To Not Lose Heart

Luke 18:1-8

How do you know when you’ve lost heart? When you’ve lost faith?

What do you do differently? Start doing/stop doing?

The most consistent thing I do when I have lost faith, or lost heart – and either don’t realize it or don’t want to admit it – is to start trying to do it all myself.

I’m fortunate that I have several good friends who will listen to me run through an ever-expanding to-do list and gently say, “But isn’t it actually the florist’s job to arrange the flowers?”

or “She’s a very capable person. She can probably do that for herself.”

or “You know, you might leave that one in God’s hands.”

Oh. Yeah. Right.

Prayer. Faith. Trust. Patience.

That’s what the gospel is about today, isn’t it?
Luke tells us that right away: Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.

In some city there was a judge who did not fear God or respect anyone. And a widow was in that city, and she kept coming to him and saying “Avenge me against my opponent.” And the judge kept not wanting to do so.

But eventually, he said to himself: “Even though I don’t fear God or respect any human being, she keeps making so much trouble and work for me that I will avenge her, so she won’t come and beat me up.”

Yep.

That’s the story about prayer.

About a judge who is too lazy or indifferent to act, and a woman demanding vengeance or vindication to the point that the judge expects her to beat him up. Literally, “hit me under the eye.”

A story about a person who gets what she wants through bullying, through implied violence; and another who gives in to that pressure for no better reason than a desire to be left alone and not have to bother.

We don’t know the particulars of the case, we don’t know where actual justice lies. Although centuries of commentators and translators have been generous to the woman, casting her as a vulnerable victim begging for justice, the raw vocabulary suggests that what she desires is not the righteous, godly judgement so often referred to in scripture, but vengeance, vindication or punishment. She wants to win, and to see her opponent lose.

Now, that still might be justice you and I would unhesitatingly support and call holy. She might be, for example, a rape victim demanding powerful punishment for her attacker. But she could just as possibly be more like a political candidate demanding an investigation and “consequences” for the “unfair” tactics of opposing politicians or indifferent third parties.

There are no good guys, no hero or heroine, in Jesus’ original story. If anything, this parable is about the opposite of the kingdom of God, about the ways our everyday world betrays our expectations and hopes.

And then there’s Luke, telling us it’s about persistent prayer, about keeping hope and faith alive.

The traditional interpretation, the one that starts cropping up as early as a generation after Jesus first told the story, is that persistence – sticking to what we ask for, even if we don’t seem likely to get it – persistence will wear down imperfect, corrupt fellow humans, so we expect persistence to work on God, too.

But do we really want to apply the lesson that you can bully or exhaust someone into compliance to our relationship with God?
Do you want to think of your prayer life as an effort to wear God down – even if we do it because we know God has already promised to act?

Or perhaps – just perhaps – is the single-minded, repetitive focus of that widow in the story actually what prayer looks like after we have given up?

Is it possible that dogged pursuit of the answer I want is a symptom of having already lost my faith or trust in what God wants?

Is it possible that to pray like that widow – focused on my own agenda, unwilling to let an issue go, repeating my demands to God even about something as obviously right as justice, healing, peace – is the prayer equivalent of my habit of trying to do everything myself because I’ve lost my fundamental hope, my trust in others, my heart’s faith in God, even while my head still insists that this repeated prayer is an act of belief?

It’s possible.

At least it’s possible for me.

And that judge might just be another model of lost heart, or faith, or hope – the model of disconnection. Because connection – respecting others, respecting God, showing up to do the work of relationship – takes ongoing, repeated, trust and hope with our actions, not just our heads.  And when we feel like relationship – with others, with God – is too much work, it’s often because the faith, heart, or hope we need for those actions is already lost.

So if, in fact, this story is a teaching from opposites, a model of the symptoms of lost faith and heart, then what it teaches us about prayer is to keep our conversation and relationship with God open-ended.

To pray, perhaps, by listening for what God might be doing for us when our petitions and intercessions seem to go unanswered.

To ask what work of the kingdom might be happening in the upheaval and distress – even while we keep praying for peace;

ask what unasked miracles might be happening in the illness itself, even while we pray for healing without giving up hope.

Perhaps this story teaches us that not knowing what to pray for – and praying uncertainly anyway – is more faithful and hopeful than knowing what we want and steadfastly praying for that.

To pray with faith, with trust, with hope, probably means letting go – over and over – of the need to work it out myself to get it right, letting go of the need to know the outcome, or the belief that there is always a right answer.

Because God treats us that way:

with faith that doesn’t force us to get it right,

hope that doesn’t need to know the end of the story,

and the trust to accept more than one answer – to our prayers, to God’s own dreams, and to Jesus’ question of whether there will be faith on earth when God comes again, and always.

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Already Given

Luke 17:11-19

At first glance, this is a story about how your mother was right.

Your mother – or whoever taught you to write thank you notes, to express gratitude as well as gratification at getting what you wanted – was teaching you something holy, something that Jesus cares about.

At first glance, it’s about gratitude, but just a little bit deeper than the surface, it is also a story about salvation, about just what it is that brings us into whole and holy relationship with God and one another, even strangers and enemies.

