The Power of Prayer (sermon, October 3, 2010, World Communion Sunday)

Luke 18:1-8

Although you may have heard of the National Prayer Breakfast that takes place annually in our nation’s capital, you may not know anything about the organization behind it. That is because this organization is particularly secretive, working as much as possible behind the scenes of the constant politicking and power brokering that takes place in Washington, D.C. It is known simply as the Fellowship.

Participants in the Fellowship include members of the House and Senate, Democrats and Republicans, Catholics and Protestants, even some Jews, Muslims, and Buddhists. Regardless of party affiliation or religious background, they are all involved in one primary activity: prayer. The Fellowship’s leader, David Coe, always urges newcomers to get involved with a prayer group, telling them to “find something to pray for that is bigger than yourself...something you can’t do so that you can’t take credit for it, when you see it start to happen. And it will happen.” David Coe is an unabashed believer in the power of prayer. (1)

I must confess that I find it almost hard to imagine a bunch of high-ranking government officials in Washington, D.C. coming together every week to pray, but it shouldn’t be surprising. After all, many of our political leaders claim that their faith is an important part of their lives, and prayer is a major part of our faith tradition. Yesterday, at our prayer retreat, we saw many different examples of prayer, many of which come form the Bible.

And yet, in spite of the biblical focus on prayer, the gospel of Luke contains only two stories where Jesus directly addresses prayer. The first is when the disciples beg Jesus to teach them how to pray. He gives them the words of the Lord’s Prayer and then tells a parable about the need to be persistent in prayer. Then there is today’s story, a story Luke tells us the point of even before he tells the story: “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” The main point of both Jesus’ parables on prayer is simply this: keep doing it.

Luke offers an unusually clear set up to today’s parable: “Then Jesus told them a parable about the need to pray always and not to lose heart.” Tom Long suggests that Luke’s introduction just proves that problems with prayer have always been around, at least since the time of Jesus and the disciples. And we all know what the problems are, don’t we? How do we pray? How much should we pray? How does prayer work? Why should we bother praying when our prayers never seem to matter anyway? But Tom Long also says that Luke knew that the deepest, most persistent problem with prayer is that “we lose heart, we just plain lose heart.” (2)

And so Jesus tells this parable about a widow. Back then, widows were powerless. All kinds of laws were created with the sole purpose of protecting widows, and yet, what good are laws when there is no judge to enforce them? This widow found herself in just such a predicament; she knew that her cause was just, but she needed the authority, the judge, to make the ruling and set things straight with her opponent. And time and time again, the judge refused. He didn’t care about the religious laws because he did not fear God; he didn’t care about his reputation, either, because he had no respect for people. So the widow used the only power at her disposal, a power every three year-old is intimately familiar with: she made herself a nuisance. She pestered him relentlessly until the only thing worth his while was to see that she got justice. With her persistence, the widow wore down the unjust judge.

In one of his comedy routines about parenting Bill Cosby talks about how young children often come running to their parents to tattle on their siblings or friends. “He took my teddy bear and won’t give it back!” The mistake the kids make is thinking that their parents care about justice. Parents are not interested in justice, says Cosby, they are interested in peace and quiet. The same seems to be true of the unjust judge. Yes, he finally settled her dispute, but why? Because he was sick and tired of the widow bothering him.

So, what are we to make of this? Is Jesus saying we should be like the widow, badgering God relentlessly until we finally get what we want? Is Jesus saying that God is like the unjust judge or like a worn-out parent of small children, who will finally grant our wish just to shut us up?

It was a perfect evening for a baseball game. Not too hot, a nice breeze blowing over the field and into the stands. There was a boy in the stands wearing a too-big baseball cap, and a worn-out baseball glove that didn’t fit. In the bottom of the second inning, a fly ball came into the stand right at the boy. He lifted his gloved hand to catch it but just then, a man sitting behind him wearing horn-rimmed glasses reached over the boy and plucked the ball right out of the air. The kid was crushed.

“Give the kid the ball!” someone shouted at Horn Rims. “Yeah, give the kid the ball!” cried someone else. Soon, the entire section of the stands took up the cry. “Give the kid the ball! Give the kid the ball!” But Horn Rims never even acknowledged the cries of the crowd. He just put the ball in his pocket and sat down, his eyes never leaving the field.

At some point in every inning, the chanting started up again; it even spread into the lower stands: “Give the kid the ball! Give the kid the ball!” But Horn Rims kept ignoring it. Finally, in the seventh inning, a man went up to Horn Rims, laid a hand on his shoulder and calmly but firmly said something in his ear. Whatever it was worked, because Horn Rims took the ball out of his pocket and handed it to the boy.

