Please Please Please?

The Parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge

18 Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. 2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ 4 For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’”[b] 6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 8 I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

My kids have this scheme. It’s a process of steps they take in order to get something they want. This is used especially in the cases where they know we will likely say “no” to the request. Step one: They ask for something they want. Dan or I respond, “No,” usually with some kind of explanation as to why we are responding in such a way. “No, you can’t have ice cream tonight because you didn’t eat your broccoli.” “No, you can’t have screen time right now because it’s too close to bedtime.” “No, I’m not going to buy you that expensive toy; you can buy it when you’ve saved up enough money.” So they try again, using step two; this time using “please.” 

When we persist in saying no, they persist in saying please.They move on to step three, which is just repeating the request over an over again until we finally relent and give them what they want. But this rarely happens. Usually, we spend the next twenty minutes repeating ourselves until we are proverbially blue in the face, answering their repeated questions of “Why?” “Why?” “Why?” with the same exact answer that we gave them the first time. Then they move on to step four, which is to try asking the other parent.

It’s a brilliant scheme really. Because, of course, to our kids, this “No” is unacceptable. They want something. They think their lives would be better with that something. So they nag and ask and ask and nag, just in the off chance that one of us will relent and give them the thing they want. I guess this has worked for them in the past, because they keep doing it. But I don’t recall one instance where this scheme actually worked. We are charged with knowing what’s best for them, and we do our best to figure that out, and that means, sometimes, we have to say “no.” 

But is Jesus on their side? Does Jesus condone their persistent pleading? Our hero for our parable today is a woman who doesn’t give up, who nags and nags, who persists until she gets what she wants. Does God want us to pray like spoiled three year olds who didn’t get their lollipop? Well. Yes. and No. 

If we take a moment to think about it, we are as powerless as that three year old — we really are like children before God, our “Father”; we are as helpless as a widow before an unjust judge. According to Walter Bruggemann, “In a patriarchal society widows are sure to be victimized because they have no male advocate…The widow is resourceless.” This woman has nothing except her voice to cry out for her justice. She’s a widow, with no financial or social resources, she’s a woman, alone in a patriarchal society. Nevertheless, she persisted.

The disciples are about to enter Jerusalem as powerless and as vulnerable as the widow. Things are going to happen that they can’t control and that they have prayed against. They are going to see their worst fears realized. 

And we, too, are as powerless and vulnerable as these disciples, as this widow.

At least, don’t we feel like this, if we’re paying attention? When politicians are corrupt and wars persist and cancer is pervasive? When children die? When the earth is spoiled? Don’t we want to just shake God and say, “Fix it! Please! We need you to fix it!”

We pray and we pray and we pray, and sometimes it doesn’t turn out the way we want. 

Because prayer isn’t a transaction. Prayer isn’t a listing of things we want for Christmas that then Santa will grant us. Prayer isn’t a vending machine where you put your quarters in and out comes the winning lottery ticket. 

So we turn it off. We stop praying. We give up. We stop asking and we stop begging and we offer God nothing more than radio silence.

And yet Jesus instructs us to “pray always”. And then, “to not lose heart”. 

Be like the persistent widow, Jesus says. The one who keeps showing up. Who keeps nagging and begging and pleading amidst a pointless pursuit. This unjust judge isn’t going to budge, but still she shows up, she presents herself and her case with passion and conviction. She is courageous. Relentless. Tenacious. 

Jesus is telling us that “Prayer is a courageous act. Prayer is an act of resistance against discouragement and defeat” (Brueggemann).  According to Brueggeman, “In a patriarchal society such exploitation of a widow would have been business as usual, and she would have expected nothing other than that. But she does!” … “She breaks the silence of conformity.” And this takes immense courage. She nags. She keeps going. She has the stamina and the stubborn endurance to keep demanding what she wants until she gets it. 

The widow outlasts the judge, not in quiet humility, but with the audacity of almost violence. In verse 5, where the judge is worried that she may wear him out by continually coming, the word for “wear out” is hoopōpiazō, literally to “beat black and blue, to smite so as to cause bruises and livid spots” like a boxer in a boxing ring. The Greek literally means something like “to give the guy a black eye.” 

Can you picture the little old woman giving the judge the ol’ 1, 2? It’s meant to be comical, but it’s also mean to show us how much she has at stake in this situation. She needs this justice, and she’s going to demand it until she gets it. 

And God wants us to pray like that. God can handle our passion, our rage, and our disbelief. God can handle the puny right hook of an elderly woman. 