Ten people with leprosy encounter Jesus:

they pray for mercy, and receive a cure.

“Go, show yourselves to the priests,” Jesus says.

And by obeying his commandment, they are cured – their skin is made clean – and when the priests see that, they can be restored to their community. They can take up their lives again, be who they used to be, among their friends and family, the life they had to give up in their illness.

That’s what we mostly pray for, I suspect, when we are ill, or when someone else is sick. It’s certainly the cure I pray for when one of you is on my prayer list: That you may be well again: recovered and strong, restored to the community and relationships and daily tasks and pleasures that surgery or cancer or some other injury or illness has interrupted.

That restoration is healing, not just for the body, but for the spirit.

And often – not always – but often, we receive what we have prayed for. The cancer remits, the broken bone heals, the surgery is successful. Sometimes the cure leaves us different – not fully back to normal, changed a bit, but out of danger,  and with cause to rejoice, to hope, and to take up our normal lives again.

That story of answered prayer is the nine lepers’ story.

They ask for healing; they obey their healer;

they are cured, and can go home rejoicing.

But then there’s the tenth leper.

He doesn’t go on his way to getting his life back, instead he turns around in the midst of his healing, praising God, to fall at Jesus’ feet in thanksgiving.

And when he – a man who belongs to the wrong religion; a man who has no business claiming to know our God, Jesus’ God – when he gives voice to the wonders and power of God, to his own gratitude,

that’s when Jesus sees it, and says, “Your faith has saved you.”

It wasn’t getting religion right. It wasn’t faithful prayer, it wasn’t asking for the cure, it wasn’t following Jesus’ commands that saved him. The faith that saved him wasn’t the ways we normally measure our faith – prayer, persistence, obedience, trust – all ten of the lepers had that, and all ten of the lepers were cured.

What saves this man is something else.

I’m reminded of something Christian blogger and author Rachel Held Evans says, at the end of her “Year of Biblical Womanhood.” She spent a year trying to follow literally all of the Bible’s rules for women – rules for everything from silence and obedience to charity, investment, executive homemaking, and ritual purity, and she reflects, at the end of her project, on how we all seem to come to the Bible, to the Word of God, looking for something.

And whatever we look for, she says – whether it is liberation, war, peace, oppression, truth, or irrelevance – we will find it.

Evans says she dove into the Bible in her project looking for a good story. And she found one.

But also, she was looking for permission: “permission to lead, permission to speak, permission to find my identity in something other than my roles, permission to be myself, permission to be a woman.”

She was looking for a kind of healing, a restoration to wholeness of her sense of self in the midst of her holy community.

But, “what a surprise,” she says, “to reach the end of the year with the quiet and liberating certainty that I never had to ask for it. It had already been given."

She never had to ask.
We never had to ask.

It is already given.

Perhaps this is what that tenth leper recognizes: That what he was looking for has already been given. Not just healing, but salvation.

We ask often for healing – we’re trained to pray for healing – for the cleansing of illness, restoration to community, the end of pain.

What we look for, we will find.

But what our hearts seek more deeply, the longing below and above the things we know how to ask or seek, what we truly need when we ask for other things,

is the power of real encounter with the living God.

And before we ask – whether or not we ask! – that real presence of God is already given.

And the difference between healing and salvation in this story lies in the tenth leper’s recognition of that gift.

Undoubtedly, each of the other nine lepers celebrated their cleansing, and were thankful. They have a healing story to tell, but they aren’t telling a story about an encounter with the living God.

The nine got what they asked for, looked for, while tenth leper saw through the healing to the truth that the prayer he had never asked was answered,

that God had come face-to-face with him, living and active,

more real than his miracle or his prayer.

The power of that real encounter with God, living and active – hyper-present, excessively among us – is what we all come looking for – in the Bible, in the church, in the world – whether we know it or not.

Two thousand years after that encounter with this leper, God is still so committed to us and our wholeness that God continues to come face to face with us, even if we never know how to ask for that encounter our souls are starving for.

The remarkable thing that tenth leper does is to recognize that already given, unasked gift. And when he does, it spins him around in the midst of his healing, to return with the praise and thanksgiving of his salvation pouring off his tongue:

making that real encounter visible to the world,

opening that recognition to others who long for the living God without ever knowing how to ask.

And that recognition is the greatest possible act of our faith.

It saves us.

This story teaches us to say thank you.

It teaches that when we pray, God responds - often with the healing we ask for, equally often in a way we don’t quite understand.

And then it teaches that what saves us is not the answer to our prayers, but our own recognition that the gifts we can’t begin to ask for are already given, and our response of praise and thanks that pours that grace out to all the world.

The Missing Piece

Luke 15:1-10

Suppose you are carrying around one hundred $10 bills, and you notice that one of them is missing. So you drop your wallet with $990 in it, and go racing off in search of your missing $10. You find it, and go home waving it triumphantly, calling all your neighbors (or perhaps, you post it on Instagram and text everyone you know) to come party with you tonight, because you found your $10.

