Proper 24C
Lectionary readings
The late Japanese American author Hisaye Yamamoto wrote a short story some 60 years ago that featured a ten-year old Yoneko Hosoume who, on the night of March 10, 1933, became an atheist. That evening, an earthquake shook her family’s California farm, so the entire family ran from the house and sat through the temblor in a rhubarb patch. “Immediately on learning what all the commotion was about,” Yamamoto writes, “Yoneko began praying to God to end this violence. She entreated God, flattered Him, wheedled Him, commanded Him, but He did not listen to her at all—inexorably, the earth went on rumbling. After three solid hours of silent, desperate prayer, without any results whatsoever, Yoneko began to suspect that God was either powerless, callous, downright cruel, or nonexistent. In the murky night, under a strange moon wearing a pale ring of light, she decided upon the last as the most plausible theory.” All of us like to think that we’ve somehow moved beyond this childish understanding of prayer, of something like a divine telegram or email service to God, where millions, billions of little, relentless missives get sent up to some heavenly computer database, where God clicks on a mouse after hearing the message, “You’ve got prayer!” (That’s from a Jim Carrey and Morgan Freeman movie.) You and I like to imagine that we’re a bit more mindful and mature enough to know that prayer isn’t a clogged customer service line, that if we just keep praying eventually we’ll get through and God will ship our requests in two standard business days. (Though I will be the first to admit that whenever I step on a plane I do plead and bargain, asking God to keep the plane in the air. It’s not that much different from my high school petitions, “God, help me ace this exam and I promise to take out the garbage for a whole week without being asked!”)
There is of course in this morning’s gospel lesson something very much about the need to pray always, to not lose heart, to persevere and persist just as the protagonist of our parable does, the widow wearing down the crooked judge until he relents. But this parable is not principally about the oft-asked but brittle question, “Does prayer work?” but instead call us into the deeper question, how does prayer work? What does prayer do? Recall: widows in this era and place and its particularly brutal forms of patriarchy, without husband or sons, were rendered completely outside boundaries of social and economic security, often relegated to abject poverty and extreme vulnerability. Vulnerable, because without male protection, widows were profoundly alone, isolated, alienated, and thus usually in need of charity, care, protection from the cruel forces of their social worlds. But here’s the surprise, the reversal that is so often the case in Luke’s gospel: it is this woman, the widow, the one who is supposed to be the object of pity and charity, who arises and asks not for mere scraps and leftovers, but demands justice. And she cries out for justice not on the outskirts of town but rather in the very heart of power, the house of the judge so full of hubris that he is in his own way disconnected, isolated, from the life of the community. So here’s the stunning portrait of what prayer is: the 1 percent is confronted by the have-nots, the one who thinks he’s above it all locks eyes with the one who doesn’t have anything, not asking for pity but demanding justice and recognition of her innate dignity. And in demanding to be recognized, the widow has brought this judge also back into the community that he disdained. Justice is not only the recognition of the poor and the marginal; justice is also the recognition by the powerful that ultimately, finally, they are in same boat, this same mortal coil, as everyone else.
This then is why the question to ask about prayer is not whether or not it works, or whether God hears the prayers of God’s people, but rather how prayer works, what kind of work prayer does. Jesus reminds us that prayer is intimately connected to the work of justice, because prayer is the very thread that stitches the fabric of justice, that reminds you and me that we are deeply interconnected, and rebinds us into a single garment of destiny. Prayer might begin as a single call, perhaps the call of someone in isolating despair, of someone plunged into the deepest darkness, the most agonizing alienation: in the hospital room, in a prison cell, on the floor of a bathroom, in a dank alleyway. It can be alone on a weekday here at Messiah, or at the back of the church with a member of the intercessory prayer group, or with a group of dedicated folks who pray for those on our list every week. But when this prayer reaches the heart of God, God’s heart is moved to stir the hearts of God’s people to make room for this cry for justice and recognition. Like faith, each one of us might pray as individuals, but like faith, our prayers are not ours own, alone. At its core, prayer is the language that binds all of us to one another, to remind us to look upon one another and respond to one another as God looks and responds to us: as God’s beloved children, with whom God grieves when we suffer and with whom God rejoices when we are joyful. Prayer then might start from each of us, individually, but it ends with us praying as and in community, reminding us that there is no one outside the family of God, no one left behind and no one too high up.
At its heart then, what prayer does when we pray unceasingly, without losing heart, is to work ever more toward transforming the world to weave this garment of God’s justice. The prophetic Hasidic rabbi, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who marched with Martin Luther King in Selma, Alabama in 1965 in support of the Voting Rights Act, said of his participation that he felt that he was praying with his feet. But of course, it wasn’t just his feet and King’s feet, but the thousands and thousands of feet who walked and marched and prayed for racial justice. It wasn’t just Heschel’s and King’s but the thousands and thousands of voices that sang and hands that clapped. It wasn’t just Heschel and King but 8000 others who walked with the audacious faith that through power of the Spirit spoken and sung, moving with them that spring morning, their prayers would bring ever more closer the beloved community that beat the heart of God by breaking down the walls that separated people from one another, that kept a widow and a judge from seeing in each other the indwelling of the divine. Later, Rabbi Heschel said this about this kind of prayer: “Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, falsehoods.” Prayer works because it reminds us of God’s words for us, God’s creation: you are, all of you, my beloved; be beloved to each other. At the end of that march, in Montgomery, Heschel heard King preach the prayer of the widow and of God’s response through God’s community praying together: “Somebody's asking, ‘When will the radiant star of hope be plunged against the nocturnal bosom of this lonely night, plucked from weary souls with chains of fear and the manacles of death? How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?’ I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because ‘truth crushed to earth will rise again.’ How long? Not long, because ‘no lie can live forever.’ How long? Not long, because ‘you shall reap what you sow.’ How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Before you and I meet together at this table that God prepares for all, we will stand for the Prayers of the People. It is during this time that we are invited to offer our individual prayers, from the depths of our darkest despairs, our most intimate cries to God. And we bring them all together, collect them, and weave them together so that our prayers are not ours alone, but now prayers shared. And when we do, we pray with our feet and with our voices, our prayers become also our cries for justice, our stand in solidarity with the all those around God’s world who also cry out for justice and recognition. People of Messiah, these words, spoken aloud, whispered, uttered silently in our hearts, are the very words that will move mountains of oppression and despair, because these words enter God’s heart and in turn enter ours. May our prayers together, today, every day, always, stich our hearts together so tightly to God’s that when the widows of our lives coming knocking on our doors, crying out for recognition, we might all be ready to open the doors of our hearts, to beat the heart of God, and say to her, “Welcome home, sister, come. There’s a seat at the table just for you.”
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