Pray always and don’t lose heart
Jrm 31 Ps 119 2Tm3 Lk 18
A major theme in today’s scriptures is prayer in the face of disappointment – persistence in prayer even when all seems lost. So we’ve heard the parable of a persistent widow who wears away at the indifference of an unjust judge: also the parable of a hated tax collector who dares pray in public. And in the letter to Timothy, the heart of the message from the veteran missionary to the younger colleague is endurance and constancy in the face of setbacks.
We can all connect with the disappointment or crisis aspect of this theme. We all know what setbacks are like: health crises, financial crises, family crises, work crises, study crises, natural disasters, wars – we’ll all have been through one or more of these. So yes, we can connect with the stress bit – we all know what that’s like. But do we connect as easily with the prayer bit?
The times of stress are shown in today’s parables as the times when it’s clear that the only thing we’ve got left is prayer. And the scriptures encourage us to go for it. Yet I sometimes hear people telling me something like this: If I don’t bother praying when things are going well, I’m sure as heck not going to start praying now that things are in a mess. I’ve got my principles.
I can understand people saying this, but it’s not quite right, is it. It’s treating God like a friend who’s our equal; as though there’s no integrity to our relationship with God unless we know we have something to offer God – like we are with dinner invitations, where we’d never show up empty handed.
But that’s not how it is. We’re not God’s equals; we’re not expected to keep the balance-sheet equal between what God gives us and what we give God. We can’t. Otherwise that proud Pharisee in the second parable would’ve had God’s ear, and the painfully humble tax collector would’ve gone unheard.
When we hear these readings as comfortable middle-class Australians, it’s amazing what our instincts for self-reliance can filter out of them. Did we hear the point of the parable of the widow and the unjust judge – the reason we should pray always and not lose heart? It’s because our prayer is not offered to a reluctant, petty official. It’s because our prayer is offered to God, and God will grant justice. And God puts that prayer in our hearts in the first place.
That’s what lies at the heart of the second parable; the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector who were both at prayer in the Temple one day. Pharisees were respected and respectable people. “They held to a liberal interpretation of Scripture, and the aim of Pharisaic law was to make observance of Torah available to all. Tax collectors, on the other hand, were seen as collaborators with the hated Romans. Far from being seen as humble or simple, they were seen to be (and sometimes were) venal, unscrupulous, and dishonest.”
Marjorie Procter-Smith. (2010). Homiletical Perspective. In Feasting on the Word: Preaching the Revised Common Lectionary: Year C (Vol. 4, pp. 213–215).
So this parable’s meant to shock its hearers. Imagine their disbelief: a Pharisee who won’t see or name his own dependence on God: and a hated tax collector who won’t see or name anything but his utter dependence on God. One of them has found God’s Law written on his heart, just like Jeremiah said it would be; the one you wouldn’t expect. And the other hasn’t got it yet.
So this parable tells us that our faith is not something we achieve or earn or do. It’s something God intends to place on our hearts, and our part is to let God do that. We’ve heard Jeremiah tell us that God writes his Law on our hearts. That’s not a statute book; it’s a promise of eternal love; eternal belonging – a little like those hearts carved into the bark of trees – except God has written eternal life onto the mortal life of our hearts.
That’s what happens for Christians at our baptism. The Spirit of God makes a home in our hearts, and from there, speaks out all our needs, articulates all our cries for justice and love with sighs too deep for words. Rom 8.26-27 And God searches our hearts and hears those prayers. The question is if we can hear them to – if we can hear the Spirit praying on our behalf.
We began with the theme of prayer in the face of setbacks. And we realised that although we’re familiar with the experience of setbacks, we’re not always that familiar with prayer. And that’s because we mistakenly think of it as something we have to do. And we don’t have time for it, or we don’t have a habit of doing it. We need to forget this ‘doing prayer’ idea. We need to change our thinking to prayer being something we hear, and something we join in with – like singing along with a much-loved song.
I confess that in my busyness – a vocation that demands that my attention dart constantly from one train of thought to the next – I don’t stop often enough to listen to the prayer that’s going on all the time in my heart. I don’t stop to hear it – to join in with the prayers coming from my heart. The more difficult things get – the more setbacks I face – the busier I’m likely to become, and, I’m afraid, less tuned in to those prayers – often out of practice. I doubt that I’m alone in this.
The wonderful Lutheran writer, Paul Santmire Before Nature, Augsburg/Fortress 2014 pp 24-26 describes practising prayer as being like learning to ride a bicycle. Practice won’t necessarily make perfect, but practice makes possible. Once we’ve learnt, our focussed attention can rest and our spirit is free to experience reality on another level. He suggests three short prayers. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me. Praise Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Come Holy Spirit; come and reign. When I pray this, and I can do it without thinking, all the time, I begin to hear what’s happening in my heart. Pray always and don’t lose heart. Amen