Year C
October 17, 2004
Title: The Call To Be a Nuisance
William Hoffman, who is a writer and a professor at Hampton-Sydney
college, has written a short story called The Question of Rain, and he
tells the story of a town and a minister caught in a theological tussle
about prayer and its meaning, and especially the appropriateness of its
use to ask God for those things we need/want/desire. In this short story,
we have a well-meaning minister who is beset by his congregation to
hold a worship service specifically calling for rain for the drought stricken
farming land of his congregants. But Wayland, the minister, is reluctant,
in good Calvinistic fashion, he’s simply reluctant to specifically ask God
for rain, since rain may not be in God’s will for the people of that county,
at least not at the moment—but more than anything he is especially
reluctant to conduct a specific service for rain, where everyone comes
with the singular purpose of asking God for nothing else but rain.
When first asked by some members of his congregation, the minister
promises to pray personally but declines the suggestion to conduct a
service for rain—“I’m not a medicine man,” he thinks, “and I’m not going
to do a rain-dance, as if I could manipulate or prompt God into action by
doing something, as if God was just waiting for us to pray to open up the
floodgates above.” But again and again he is asked by yet more
members a worship service for rain, and eventually even people outside
the church begin to ask him about it, and it eventually becomes a crisis
of faith for him—“are we afraid to put our faith to the test?—one of his
church member’s asks him, a member he respects for his faithfulness
and wisdom. And after weeks of being hounded by requests for this
special service, the minister is shaken by this member’s question. “And
if we fail?” the minister replies. “Then it’s us, not God, whose failed,” the
member says in turn. I must admit that I don’t think I agree with this wise
older man in the story—I don’t know if its possible to “fail” at prayer, but it’
s a haunting moment in a story that asks the fundamental question about
the usefulness, the purpose of prayer, and our reluctance, at times, to
ask for what we need, and perhaps more selfishly, to maybe even for the
things that we want.
Do we dare take the chance of asking something of God and then not
getting what we need or want—a cure for a friend, a job to fill our days,
money to fill our empty bank accounts? What if we don’t get what we
want or need—what will that unanswered prayer provoke in us? Could it
all be a joke, this thing called prayer, and this divine other we call God?
If we do not get what we want—justice, a cure, help, whatever—will we
have any faith left over, when the justice doesn’t come, and the cure
doesn’t materialize, and the help never arrives—what will we do when
heaven continues to shut its doors, and no rain is forthcoming? And so
some of us don’t ask much from God anymore, or we don’t ask for
anything too specific—I mean, why take the chance? If we have no great
expectations, we will have no great disappointments.
And yet, over and over again, we are asked to pray by the living Christ in
the Gospel stories—over and over again, there is an invitation to expect
great things of prayer and to expect great things of God—“ask and it will
be given to you” (Matthew 7:7) we are told in the Sermon on the Mount.
And this parable, this beguiling, and simple, and yet uncomfortable
parable that we heard today, asks us to do the same, to keep asking and
asking, and asking, until our knuckles become bloody from rapping on
the door of heaven, until we get what we want, or at least get what we
need. This really is an amazing parable that Jesus shares with his first
century listeners and with us here, especially because of the stark image
that Christ seeks to contrast God with—a judge who cares for no one or
no thing, not even the justice he is entrusted with, justice he is entrusted
with executing for the defenseless in his land. But it’s important to
situate this parable in a larger narrative—the passage before this
moment gives it a context that helps us understand why this parable is
told at this moment in the Gospel of Luke.
In the latter part of chapter 17, the chapter before our parable this
morning, Jesus tells his disciples of the coming kingdom of God, the
coming realm of God amongst them, both in its present form, which he
represents at that very moment, but also the coming realm of God in the
future—when the end of time, when God wraps up the story of this
planet, maybe of this universe. The images he uses in this moment are
stark, and yet familiar to his first century audience—the imagery he uses
are familiar to a culture drenched in the apocalyptic literature of the day.
Story of endings, of terrifying endings were floating all around Jesus’
contemporaries, so they had heard the language but were probably as
mystified by its meaning as we are today. “I tell you” Jesus says, “on that
night, there will be two in one bed; one will be taken and the other left.
There will be two women grinding meal together; one will be taken and
the other left.” And then the disciples ask Jesus about where this coming
of the kingdom of God will take place, what location will this manifestation
take place? In reply, Jesus says something incredibly cryptic, mysterious
even: “Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather.” Pay attention
to what’s happening around you, he seems to say to them, and look for
signs of the completion of God’s work in this world, when the realm of
God will finally manifest itself fully.
At end of this cryptic moment is the place where our parable for this
morning comes into play, he shares this story, this parable, after telling
them to look for signs of the end all things. Christ tells them the story of a
judge who is unwilling to mete out justice to the most vulnerable of
citizens in this ancient day. It is no accident that the heroine in our story
is a widow—in Israelite society, only an orphan would possibly be more
vulnerable to socio-economic forces of the time than a widow woman who
was not under the care of a husband, or a husband’s family—she was no
longer even the economic obligation of her own family of origin. The
reality is that her situation was the fruit of a patriarchal culture that did
not value women very much. The story itself is stripped of details, we
are told of a “certain city,” a judge with no name, a widow without a past
and a story—only the present situation is before us, and even that is
without any sort of accompanying details. Was this judge just a beast of
a human being or was he expecting a bribe from either the widow or her
opponent in this legal dispute? And we don’t even know whether the
widow was all that poor, though the assumption would be that she was,
since it gives the story greater power. Again, the story is just free of
details, and what we get is a judge who is just seemingly being badgered
by this widow who demands that he give her justice in this mysterious
dispute.
