A Sermon Based Upon Luke 18: 1-8
By Rev. Dr. Charles J. Tomlin, DMin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Sunday after Pentecost, October 20th,
2013
“Then
Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart
(Luke 18:1 NRS).
Honestly, I don’t watch much T.V. these
days, except for news programs, documentaries, a few sporting events, and an
occasional movie I rent on DVD. There’s
just not much on T.V. that is worth watching.
But recently, someone told me about a new show called “The American
Bible Challenge” with guest host, Jeff Foxworthy. The other night I watched and enjoyed
it. It’s a game show that tests the
Bible knowledge of different teams of contestants who compete against each
other for charity. Frankly, some of the
questions are quite difficult, even for students of the Bible. On the first show I watched, 3 Jewish Rabbis,
who claimed to know their Hebrew Bible quite well, were the first to
leave. A group Christians wrestlers won
the grand prize, $20,000 for their chosen charity. I guess it proves that wrestling is good
training for Bible Study.
Different questions were asked during
the show. One of the most difficult ones
was to try to pick three different names used for money in the Bible. The choices were: Mina, Penny, Lira, Dinar,
Gerah, and Rupee. Which ones would you
choose? The correct answers were, Mina,
Penny, and Gerah. Did you know that the
word “Penny” was in the Bible? “Tough
question, right? But what really got my attention was another
question they asked concerning people’s belief about the Bible. They asked the contestants to work together
as a team and write down the percentage they thought was right about this question: How many percent of Americans believe that
the streets of heaven are literally paved with pure gold? The possible answers were 72%, 51%, or 28%.
Which one would you answer? Out
of the three teams competing against each other, two teams answered 51%, but the
correct answer, which only the Christian wrestlers gave, was 72%.
Most people take the Bible
literally. It’s very much the same when
it comes to the theme of today’s text, answered prayer. Most people believe that when you pray to
God you will get an answer. As I heard
one preacher explain in my childhood: sometimes you get a no, sometimes a yes,
and sometimes you get “you have to wait”, but there is always some kind of
answer to our prayers. Yet, here’s the
problem with that kind of statement.
Prayer does not always get a direct,‘literal’ answer, at least not immediately,
and sometimes not at all. All of us
have prayed prayers that did not get an answer or the answer we asked for,
haven’t we? We have prayed for sick
people who did not get well. We have
prayed for jobs we never got hired for. We
have prayed for marriages that did not stay together. We have prayed for children who did not turn
out as we’d hoped. And we have prayed
and hoped for many others good things that have not yet come true. So, if you take answered prayer literally,
and you are honest about it, you must face some road blocks and dead ends.
DON’T
LOSE HEART….. AN ANSWER WILL COME?
Several years ago, Teresa and I were
vacationing near Sunset Beach, N.C. One
day at lunch time, we decided to ride our Bikes from Sunset Beach to Calabash,
where there was a small seafood hut.
All went well, except for on the ride back. I decided we would take a shortcut on a dirt
road. As we road back into a wood and
neared a house a large Doberman dog came up beside of Teresa. He didn’t bark, but he stayed close on her
heal, marching like a sentry. He was so
close, she felt the dog’s breath.
Another Doberman, which was tied up, was barking in the distance. It was nerve racking. I encouraged Teresa, as she frantically cried
out for help, “Keep on Riding”, “Look straight ahead”. Don’t look him in the eyes.” After we finally got past the home, the dog
stopped following. We got through it,
or should I say, she got through it.
Then we came to a dead end in the road. There was nothing but swamp ahead of
us. We had to turn around and got
back. It was one of the few times in my
life, I became more afraid of my wife than I was that Doberman Pincher. I don’t remember whether how we prayed,
but we were both praying, “God, please help us get by that dog without getting
eaten alive!” We proceeded ahead and we
heard the Doberman that was tied start barking in the distance. We expected the other Doberman any
moment. But for some reason or other, it
did not come. This time, thank God, we cycled
by without our Doberman “tour guide.” I
still haven’t heard the end of my decision to go down that road, but at least
for now, I’m still alive, thanks to my wife, not just the dog.
