Hopelessness and Prayer

Malcolm Young  Jer. 31:27-34Christ Church, Los Altos, CA Sermon K28 Ps. 119:97-104

20 Pentecost Proper 24C (RCL) 2 Tim. 3:14-4:5

Sunday 17 October 2004 Luke 18:1-8

“Jesus told the disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”  Lk. 18:1-8

“One November morning… when I was ten years old, my father got up early, put on a pair of gray slacks and a maroon sweater, opened the door to look in briefly on my younger brother and me, who were playing a game in our room, and then went down into the garage where he turned on the engine of the family Chevy and sat down… to wait for the exhaust to kill him…  [T]here was no funeral because on both my mother’s side and my father’s side there was no church connection of any kind and funerals were simply not part of the tradition.

“…[A]s far as I can remember, once he had died my mother, brother, and I rarely talked about him much ever again, either to each oth

er or to anybody else.  It made my mother too sad to talk about him, and since there was already more than enough sadness to go round, my brother and I avoided the subject with her as she avoided it for her own reasons also with us.”

This is not my story.  Frederick Buechner wrote this about perhaps the most important moment in his life.  For fifty years he sought healing.  He strained to be reconciled both with the tragedy of his father’s death and his family’s silence about it.  The journey that he started on that autumn morning led him to the very heart of Christ. 
In a way it is my story.  It belongs to all of us.  We all know about hopelessness and despair.  Perhaps you feel that your spouse does not understand you and because of your history together you cannot talk about it.  Maybe words like anger, loneliness, disillusionment and frustration best describe your relation to someone you are supposed to love.  Perhaps your father died this week and you still have more you need to say to him.  Or you were diagnosed with cancer and feel frightened because the doctors don’t seem to know what to do.  A widow eating alone every night across from her husband’s old chair knows this feeling.
In this world we see no shortage of despair.  Seventy thousand refugees have died in the Sudan since March.²  We long for signs of peace in war-torn Iraq and Israel.  We feel frustrated as politicians make promises that they cannot pay for and obscure the truth.

The hopelessness in a family trying to erase the memory of a father is exactly the kind of despair Jesus talks about to us today.  The vividness of Jesus’ story makes it easy for us to forget that his subject is hopelessness, hopelessness and prayer.  The Bible explains, “Jesus told the disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”
At first the story hardly seems connected to this point.  A poor, inconsequential widow asks for help from a corrupt political appointee.  He cares only about his own advancement not the cause of justice.  She may not have power, but she also will not leave him alone.  She pesters and hassles him.  The judge says to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she will not wear me out.”
1. We can draw two kinds of mistaken conclusions from this story.  First, one might believe that like the judge, God acts in an arbitrary way, that God cares more about the frequency of our prayers than about justice.  Jim has a cartoon in his office.  It shows a man in a suit coming through the receiving line after church.  Shaking hands with a solemn pastor he says, “Oh, I know that He works in mysterious ways, but if I worked that mysteriously I’d get fired.”

Sometimes it seems to me that the only way that the eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant could believe in religion at all was because he saw cruel people die without being punished for the evil that they had done.  He believed so strongly in justice, that he couldn’t imagine that this world is not paired with an afterlife of punishment and reward.  We see injustice everywhere.  Sinners prosper.  Corrupt and dishonest people succeed.  Bullies humiliate and maim others without ever experiencing the kind of suffering that they cause.

Some people say that this is God’s justice.  As mortals we just lack the ability to understand it.  I do not believe this.  Christians can know what God is like.  God is not arbitrary but merciful and good.
2. A much more common way of explaining the story of the unjust judge is to see it as an encouragement to nag God.  According to this view we are the widows and God is the judge.  If the widow in the story gets her way by making a nuisance of herself, we can do the same with God.  This way of reading the story almost seems to presume that God, like a distracted parent, does not hear us the first time, or that God does not really know what we need until we say it a few times.  This kind of God also seems utterly false to me.  It reminds me of a child on a playground requiring another kid to say “pretty please” before sharing the kickball.

