Bruising Our Knuckles on Heaven's Door

The First United Presbyterian Church

“Bruising Our Knuckles on Heaven’s Door”

Rev. Amy Morgan

March 31, 2019

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Psalm 121

I lift up my eyes to the hills-- from where will my help come?

 2 My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.

 3 He will not let your foot be moved; he who keeps you will not slumber.

 4 He who keeps Israel will neither slumber nor sleep.

 5 The LORD is your keeper; the LORD is your shade at your right hand.

 6 The sun shall not strike you by day, nor the moon by night.

 7 The LORD will keep you from all evil; he will keep your life.

 8 The LORD will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.

Luke 18:1-8

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.

 2 He said, "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.

 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, 'Grant me justice against my opponent.'

 4 For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, 'Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone,

 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.'"

 6 And the Lord said, "Listen to what the unjust judge says.

 7 And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them?

 8 I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"

She was a retired Presbyterian minister…who didn’t believe in God. She told me this quite plainly and openly. She had prayed and worked for justice for so many years. She had labored in the church and within the denomination. And one day, she looked at the world around her and saw nothing but suffering, oppression, and injustice. All her prayers and labors seemed to have been for nothing. Nothing had changed, nothing was getting better. God was not coming through. And so, any metaphysical considerations aside, she decided she was done with God. If God existed, God wasn’t interested in helping people in need, making the world a better place. I tend to think she did believe there is a God, but she was so unhappy with the job God was doing that she ended the conversation she’d been having with God for many years. She lost heart.

Several years later, when her heart physically gave out, I was more concerned for God than I was for her. I can only imagine the earful God received upon her arrival in heaven.

This is the sort of situation Jesus hoped to avoid. Just before the parable we read today, Jesus has been informing some Pharisees and his disciples about what they should expect from the eschaton, the end-times. It’s a pretty disheartening message. People minding their own business and then just being wiped out, like in the flood of Noah’s day or what happened to Sodom and Gomorrah after Lot left town. Two people will be in a bed or out grinding meal, and one will be taken and the other left behind.

The Pharisees ask Jesus when this will all happen. And the disciples want to know where. They think that being prepared for such things involves knowing the time and location. But Jesus refuses to answer these questions. Instead, he tells the disciples, "Where the corpse is, there the vultures will gather."

This is dark stuff. Injustice and evil will be extinguished in dramatic fashion, but we don’t know when or where. We’ll know it when we see it. We’ll know death has been slain when we see the vultures circling. Not heartwarming sentiments.

And so Jesus tells his disciples a parable “about their need to pray always and not lose heart.” As their knees are knocking and hearts are pounding out of their chests with fear and excitement, as their minds are swimming with confusion and Jesus notices all the blood has drained from their faces, he decides they need some encouragement.

The parable he tells features two stock characters: an apathetic judge and a vulnerable widow. Now, we believe in blind justice and don’t want our judges influenced by their religious persuasions or personal biases. However, in the first century, to say a judge neither feared God nor respected people would have been the highest offense. Judges were charged to fear God, and a judge in Israel would have been beholden to God’s command to show particular concern for the rights and well-being of vulnerable populations like widows, orphans, and outsiders.

And so the widow becomes a stand-in for all of those who are powerless, voiceless, and vulnerable in society. She had no kinsman to plead her cause in court. She had no resources to bribe the judge. All she had was her persistence. He unwillingness to back down and take no for an answer.

When I was a kid, I would consistently pester my mother with the complaint that things weren’t fair. Her standard response to quiet my complaining was “Life’s not fair.” And I never had an answer for that one.

But when the judge tells this widow, “Life’s not fair,” she’ll have none of it. She knows better. Life may not be fair, but she still deserves justice. And she will not be silenced until justice is served.

These stock characters could correlate to any number of apathetic powers and vulnerable populations in our world today. Corporations building pipelines and Native Americans protecting their sacred land. Utility companies who shut off water and electrical service and residents of impoverished cities. Human traffickers and desperate immigrants.

But this parable is not about judges and widows, the powerful and powerless of this world. It is about the disciples’ need to “pray always and not lose heart.” Jesus makes the point utilizing the Jewish and Greek rhetorical technique of lesser to greater. If a wicked and earthly power will finally give in to persistent cries for justice, how much more quickly will God – who is all-good and all-powerful – respond to the cries of people God has chosen?

And this argument is all well and good. Until you’re sitting in a living room with 4 children who have just lost their mother. Or reading news reports of the number of people who have died from hunger in Yemen. Or reading the obituaries of children gunned down in their school. Or seeing the same people on our doorstep and in the Community Kitchen, year after year. Or descending deeper into debt while you tirelessly search for employment. Or experience nothing but set-backs in your attempts to heal from illness, injury, or surgery.

Where is this God whom Jesus promises will come quickly to our aid? Have we not cried out? Again and again? For life. For peace. For healing. For hope. It’s enough to make you give up on faith.

And that’s precisely why Jesus tells this parable. To prepare his followers for the long wait. For his return. For justice. For a new heaven and new earth. It’s all coming, and in fact, has already arrived. And if you’re looking for it, waiting for it faithfully, you’ll be able to spot it as easily as you can spot a dead corpse under circling vultures.

