Don't Lose Heart, Friend 10/20/19 (Pentecost 19C)

The Rev. Dr. Rebecca L. Kiser

Don’t Lose Heart, Friend  - Keep On Keepin’ On

Oct 20, 2019   Pentecost 19C    Luke 18:1-8

            One of my favorite folk singers is a western Virginian by the name of John McCutcheon -  I’ve been a fan from way back.  Like many folk singers, he often tells stories between songs in his concerts.  I‘ve borrowed one my his favorite lines about storytelling:  “You know, storytellers always tell the truth…  (audience titters a bit)...then in a wry voice, “Just not always factual.” That is kinda the way stories work, isn’t it? Aesop's fables using animals to reveal human behaviors; mythology telling us truths about living that are usually peopled with made up folks. 

            Jesus is a story-teller, too.  We call Jesus’ stories ‘parables.’  There have been different ways of working with these parables through the ages of Christianity.  Quite a ways back,  it was fashionable to look at them as allegories; that is, where there is a one-to-one correspondence, like The Judge represents X, the widow represents Y, her lawsuit represents Z, and so on, and all about the Christian life.  On through a few decades, a scholar named Jeremias started a school of thought that looked at parables as having only one main point, and you either got it or you didn’t.  More recently, parables have been seen as multi-layered, with a recognition that our interpretations may differ because of where and how we have lived, ie our cultures, and our life events.  The most recent method of looking at parables have seen them as terse political commentary on the culture of Jesus’ day, which makes for interesting reading for social commentary on today.  To be sure, while cultures have come and gone since Jesus’ time, the things people get up to really haven’t changed a whole lot, so if we can hear Jesus’ critique on his culture, we can apply it pretty easily to the world we know. I’ve recently read a book called Short Stories of Jesus by Amy-Jill Levine, who, as a Jew herself, adds a unique understanding of 1st century life for Jerusalem and surrounds, plus a good knowledge of Greek and Aramaic.  Those details of life and translation often add depth, too. 

Today’s parable seems to have been taken a certain way for many years, based mostly on the sentence Luke adds at the very beginning, that its supposed to tell us to pray always and not lose heart.  I’ve had trouble with this interpretation since early in my own career.  Let’s look at the story’s details.

The story opens with the main character, a widow.  We may remember from Sunday School that widows (and orphans) are often poor and powerless persons in that century and culture.  Without a husband, brother, father or son to take care of them and their lives, they are virtually invisible in a patriarchal-based culture.  Widows and orphans are basically family-less, and sometimes called “the least of these” in Scripture in both Old and New Testaments.  If you know the musical Les Mis - the word ‘Miserable’ is the word for the ‘least of these,’ the ‘wretched of the earth,’ as one of the songs from Les Mis translates into English.  Widows and orphans are among the powerless, those who are the bottom of the chain, those marginal and almost invisible persons on the underside of human cultures, and they rarely get justice.  So this widow is our protagonist.  People who heard Jesus tell this story would understand that.   

The next character introduced is the judge who ‘neither feared God nor had respect for people.’  He also is a recognizable character - in it for what he could get, buying into the culture that overlooked those of the lower classes, and not caring about their welfare.  “Let them eat cake,” (which is a kind of coal, not a dessert), may describe his attitude.  And it actually sounds like he didn’t even respect ANYone.  He’s been called “The Unjust Judge” in other translations. Its not that he is overwhelmed by the size of the problems of the poor and doesn’t know where to start - its that he likes things the way they benefit himself, and frankly doesn’t care about anything else.

The problem of the parable is that the widow keeps coming to this judge in court, to get justice for some issue that involves her rights. She wants wrong corrected, and right to prevail.  And the judge really doesn’t care, doesn’t see the problem, and wishes it would all go away.  Eventually, the story tells us, he reasons like this - “I neither fear God nor have respect for people,” he says to himself, “but this widow’s persistence is making me look bad.  I’m tired of her and her problem, and she’s giving me a black eye.”  ‘Black eye’ is what Levine says this Greek word really means - I think its a way of saying he’s being damaged in his own status, not looking good to others.  SO…. he grants her the justice she seeks so persistently. 

Now the interpretation I’ve heard all my life says that we ought to be as persistent as that widow, and keep praying day and night, until God answers.  What bothers me about this interpretation is that I hear the story teaching precisely the opposite!  That God is NOT like that unjust judge, but rather cares deeply about us.  The unjust judge is the opposite of what God is like, as revealed by Jesus.  The unjust judge is the foil, the antithesis of God’s response to us, which is caring and loving.  God hears our prayers, God cares for our situations!  God isn’t unconcerned; we don’t have to pound on God’s door to get attention to our situations; we don’t have to wear God out with our own heart’s pain until God finally pays attention and does something just to shut us up!  That is not what God is like!

