What a great day it is to be alive in the kin(g)dom of God! Today we baptized a child and celebrated God’s calling upon 10 adults – and their children with them – to be counted in the family and household of God. Today is one of those beautiful days when all my fears and anxieties about the church as a limited human project are proven wrong!
Now, if that sounds a little odd to have the Pastor say that he worries about the church as a limited enterprise, welcome to Reformed Protestant theology, where we are pretty certain that the church is more of a hospital for forgiven sinners than it is a hotel for saints. By that I mean that we are keenly aware of our sinful nature, our need for forgiveness, and the fact that all we say and do is in response to the grace and mercy of God! That does not mean that we are inherently bad people. It just means that we are more wired for self-preservation than we sometimes realize, and without God’s grace and mercy and sacrificial love to guide us we might just miss out on the things that make life worth living.
Into this space, we receive the encouragement of Jesus to pray always and do not lose heart. I find it interesting to be given this gift by the lectionary texts when earlier this summer we explored what it meant to offer our hearts to God with the theme from PYT “Here’s My Heart.” If you recall we talked about being recognized, called, and claimed by God. We talked about being cherished and beloved, and how there was a perfect match for each of our hearts in the heart of Jesus. We talked about the way that sharing God’s heart gave us something to offer others, especially those who the world is so ready to exclude or deny or lock up and hide from view.
As people who share a heart with God, Jesus speaks to us through these ancient texts today to remind us to center our lives in devotion, be persistent in prayer, and to share this faith in ways that transform and redeem us and those we share it with over and over and over again. I think it’s really important to consider the way these texts breathe life into one another. In fact, the literal translation of 2 Timothy 3:16 is “all scripture is God-breathed.” Of course, you have to hold that with a little objectivity. At the time of this letter, the only scriptures were the law and the Prophets. These, Paul believed, indicated the truth of God’s love as expressed through Jesus as the Messiah of God.
We, of course, believe that the new covenant Jeremiah spoke of was established through
Jesus, but it was for all people for all time, that all may know of God’s love and be forgiven. Paul wrote about this love to Timothy. He reminded Timothy of the people that taught him and the sacred texts that told the story of God’s love from ancient days. He wanted Timothy to know it in his bones and share it with others in ways that would convince them that this faith, this God, this grace and mercy and love were worth believing in. All of this is worth believing in because sometimes it’s all we have to believe in.
That’s why Jesus didn’t just say, “don’t forget to pray,” like a parent sending a child to bed before Christmas. He said, “Pray always, and do not lose heart.” Root your life in devotion to God, because you believe in the active, transforming the presence of God!
Jesus told his disciples this – and probably a few Pharisees nearby – because he had just told them about the coming and present kingdom of God, and they were a bit overwhelmed. In order to break through their malaise, he chose the most extreme pair he could come up with: a judge with no fear of God or concern for humanity, and a widow – the epitome of need.
The Judge was simply the worst person imaginable. If the summary of the law is to love God with all that you are and love your neighbor as yourself, he was obviously the opposite of the law. The widow, on the other hand, is literally one of the two people you cannot deny care for according to the law. Everything about this is wrong, and everyone knows it, yet it stands to show that even in systems of justice the unjust may still have power. Regardless of how likely or unlikely it was for their time, the point that Jesus makes is that even the worst person imaginable might be worn down by persistence and tenacity – if for no other reason than self-preservation.
How much more responsive must God be for us? How could we be any less persistent in our prayers? How dare we expect anything less than the care and mercy of God to come to our aid? These are easy words to say, and they sound good to hear for the most part. Still, if it were that easy, I wonder if Jesus would have needed to say, “Don’t lose heart.”
A woman came to see me a few days ago because she was simply broken and needed
someone to tell her that God was still in the mix. You don’t need to know her story, but in
some ways, I bet you do. I bet you’ve seen it or felt it or known someone who has “lost heart” in some way.
She was caught up in the conflict between her own actions and those of others wanting a God that might redeem her from them. I encouraged her the best I could and prayed with her and sent her on her way with a few names and numbers of people who might help in ways that I could not.
While the weight of it stayed with me I couldn’t help but think of her as the widow and God as the Judge, at least I think that’s how she would see it. My hope is that she will come to see God as active and present through the people and opportunities that God calls into her life. My hope is that she will begin to see God as the one calling repeatedly for the unjust to act with justice. In the end, that is what Jesus asks of you and me. For the Widow’s persistence moves even the unjust toward justice, and isn’t that what the “Son of Man” is looking for all along?
