First United Methodist Church of Reno

²⁷The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. ²⁸And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the LORD. ²⁹In those days they shall no longer say:

³⁰But all shall die for their own sins; the teeth of everyone who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.

³¹The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. ³²It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. ³³But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. ³⁴No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, “Know the LORD,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.

¹Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. ²He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. ³In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ ⁴For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, ⁵yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” ⁶And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. ⁷And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? ⁸I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Children seem to be born knowing just how to get what they want by wearing down their parents’ (and, I would hasten to add, their grandparents’) resistance. It may begin with a sweetly plaintive plea and yet move inexorably to pitiful crying, and we melt before the unhappiness of these little ones. The world of advertising certainly saw the value of this technique – of a message repeated over and over and over – and has employed it with great marketing success in television and radio commercials, as well as on billboards along busy highways. Billions of dollars every year are paid to ad companies who are simply acting like children have always acted since the beginnings of the family.

So, our familiarity with this method (and others like it) ought to have prepared us for today’s parable from The Gospel According to Luke. This little tale of a widow and an unjust judge may have even caused some of us to say to ourselves, “I’ve known people just like that woman,” or “I’ve done exactly what this judge did and for the very same reason: to finally have some peace and quiet!” On a deeper level, though, who among us doesn’t admire this widow’s undaunted tenacity? But what’s it have to do with prayer?

I suggest that this case never left the widow’s thoughts, that her whole life was centered on winning it, and on doing anything that justice would demand. While her days may have been punctuated with endless visits to the judge; her nights were consumed with finding new and more forceful ways to influence his decision. Haven’t we ever known such a concern, joy or outrage that’s never been far from the center of our own consciousness? In the all-pervasive centering of her life, and in her constant demands, the widow exemplifies what it means to “pray always and not to lose heart.”^⁴

We know people whose existences reflect this consistency of prayer and life – a hero of my own like this was my colleague, Virginia Hilton, whose brief biography you may read on the door of my office or in the footnotes of this sermon.^⁵ Heroes’ names come easily to mind, but the list is actually much longer. There are the mothers and fathers who sacrifice every single day for their children’s welfare, teachers whose concern and patience motivate hundreds (if not thousands) of students to develop their God-given potential, cooks in soup kitchens who use their skills to prepare nourishing meals and appetizing food for the poor. These people’s preoccupation with the things of God is revealed in their listening to God’s call to them in their neighborhood and at their workplaces – in everyone they meet their lifestyles mirror the lifestyle of Jesus. In their constant readiness to live selflessly, honestly, generously, and peacefully they exemplify what it must mean to “pray always and not to lose heart.”

Reflecting on the lives of such people ought to help us understand why answering that final question in the parable was left up to each of us – if we will hear it: When the fully human one comes into our own lives, will he find this kind of lived faith in us?

St. Teresa of Avila was one of those faithful people they say. Already old and sick, she set out on yet another journey to found a convent of her Carmelite order; and after bouncing around for hours in a cart, she arrived at her destination in the middle of a thunder storm. When she stepped out of the cart, she slipped and fell, face down in the mud. Raising her mud-spattered face, she shook her fist at the heavens and said, “Lord, if this is how you treat your friends, you should not be surprised you have so few!” Now that is a woman of faith and a model of prayer.

We can understand why people give up, wear out, cut their losses and run. We marvel at those who persist against all odds, who redouble their efforts to be vindicated, to heal, to succeed, to rebuild, to begin again and again and again. What’s the source of such inner strength? What causes this widow to be so relentless? In the face of often huge opposition, what helps such people stick with it when there’s work and justice to be done – and to do it without losing their mind, let alone their patience?

A clue to the source of this kind of persistence can be found in any of the stories in the Bible where you hear the phrase, “your faith has made you well.”^⁶ It’s not about God. It’s about us. When suffering becomes overwhelming and all human efforts have seemed to fail, something redirects our energy to where release can be found. Paradoxically enough, this kind of trust arises out of hopelessness – in moments where change seems impossible. Persistence flowing out from the power of that kind of faith – a faith that initiates and acts – is the form of prayer that Jesus is talking about. According to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, it’s in our ability to lay open before the world all of our sorrows and dreams, desires and desperations. That kind of persistence will then reveal to us our true aspirations, the longings we’ve forgotten, the pangs we’ve ignored for far too long or have let slide into numbness. Persistence reveals what we truly care about.^⁷

We miss the mark,^⁸ then, if we think that this story is supposed to teach us something about intercessory prayer. It’s primarily about the yearning for change. So it was very appropriate that the story told of a poor widow. She represents a behavior, maybe, but she also represents the poverty and vulnerability which is at least one point of the parable’s message. The story has been shaped in the cruelty of exploitation and the arbitrary abuse of power. It belongs in the world which Jesus is addressing. Jesus is reading the signs in the wounds of his people. The contours of their devastation shape the structures of his thought, because this is where he belongs and these are the people whose cries he hears. Whose persistent voices are calling out for us today to listen?