In our text today, if you liken prayer
to the journey of riding down a dirt road being accompanied by a Doberman
Pincher, most of us can tell some story about coming to a ‘dead end’ and having
no place to turn. It is this ‘dead end’
place that Jesus is concerned about when he told this story about the Widow and
the Unjust Judge. This Widow faced one
dead end after another. She kept coming
to the Judge to get a hearing, who instead was like that Doberman Pincher,
completely without concern for her or her situation. Jesus even tells us that the Unjust Judge ‘neither feared God nor had respect for
people’. He really was a ‘mad dog’ judge. Jesus
wants his disciples to know that this is how unanswered prayer often feels. In this image of the Unjust Judge, Jesus is
putting unanswered prayer on the “hot seat.” Having
such a biting response to our prayers even makes God seem unfair, and makes many
prayers seem not worth praying. We pray and expect answers, but we end up on
at a dead end dirt road. If we go back
that way again to pray once more, it’s as if a Doberman Pincher God is waiting
to pounce his ‘no’ or ‘wait’ upon our dire situation, so why go at all?
To people who feel this way about prayer,
Jesus surprisingly gives the interpretation or moral of his story, even before
he tells it. He has urgent good
news. He wants people to know why they ‘need to pray always and not to lose hope’. Even if there is no answer, and even when it
seems there will be no answer, and even if the lack of answer makes God looks unfair, Jesus
still says we should pray anyway, and ‘not
lose heart’.
This is really a hard true reality to
face, isn’t it? But sometime or other we all have to face the ‘music’
of unanswered prayer. In the comedy
film, Bruce Almighty, with “Bruce” being
played by funny man Jim Carry, Bruce comes to God telling him hard life is and complains
again that God doesn’t understand because God has a much easier job. God, who is played by Morgan Freeman, decides
to prove to Bruce that being God is not as easy as he thinks, so he allows
“Bruce” to be ‘God’ for a while. One of
the funniest moments comes when Bruce keeps getting prayer requests through
emails and has an impossible time answering them all, without making a mess of
the world. The point of the movie is
that it’s not easy to balance what people ask for and what people and the world
truly need. We can all understand that
difficulty, can’t we? We understand that
when the doctor tell us Mama’s body can’t get better because bodies are made to
wear out. We understand that sometimes
we can’t get a certain job, because someone else needed a job too. And we even understand that God can’t give us
everything we ask for, because getting everything we want is not always what we
need, nor what life is about.
Answered prayer is not as easy as it seems. Someone has said that you don’t understand
prayer, unless you have ever knocked on a door and gotten bloody knuckles (Fred
Craddock). So with the difficulty of answered
prayer put before us in the Widow who keeps on going to this judge and is not being
heard, why would Jesus still dare tell his disciples ‘to keep praying always’ and “not
lose heart”? Why, in spite of the all difficulties of
answered pray, would Jesus still believe that when we pray, the answer will one day come? How can God answer every single request that
has ever been asked? How can God answer
every prayer when it sounds as improbable as it seems impossible?
DON’T
LOSE HEART….WHEN THE ANSWER DOESN’T COME
What might help us understand Jesus’
confidence in answered prayer is that this is not the first time Jesus has
suggested that our prayers will be answered.
If you remember, back in Luke, chapter eleven, the disciples came to
Jesus asking him to teach them how to pray.
Jesus grants their request by giving them a model prayer, which we all
know today as the Lord’s Prayer. In
this prayer Jesus teaches his disciples what they should pray for. Jesus gives his disciples a list of things
they should pray for if they want their prayers to be answered. Interestingly, when you read through the list
of prayer requests in the Lord’s Prayer you don’t find the most familiar prayer
topics. Things like, as memorized in
the King James Version, “Hallowed Be Thy
Name” and “Thy Kingdom Come, Thy
Will Be Done” don’t get on most of our prayer lists, do they? We make our own prayer lists with needs and names
on them that we want and wish to be healed, helped, protected or encouraged,
but as far as I can tell, Jesus never modeled any kind of prayer like
this. The prayer Jesus modeled looked very
different with a very different kind of agenda.
Even when we get to the more personal part of the model prayer, Jesus only
lists the most basic needs like food for “daily bread”, granting and receiving “forgiveness”,
and the need to be led away from temptation and evil. Most of us expect exactly the opposite. We pray for “all you can eat”, for revenge on
our enemies, and for a ‘good time’ that might take us to the very edge of evil.
Have we ever thought about the fact that
maybe part of the reason we don’t get what we pray for is because we are not asking
for the right things in the way Jesus taught?