And so we pray. And so, somehow, it makes a difference. Even if they are the selfish prayers of a ten year old boy or the frantic stress of a forty year old woman, they are attempts at connection, pleas for relationship. To pray means that we are still invested in this world, we still want things, life still has meaning for us because we long for more. And if we can get to those prayers, then we can get to the prayers that are what are really in our best interest, prayers for justice. 

These are no passive prayers. There’s no way to pray that doesn’t change things, because in the process, you are changed. To pray is to be affected by the world.

And this is hard, hard stuff, because if we pray with the passion of the persistent widow or the ten year old boy, we are all in, we are fully invested, it’s life or death, we have to have the thing that we’re asking for, and if we don’t get it, we will be crushed. Can we pray for justice like a little boy who wants a new baseball glove or a second scoop of ice cream, or for his parents to stay together? Can we have that kind of passion, or are we a step removed, an arm’s length away, a safe distance where we won’t be hurt if the prayer doesn’t come true?

What if we nagged God for justice with as much at stake as a widow who has nothing left, who has it all riding on this one decision, who is nothing without this one judge’s determination.

This is a terrifying move, because God just might say no.

No. You won’t be healed. No. The divorce will go through. No, the medical bills are still here. And there’s so much at stake with these big things — like war, climate change, corruption, poverty, overdoses, and hunger — that if I pray for them as if my whole life is on the line, I might be crushed. God might say, “No.”

I want to hide, scroll past, sleep through and switch stations, but that is me literally unplugging, disconnecting from the things that God is connected to. 

“Keep praying,” Jesus says to these disciples on their way to Jerusalem. “You’re going to see hard things soon, but don’t give up, don’t lose heart. Keep showing up with your whole self.” Don’t disconnect yourself from the things that God is connected to. And God desperately wants to be connected to you. To me. To all of us. 

Because that’s the real persistent one in this story. God isn’t a magic genie who provides us with our three wishes; God isn’t there just to grant us what we want and then go back into his lamp. God pursues us. God wants a relationship with us. God wears us down so that we can finally accept God’s answers to our prayers, even if that answer is No, or maybe, or just silence. Nadia Bolz-Weber says, “Maybe prayer isn’t the way in which we manipulate God, but simply the posture in which we finally become worn down by God’s persistence - God’s persistence in loving us.”  “To pray is to connect ourselves to the persistent longing of God,” she says. 

God isn’t some magic eight ball that passively answers our prayers with a “Yes,” “No,” or an “Ask Again Later.” No matter what the answer is to our prayers, God wants us to keep going, to keep asking, because it’s about the relationship, not about the end result.

“And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off?”

I want my kids to keep coming back to me. I want them to keep asking for things. I want to stay connected to my kids and to their deepest desires. Sometimes that means we have to say “No” a thousand times because they, like us, get distracted. They get distracted from what they really want, which is love and security and comfort and acceptance, and for the briefest moment they believe that the newest Pokemon card, the upgraded Minecraft game, or the triple fudge sundae is going to do it for them. 

But will we hesitate to give them the desire that is behind those desires? Will we hesitate to give them love, security, comfort, or acceptance that they’re aching for? Absolutely not, when it’s in our power to do so. So I want them to keep coming back to me so that I can help show them where their true desires are — not in this new nerf gun or Chipotle for the third time this week — but for Justice, for Jesus, for the God who doesn’t hesitate to give us the good things we need. 

Keep asking, Jesus says. You’ll come to the heart of what you truly need in the asking. You’ll come to the heart of what you truly desire by asking for all those things you think you need. Sometimes you’ll get it right. Sometimes God will grant you those desires of your heart because that is what your heart truly needs. Sometimes the answer is “no,” and honestly, I don’t understand why. So I’m going to keep asking why? and how come? and please? again and again because I know that God is persistently listening to my pleas, even when I don’t get what I want, what I truly believe my heart needs. 

I don’t know how God answers prayer. I just know that God wants us to pray. Pray like the six year old who needs ten more minutes before bed. Pray like the woman alone in the world who needs justice from an unjust judge. Pray with your whole heart like your life is on the line. Pray like that.

Thanks be to God.

The Dark Thing: Yours, Theirs, and It. A L’Englian Sermon in Two Parts.

Luke 9:1-6, 23-27

Preamble: 

Anything you really need to know about me you can discover in the pages of Madeliene L’engle’s young adult novels. If Jeff and Mike get the conflict of the powers of darkness and light in the form of light sabers, x-wing fighters, and overly articulate robot-droids, I get the conflict of the powers of darkness and light in the forms of tessering through time and space with embodied soul-stars, brilliant five year old boys, an obstinate and overly emotional teenage girl, and sometimes, if you’re lucky, a few dolphins thrown in.

