Taking Faith for Granted
Scriptures: Jeremiah 31:27-34
Luke 18:1-8
How many things can you think of that you take for granted? That’s actually an oxymoron, isn’t it? If you’re thinking about it, you aren’t really taking it for granted. But play along with me here for a moment. What about the air we breathe – or even the act of breathing itself? It would be rare for any of us to be conscious and focused on each breath that we take, each inhaling, each exhaling. But if you are visiting someone in a hospital ward – someone with, say, emphysema, hooked up to an oxygen tank, you become somewhat more aware of what it takes to keep on breathing. Or, what about the food that we eat? If you’re on a diet, I suppose, you’re more conscious of the calorie in-take and the amounts of food that go into your mouth. But even this doesn’t compare with a true hunger that leads to starvation and how conscious that can make us about food. Ann heard a statistic on TV the other day that, world-wide, 25,000 children die of malnutrition a day! That’s an incredible stat, and it made her sit up and pay attention to what could be done, even in a small way, to alleviate that situation. Food was no longer being taken for granted. Or, what about water? Now, I know that here in this dry valley there’s a certain water-consciousness all the time as we three-days-a-week water our lawns. But when compared with what’s happening in Georgia and other parts of the American southeast, where water shortages and a dry spell are about to result in real restrictions, our water woes here could almost be taken for granted.
The matter before us today is how much we take our faith for granted. Oh, at one level that’s not really an issue. We are here today because of our faith, and we know it. It generally is a conscious decision that brings us to this place, and that conscious decision is one that takes us into the world of faith. But a decision is one thing; living out what that decision comes to mean for our lives may be another. And here is where it may be possible to live as though faith is just a natural part of what’s around us – like air and food and water – without taking the time to think consciously about its meaning for us.
In a sense these past three Sundays – from Worldwide Communion Sunday to today (as we’ve been looking primarily at the teachings of Jesus in the gospel of Luke) -- form an arc that have had us looking at faith, prayer, healing, and now back to faith again, as we circle back to see how prayer and coming to a sense of wholeness can help us to focus on a fulfilling faith that fills up our lives.
Two weeks ago the story from Luke was about the disciples asking Jesus to increase their faith, and we talked about how faith can’t really be measured or quantified. Last Sunday we spoke about the healing power of prayer and how when we feel that power in our lives it speaks to how God is bringing us to wholeness through faith. Today the focus is on perseverance – how faith, which is another way of saying “God’s grace”, is there for us for the long haul.
Do you remember the movie from last year called Amazing Grace? It depicted the story of William Wilberforce and the abolition of the slave trade in early 19th century England. I’ve already referred to it once or twice in sermons. The key point for our purpose today is how long it took Wilberforce to realize his dream of seeing the slave trade abolished – over 20 years! Initially, Wilberforce had no particular interest in religion or social justice, but an experience when he was twenty caused him to see his position in Parliament not just as a way to play politics but as God’s calling. Nevertheless, as the movie portrays, he was obstructed by other members of Parliament who had vested interests in slavery. Moreover, he was often sick and bed-ridden for weeks at a time. Prayer sustained him during these dark times until he was finally able to see the change that abolition accomplished.
Determination. Perseverance. Unwillingness to take “no” for an answer when he knew God wanted a “yes” for this cause. These were the marks of William Wilberforce’s faith. Now, I know that perseverance, in-and-of itself, does not always result in the kind of victory illustrated by Wilberforce’s campaign. I am mindful that Moses, that towering figure of faith, was not allowed to see the Israelites enter the Promised Land. But, persevering in a cause that has been fueled by our faith is a way of testifying to the strength of that faith within us. A friend of mine is very fond of saying that we are not called to be successful, but we are called to be faithful.
William Wilberforce’s story resonates with the parable from Luke that we read today. Jesus told it in order to illustrate the importance of persistence in prayer – as the introduction to the passage says, he told it “about their need to pray always and not to lose heart”. Here we have a widow who is rebuffed at every turn, and yet she persists. As MacLean Gilmour notes, “In the Bible a widow is often a typical representative of those who need to be defended against exploitation. It is taken for granted that her cause is just.” The kicker in this story is the character of the judge. We are used to assuming that the authority figure in Jesus’ parables is a stand-in for God, but here the judge seems mean-spirited and stubborn and only grants her wish “so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” That seems like a poor reason for offering justice. John Knox clarifies this for us when he says:
“A parable has one central jet of truth, in this instance the need for persistence in prayer. The judge is drawn as an unworthy man that the parable may stress the ‘how much more’. If a heartless judge grants a widow’s prayer, surely God’s heart of love will not refuse her. But this assurance only deepens the problem of the story: why should anyone, especially a widow (symbol of the innocent and the helpless), have to plead and wait, and wait and plead? The pain and burden of ‘unanswered prayer’ are in that question. We do not know the whole reason. If we did we should be God, and we should have not need to pray. But we can partly understand; and we must measurably understand, or our persistence in prayer will become blind rote and repetition.”