“He gave the kid the ball!” someone shouted, and soon, the whole crowd was on its feet, stamping and yelling, “He gave the kid the ball! He gave the kid the ball!” Even the ballplayers on the field were looking up into the stands, trying to see what was happening. (3)

Is that what prayer is like? Persistence pays off and we get what we want? I don’t think that’s exactly what Jesus meant. After all, the widow didn’t get a mansion or a pony or her dead husband back. She got justice. Not only that, but she got justice from a judge who was not just.

Two wealthy philanthropists had a meeting with Mother Teresa. They knew that in this meeting, Mother Teresa was going to ask them to donate a large sum of money for her mission to those with HIV. Before the meeting, the men agreed that they would listen to her speak, but they would tell her they didn’t have any money to give, even though the reality was they just didn’t feel compelled to donate to that particular cause. “HIV just isn’t my thing,” said one of the men.

So Mother Teresa came in and made her appeal for the AIDS Hospice. When she finished, the men said, “We’re moved by what you’ve said, but we simply don’t have any money to give you.” She looked at them and nodded and said, “Then let us pray.” After the prayer, she made the exact same appeal as before. Again, the men said, “We’re touched, but we’re sorry, we just don’t have the money.” Again, she nodded and said, “Let us pray.” At which point one of the men jumped up from his seat and said, “Alright, alright, let me get my checkbook!” (4)

Today’s parable is not just about the pwer of persistence, of making ourselves a nuisance until we get what we want, it is about God who longs for justice and who will answer our prayers for justice in our lives and in the world. Jesus is telling us don’t give up on justice, don’t lose heart that God can and will set the world right, even though it might take so much longer and look so much different than we thought. Yes, we might look around this world and see that the powerful always win at the expense of the weak; the rich get richer by exploiting the poor; those working for peace seem to be endlessly toiling in vain. That’s what it looks like, but in the face of all that, Jesus reminds us to “pray always and not lose heart.”

And we can do this because of who we pray to. We do not lift up our prayers to an unjust judge but to the God who created the universe and everything in it, the God who rescued the Israelites from slavery and who sent the prophets to demand justice when the Israelites’ society became unjust. If the unjust judge would finally honor the demands of that persistent, relentless widow, Jesus is saying, then how much more will God honor the cries for justice that come from God’s own beloved children? How much more? After all, ours is the God who proclaimed through the prophets, “Let justice flow like a river and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” How much more? “And Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not lose heart.”

When I spent a year in Belfast, Northern Ireland as a student pastor, I got to know a woman named Ruth Patterson. Ruth was the first woman ordained as a Presbyterian Minister in Northern Ireland, and she knows a lot about praying for justice. After years of working in a Presbyterian Church during the worst of the Troubles, when terrorism was the primary means of communication between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, Ruth left parish ministry and founded Restoration Ministries, an organization that served both Catholics and Protestants and which tried to model unity in diversity, bridge building in a torn community, hospitality, and the power of prayer. The home base for Restorations Ministries is a beautiful old house where people come to take refuge. As Ruth puts it, “Prayer is at the centre of what we do and it seems, as the years go by, that the bricks and mortar of this old and beloved house are absorbing some of the many prayers offered here every day. We rejoice that people find within these walls a place of safety and beyond that a sense of the presence of God.” (5)

Ruth tells the story of a woman named Jean McConville, a thirty-seven year-old widow and mother of ten children, who was a Protestant by birth and married to a Catholic. In the 1970s, at the height of the Troubles, she assisted a dying soldier who was shot outside her home. Not long after, she was abducted from her home by twelve people wearing masks. Her family never heard from her again. The children had to be split up and sent to various institutions. For thirty years, Jean’s family tried to find out what had happened to her, but they found nothing, and they had no remains to lay to rest. They had no justice.

When she met them and heard their story, Ruth encouraged Jean’s family to pray and she also took up the cause in prayer. For two years they specifically prayed that if no one would come forward with information about Jean, then the earth itself would yield up its dead. And after two years of persistent prayer during which this aching family did not lose heart, that’s exactly what happened. And on All Saints’ Day in 2003, Jean’s children and grandchildren laid her body to rest at long last. (6)

Today, Christians around the world celebrate communion in the face of all kinds of injustice. In all kinds of circumstances, we lift our prayers to God, who is loving and just. We break bread and pour wine and when we do this we proclaim that in spite of the poverty and violence and heartbreak all around us we will pray always and we will not lose heart that with God’s help, justice and peace will reign. May it be so. Amen.

Endnotes:
1. Peter J. Boyer, “Frat House for Jesus,” The New Yorker, Sept. 13, 2010. Online here.
2. Tom Long’s sermon on this passage is available online here.
3. This story was told in Tom Long’s sermon footnoted above, but can also be found in Chicken Soup for the Sports Fan’s Soul, pp. 307-8.
4. Tom Long tells this story in his sermon footnoted above.
5. Ruth Patterson, Proclaiming the Promise. Veritas, 2006, p. 93.
6. Ibid., pp. 74-5.