So, just as Mike waits for the day to introduce Finn to all things Star Wars, I was counting down the days until it’d be even closely age-appropriate to read Jonah A Wrinkle in Time. It’s a slow start, that book. Lots of set up and idealized family systems and teenage awkwardness, but Jonah hung in there. So it’s about Meg, the obstinate and overly emotional teenage girl, Charles Wallace, the brilliant but vulnerable five year old brother, and Calvin, the handsome, intelligent, and popular basketball player who seems to have everything except a decent family. They  “tesser” or travel through time and space by sort of folding it together to a strange grey planet in hopes of rescuing their dad from the clutches of an evil disembodied brain that wants to make droids out of everyone, controlling their every action and thought, so that the planet lives in “harmony” without conflict, even if that means redundancy, a sterilized cycle of living, and complete acquiescence of those who live there.  And a good round of torture for those who refuse to comply.  And then, finally, that’s when Jonah begged me to read further — way past his bedtime. 

Hey. Don’t judge. Yours has Ewoks

Even though I try to quote Rene Girard and explain mimetic desire and the scapegoat effect, my two boys have been having a bit of trouble untangling the myth of redemptive violence lately.  Every time conflict arises, and I ask what happened, I get “well, he hit me/stole my toy/ pushed me / knocked down my tower first.” So then, of course, the other hits/steals/pushes/ knocks down right back. And on and on the cycle goes. Their first instinct is to always “get even,” to do unto others what has been done to them, to reply to the baiting and ignorant Facebook post because they can’t resist stepping in to the argument, even though you, I mean they, know it will turn into nothing other than a huge cyber dumpster fire. 

The human instinct to “get even” is so strong in all of us isn’t it? 

Lately, there’s been a bit of conflict on the bus for my oldest. Lots of inappropriateness combined with excuses and scapegoating and weaseling out of responsibility. “It’s not my fault.” “So and so told me to do it” he says. “He said it first,” he tells me. 

Well. Long story short. If you want to reduce Jenn to tears, just ask her to try to explain to her son about how we are all made of mostly goodness, but sometimes the darkness takes over and our task for everyday is to keep the darkness from winning and then have her read the last two chapters of a Wrinkle in Time to her seven year old son, right before bed. Mix those together, put it in a greased pan and bake at 350 degrees for twenty minutes and voila, a Jenn puddle and an exhausted, muddled, eye-rolling, and maybe a tiny bit changed seven year old. The feels, you guys, so many feels.

So here we go:

Part 1 - Enough about Jenn’s emotional instability, we came here to learn about Jesus, dang it. 

    Things have been going like gangbusters for Jesus and his posse. He’s been preaching and wandering and healing and telling stories and crowds are following him all over the place. Everybody loves him. He’s Justin Bieber before the neck tattoos. So what do you do when your family business starts raising a profit? You expand, of course. Time to franchise!So Jesus divides up his posse and sends them out with nothing other than a carry on bag of authority to cure and heal. Leave the checked baggage at home.

And then he gives them “detailed” instructions: 

1. don’t take anything with you

2. stay where they welcome you

3. where they don’t, shake the dust off your feet and move on.

     Jesus sends out his followers into the unknown, into the wilderness, into the wandering. And it sounds like he’s prepping them for a flight on a discount airline. 

But actually, this is pretty sound advice that reveals to us what is at the heart of the Gospel. 

1. You don’t need anything but you.
2. be present. build community.
3. Don’t take other’s baggage with you when you leave. 

     Or, what I should have told my oldest about what he’s to do when he gets on the bus and travels into the wilderness that is first grade:

1. You are enough. You don’t need posturing, or achievements, or false acceptance from kids who claim to be able to withdraw their friendship and approval. You are made of goodness. Of light. When you travel to these unknown, far-off planets called school and relationships and difficult choices, you don’t need to be or to do or have anything other than who you already are, what you already do, what you already have. Forget John Calvin, our grand self-hating Presbyterian founder, and his total depravity. No. Not the Calvin from our Wrinkle in Time story. He’s cute and strong and smart and adorable. And, Ok, maybe don’t forget about our buddy John completely, but God has given you everything you need. Just trust it. 

2. Be a friend. Don’t get distracted by your worries or your feelings of inadequacy; you might miss what someone is offering you. Don’t let your own darkness cover over what is right in front of your eyes. You might miss the Gospel that is already here, the light that is already being shared. All you have to do is show up and stay. Be present and accepting and forgiving.

