I was the last person in my seminary class to get ordained. In every class, there is one person who seems to just take forever to get a call, who everyone says, “how is so-and-so not ordained yet?” In my class, that person was me. This was especially frustrating for me as a rule-follower; because I did all the things I was supposed to do. How come I was doing all the things I was supposed to and waiting, while my less rule-abiding classmates were getting calls. It was a very discouraging time in my life, and I really questioned whether I had truly been called into ministry. It wasn’t until the bishop of this synod went around the system and invited me for an interview here, that I finally was able to move out the uncomfortable in-between space of being an unordained seminary graduate and into the role of called pastor to a congregation.
The night before my ordination, I met up with my pastor. Pastor Wendy was with me through every step of the process of becoming a pastor. She read my initial entrance essay, she talked me through internship, she actually printed my final paperwork, because I didn’t own a printer at the time. And in the two years of waiting, she would check in with me, see how things were going, and encourage me in my sense of call. So as we sat outside a DC restaurant on a beautiful summer night, after rehashing the journey it had taken to get here, she listened as I went on about how excited I was about the church I had been called to. How its mission fit with my experience, how nice the people were, and how supported I felt by the synod. “It almost makes the wait worth it,” I remarked. “If things had come together in California, I never would have ended up in Michigan.”
At which point, she stopped me. “I hope you don’t think,” she said, “that this last two years was some sort of cosmic test that God made you go through, because it was not. The last two years are nothing more than an example of how the assignment process is broken. God has been with you every step of the way as you searched for a call, and God certainly helped you to get this one. But the last two years were not some divine test. The system is broken, it was not “God’s plan” that you should suffer.”
Her words stuck with me and have been a big part of my healing process, not just in that, but in many other times when I’ve felt stuck in a situation beyond my control. The idea that this thing, this struggle, this frustration is not from God, but God is with me in getting through it, has given me the strength and the courage to just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
I thought about her words again this week, as I was reflecting on the parable we heard this morning. Luke introduced it as “a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” The parable spoke of a widow who badgered an unjust judge, until he finally granted her justice. “And will not God,” Jesus went on, “grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?” There is, I think, a temptation to hear this “parable about [the] need to pray always and not to lose heart” as a manual for how to get one’s prayers answered. Now certainly prayer is an important thing, the most important thing. And Luke is right, we are to “pray always and not lose heart.” But I think to assume that the point of the parable is that we are to be like the widow and constantly badger God until God finally relents and gives us our way is to really sell God short. It turns our relationship with God into a transactional relationship. If prayer becomes a method for getting what we want, then we turn God into a vending machine. Put prayer in, get what we want out. The problem with that is prayer really doesn’t work that way. We don’t always get what we prayed for. And if our faith is based on this vending machine model for God, and we don’t get what we prayed for, then the problem can only be one of two things. One: We didn’t pray hard enough. We didn’t put enough in to the vending machine, so God did not deliver what we wanted out. It’s our fault, we failed. Or two: The vending machine is broken. We put in all the prayers we had, but we didn’t get the result we expected, so God must not be keeping up God’s end of the bargain. It’s God’s fault, God failed. But prayer, faith, God is not a transactional relationship, it is a transformational one. The reason we are to pray always and not lose heart is not because that is the way to get God to do what we want. The reason we are pray is because prayer changes us. Prayer is the way God changes our hearts, prayer is the way God strengthens us. Example of that. Growing up there was a girl in my youth group that I really didn’t like. She’d always been mean to me, more like as long as I could remember. I saw her as kind of a bully, and I just really didn’t like her. One week, our youth director had us draw names from a hat, and we were to pray daily for the person whose name we drew. I, of course, drew hers. Now, I did not want to pray for her. But, as we’ve discussed before, I am a rule-follower, so I dutifully prayed for her every day. You know what happened? I changed. I developed compassion for her. We didn’t become best friends. In fact, to this day, I’m sure she has no idea the effect she had on my faith life. But over the course of that time of praying for her, I came to see her differently. I saw the struggles in her life. I saw all the things the world had thrown at her, the things she’d had to overcome. And it changed me. That is the power of prayer. It changes us, it drives us into action. Pope Francis said, “you pray for something and then you do it, that’s how prayer works.” When we pray for help in a broken relationship, we find our own hearts softening toward the other. When we pray for health, we find ourselves making healthier choices. When we pray for intervention in a situation of injustice, we find the courage to combat the systems that created injustice. Not all at once, but over time. Just like the mulberry tree is probably not going to go rushing through the air into the sea, prayer does not always get an immediate response. But like a muscle grows stronger with use, prayer shapes our hearts and our minds and our souls to bring about the Kingdom of God.
The widow can certainly be a model of persistence for us, but if she is going to be an effective model, we have to also wonder how she became so persistent. What gave the widow the strength and the courage to go again and again to the unjust judge and demand what she deserved? Desperation certainly, but even desperation requires the choice to keep trying. She could have quit, she could have resigned herself to hopelessness, but she didn’t. I think the widow’s persistence came from her being the opposite of the judge. The parable sets her as the contrast to the judge, so I think it is safe to assume that where he did not fear God, she did. And I’m using fear in the Psalmist sense of the word. Not fear as in terror, but fear as in awe or wonder. I think the widow’s fear, awe, wonder in the persistence of God gave her the courage to outlast the judge, to continue when he could not, because her faith was in a God who would be with her through everything. I love the confidence of our psalm this morning, “The Lord will not let your foot be moved; the Lord who keeps you will not slumber. The Lord who keeps Israel with never slumber or sleep…The Lord will keep you from all evil; the Lord will keep your life. The Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.” Forevermore, what consistency, what persistence is that! Not just this psalm, but the entire Bible is a love song of God’s persistence to God’s people. From the Garden of Eden through the New Jerusalem, the Bible is a collection of stories of God’s people turning away, and God patiently bringing them back again, over and over and over again. And who is Jesus but the incarnation of God’s desire to be with God’s people. Jesus is what happened when God’s need to be in relationship with humanity overwhelmed the human-divine separation and the divine itself took on human flesh and frailty, took on the lowliest of human form, a baby born to backwoods, out of the way, peasant couple. And what is the resurrection but the persistence of the God of life over the power of death itself, for even death could not hold Jesus captive.
So yes, the writer of Luke’s Gospel is right. We need to pray always and not lose heart. But we do that, we can do that, because of God’s persistent love for us. When we cannot pray, when we do lose heart, we can go to scriptures, we can go to the font, we can go to the table, and we can be reminded that no matter what struggles we face, no matter what injustices we meet, what pain we endure, God is with us in those places. God is persistent. Thanks be to God. Amen.
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