The judge, in response to her continual visits, just finally caves in, but he
does so not because he thinks she is necessarily right, but because he
just doesn’t want to be harassed by this widow anymore. In fact, the
Greek here hints at something a little bit more violent than the word
“bothered” that our translation uses—it actually implies that he fears that
she will violently assault him if he doesn’t give her justice! She acts so
boldly, so out of character for a person in her station in life in this day
and age, that the judge fears for his physical safety and gives her the
justice she deserves! The badgering, the nuisance of having to say no,
no, no over again finally got to this unjust judge, and so he relents—she
gets what she deserves.
And then, in the parable, Jesus contrasts this judge to another, greater
Judge, and compares the two, saying that if this woman can get justice
from this unjust judge, then certainly you can expect justice from a just
judge—surely God will listen to you, and you will receive what you pray
for, and there will be no delays in justice for you. He makes the point by
contrasting the judges—the character of God is greater than the
character of this judge, so you can expect more from God. But then
Jesus ends the parable with a hint of chapter 17 that precedes this
passage—“when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” At
the end of all things, will the Christ find people who have continually
prayed night and day, who, like the widow, have been relentless in their
pursuit of God in their calls for justice?
And though this question by Christ is left unanswered in the text, it hints
of another question, one that was asked by the pastor in Hoffman’s
story—are we afraid to put our test to the faith? I mean, what does it
mean to pray, what it does it mean to beg God to make a difference in
this world, and are we afraid to ask God to make a real difference?
Where does that fear come from? And why does Christ fear that when
the end comes, people will have stopped being relentless and
passionate in their pursuit of God, relentless and passionate in their
pursuit of God to do justice in this world? Why is their a hint that when
the end comes, what will be found are people who have lived lives rooted
in fear, people who have never put their faith to the test, people who
feared failure more than they expected success, when it came to practice
of prayer? I suspect he is worried that none of us expect rain if we pray
for it, hope if we ask for it, help when we plead and beg for it, that we will
be a people of little faith when the end comes. Jesus seems almost
cynical here, as if he expects the end to find no one with the relentless
character of the widow in this parable.
And I wonder why he feels the need to tell this odd, even disturbing
parable right after he promises his disciples the sort of divine entrance
that would impress most of us. But Christ feels the need to ask them to
do something more than to watch for vultures circling a corpse, to watch
for signs of the end of all things—he wants them to watch AND PRAY—
so that they wouldn’t lose heart before the end comes. In the ancient
world, the end of things, the return of God was also the advent of justice,
the making of all things right, and the coming of the divine Judge who
would bring justice to a world drenched with injustice. When the end
comes, there will be no need for widows to threaten and badger judges
until they receive justice they rightfully deserve. But until then, we are
asked to pray always, not so that we can badger God into giving us and
the world justice it deserves, but because, in the end, prayer doesn’t
change God as much as it changes us.
It is the waiting and the naming of our needs and the needs of the world,
it is the naming of all these things before God that changes us, that
transforms us, that gives us heart when we were about to lose heart, to
lose our hope, which is they very thing Christ fears for his earliest
disciples: that they will lose heart, amidst the chaos to come, that they
will lose their faith. And his solution to this fear is to pray, pray for the
world, for ourselves, for justice, for those we love and those we do not.
Pray—he seems to say, pray when it becomes absurd to pray, pray
because prayer opens the door to hope, and pray because I have asked
you to pray, Jesus seems to say. Naming what you need, naming what
you want, name what the world needs, and ask because in the asking,
you will be transformed.
The pastor in Hoffman’s story is right, in a way, or his instincts are right,
at least—he’s skeptical about trying to convince God to send rain—after
all, he just assumes that God wants the best for them, which we would all
assume But what he forgot in the midst of his desire to not set up God
for failure is that the congregation was never really asking for rain as
much as they were asking for a chance to gather together and be
transformed by the act of asking for a miracle. And even more
importantly, unlike the pastor in the story, they did not fear an answer
that might include “no”—they just needed to ask God for help, and to ask
God together, as a people of faith. They didn’t fear the answer from
God as much as they feared not asking in the first place, perhaps in
contrast to many of us—and to be honest, that is what is asked of us, a
releasing of our failure that God might actually fail us, and to make a
decision to pray for our sakes and for the sake of the people we love
and those we don’t, and to pray for the sake of all the world, so that will
hope will live on, so that we will not lose heart, so that we will be
transformed by the simple act of asking.
So, we pray, we pray in the good times, but we must especially pray
during the bad times, when chaos rages around us and droughts of spirit
and land overwhelm us. It will change us and it will prepare us for the
answer whatever answer comes the compassionate judge who loves us
and who will, one day, make all things right.
And if we do, if we do pray, something may happen, something may
come of it—certainly our transformation—but the thing that we feared
might not happen may indeed happen—a miracle, justice from a unjust
judge, perhaps, a cure where no cure was possible, hope when the
situation was without hope, rain when it looked as if the ground was
turning to dust.
I read from the end of Hoffman’s story:
He looked at the sky and, tingling, saw the dazzling cloud growing,
building rapidly into a thunderhead, the underside purplish, the crown of
radiant whiteness seething as it mounted into a cathedral of a cloud.
People came from their houses to stare. Then Wayland felt a coolness,
a nudge of air, and knew rain must be close. Wayland’s amazement
gave way to rapture as the majestic thunderhead conquered the
heavens. He realized his mouth had opened as if to catch the rain on
his lips. The pressure of gratitude brought him near to weeping.