Sometimes, we might feel that it takes forever for something we’ve prayed about to break open and be addressed.  Here’s my take on this - I think God hears and cares immediately, and that it often takes God a lot of steps before things are addressed.  Maybe WE have to grow; maybe another person has to come to a realization - maybe that person is incapable of acting how we wish they’d act, and we have to come to grips with that ourselves.  Who knows what is going on while we think God is ignoring us?  I believe that God is already working.  I’ve also thought about how God’s idea of ‘immediate’ isn’t like ours -  I mean, the view of our faith on material creation as a work of God is described in the book of Beginnings, Genesis,  as a “day.” It actually took billions of years and lots of steps, our science now knows.  God doesn’t seem to be in the same sense of linear time that we know. 

Well, that’s how I’ve looked at this parable, and its been helpful to me in thinking about issues of justice, like how many years it has taken for the status and treatment of African Americans to be seen as an issue for all of us in our country.  All kinds of bigotry held it back; all kinds of cultural assumptions had to be confronted.  The system here in America worked well for white people - we had little initiative to change it.  It took a long time, and much work and writing to make us take this issue seriously.  It took leaders being raised up and even murdered to bring us to the conviction that this was wrong.  God was working – and it took a long time.

Its now been 60 years since the Presbyterian church began ordaining women to the ministry, and it took more than 25 years of work and advocacy before that positive vote!  THEN the local churches had to see this wasn’t just a theoretical thing, and hire us, which was another long time.  Lots of things have to be addressed before an initial vision of justice becomes reality. 

In preparing for this sermon, I was challenged to see yet another way to view this parable, a new way for me.  I call it the “quit seeing yourself as the good guy, and picture yourself as the bad guy” way of interpretation.  So, what if we’re the unjust judge??? What if the widow’s perspective is the perspective of GOD? Its GOD who is angry at injustices in the world, and GOD who keeps urging us and urging us to do justice for those who are more powerless, and suffering at the injustices of the societies of the world.  Like the unjust judge, we humans take SO LONG to finally see things as God sees them.  In this take on the parable, God identifies with people like that widow - the humble, the powerless, and those who are wronged by the way cultures function.  It not US who long for justice, but God, who has to keep at us and keep at us, gradually enlarging our hearts and our compassion until we care as God already does. 

Play with THAT in your mind for a while!  Its quite a shift in perception, and I think there’s something in it that speaks to what Jesus reveals about God in the rest of his ministry and teaching. Its also the message of all the Old Testament prophets, one after the other - cultures and nations are judged by God based on how the least among them is treated.   Keeping the ways and commandments of God is intricately tied up with the way a community treats the least among them. 

We can look at the examples I made earlier - that it was and is God who awakens consciences and consciousness of people to the injustice going on in our practices  - for example, of enslaving people and misusing our  power over people’s lives in a way that angers God, who cared and cares for ALL people.  God had to work persistently against the way our culture thought of people of color, and what we white folks of the dominant class thought was okay to do.  God even had to open our eyes to seeing how we church folks had misused Scripture to try and prove our bias. 

And that it was God who finally broke through the bad teachings and assumptions about women that, again, we church people had tried to prove through misusing Scriptures.  And the whole culture that accepted a view of women as lesser -0 those things take time to shift.

We could go on - the state of New York required all employers THIS YEAR to institute training to prevent sexual harassment in the workplace.  All employers had to accomplish this by Oct 9.   Churches were not exempt - we here at Jamesville Community Church did it, too. 

We could add other current issues of our culture - and any issue we talk about probably has Christ-followers with various points of view as to what faithfulness and justice look like.  Knowing that, we could look at the refugee crisis at our southern border, which many Christ-followers are perceiving as a justice issue as well as a humane issue, and seeing that Scripture calls for us to care for the suffering and treat all people honorably. There is also the ongoing responses to in church and culture to those who are born with a different sexual identity. Even our two contributing denominations here at our church - the United Methodist and the Presbyterians - there have been opposing votes on the ordination and marriage of LGBTQ persons.

  

What I’ve noticed in my own spiritual life is that ever since my heart became more sensitive to injustice, mainly from what I‘ve seen as a clergywoman, my sensitivity to mistreatment and injustice to ANY group of people has increased.  There was a time when none of these issues were on my radar screen, and how things were was unquestioned. 

This morning, I hope looking at this powerful though short story of Jesus, raises up some meaty material for our own talks with God in prayer.  Shortly after the benediction today, as we gather in the Fellowship Hall, we’ll look at the last 100  or so years of our own congregation’s history, and think of how things have changed over the years, and what generations before us faced as faithful believers.  The larger, capital-C Church, in seeking to be faithful, has sought God’s will through wars, economic development and depressions - yet has kept on.  Its our leg of the race now, we’re carrying the torch or the baton, and we celebrate the faithfulness of God through the centuries before and centuries to come.  AMEN.