Let’s consider more of what Jesus says
early on about answered prayer. After
Jesus gives us the list of things we should pray about, he then gives his story
about the Friend at Midnight, who tried to get his friend to get up in the
middle of the night and give him some bread.
The friend does finally get an answer, as he finally gets the bread, but
it’s not because they were friends, but because he kept persistently and
relentlessly knocking. But remember
again, the midnight visitor was not asking for a meal fit for a king, but he
was asking for ‘daily’ bread (or nightly bread). Jesus then goes on to tell his disciples ‘to ask, seek and knock’ which in the
original language means, ‘ask and keep on
asking, seek and keep on seeking, and knock and keep on knocking.” When Jesus says “….everyone who ask, receives, who seeks, finds, or who knocks, will
have the door open,” he is still not making true prayer a ‘blank check’ to
get what we want. As we all know, when a
person is dying and praying to live, that prayer cannot always certainly or
immediately be answered. When a prayer is asked for all kinds of other
personal things for specifics we want or need, those prayers can’t always be
answered either. God’s agenda for
answered prayer is not answering our own personal agendas. But the kind of prayer that Jesus promises will
always be answered is made clear in this text.
In his closing comments, Jesus likens God’s desire to give us good
gifts, like a desire of a good Father, who will only give good gifts to his
children. Like that ‘good Father’ God only
gives the best things, but this does not mean he will give us anything and
everything we ask for. No, it can’t
mean that, and then Jesus clarifies for all of us, that there is there is only
one answer the Heavenly Father will always give, the ‘gift’ of the Holy Spirit
(Luke 11:11), which is nothing less than the gift of God’s self.
Are you disappointed? Prayer is not always what we make it out to be,
is it? Prayer is not always a “Sweet
Hour of Prayer”, but it can be praying with bloody knuckles where we end up
with only one answer: God is with us. Jesus made this very important clarification
about prayer early on, and most of us still don’t get it? But what we need to understand most about
prayer that God does not answer prayers like some ‘Bruce Almighty’ getting all
kinds of different email requests.
Prayer is not like that at all.
You really have no guarantee anywhere in the Bible of getting everything
you pray for, unless you pray for the things Jesus taught his disciples to pray
for, and to pray about.
For you see, prayer is a discipline, not
a luxury. Prayer is not something as simple as one, two,
three, or something you can market or sell with a formula for success. The Diet Industry likes to market quick
fixes of diet plans and pills, but you can’t market a true diet, which is a
lifestyle choice of moderation and exercise.
Few want a diet plan like this, and that’s why only those who understand
what a real diet is, lose weight. In
the same way as learning about the discipline of weight loss, part of the discipline
of true prayer is learning both what to ask for, and what not to
ask for. Remember the Psalmists first
line in the most famous prayer of praise in the Hebrew Bible: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want”. Here is an expression of how David learned
to pray. As a new another translation
puts it, “The Lord is my Shepherd and
Guide, I already have everything I need”.
That’s how David prayed. That’s also how Jesus taught us to pray. When we have the Lord, the great Shepherd,
which is nothing less than the gift of the Holy Spirit, it is only then that we
come to fully know what little else we really need. When we learn true prayer, our prayer lists
get shorter rather than longer. Only by
wanting God and by wanting what God wants, will we know the fulfillment of the promise
of answered prayer.
DON’T
LOSE HEART….THE ANSWER THAT MUST COME
At the center of this story about ‘Answered
Prayer” is not the answer that finally came, but the Widow keeps going, and
going, and going back to the Unjust Judge demanding he do what is right, fair
and just. Again, the point is not, how the Judge finally
answers, for he is never anything but a scoundrel. The point
is how this faithful, resilient, and resourceful widow kept on bothering him
with what is right.
Her story can never be reduced to the
answer she gets or doesn’t get. Her story
is about who she is and what she does even when the answer doesn’t come. She’s the
kind of righteous, determined person who never gives up demanding justice,
fairness, and righteousness, representing all the “chosen ones” Jesus also mentions, “who cry out to God day and night” (v.7). In a fallen, broken, unfair world, people
like her are the answer God has to bring to the world. People like her are the kind of people who
want what God wants. She is the answer
to the prayer Jesus taught us to pray, which says “holy is God’s name, God’s
kingdom come and God’s will be done on earth…." She is kind of person who is the answer
to God’s prayer spoken in Jesus Christ.
