Twenty-First Sunday after Pentecost
October 21, 2007
Sermon by Pastor John Marboe
The Holy Gospel according to St. Luke. (Luke 18:1-8)
Then Jesus told them a parable about
their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge
who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept
coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to
himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because
this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not
wear me out by continually coming.’” And
the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen
ones who cry to him day and night? Will
he delay long in helping them? I tell
you, he will quickly grant justice to them.
And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
The Gospel of the Lord.
Luke tells a story in which Jesus tells a story about
a widow and an unjust judge. We don’t
know who they were. We don’t know their
names. We don’t know where they lived. We don’t know how the widow became a
widow. We don’t know if she was old or
if she was young, or if she had children or not. We don’t know if this is a true story in the
way we usually mean when we say “true story.”
What we usually mean by “true story” is, “Did it really happen?” We mean historically and factually. Maybe this story Jesus told was based on a
true story, or maybe he simply made it up to fit the occasion.
What is a true
story? Our notion of what is true is
quite important, and yet we seldom think about it directly. I spoke to an elder gentleman this week who
told me about growing up in his hometown church and having confirmation
class. And in that class they were
debating whether Jesus could have ever made up a story. And they concluded, as a class, that Jesus
could never have made up a story; that every story Jesus told had to actually
have happened, otherwise it wouldn’t be a “true story.”
But what is a true
story? It’s complicated. For one thing, memory is tricky. The Greeks understood how tricky she is and
thought of memory as a goddess named Mnemosyne.
She was the mother of the nine muses.
Our memories come and they go, don’t they? We don’t have an easy relationship with our
memories, do we? Raise your hand if you
find memory a little bit hard to hold onto.
We’re never fully in control of our memory. So with our factual histories, they are
constantly being revised. Think, for
example, of Thomas Jefferson, perhaps the greatest founding father of our
country. Well, DNA testing has revised
our history a little bit, hasn’t it?
It’s verified the stories of all his African-American descendents, who
all these years have known that they were descendents of Thomas Jefferson; but
the story was not believed by whites until DNA proved it was true. And so history has been adjusted, and our
collective memory has changed.
Or think about how memory works within your own
family. Think of your family
stories. One reason I love going to
family reunions is because I love watching the siblings my mother’s age argue
about what really happened, who really did what, and said what and why. There are three distinct versions of the
official family history in my family.
Nobody recalls the same event exactly the same way, and perhaps what we
call history and what we call fiction are inexorably bound up with
each other.
When I was seven years old, I went fishing with my
dad. We were in a great big speedboat
with large sides I could barely see over. I had my black Zebco 202, and I was
casting with the big guys. On one cast,
I all of the sudden had a big strike. I
set that hook as hard as I could, and I gripped as tight as I could; and my
little rod bent all the way over the side of that boat. And, quick as a wink, my father snatched that
rod out of my hand and brought in that eight-pound northern pike. I was crushed because I wanted to bring it
in. The picture of me holding that big fish made it to the 10 o’clock news in
Fast forward twenty years, and my father and I are
spending some time together; he is at the end of his life, dying of
cancer. We’re recounting story after
story that we remember together. We get
to that story, and I recall it, and I tell him how I felt about that time. He was astonished because—you know what?—he
remembered that I brought it in all by myself.
Memory is a tricky thing. This is why I emphasize this morning that our
story is actually a story about a story about a widow and an unjust judge.
I had a history teacher once who used to like to say,
“Let’s bring Plato into the room,” or “Let’s bring Teddy Roosevelt into the
room,” or “Let’s bring Abraham Lincoln into the room.” Then, of course, he would proceed to tell a
story about what one of those people either said or did. A good storyteller can, in fact, bring
somebody to life in a conversation or in a room. But he would always qualify his remarks with,
“You realize, of course, that this is my Plato,” or “This is my
Abraham Lincoln,” or “This is my Teddy Roosevelt.”
A well-told story invites characters into our lives
and gives us a relationship to them, where they can speak to us. They speak to us in ways more powerful even
at times than our living, breathing neighbors.
For one thing, stories are portable; stories go with us wherever we
go.
You know, the widow and the unjust judge have been
with me all week, speaking to me. I’ve
been asking them who they are, what they would like to say to us today. Wherever I have gone, they have been with me,
even in my sleep.
Jesus, after telling the story in our text today,
says, “Listen to what the unjust judge says.”
When Jesus told a story, he expected the characters to come to life and
speak to those who heard it.
This morning we’re invited to consider what this
unjust judge is saying. We have a story
about a widow and an unjust judge. And
what is it about? Luke prefaces the
story, saying Jesus told it to the disciples to teach them about their need to
keep praying and to never, never give up.
Since Jesus says it has to do with prayer, we might
be tempted to think that the widow is us, the unjust judge is God, and her
persistent complaint is our prayer. But
is Jesus really comparing God to that heartless, callous, godless creep of a
judge? Probably not. Probably only in the negative sense. No, what he is saying is God is not like this
heartless, unjust judge. So if the widow
can get what she needs out of him, how much more can we expect and hope and
keep asking God for what we need? The
widow’s gritty and gutsy persistence gives us a different image of prayer than
we normally have. She’s relentless,
she’s strives, and she struggles, and she acts, and she hopes, and she will not
give up. It’s a very atavistic view of
prayer—prayer, not as quiet, compliant, and certainly not as fatalism, not
“whatever will be will be,” but dogged determination.
There is not just one way to pray. There are many ways to pray. Quiet contemplation is certainly one good way
to pray. But the story of the widow
gives us a sense of another way that perhaps we don’t know so well. The story of Jacob wrestling with God until
God blessed him gives us a similar picture of prayer.
We live in a world where all human beings live
somewhere between hope and despair. Most
of us have felt those extremes at one time or another. The widow exists, and so does that unjust
judge. When power is in the hands of the
cruel, when injustice is enfranchised, when the side of justice is powerless,
when we are desperate for a different world, a different state of affairs, and
we don’t have the means to change them, when we or others feel hopeless and
nobody cares, there is the widow, and there is the unjust judge.
Luke told this story about Jesus telling this story
to encourage all who are tempted to despair.
The story doesn’t promise a particular outcome. It doesn’t tell us exactly what to do or how
to do it. It is, rather, an
encouragement to persist in the pursuit of a more just world for ourselves and
for others, and to keep on praying.
Amen.