Pray Always and Do Not Lose Heart

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Seventeenth Sunday After Pentecost, October 20, 2019 by the Very Reverend Tyler Doherty.

I’ve been thinking recently about our journey with Jeremiah these past few weeks. He’s told us the story of impending invasion by the armies of Nebuchadnezzar, the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, and the exile of people of Israel into Babylon. Last week, we heard something rather astounding—that even in exile the people of Judah are to build houses and live in them, plant gardens and eat what they produce; to take wives and have sons and daughters; to seek the welfare of the city where they now live; and perhaps most astonishingly to pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in the welfare of the city they will find their own welfare.

This is pretty earth-shattering stuff. What God is saying through Jeremiah is that even in a time of exile, when the Temple has been destroyed and they are prisoners in a foreign land, the people of Israel are called to be the same covenant people they have always been. God is present and active, working to restore God’s intended purposes, even in Babylon.

Observant, faithful Jews would have identified worshipping God with the Temple. When the temple is gone, what are they to do? When the Temple goes, where is God? Jeremiah reminds the people, still reeling from the trauma of war, destruction, and diaspora, that God is there too. And exile is not just a time for waiting it out, it is a time and place where even in the most unlikely of circumstances fruitfulness, abundance, and joy can be drawn from sorrow, loss, and dislocation. More than that, Jeremiah reminds the people of Israel that their job is not to lose heart, but to maintain the same love of God and love of neighbor they practiced in Jerusalem—caring for the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, praying for new alien city in which they suddenly find themselves living.

Exile is a powerful metaphor that we encounter in all sorts of ways of in our day to day lives. At the loss of friend or loved one. At the fracture of a relationship. When we suddenly find ourselves booted out from the land of milk and honey and in the wilderness of a difficult diagnosis. Getting older can often be a kind of exile—our friends begin to pass away, we can’t get around as easily, our once sharp memory comes and goes and we find ourselves in a grayish desert place. Even the Church, which once enjoyed pride of place in 1950s and 60s could be seen as existing in exile—chased into the wilderness places by an increasingly secularized and consumer-driven culture.

Jeremiah reminds us that exile is not a new thing. The people of God have been here before. God has been here before. And what we see as the intractable end of the story never is in God’s eyes. When we are at the end of our imaginative possibilities for alternate futures God is never at the end of God’s. God’s mercies are new each morning. New creation, new possibility, new more just social arrangements are coming towards us beyond the boundaries of what we with our puny human minds can ask for or imagine. Sour grapes and teeth on edge aren’t the last word. God, even in exile, is surely coming. God’s desire is to build up, to plant, to fashion for Godself a people who don’t just know about God, but who embody, enact, perform, God’s love for God’s people to everyone.

That’s why we have the parable of the persistent widow paired with our reading from Jeremiah. If you think about it, the Widow too is in exile. Without financial means to support herself and without a male advocate (a sad necessity in the patriarchal society she finds herself in), she is in a most precarious position. She stands before the door the of the Unjust Judge and hammers away day after day. Haven’t we all stood before the Unjust Judge at one point in our lives? The Unjust Judge of cancer or mental illness? The Unjust Judge of joblessness, racism, or sexism? The Unjust Judge of loneliness? The Unjust Judge of addiction or exploitative economic arrangements?

Jesus tells us that this is not a parable about having to bend God’s ear, or flap our arms frantically to capture God’s attention. God is not like the Unjust Judge who can’t pry himself away from the television set long enough to hear the Widow’s complaint. Jesus tells us to, “Pray and never lose.” Even in exile, even standing in front of a locked door that seemingly won’t budge, Jesus tells us to persist in prayer. We are to “be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable,” as it says in Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy.

Persistence in prayer is a funny thing. When we keep showing up—asking, seeking, knocking—we find something interesting happens. Gradually our fixed ideas about how things should be start to yield to God’s dream for the world. We move slowly from a place of paucity and lack to the place of open-handed surrender—“into your hands I commend my spirit.” My will slowly shifts to “thy will be done,” and we start to see that our prayers have already begun to be answered in the people and communities that God has surrounded us with. Perhaps it’s a grief support group or an addiction counseling service. Perhaps it’s an advocacy group that is working to respect the dignity of every human being and advocating for peace, justice, and reconciliation amongst all peoples. In the simple act of persistence, of showing up, we gradually are transformed into the answer to our prayers. We begin to see with God’s eyes and not just our own—and we see that everything we need has been richly provided to overflowing.

How long does that shift take? I don’t know. But the movement from “my will be done,” to “thy will be done,” from scarcity and lack to abundance and fruitfulness is the basic arc of the Christian life. And it’s important to give honest expression and voice to that “my will be done.” We throw ourselves at the door, pour ourselves out like our head were a fountain of tears, and name before God what is on our heart. You start where you are. “Pray as you can, and not as you can’t,” as Benedictine Abbot Dom John Chapman was fond of saying. The widow’s plea for justice is eventually answered. But do we know that she got on the last day what she was asking for on the first? Might not she, through her persistence, through her constant prayer and not losing heart, have been given a new set of eyes, a new set of ears with which to see that her days in exile are no longer?

I remember when Michelle and I were living in Boulder, CO we had a neighbor who was waving a pistol around and threatening to kill us because we had removed his wife from an abusive situation and taken her to a Women’s Shelter. After a few days she returned home and for the next three months this guy demanded who had taken her. She finally buckled under the abuse and when the husband found out it was us, he was determined to cut us down. Fortunately, a SWAT team showed up just in time and took him into custody (finding an apartment full of weapons in the process). For weeks, I prayed that God punish this man. While he was locked up awaiting trial I kicked over his beloved Harley-Davison left in his parking spot and spat on it. I wanted vengeance. I knocked and knocked on that door.

But eventually something shifted. I realized that it wasn’t that I needed vengeance. I needed to forgive this man. Hate was eating me alive. I was in hell. So I prayed to want to want to forgive. I kept knocking at that door. And one day, when I went to God in prayer, I found I wanted to forgive. That was a start. I kept knocking and knocking and one day I found forgiveness was there. What I started off wanting had shifted into what God wanted and persisting in prayer was the engine for journey into love. It wasn’t what I wanted, but it was what I needed. That hot hell of self-enclosure and revenge opened into a good and broad land, a spacious place of refreshment where burdens were put down. Forgiving was indeed sweeter than honey to my mouth. I realized that unforgiveness was a kind of exile, but that even there in that hot dry place, God was already working with my stiff-necked self to make me a little more like Him, to open me that I might be healed and then be that healing for others.

If you think about it, Jesus is the archetypal Widow. He stood before every Unjust Judge and knocked with the steady, persistent rap of love. He knew exile. He knew injustice, exclusion, persecution, and death. But he always remained on the way, his faced turned towards Jerusalem and set like faithful flint. That’s the Good News of the Gospel. That Jesus has stood where we stand. He’s knocked on the same doors we’ve knocked on. He’s known it all from the inside-out and redeemed it in his resurrected life. He’s taken our standing at the locked door into himself and redeemed it. He’s made a way out of no way, new life out of apparent dead ends and unheard prayers. The way through has been opened, the veil has been pierced, and praying always and not losing heart helps us see that we’ve been standing in front of an unlocked door the whole time, waiting to walk through the gateless gate that is love loving love in love.