Don’t misunderstand, then, prayer is not our side of some bargain that we make with God – it isn’t the way in which we somehow convince God to do good things for us. Our confusion about prayer is most clearly evident in times of crisis. When someone we love is desperately ill, or when some unanticipated tragedy explodes into our lives, we pray in anguish because we want things to be other than the way they are. It’s very human of us not to want to see somebody we love in pain or dying, but we shouldn’t draw our fundamental understanding of prayer from our usual response in times of crisis. In that kind of a situation, it becomes all too easy to experience prayer as an attempt to get God to get us out of it.

I don’t know who (or what) God actually is, frankly. The more that I come to know of God the more awesome and mysterious God becomes. But I have come to know Jesus. For him faithful people are those who are willing to enter into an honest and persevering relationship with all that is holy, with all that is good, with all that is beautiful, with all that is just, with all that is…of God. So Jesus’ way of praying isn’t to have us throw up a wall of pious language – sweet incense and flower petals – between ourselves and God. Jesus longs for a people who will open up the dark corners of their broken hearts, who don’t speak in easy pieties shaken lightly from their sleeves, but in words that burn with a passion that has been forged on the anvil of the real struggles of human life.

While the world’s response to our actions is important, it should never determine how, or whether or not, we should act. The world may truly be indifferent to the way that we people of faith act, and it may continue to put off addressing our demands. But the world’s indifference suggests to me that we ought to keep at it – to persevere in the face of resistance. When we do fail or become overwhelmed with frustration or anger in the face of injustice, we still must never give in to the values and perceptions of the people in power. What we’ve got to do is keep praying in the way that this widow did, and keep contemplating alongside other people of faith, so that the vision given us for all humankind by Jesus is persistently pursued and – some day – seen and understood by everybody.

Jesus, I think, is telling us here that prayer isn’t the warm buzz of spiritual contentment experienced by those who are comfortable in this world. Prayer, instead, happens when the voice of the marginalized is heard and when the volume of that voice increases until justice is done. Prayer, for Jesus, isn’t passive, pious or comfortable at all. It’s feisty, contentious and restless for justice!

One aspect of persistence, oddly enough though, is actively waiting for what you know must come! Like knocking on a door that you know should be opened to you, any such waiting presupposes some kind of caring.^⁹ We wait for what matters most to us – we wait for a child to be born, we wait for a loved one to come home, we wait for a letter from a close friend and eagerly open it when it arrives. Waiting strips away any self-deception we might have and reveals our real needs, values – indeed, who we really are. This kind of awareness exposes us to powers and qualities about our world that we might otherwise pay no attention to at all. This recognition, arising out of the depths of our greatest needs, leads us to not lose heart, to direct our trust to the source of new life. As Rabbi Heschel has also so eloquently put it:

This is the task: in the darkest night to be certain of the dawn, certain of the power to turn a curse into a blessing, agony into a song. To know the monster’s rage and, in spite of it, proclaim to its face (even a monster will be transfigured into an angel); to go through Hell and to continue to trust in the goodness of God – this is the challenge and the way.^¹⁰

Like the widow in our parable for today, then, we are invited to be persistent in our praying for what the gospel – God’s good news – promises to us all: love and shalom, justice and daily bread, drink for the thirsty and good news for the poor, release for the prisoners and sight for the blind. We pray for it all – not only here on Sunday mornings, or in solitude and in silence, but by pounding on the doors of injustice against those who continue to perpetrate it. We pray, as well, by opening wide the door of welcome ourselves, that all who come seeking such good news will find it here among us.

2 More than any of the other gospel accounts, Luke places a special emphasis on the role of prayer – mentioning it eighteen times (to Matthew’s thirteen and Mark’s ten). To be sure, Jesus himself is often shown to be in prayer here in Luke’s gospel, but will God respond to them, the disciples wonder? Using a rather comic example of two caricaturized characters that would be immediately familiar to a Greco-Roman audience, Jesus explains that the real issue is persistence. If we keep at it, justice will be ours. As an elderly black pastor explained this parable: “Until you’ve stood for years knocking at a locked door, your knuckles bleeding, you don’t really know what prayer is” (from Fred B. Craddock, in Luke, Interpretation [Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990], p. 2101).

