end with a story I shared with the Deacons last week written by Dr. Rachel Remen, who as a little girl was taught by her principle, at an assembly filled with children, that they better pray three times a day because God needed to be reminded that they were there. You prayed because you had to make him look at you. (Much like a persistent widow of an unjust judge) The principal told the children that If God turned God’s face from you, you would wither up and die like an autumn leaf. She even held up a dry withered leaf to illustrate her point. Remen was five years old when she witnessed this and it frightened her to the core. She began to worry that God might blink. If God blinked than surely she’d die, and she began to lose sleep night after night. She eventually went to her Grandfather who was the only religious member of her family and described what had happened and began to cry in fear. Her grandfather stroked her hair and seemed distressed and angry, but calmly asked her, Nashume-le (which means “little soul”) Would you know if your mother and father had gone out and left you alone in the house? Still crying she answered yes. He asked, “how would you know that? Would you see them and look at them?” She shook her head no.  “Would you hear them?” No. “Could you touch them?” She had stopped crying and was puzzled saying “I just know that I’m not alone in the house.” Her grandfather said “Good! Good! That’s how you know God is there. He doesn’t need to look at you to know you are there. God just knows, in the same way, you know God is there. You just know.”

God does not need your persistence, we need our persistence. We need perseverance, we need to be reminded that we are not alone. When we pray, when we are hurt from falling down and are tired of asking, again and again, we remember the promise that was made long ago, we are loved by a God who has written that love in our hearts, Luke ends the passage “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Will he? Will he find it in your heart, in your will, in your soul, in our faith? God has written his promise on our hearts. Take it to heart. God doesn’t blink, we do. God is relentlessly welcoming us into prayer, into a relationship, into faith, reminding us that we are never alone, not in the house, not in the world, and not in ourselves. Jesus Christ’s perseverance will never be in vain when we persevere in faith. Because our faith makes a difference in our lives, the lives of those around us, and most certainly in the heart a God who never blinks.