Another way to get at the meaning behind this parable is to say that prayer is not so much asking for something as it is shaping the person who prays. Our need is to pray ceaselessly, and in that persisting posture of prayer we begin to sort out what is truly valuable and what is only fleeting. Even though it wouldn’t scan as well (and Anita would hate it if we tried it this way) that hymn we sang at the beginning of the service should really be “Sweet Lifetime of Prayer”, rather than “Sweet Hour of Prayer”.
The justice issue that the widow was bringing before the judge really mattered to her. It mattered enough that she was going to keep at it even after being consistently knocked down. It was, in other words, helping to form a central part of who she was. Constant prayer does that to us – it focuses our lives on those things that are truly important and meaningful – it shapes the kind of person we become. And the promise implicit in the parable is that we will be heard. The judge may have granted the widow judgment out of a desire to be rid of her, but God hears us throughout, and whether our prayer is answered directly or not, God is always there to listen. We are constantly and consistently “standing in the need of prayer”.
There’s a third level to this story, too. As with the healing of the ten lepers, that we talked about last week, in this parable the widow’s story connects private prayer with public action. Once again, Jesus wants his disciples – which means us – to see a bigger picture. We aren’t just supposed to pray passively, hoping that God will change the world on our behalf. Prayer may be, as the song puts it, “the wind beneath our wings”, but it also calls us to take action where there is injustice in the world in God’s name and for God’s sake. This widow’s story doesn’t make a distinction between petitioning in prayer and petitioning as public activism.
Prayer, as Jesus taught it, isn’t something you just do at night when you’re alone in your bed or when you go into a room to shut yourself off from others in order to pray. He doesn’t intend for it to be personal therapy or a crutch when we have hit a metaphysical stumbling block. Reinhold Niebuhr had it exactly right when he wrote the “serenity prayer”: prayer is about accepting the things I can’t change, the courage to change the things I can, and (most importantly) the wisdom to know the difference. In order to get to that wisdom we need to pray constantly and persist in changing those things that need changing in this world.
What that can lead to is a whole new way of understanding God’s relationship to the world – and God’s relationship to us. The companion passage today from the book of Jeremiah is one of my favorite pieces of scripture. It speaks of a New Covenant between God and God’s people, and it speaks about how God will help the people to build and to plant. Once again here Jeremiah is being something other than that prophet of gloom and doom we expect from him, given other passages in his book. Here he wants to assure the people who are in exile that God will be steadfast – and thus it is important that they persevere.
And look at how that perseverance pays off! Listen to this affirmation and these words that are among the most lilting in all of the Bible: “…this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after these days, says the Lord: 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….. they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.” Wow. What an incredible promise! This is the covenant that God brings about between God and God’s people in the person of Jesus the Christ. Recall that “New Testament” really means “New Covenant”. What we have in the gospels is the story of the pledge that God made as long ago as the time of Jeremiah to love us, and to forgive us, and to give us the fullness of God’s grace. No wonder it has been called, and we believe it to be so, “The Greatest Story Ever Told”.
What Jeremiah and Jesus are saying is that perseverance in prayer unleashes a power in us that affects both our internal lives and the world where we are called to right injustices. Too many people regard prayer as a formalized routine of words, or as a series of petitions for material things. Some people save their prayer for Sundays, as if they were taking advantage of the weekend, unlimited calling plans on their cell phones. In this sense, we take prayer for granted, even undervalue its power and meaning as we limit it. Jesus’ talk of incessant prayer is about the power we have been given to engage God in conversation. Prayer is a free call, an 800 number, a direct line to God open every minute of the day.
The great thing about prayer, of course, is that we can do it anywhere and everywhere. Do you ever get embarrassed by people in, say, fast food restaurants who pause for a moment of prayer before eating? You shouldn’t. In fact, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to start that practice yourselves. On the golf course, in the shower, watching television – think about the most outrageous places you can to engage in conversation with God, and you’ll find that there really isn’t anyplace that’s inappropriate. Prayer will change things; but, much more importantly, prayer changes us. Only in prayer do we achieve that harmonious assembly of body, mind, and spirit which gives the frail human reed its unshakable strengths. Just as we cannot take faith for granted, we cannot take prayer for granted either, and finding extraordinary places to pray is one way to keep it from being a routine thing.
Do we take faith for granted? I don’t think so…..or perhaps more precisely, I would hope not. The final three verses in our text from Luke today are Jesus’ own commentary on the story he has told about the widow and the hard-hearted judge. He is proclaiming that God will offer God’s justice – which really means God’s grace – on all those “who cry to him day and night” – to those, in other words, who pray without ceasing. But then he ends with the plaintive question, “And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” John Knox responds to Jesus’ question with these words: “We ask the same question. The blight of worldliness, the threat of war, the spread of selfish propaganda make the church a beleaguered garrison in a hostile land rather than a conquering army. Perhaps faith does not find God except on the last edge of helplessness. The realism of these verses fits every age.”
Suppose faith should disappear! If that were to happen the world would be a hopeless, helpless place indeed. We cannot let that happen, and so we are called to show the world how strong we are in the faith. No, we can never take faith and prayer for granted. We need to persevere, so that in the end we can say, as Paul does to Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” (II Timothy 4:7)
Amen.
Dave Pomeroy
First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
October 21, 2007