But this is an already-but-not-yet kind of event. It is here, but not fully realized. Has the kingdom of heaven arrived? “Yes…and,” says Jesus. Yes, it has arrived. And, it is unfolding in time and space, in the wickedness and injustice of the world we live in. And the way that we participate in that here-and-now-and-yet-to-come kingdom is to pray, to demand justice, to pound on heaven’s door until we’ve bruised our knuckles and to keep on pounding until God’s will is done on earth as it is in heaven.

Our prayers do not go unanswered. Not when mothers die and children starve and students are massacred. Not when the addicted succumb to their addiction and debt overwhelms us and our health fails us. These are not unanswered prayers. These are the unjust judgments of life. Death and sin and evil, violence and addiction and poverty and illness are not God’s will. And they are not signs of God’s impotence. They are the unjust judges Jesus encourages his followers to resist, for as long as it takes for God’s kingdom to be fulfilled on earth.

But the only way we can resist, the only way we can persistently pray and hope and cry out for justice is to trust that God’s love is even more persistent than our prayers. Our cries for justice do not go unheard or unheeded by God. Scripture tells us, again and again, that God is on the side of justice. God is on the side of the vulnerable – the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. God is on the side of those who have no voice, no power, no influence.

God may not always grant our requests. But God will hear our prayers. As God heard the cries of the Israelites. As God heard the cries of Hannah. As God heard the prayers of Anna and Simeon. As God heard the cries of the disciples caught in a storm on the sea. As God heard the cry of Jesus, on the cross, asking why God had forsaken him.

God released Israel from captivity in Egypt. God gave Hannah the son she longed for. In Jesus, God gave Anna and Simeon the Messiah they prayed for. In Jesus, God calmed the storm that terrified the disciples. In Jesus, God put to death any ideas about God’s distance from or apathy toward suffering. And, in persistent love and faithfulness, God raised Jesus from the dead to put to death any idea that our waiting and praying and crying out for justice might be in vain.

But in the end, Jesus isn’t sure that even this will be enough for us. Even with all the testimony our scriptures offer to God’s persistent love and faithfulness, he questions if this will be enough for us to keep the faith for as long as it takes. “When the Son of Man comes,” Jesus asks, “will he find faith on earth?”

In the Greek text, this sentence includes the definite article. “Will he find the faith on earth?” Will he find the faith like this persistent widow, the faith of one who will never give up on God, never give up on justice, never give up on hope?

We often think of faith as some kind of intellectual assent to a set of ideas. Or maybe as a way to make meaning out of our reality. Or maybe something that brings us comfort and peace. But faith, as Jesus is defining it here, the faith, is trusting God will be God. It means trusting that God is just and righteous, that God will keep God’s promises, that God will provide for all we need.

Maybe that’s not what we’re seeing when we look around, when we move around in our lives. We see a lot of suffering, a lot of injustice, a lot of cruelty and wickedness, a lot of apathy and greed.

And so we are really left with two choices. We can walk away. That’s an option. We can give up on God, give up praying and hoping and demanding God set things right. We can silence ourselves and let the world have its way. We can decide that sin and brokenness will win, that “life isn’t fair,” and we just have to learn to live with it.

Or, we can keep praying. As futile as it may seem after more than 2,000 years, as impotent as it may feel in a world filled with apathetic powers, we can keep coming back to God, demanding justice, demanding that God set things right.

I don’t know what God’s perfect justice looks like, but it might look something like the story Jesus tells right after this. About a Pharisee and a tax collector going up to pray. And the Pharisee thanks God that he is so righteous, that he’s got it all together, that things are going so well for him. And the tax collector asks God to have mercy on his sinful soul. And the tax collector, Jesus says, is the one who gets justice. He’s the one Jesus calls justified. It’s the same word used in the parable of the widow and the judge.

Now, it doesn’t say the tax collector left his crummy job and became a rabbi. It doesn’t say he turned his life around and lived happily ever after. He was granted justice in the act of penance, confession. He named his total dependence on God and begged for mercy.

So maybe God’s justice doesn’t look like all our prayer requests being granted, even if the things we pray for are good things – like healing and world peace.  Jesus never promised to be the star we could wish upon. He’s not a genie in a bottle.

Maybe God’s justice looks something like the Beatitudes Jesus told - the poor inheriting kingdoms, the hungry being filled, weeping pouring over into laughter, rewards for all those who get bullied for being Jesus freaks.

I can’t make any promises about what will happen if we keep praying persistently. I don’t know where or when the kingdom of God will arrive, bringing God’s justice into completeness in the world, any more than those Pharisees and disciples who asked Jesus about it did.

Jesus never promised that following him would be easy. He never promised we’d get everything we want.

But he did promise that God would grant us justice. He promised God’s kingdom would come, and he taught us to pray for that, too.

So either we believe him, or we don’t. We trust him, or we don’t. We pray, or we give up.

It doesn’t sound like Jesus expected too many of us to stick with it. “When the Son of Man comes, will he find the faith on earth?”

I hope so. I hope we don’t give up. Because God’s promises are pretty big, and audacious, and wonderful. I want God’s justice. I want God’s kingdom on earth. And I think I want it enough to keep praying for it, demanding it, and working for it, long past the point of reason. I think it is a hope worth carrying on for another generation, if Jesus doesn’t return before our earthly course is run.

Because in praying for justice, I image I will do a better job of working for justice. I imagine I’ll do a better job of noticing justice when it does show up in the world around me. And that may keep my hope alive, keep me persistent in prayer. Until God’s kingdom comes and God’s will is done, on earth as it is in heaven. Amen.