You laughed, didn’t you? It’s foolish to make all that fuss about $10, and especially to abandon nearly $1000 in search of a mere one percent of the cash.

But if that’s a story about repentance, I’m even more lost.

Just so, Jesus tells us, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous people who need no repentance.

It’s ridiculous to think that a ten-dollar bill represents a repentant sinner. Cash can’t repent. Neither do sheep, in the original Jesus story, and Jesus knows that.

But Jesus tells this story of the shepherd abandoning the many to find one lost sheep, and a woman who abandons her necessary daily work or much needed rest to find – right now! – the ten percent of her savings that she’s misplaced.

Luke tells us that this is about sinners, Pharisees, and repentance;

and we are left to find the relationship, the connection that makes nonsense into the truth at the heart of our relationship with God.

What the stories today have in common is extravagant: the abandonment of everything else in the pursuit of one thing missing, and the insistent celebration when the missing is found.

But why all that fuss for one little thing?

Often, in the gospels, in the absurd logic of God, what matters is completion, as if that one thing – one sheep, one coin – is the last piece of a puzzle. While you can see the picture with one piece, one pixel missing, that little random hole is frustrating, haunting, and finding the missing piece and putting it – completing the puzzle – provides a satisfaction all out of proportion to the work or the rational value involved.

Wholeness matters.

Its absence is what keeps us awake at night.

It’s what we lose when someone dear to us dies.

It’s what allows us to move on from tasks and relationships when we have to let go.

And wholeness, completion, is the defining goal in God’s relationship with us. Scripture is full of stories about how God has been seeking the wholeness of creation and humanity above all else, from the very moment of our beginning.

And that’s where Jesus’ stories about the sheep and the cash began today, too. The Pharisees – the ones most faithful and careful about our righteousness and God’s – complain that Jesus is damaging God’s righteousness by welcoming and eating with sinners, with people who don’t belong to God’s community, because they care only for themselves.

And Jesus tells them stories about missing pieces and completion.

It seems that those people –the ones who obviously have no use for God, those people, the ones who disrupt and even hurt the community – those people are part of the whole of the Kingdom of God.

And God is so serious about that wholeness that Jesus will welcome them, eat with them, treat them as family, even while they are still sinners, still so focused on their own advantage that they don’t care about the community, and just as incapable of repentance as a $10 bill or a sheep.

That’s a shock for the Pharisees, and a shock for us when we apply that sense of completeness not so much to tax-collectors as to our own century’s betrayers of the community good:

terrorists, Congress (more particularly, the politicians of the “other party”), corporate executives who ship jobs overseas, or quadruple the cost of a life-saving epi pen; protestors who snarl traffic or seem to question our national values, or police who break their our trust.

To imagine that God welcomes, that Jesus seeks out those people, before they repent  – even if they never repent! – to imagine that neither heaven when we encounter it, nor God’s reign on earth, is complete without those people, unchanged, is messy and a little bit offensive.

But it begins to make sense if repentance is about completion. About finding the missing parts in our community, in our work, our families, our selves – even the ugly, awkward missing parts –and celebrating the finding.

It is definitely the work of repentance to seek wholeness.

And seeking the wholeness of our community sometimes requires sacrifice, requires letting go of the good we’d like to hold on to.

Elsewhere in the gospel stories Jesus encounters a rich young man: a man who has kept all the commandments since childhood, a man with all the signs of God’s favor, but incomplete.

“What must I do to receive eternal life?” he asks.

“There is only one thing you are missing,” Jesus answers: “Sell all that you have; give the money to the poor, and come follow me.”

One thing missing. But that one thing is a transformation.

Let go of the much that you have in pursuit of the one thing you’re missing. Put the wholeness of the community ahead of yourself, and come, follow me.

What would Jesus tell you, us, is the one thing lacking, between us and wholeness, eternal life?

Who are the people who don’t seem to fit here, but without whom we cannot be complete?

It might be color, or physical handicap, or sexuality – the obvious divisions in our culture – that separates us from the people our community is missing, but it might also be political opinion, activism, behaviors that threaten our own sense of righteousness and security.

This may be a particularly important question today, this week, as we remember, and grieve, and reflect on the changes in our world, in our definitions and expectations of wholeness, after the terrorist attacks of September 2001.

It might be a particularly good time to ask ourselves: What do we have to let go of to welcome those missing people to the table without insisting that they change to fit in?

And ask yourself: what is the part of your life that keeps you from following Jesus with your whole heart and soul and mind and strength?

It might be a part of you that you have denied, because it’s uncomfortable, and doesn’t fit.

Or it might be that your missing piece is hiding behind something you want to hold on to.

What do you have to let go to embrace that missing piece?

That’s repentance.

Pursuit of the one, small, missing thing, because it is not a small thing, it is the only thing that matters, when it makes the difference between wholeness and wrongness; between integrity and brokenness.

And that – the foolish, glorious, commitment to the pursuit of wholeness – produces overwhelming joy in heaven, and delight in the heart of the God who brought us into the kingdom, into eternal life, before we were ever ready, or repentant, or whole.