Finding Faith on Earth  

September 23, 2007

Rev. Dr. Jon Smoot

 

Prayer is a problem for us. Does God answer prayer? If so, which prayers get affirmative response while others apparently float off unseen and unheard into the cosmos? Why is one person healed and another is not when people are fervently praying for both of them?

My beloved sister, Jan – the most faith-filled person I have ever known, received a visit from some Job’s comforters the day she went into hospice. She was told that she might yet be healed if she but had more faith. I was outraged, but Jan took it in calm stride and she died with great dignity and gentleness and peace – surely an answered prayer, but not what anyone wanted for an outcome. Why do anguished prayers on calloused knees for justice, peace and compassion seem to fly right back into our faces with three swinging nooses in Jena, LA; a war costing $720 million a day and costing much more in blood, and wasted opportunities and lives; and the continuing outrage and heart-break in Darfur.

 

If God already knows what we need and want, the deepest matters on our hearts – isn’t prayer just a waste of God’s time and ours? What difference does it make? Does God have a stop-watch or keep a file on how hard or how often we pray? In my church where I grew up, we used to have an annual 24-hour concert of prayer for some mission or cause; people were supposed to sign up for 30 minute prayer segments that covers the 24 hours. As a church-child this fascinated and frightened me – how could you pray for anything for a solid 30 minutes – what if you broke connection and concentration for even a second for whatever reason? Does God lose interest because you did and the prayer connection is broken like losing an Internet connection, and you have to sign on all over again?  And just what kind of prayer does God listen to? Some years ago, a well-known televangelist started a firestorm when he opined, “Does God hear the prayer of a Jew?” To which I reply, “Does God hear the prayer of a jerk?” Does God listen to and answer our prayers if they are self-centered, or concerned with only petty issues, or are irrelevant to God’s redemptive purposes?

 

We can go nuts asking questions about prayer, not because we are disbelievers, but precisely because we are believers in God. Prayer is a problem because at some level we have the good sense to know that when we pray, we are putting our faith on the line.

Jesus knows this and also knows us all too well… he says that we are to pray always and not lose heart. That’s a very tall order, and maybe exactly why the little parable he tells takes some surprising twists:

 

Although the context appears to be prayer, the story is about obnoxious persistence for justice and concludes with a wistful question on whether or not faith will be found on earth. That makes this passage very confusing. Biblical scholars are divided on whether or not this passage is just the result of a bad editing job, with abrupt and incoherent transitions smashed together in an artless way. Or, is Jesus or Luke being misunderestimated here?

 

I think so. I think Jesus is being cagey and crazy like a fox, while we’re the ones that are plodding along with pedestrian, powerless, and predictable opinions on what prayer and faith look like.  I say the words “faith” and “prayer” and for some of you, your eyes glaze over and you look at your watch. Some of you start feeling badly or guilty about paltry prayer and feeble faith. And so Jesus mixes it up with us, telling a funny story about a sleazy judge and an uppity widow woman. It’s even funnier when we realize that what we translate here as “I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming” – in the Greek it is literally, “I will grant her justice so that she won’t give me a black eye.”

 

The reason why this story doesn’t give us a deep, joyous belly laugh is because we really don’t “get” God or get what God is commanding us to do and be. This is a “how much the more so” parable – one of Jesus’ favorite teaching tactics. One writer says, “If an ordinary selfish man or woman will not long ignore the plea of another human being in dire need, the argument goes, how much the more so will a loving God come quickly to the rescue?”

 

I believe that we are more caught up in the internal, privatized implications of faith and prayer, than we are caught up in the joyous, belligerent, obnoxious social implications of following a joyous, belligerent and obnoxiously persistent God. You see, Prayer, Justice, Faith – do travel together, when we are jolted out of our privatized religion and driven out into God’s world with God’s power and justice and compassion with enacted faith and enacted prayer.   

 

Preacher Barbara Brown Taylor suggests that Jesus’ concluding question on finding faith on earth indicates that maybe he didn’t know enough persistent widows. Her prepared response to her seven-year-old granddaughter’s question of the effectiveness of prayer indicates that Taylor has known a few. “Jesus did not know too many people with the faith to stay at anything forever. Then, as now, most people prayed like they brushed their teeth – once in the morning and once at night, as part of their spiritual hygiene program…One day, when Madeline asks me outright whether prayer really works, I am going to say, ‘Oh honey, of course it does. It keeps us chasing after God’s heart. It’s how we bother God, and it’s how God bothers us back. There’s nothing that works any better than that.’”

 

When we bother to badger God more, reminding God to keep God’s promises of shalom, be prepared for God to bother you right back. Be prepared to become unsettled with yourself and your complacency in the face of the world’s wounds. Be prepared for God to monkey with your priorities, that must suddenly include someone or some situation in dire need of grace and shalom. We are so quick to say that we don’t have time for others or for expressing our faith with our hands and feet, but we always seem to have the time to do the things we want.

 

I would challenge you on that, and implore you to start bothering God more and have God bother you right back into enacted faith and enacted prayer. As individuals and as families, ask not what God can do for you, ask what you can do for God.

 

It is in our persistence to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God where we display our faith and our lives becomes a living prayer on behalf of a joyous, belligerent, and persistent God. That is what we were made for.  Does prayer work? It will, if you will.