Both of these interpretations draw similarities between the unjust judge and God, but this is not our God.  God’s ways are not simply arbitrary.  God does not require that we come begging.  The reason we love Jesus is that he tells us what God is like though his life and teachings.  Jesus gives us this story so that we will not lose heart, so that we will pray unceasingly.

I have a friend named Sue Everson who is a world authority on hopelessness.  As a medical researcher she studies the effect that hopelessness has on our health.  What we understand anecdotally, she studies empirically.  One of her more startling statistics is that people who feel hopeless are twenty percent more likely over four years to die from a stroke.  Hopelessness increases your chance of a stroke to the same degree that smoking a pack of cigarettes a day does.  Sue scientifically studies how religion seems to make people less hopeless.
Jesus also connects prayer and hopelessness.  I think he does this both because it is harder to pray when we feel hopeless and because it is often only through prayer that we can find our way out of hopelessness.

Every sermon about hopelessness should include a joke…  God decides he wants to be more in touch with what is happening on earth.  So God sends the angel Michael down here to investigate.  Michael reports back.  “It is awful down here.  Ninety-five percent of all people are rotten to the core and cannot pray.  The good news is that five percent are great.”  God cannot believe this so he sends another angel, Gabriel down to verify this.  Gabriel comes back and says, “Ninety-five percent of the people are total sinners.  Fortunately five percent really love you.”  This was not enough for God.  God decides to send Angelica, the chief executive angel down to investigate.  She says the same thing.  Ninety-five percent of all people do not pray as they should and five percent are good.
So God decided to send an e-mail message to the five percent whose prayers are acceptable and do you know what it said?  I didn’t get one either?
I think that prayer is difficult for people, maybe even for ninety-five percent of us.  As Jesus says, the problem with prayer is that we have a hard time not losing hope.  If we felt hopeful about prayer we would do it more often, we might even pray unceasingly.  If we believed that peace could come through prayer, or that prayer could heal and reconcile or change the way things are, we would do it more.  But instead we lose heart.  Maybe we think of the times we have been disappointed in prayer.  Maybe we are not even sure that there is a God to pray to, or that God hears our prayer.

The preacher William Willimon says that we ought to think of prayer not as asking God to do something for us, but rather as a request that God will be God, that God’s goodness will shine through.  He gives us the example of what it feels like to be comforted as a child.  My three year old daughter Melia’s tiara broke this week.  As most of you know she has worn this every waking hour for the last four months.

My wife Heidi, held her and repeated, “it will be alright.”  She was not saying that Melia was wrong to feel upset about this.  She also didn’t mean that the tiara could be made as good as new, or that everything would be fine immediately.  Instead what Heidi meant was that no pain or sorrow lasts forever, that in the larger scheme of things good and justice prevail.  Somehow even the worst things that happen to us become part of our story and we go on.

This brings me back to the boy whose father committed suicide.  Later this author explains that God is present in private events but does not move us like pieces on a chessboard.  He writes, “[I]nstead, events happen under their own steam…  God is present in them not as their cause but as the one who even in the hardest… of them offers us the possibility of that new life which I believe is what salvation is.”
“For instance I cannot believe that a God of love and mercy in any sense willed my father’s suicide; it was only father himself who willed it as the only way out available to him from a life that for various reasons had become unbearable.  God did not will what happened… but I believe that God was present in what happened.  I cannot guess how he was present with my father… but my faith… is that he continues to be present with him in ways beyond my guessing.”

“I can speak with some assurance only of how God was present in that dark time for me…  Who knows how I might have turned out if my father had lived, but through the loss of him all those long years ago I think that I learned something about how even tragedy can be a means of grace that I might never have come to any other way.”

In conclusion, Jesus’ parable is not so much about whether or how prayer works so much as it is about God’s goodness.  God is good and just.  Letting God be God means trusting this goodness and love.  It means that ultimately at the end of every story God’s mercy and kindness are revealed.  In prayer we experience how God cares, how God continues to act in our hearts even when we are tempted by hopelessness.  When Christ appeared to Julian of Norwich during a severe illness in the year 1373 he said, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”