Praying Miracles
Luke 18:"1-8 Pentecost 21c, October 17, 2010-10-17
I want to thank Margaret and the wardens and indeed yourselves for allowing me to be here to preach and preside. It is my hope that the relationship between St. Alban and Our Saviour communities can grow in the coming days, months and years. Once again thank you for allowing me to be here. This is both a privilege for me and a respite for the people of Our Saviour from me.
I want to begin by having you ask yourself three questions: What do you think about when you think of PRAYER? How do you feel about PRAYER? And finally, what do you do about PRAYER? Do you actually pray regularly?
I ask you to wrestle with these questions because today's gospel warrants such wrestling. I myself wrestle with such questions. These questions remind me of Helen. Some years ago, in the very first parish I in which I served I met Helen. Helen was a woman of prayer. As I gradually began to know her I discovered that she prayed for many reasons. Helen grew up with an alcoholic father. She married a man, who though then sober still often functioned as if he were drinking abusively. To top it all off her then 17 year old son was already suffering with chronic alcoholism. In the midst of this Helen worked from a strong Christian faith perspective. She was convinced that God often had anc continue to help her. For Helen prayer was a primary, essential means of being open to God and receiving God's direction and assistance.
I, on the other hand, was a recent graduate of a Master's program in theology. Although I considered myself a person of faith, my prayer life was somewhat limited. I reasoned to myself, God knows everything. Didn't it follow then that God doesn't need me to tell God about my needs or others needs or even the needs of the world. Such was my self rationalization until Helen entered my life.
One day Helen made a request of me. She said, "Pastor Tim, how about if you and I get together once a week to pray for people in this community who are ill or hurting?" Well, how could I say, "No" to such a request? I wanted to be a good pastor to Helen and to the entire community.
And so it began – my intentional experience of prayer. Each Monday night Helen and I would pray by name for the people in that little community. We would hold up their needs as we knew them. If we didn't really know many of the details of a person's life, we would offer general intercessions for them. Can you imagine my surprise when on Tuesday mornings some of the people we had been praying for would show up in my office or call me, "Just to chat!" WOW!
Gradually I began to realize that I needed to rethink and redo my entire practice of prayer. Maybe prayer wasn't so much about God and attempting to change or influence God's mind. Maybe prayer has more to do with me, my mind and my actions in the world, as I communicated with God. To be certain – our prayers are not always answered, at least in the ways we expect or ask for.
Such reflection delivers us into the heart of today's parable. Here Jesus tells about a widow who desperately requires justice. She will not rest until her need for justice is met even though her only immediate avenue for such justice is an unjust judge who "neither fears God nor respects any person". Eventually even this unjust judge caves as a result of the widow's relentlessness. She will not take no for an answer as a response to her need.
Out of this parable Jesus asks two questions: Will not God vindicate God's elect, God's chosen ones who cry to God night and day? And, subsequently will God delay long over this?
The Gospel treats these questions as being rhetorical. Will not God vindicate God's elect? OF COURSE! Will God delay long in such vindication? NO WAY!
But, "Is this our experience?"
I remember Mary as being a woman in her late 30's with 3 children. They were 9, 6 and a wee babe. Mary was an amazing nurse, mother, and wife. She was a woman who not only cared for others but herself. She physically worked out regularly. She didn't smoke. She drank very little. She gave much of herself for others in the community and the church. One afternoon I received a telephone call. Mary and her family had just the day before returned from a trip to Disneyland. But the very evening of their return she had suddenly become critically ill. She had instructed her husband to taken her to the emergency room of the local hospital. There they learned that her cancer markings were through the roof. Mary had acute leukemia and was air evacuated to Vancouver that night.
How our prayers went up. First we asked God that Mary's treatment would go well. Then we asked and pleaded with God that a bone marrow donor for Mary would be found. Then I prayed that she might live to raise her children. Mary was granted five more wonderful years of life. But then oh so suddenly I received the call. Mary had take a turn for the worse. Her health spiraled down from there. Within 10 days she had died. And Ia ask, "Is this God vindicating God's elect"?
On a more encompassing scale scanning the reality of many, many people, how is it that we have so much while many millions of people, indeed over a billion live on less than a dollar fifty a day? There are many who cry out to God for vindication. And there are many people who give the sweat, blood and tears of their lives to work at the millennium development goals. One of those goals is to significantly reduce both poverty and hunger in the world. Indeed both through the Anglican Communion and the Lutheran World Federation significant things are being done to work on behalf of and with others who are hungry, have little or no access to adequate shelter or health care or even safe water. Even our government has taken some steps to forgive international debt, so that other local governments can be enabled to provide better care for their peoples. But how long will such "vindication" take? In the mean time how many more people, children, women and men will die?
Even among Christians there is significant acrimony, misunderstanding and hatred. Does not God hear those of us who are crying out to God for change of hearts and minds that we may be One, not necessarily politically or even structurally, but certainly in mission as we intentionally seek to share the love of Christ in thought, word and deed for all?
If we have the capacity to either think or feel or are doubly blessed to intentionally engage in both, we will be tempted to throw our hands up in despair and give up trying to care, seeking to make a difference.
BUT if we give into such temptation we forget both who we are called to be and whose we are. Then we turn our backs on the One who is encouraging us to pray even now. It is Jesus who encourages us to pray through his words and actions. Do we see how frequently the Gospels tell us that Jesus withdraws to pray? Though being swamped by injustice, evil and apathy Jesus keeps on praying. It is at least in part due to this intimate relationship with God the Creator that Jesus is enabled to move onwards to Jerusalem. He seeks both to know and do His Father's will.
So, think about this: 3 years of his ministry, night and day with the 12 and some others. Yet at the time when he was most vulnerable, those 12 abandon him. True, they were quite small in number. We are greater in number now than they were then. But Jesus does not give up on them. Nor does He give into the temptations of power. Instead, in obedience to God Jesus willingly gives his all. He suffers and dies so that all may live not only in the future but also here and now. In the words of his own first sermon as reported in Luke, "The Spirit of the Lord is upon him because that Spirit has anointed him to preach good news to the poor, sent him to proclaim release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind and liberty to those who are oppressed as well as the acceptable year of the Lord when all debts would be forgiven."
To be sure there is much to this gift we call life. There is the wonder of birth, the angst of death. There are the heights of joy and the depths of despair. There is the communion of friendship, the mystery of love, the pain of betrayal, of severed relationships. There is also by God's grace the miracle of forgiveness.
But before, after and under all of life there is God. God is the One who dares to take on flesh for us and all others, including all of creation. In Jesus, God enters into the fullness of humanity. In Jesus, God blesses life and delivers our lives by living, loving, suffering and dying. Through Jesus we see the hope that God brings to us in the midst of all that comes. It is the very Spirit of the risen Christ who calls us, commands us to pray for God's coming reign that in some fleeting moments seems to be nearly present, right here, but at many other times seems so distant. Jesus calls us to pray always so that we may ourselves actually be part of God's coming reign and not opposed to it.
It is in our prayer that God often moves us beyond our lack of faith and hope, even through our despair to new life and living hope, in the midst of any and all circumstances of life.
May God help us to pray always and not lose heart. For prayer itself is miraculous, an integral part of the living faith and following of Jesus we are invited to. Amen.