Can we see ourselves as both the person whose
determination to do the right thing is an answer to prayer? Martha Coldwell was a fellow Baptist missionary
who trained with me and served in Rwanda.
So, when the news of the terrible genocide in Rwanda came out in 1994,
my ears perked up. Martha, later told
me she was out of the country when the terrible events happened; when that African
nation descended into a dark madness, with the powerful Hutu majority beginning
a systematic slaughter of the Tutsi minority. Someone called that massacre "the fastest
and most efficient killing spree of the 20th century." In one hundred
days, the Hutus killed 800,000 Tutsis.” (See Samantha Power, A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, as cited by
Thomas Hibbs, in The National Review Online, January 18, 2005). Later, some of you may have seen the film, Hotel Rwanda, which shows Paul
Rusesabagina, a hotel manager in the Rwandan capital of Kigali, unknowingly and
accidently driving his vehicle over hundreds of bodies of those slaughtered and
left dead in the road. Paul himself was
a Hutu, who promised to protect his Tutsi wife and the family he loved, and he
also ended up finding the courage to shelter and save over 1,200 Tutsi people by
hiding them in the luxury hotel he managed.
But Paul did not start out as a hero, or
an answer to prayer. As the horror
built, Paul initially protested that there was nothing he could do. But his reluctance was challenged by the
steady beating of truth upon his door. Alan
Culpepper, a Baptist professor once said something like: “To
those who have it in their power to relieve ... distress ... but do not, the
call of Jesus to pray day and night and demand God’s righteousness is a command
to let the priorities of God's compassion reorder the priorities of our lives."
(R. Alan Culpepper, The New Interpreter's
Bible, Vol. IX, Nashville, Abingdon Press, 1995, 339). As Paul heard the knock and opened his heart, he began
to see the horror and experience the shame. It was a truth he didn't want to
admit; but in the end, his conscience prevailed and he acted to save as many
lives as he could. He was the answer to
prayer. He joined in the knocking on
the door of injustice, hate, evil and wrong.
But, interestingly, Paul was not the
only one to hear the beating on the door and to experience the need to reorder
his priorities; it happened also to many viewers of the film. And I think it happened especially in one
telling moment. About midway through
the story, as the slaughter of the Tutsi people escalated in Kigali, Western
reporters began to capture scenes of the genocide on tape. Paul was heartened a bit, because he assumed
the broadcast of such images would prompt immediate Western intervention. When
a skeptical Western reporter expressed doubt, Paul was dumbfounded. "How can they see that and not intervene?"
he asked. But the reporter had seen it all before. "More likely," he responded, "people will see the footage, say 'Isn't that horrible?' and then go right on with their dinners."
The most disturbing moment in that deeply
disturbing film is that people often do just that. Too often we see what is wrong, and we do
not feel the shame or respond to bring about the answer for rightness, justice,
fairness and the righteousness of God!
So, who are we in this parable of Jesus? Are we more like the Unjust Judge who goes on
ignoring the cries in our world, or are we like the woman who keeps on asking,
seeking, and knocking, crying out and demanding that right be done, just as
Jesus taught us to pray that God’s will be done, on earth as it is in heaven? This widow woman, says Jesus, is who we all
should be, not just a people praying on our knees, but a people out there
beating the bushes and insisting on nothing less than God’s righteousness to be
done in our world.
Let me just say, that if we are like the
Unjust Judge, ignoring the truth of what we need to do, God has not given up on
us. The good news of this story is,
that God wants us to be like this widow, wanting what God wants, --unrelenting,
persistent, resilient and assertive. God hasn't given up on us, even when we have
acted as though we "neither feared
God nor had respect for people." And God works through us, when we, like the
widow keep on crying out for and doing what is right. People like her, are the answer to
prayer. They, and we are the answer to the
prayer to all kinds of other widows, orphans, strangers and other sojourners of
this world. If we will let the cry of the hurting break us, there is still hope
for goodness, relief, reconciliation and fairness in our world. Will
we keep knocking and answering the door?
This is how all our prayers will be answered, and God’s too (This final point is found in Robert Dunham’s
sermon, “Whose Persistance” at Day1.org, http://day1.org/1064-whose_persistence.)
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