Sunday, October 16, 2016
22nd Sunday after Pentecost
22The same night [Jacob] got up and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok. 23He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. 24Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. 25When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he struck him on the hip socket; and Jacob’s hip was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. 26Then he said, “Let me go, for the day is breaking.” But Jacob said, “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” 27So he said to him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Jacob.” 28Then the man said, “You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed.” 29Then Jacob asked him, “Please tell me your name.” But he said, “Why is it that you ask my name?” And there he blessed him. 30So Jacob called the place Peniel, saying, “For I have seen God face to face, and yet my life is preserved.” 31The sun rose upon him as he passed Penuel, limping because of his hip.- Genesis 32:22-31
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?” – Luke 18:1-8
Ida B. Wells knocked on the door of that unjust judge all her life. Like the woman of the parable, her name is not one that most people remember. She was born into slavery in Mississippi in 1862. She lost her siblings and parents in a yellow fever epidemic and had to work hard just to survive. Decades before Rosa Parks, this much-less-known woman refused to give up her seat on a train car. The unjust judges of the Supreme Court ruled against her and the Civil Rights act of 1875. But she just kept knocking. She was a teacher and then a journalist focused on issues of racism in the United States. Her life was threatened by many but she kept writing. Her investigative journalism documented the lynchings of black men in the early 20th century and later her activism expanded to include women’s suffrage as she knocked again and again bringing to light what the culture wanted to keep behind closed doors. By her own account, she was even shut out of the list of founders of the NAACP by her sometimes collaborator our valley’s own W.E.B. DuBois. Ida B. Wells knocked all her life, and the responses of the judge were too few and too slow.
And so we pause to knock at the door with her, praying for an end to racism and racially motivated violence, for a rich and diverse community. We pray in song: “Lord, listen to your children praying. Lord, send your spirit in this place. Lord, listen to your children praying. Send us love, send us power, send us grace.”[1]
In the midst of a story of war, Leymah Gbowee, the author of this week’s Immanuel Book Group book, just kept knocking on the door of the unjust judge. She says this early in the book: “They say God responds to our prayers but we have been praying for deliverance and nothing happens. The war is not ending…He is not listening to us.”[2] She recognized that in the stories we tell about war we almost always tell of men and of boys. But she and the other women of Liberia knocked at the doors of justice day after day after day. For a while they did it by fighting for survival and hiding the men of their family lest they be killed or conscripted. Then Leymah knocked at the door of justice in her work with trauma victims. But the door remained closed. So she founded the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, and through peaceful demonstrations, strikes, and sit-ins over the course of a year they knocked loud enough for the world to sit up and listen. And they ended the war. But there is still work to be done to heal and rebuild, more doors that need to be opened. And so few people even know her name.
And so we pause to knock at the door with her, for peace in every nation, for healing and reconciliation where unspeakable atrocities have ripped human lives apart, for child soldiers and countries where poverty and drought disproportionately affect the daily lives of women and children, praying in the words attributed to St. Francis: Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Where there is hatred, let us sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is discord, union; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. Grant that we may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
And this week, I listened to many named and unnamed women in the news and on social media describe their experience of sexual assault. Women who bravely named their experience in a world that usually reacts with skepticism and excuses. Women (and men, too) at our local colleges have been part of a national movement working to name and address the culture that too often excuses sexual assault, but the changes have been inexcusably slow. Knocking at the door of justice where the response is too often inaction. This week I heard people I care about deeply describe not one but repeated incidents where their right to protect their own body from others was ignored not just by their assailants but by people in authority. When will the unjust judge open the door?
And so we pause to knock at the door with them, for justice, for safety, for both men and women caught up in a culture that treats other human beings as objects. We pause to pray in silence…
These are the stories Jesus tells with this parable. Jesus frames it as a fictional story, but you wonder if he had some particular widow in mind. His mother, perhaps, who sang her song of justice, her song of turning the world upside down. Or the widow whose son he raised from the dead. Or one of the women who show up later in his story, when the disciples have all hidden themselves away in fear. Whoever Jesus has in mind, this woman pounds and pounds and pounds at the door. And this is like prayer, Jesus says. The assumption is that it’s like prayer because we keep hounding God for what we need. Not even luxuries or miracles, but peace, food and water, shelter, equality, justice. We pray. Every Sunday. Every day. Maybe multiple times a day. We pray in song, in words, in silence. We pray in letters to the editor and in protest signs and sit-ins. We pray in the voting booth and in our community engagement and in our conversations with other people. And despite many, many points of progress, it feels like the one to whom we address our prayers isn’t bothered enough yet to do anything about it.
But listen to this from Harriet Tubman, another woman who knocked and knocked at the door: “Long ago when the Lord told me to go free my people I said, “No, Lord. I can’t go. Don’t ask me.’ But he came another time, and I said again, ‘Lord, go away. Get some better-educated person. Get a person with more culture than I have.’ But he came back a third time, and spoke to me just as he did to Moses. He said, ‘Harriet, I want you.’ And I knew then I must do what he bid me do.”[3]
That’s how this story is like prayer. For prayer is where we often talk to God until God finally gets us to quiet down and listen. Prayer is where God hounds us until justice emerges. Prayer is where God wrestles a blessing into us like God did to Jacob, a blessing that opens us to the possibility of reconciliation, but also a blessing that leaves us limping, leaves us disturbed at how the world is. Prayer is God banging down our door until we are so completely and utterly disturbed that we are transformed from unjust judges into widows begging for justice. God pounding away at us until we find ourselves on the other side of the door, with Ida and Leymah and Harriet, all the women who have survived through violence, on the side of the door with Jesus, the vulnerable one.
So do not lose heart in your praying, Jesus says. Do not lose heart when God pesters you in prayer, for when God has pounded so hard that the door between us falls down, when we find ourselves with Jesus, we are at once made whole again, brought to a place of peace and safety, and at the same time disturbed and perhaps even frightened at what we have been called to say and do. Because when we find ourselves with Jesus and with the persistent widow, we are headed for resurrection, but not until God has pounded down every last door to draw all creation into the kingdom of God.
-Pastor Steven Wilco
[1] Ken Medema, “Lord, Listen to Your Children Praying.” Hope Publishing, 1973.
[2] Leymah Gbowee. Mighty Be Our Powers. (Beast: New York, 2011), p. 25.
[3] Quoted in More Days for Praise by Gail Ramshaw. Augsburg: Minneapolis, 2016, p. 56
Stewarding the Word 