3. And when it’s time to leave, don’t take the others’ darkness with you.  Don’t track the mud from one house into another. Don’t fight it with your own darkness; that won’t help any of us see. Don’t press reply. Don’t participate in hurt just because you want to be accepted. When you’re scared that you’ll be alone and unloved, go back to number 1. You’re made of light. Your fear is made of darkness. You have everything you need to choose the light. Because if you carry others’ darkness along with your own, it’ll get so heavy, and you’ll forget why you’re out there wandering the multiverses in the first place. You’ll turn into a black hole.

     So great. That’s what they do. And then a bunch of stuff happens:

1. Herod feels threatened by what’s happening and is confused. Didn’t he just kill that guy?

2. Jesus feeds five thousand plus people

3. Peter declares Jesus as the Messiah

4. Jesus tells his friends he’s gonna die…and then come back to life.

     All that traveling and dusting and light sharing with nothing than who God made them to be has led them here, to Part 2.

So now that we’re all warmed up, let’s speed this thing up, shall we?

Part 2: The Black Thing. It’s in you, but it’s not you.

     In case you didn’t get it the first time, disciples, sharing the Gospel is as uncomplicated as wandering the desert with nothing but the clothes on your backs, but is as dangerous as traveling through time and space to a planet run by a dismantled brain that wants nothing but to control, numb, and spread darkness over everything.

Jesus gives them this strange, twisting seemingly contradicting puzzle to parse through. Jesus gives them further instructions about following him: he tells them, if you want to be my followers you need to do these three things:

1. deny yourself and take up your cross every day. 

2. and if you want to save your life, you need to lose it.

3. you need to give up the whole world so you can gain your life. Because what good is it to gain all the things, but lose yourself?

     The kingdom of God is coming, is even here, for some of us. The light is going to win, and, in fact, has already won for some of us. 

     I always interpreted this passage to mean that we’ve got to suffer. That I’ve got to do whatever it takes to un-Jenn myself so that I can save myself. As if the thing worth saving needs to be disconnected from anything that makes us, us. Deny yourself. Sacrifice yourself. Carry your cross and accept suffering and being made into nothingness. I sort of let the third part of the instructions drop off into the ether, get sucked up into a black hole of nothingness and sacrifice.

     But the third instruction is the key to understanding the other two. What’s the point of gaining the whole world if you lose yourself? Jesus never wants us to lose any part of our true selves in the first place, just the dust, the excess, the darkness that distracts us and causes us to turn to violence, blaming the other for our actions, responding to others’ darkness with our own. The crosses we need to carry are not simply a means of suffering enough so that we can collect enough salvation points to “get in.” You’re already in. The Kingdom of God is coming, is even here for some of us. Losing your true self by self-hatred and immolation just recycles the darkness inside of us. It’s like trying to dig your way out of a hole. It’s like a condescending facebook reply. It’s like doing the negative thing because some third grader on the bus who is the fastest runner in the whole school told you to and you’re afraid he won’t like you anymore.  

      It’s like hitting your brother because he hit you first. Taking up your cross means carrying the thing with you that will be the means for your salvation. That thing that won’t be easy, but will bring more light into the world. 

What I should have told my oldest son is that when we go out into the wilderness, out into the frightening expanse of this world and beyond, Jesus wants us to

1. give up the part of yourself that carries the darkness. Instead, take on the things that bring more light into the world, even if it’s not easy.

2. If you really want to know how much you are already loved, and experience that love from others, you have to be yourself. 

3. You have to give up the idea that darkness can be expelled by darkness. You can’t respond to violence with violence. You can’t do what you feel pressured to do because you’re scared. We all have to wake up everyday committed to growing the light and pushing out the darkness. All the darkness in the world is never going to make up for the light we give away.

     A tall order for a seven year old. A tall order for a group of disciples who got to know Jesus personally. A tall order for all of us. 

Now for the cool down.

Epilogue: We’ve been given all the things. We’ve been given ourselves.

     Well, turns out that in the process of trying to rescue their dad, Charles Wallace, the five year old prodigy, gets sucked into the big evil brain thing and loses himself to the darkness. All that is good and real in him is gone. And it’s his big sister Meg’s job to get him back. She is given nothing for the journey. Nothing but the grace to be herself. She is thrown back onto the creepy planet of grey blind acceptance with nothing but her stubbornness, her obstinance, and her love for her baby brother. When the brain tries to change her, tries to suck her in, she shakes the darkness off, and goes back to focusing on love. She can’t love the thing, but she can love her brother. And that’s enough. 

Hey, Jonahbug, your light is enough. 

That is the Good News of Jesus Christ. 

The feels you guys, so many feels.

Thanks be to God.