By the way, the phrase translated here as “so that she may not wear me out,” in Greek, is literally “so that she may not give me a black eye” (the literal meaning of hypopiazē)!

3 Taken from the second verse of one of our songs from The Faith We Sing songbook sung on this day, “You Are Mine,” the words to the whole song are:

I will come to you in the silence; I will lift you from all your fear.

You will hear my voice; I claim you as my choice, be still and know I am here.

CHORUS: Do not be afraid, I am with you.

I have called you each by name.

Come and follow me, I will bring you home;

I love you and you are mine.

I am hope for all who are hopeless; I am eyes for all who long to see.

In the shadows of the night, I will be your light, come and rest in me.

CHORUS

I am strength for all the despairing, healing for the ones who dwell in shame.

All the blind will see, the lame will all run free, and all will know my name.

CHORUS

I am the Word that leads all to freedom; I am the peace the world cannot give.

I will call your name, embracing all your pain, stand up, now walk, and live!

CHORUS

5 In the early 1940s, a New Jersey seventh-grader named Virginia stood up to her school's grown-ups and refused to sing at her school's eighth-grade graduation ceremony because her two African American classmates were not allowed to participate. It was 20 years before the civil rights movement took hold of the country. The girl's defiance was just the start of Virginia Hilton's lifetime commitment to civil rights, women's rights and gay rights.

The Rev. Hilton, one of the first women ordained as a United Methodist minister in the California-Nevada Conference, died Sunday [October 7, 2007] of breast cancer. She was 77. As an activist and advocate, the Rev. Hilton defied authority again and again during her life to stand up for what she believed.

As a child, she quit the Girl Scouts because of its then-racist policies. In her late 60s, she was one of the Sacramento 68, a group of clergy who risked being defrocked for defying the United Methodist Church doctrine by participating in the holy union ceremony of two lesbians. She was "more apt to seek change through grace and dignity than through vitriol and volume, but was not above good old-fashioned demonstration and protesting through peaceful resistance," according to a statement by her family.

The Rev. Hilton was born Virginia Young on Sept. 13, 1930, in Dayton, Ohio. Her father was an Evangelical United Brethren preacher, and the family moved frequently. The Rev. Hilton saw her parents work for social change in New Jersey, New Mexico, Wisconsin, Indiana and Ohio. In 1952, she married Bruce Hilton in New Mexico. Thirteen years later, the couple received a phone call from the Delta Ministry asking them to move to Mississippi to help African Americans register to vote and run for office.

"I was ready to go," Bruce Hilton said Thursday from his home in Sacramento. But he was worried about moving his family - four boys including the youngest who was still an infant. His wife didn't hesitate in her response, he said. "She said, 'If that's what God wants us to do, we'll do it,' " Hilton said. In Mississippi, the family was evicted from its first home after the Ku Klux Klan distributed flyers throughout the county saying the Hiltons were communists. At another home, a bullet flew through their front window. While in the South, the Rev. Hilton helped educate and care for the children of African American sharecroppers kicked off their land for registering to vote. She took them to the doctor, through the "Colored Only" door, only to return another day with her own children, who would file through the "White Only" entrance. "She faced what was going on," her husband said.

During the 1970s, the Rev. Hilton worked as a registered nurse, but "she realized that she was limited in her role in what was expected of her as a nurse," said her son Steve Hilton. "She saw the whole continuum of spiritual and physical care and wanted to go beyond the limitations of her role as nurse." So, in 1978, she graduated with master's degrees in divinity and counseling from the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley. She then became the 12th female minister in the California-Nevada Conference of the United Methodist Church. She later joined the conference's board to help more women become ordained. Over the next 20 years she worked at churches in Concord, El Sobrante, Albany and Sacramento, was ordained as an elder in 1980 and served seven years as pastor.

In the late 1970s, the Rev. Hilton began her work with gay rights after learning that one of her sons was gay. She co-founded the Parents Reconciling Network, a national United Methodist network for parents of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender children.

"I think of her as gutsy, but not abrasive," said her husband as he reflected on her life of activism and advocacy.

As a mother, she was patient. "I can testify to that," said her oldest son, Steve Hilton, adding he tested her patience on more than one occasion. "If the time came for righteous anger, it was always there." (This obituary appeared on page B - 11 on October 12, 2007 of the San Francisco Chronicle)

In time, may the same be said of the rest of us.

The First United Methodist Church of Napa, CA

October 21, 2007