Luke 18.1-8
18 Jesus was telling them a parable about their need to pray continuously and not to be discouraged. 2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him, asking, ‘Give me justice in this case against my adversary.’ 4 For a while he refused but finally said to himself, I don’t fear God or respect people, 5 but I will give this widow justice because she keeps bothering me. Otherwise, there will be no end to her coming here and embarrassing me.” 6 The Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 Won’t God provide justice to his chosen people who cry out to him day and night? Will he be slow to help them? 8 I tell you, he will give them justice quickly. But when the Human One comes, will he find faithfulness on earth?”
Let the words of my mouth
and the meditations of my heart
be pleasing to you,
Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
and the meditations of my heart
be pleasing to you,
Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
It strikes me as odd that Luke introduces the parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge by telling us what it’s about: Pray continuously and don’t be discouraged.
If he’s just going to lay it out, I don’t really need to be here, do I? Can I just go home and grill hot dogs?
Pray continuously… don’t be discouraged.… But when the Human One (the Son of Man; the Eternal Creator Become Flesh) comes, will he find faithfulness on earth?
Are those connected? Because it feels disjointed. Wouldn’t you want to encourage people positively instead of sowing the seed of doubt?
Will the Human One find faithfulness on earth? Will there be anyone left to witness? Are any of these disciples and followers really good enough to endure?
That last sentence is so disjointed that I wonder if we’ve had the ending quotation mark in the wrong place for years. I wonder if those are Luke’s words commenting on Jesus’s parable.
Remember, friends, there’s no punctuation in the original Greek. Or spacing. Or capitalization.
Will the Human One find faithfulness on earth?
The question is strong and pointed enough on its own, of course. And our other readings today have something to say about what will come of the human race, specifically of God’s people, as humanity continues to age.
Paul warns Timothy to “continue with the things you have learned and found convincing”
because “There will come a time when people will not tolerate sound teaching. They will collect teachers who say what they want to hear because they are self-centered. They will turn their back on the truth and turn to myths.”
Our temptation, of course, is to read these verses and think, “That’s right! People are teaching all sorts of unsound doctrine and turning others away from Jesus.” And the assumption is that I have the sound doctrine and I have the authority and know-how to turn people back to Jesus.
Well…
1) If you’ve got the know-how, why aren’t you doing it? And,
2) What makes you right and other Christians wrong? Aren’t you reading the same Bible?
It’s a little weird, actually. There’s this really personal bit in Paul’s letter to Timothy. It’s a direct address, unlike Paul’s other letters to Corinth and Ephesus and all the other churches.
Paul encourages Timothy to continue in the things that he learned and that he found convincing.
Gosh, it’s almost as if Paul is encouraging Timothy to think for himself. As if Timothy should think critically when he confronts something outside his comfort zone, which the story of a resurrected Messiah no doubt was.
Critical thinking is outside of the comfort zone of the modern Church, which is reverting back to the Dark Ages and teaching that we should just shut up and listen to multi-millionaire megachurch pastors who play politics with some of the most dangerous and powerful criminals in Washington. Don’t think for yourself. Don’t try to make sense of the Bible. Just understand it the way I’m telling you and everything’s going to be alright.
Continue with the things you have learned and found convincing.
The prophet Jeremiah looks forward to a day when we won’t even need the Bible or the Torah or even prophets like him anymore. He shares this vision:
This is the covenant that I will make with the people of Israel after that time, declares the Lord. I will put my Instructions within them and engrave them on their hearts. I will be their God, and they will be my people. They will no longer need to teach each other to say, “Know the Lord!” because they will all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord; for I will forgive their wrongdoing and never again remember their sins.
That sounds like a pretty wonderful day, doesn’t it? A day when God waves a magic God-wand over the people, maybe after getting rid of all the heretics and pagans, and all God’s people suddenly just know God.
Except Jeremiah isn’t actually that specific.
He doesn’t point to this being a magic moment. He just says it’s coming. God is going to inscribe the Word on our hearts. Engrave it. You don’t do that with a pencil. This is a Word God is carving onto the people of God. It’s a Word that can never be erased or painted over.
Have you seen trees people have carved into decades ago? Some are better at covering up those wounds than others. There’s one huge Beech at Wesley Woods that kids have carved on for probably six decades. That fine Beech bark has grown around the carvings, scabbing and swelling but maintaining the marks that professed love and joy and playfulness in what must have seemed like harmless vandalism. It has made those marks as permanent as the tree. They will outlive all the original authors and only finally pass when the tree has fallen and crumbled back into the soil.
That’s the kind of mark God is writing on our hearts.
It’s not about memorizing verses or being able to drop names like Methuselah or Matthias. It’s not about knowing how many books or verses there are, or how many times Jesus said, “amen”.
It’s about God’s grace written on your heart.
And that’s not something that happened when Pastor JoeBob dunked you in Copper Creek. That’s something that happened when God imagined you, when your first divine blueprint was drawn. God’s Word written on your heart has never not been there. It’s written in your fundamental structure, probably encoded in your DNA.
It’s God’s grace calling you, teaching you without words what’s good and what’s bad, what’s right and what’s wrong, how to decide when the decision seems impossible, or when it seems the lesser of two evils.
You see, God is never like the Unjust Judge. God always listens. God is always with us. God’s grace is ever calling us.
But we aren’t always like the widow. We give up easily. We forget about Emmanuel, God ever present, never looking away, always calling to us, the Word of Creation written on our hearts.
I suspect that the real danger of failing at persistence is that when we give up, it’s not God who forgets; it’s us. If we stop begging for justice, God is still working for us. “Will [God] be slow to help them?” Jesus asks,
I tell you, he will give them justice quickly.
But people are hard to change, and if you haven’t noticed, ours isn’t a God who delights in manhandling people. God is a much more understanding Parent than I could ever hope to be. God hints, nudges, suggests, loves us into justice and mercy and forgiveness. God is nurturing us into perfection.
With all the people God has to change to work toward out good, and, for that matter, to their own, is it any wonder that the Kingdom comes in anything but baby steps?
We are going to have to learn to be patient. God’s Kingdom doesn’t come overnight. It comes with every heart that is nudged and nurtured closer to God’s heart.
So let God start with you today. Let God turn you around. Let God remind you of the Word of Creation, written on your heart that is made in God’s own image, purchased at the highest cost.
Because God loves you that much, too much to let you go, too much to give up on you. Let God turn you around today and bring the Kingdom through you, and through all the wonderful gifts with which our loving Creator has uniquely blessed you.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
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