It is undeniable that there is injustice in our land and in our world. Politicians are going to
make a lot of hay about it all in the coming runoff and in the upcoming presidential election, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. We live in a nation where people call the police on their neighbors out of fear of skin color, and sometimes our neighbors die from a good cop with bad intel. We live in a nation that is creating a privatized industry out of imprisonment, particularly for those seeking asylum from violence in other countries. In this prison economy, we also find disproportionate sentencing between whites and people of color for the same crimes. This is just one way of describing what some call “white privilege.”
Now, if that sounds a little odd to have the Pastor say that he worries about the church as a limited enterprise, welcome to Reformed Protestant theology, where we are pretty certain that the church is more of a hospital for forgiven sinners than it is a hotel for saints. By that I mean that we are keenly aware of our sinful nature, our need for forgiveness, and the fact that all we say and do is in response to the grace and mercy of God! That does not mean that we are inherently bad people. It just means that we are more wired for self-preservation than we sometimes realize, and without God’s grace and mercy and sacrificial love to guide us we might just miss out on the things that make life worth living.
Into this space, we receive the encouragement of Jesus to pray always and do not lose heart. I find it interesting to be given this gift by the lectionary texts when earlier this summer we explored what it meant to offer our hearts to God with the theme from PYT “Here’s My Heart.” If you recall we talked about being recognized, called, and claimed by God. We talked about being cherished and beloved, and how there was a perfect match for each of our hearts in the heart of Jesus. We talked about the way that sharing God’s heart gave us something to offer others, especially those who the world is so ready to exclude or deny or lock up and hide from view.
As people who share a heart with God, Jesus speaks to us through these ancient texts today to remind us to center our lives in devotion, be persistent in prayer, and to share this faith in ways that transform and redeem us and those we share it with over and over and over again. I think it’s really important to consider the way these texts breathe life into one another. In fact, the literal translation of 2 Timothy 3:16 is “all scripture is God-breathed.” Of course, you have to hold that with a little objectivity. At the time of this letter, the only scriptures were the law and the Prophets. These, Paul believed, indicated the truth of God’s love as expressed through Jesus as the Messiah of God.
We, of course, believe that the new covenant Jeremiah spoke of was established through
Jesus, but it was for all people for all time, that all may know of God’s love and be forgiven. Paul wrote about this love to Timothy. He reminded Timothy of the people that taught him and the sacred texts that told the story of God’s love from ancient days. He wanted Timothy to know it in his bones and share it with others in ways that would convince them that this faith, this God, this grace and mercy and love were worth believing in. All of this is worth believing in because sometimes it’s all we have to believe in.
That’s why Jesus didn’t just say, “don’t forget to pray,” like a parent sending a child to bed before Christmas. He said, “Pray always, and do not lose heart.” Root your life in devotion to God, because you believe in the active, transforming the presence of God!
Jesus told his disciples this – and probably a few Pharisees nearby – because he had just told them about the coming and present kingdom of God, and they were a bit overwhelmed. In order to break through their malaise, he chose the most extreme pair he could come up with: a judge with no fear of God or concern for humanity, and a widow – the epitome of need.
The Judge was simply the worst person imaginable. If the summary of the law is to love God with all that you are and love your neighbor as yourself, he was obviously the opposite of the law. The widow, on the other hand, is literally one of the two people you cannot deny care for according to the law. Everything about this is wrong, and everyone knows it, yet it stands to show that even in systems of justice the unjust may still have power. Regardless of how likely or unlikely it was for their time, the point that Jesus makes is that even the worst person imaginable might be worn down by persistence and tenacity – if for no other reason than self-preservation.
How much more responsive must God be for us? How could we be any less persistent in our prayers? How dare we expect anything less than the care and mercy of God to come to our aid? These are easy words to say, and they sound good to hear for the most part. Still, if it were that easy, I wonder if Jesus would have needed to say, “Don’t lose heart.”
A woman came to see me a few days ago because she was simply broken and needed
someone to tell her that God was still in the mix. You don’t need to know her story, but in
some ways, I bet you do. I bet you’ve seen it or felt it or known someone who has “lost heart” in some way.
She was caught up in the conflict between her own actions and those of others wanting a God that might redeem her from them. I encouraged her the best I could and prayed with her and sent her on her way with a few names and numbers of people who might help in ways that I could not.
While the weight of it stayed with me I couldn’t help but think of her as the widow and God as the Judge, at least I think that’s how she would see it. My hope is that she will come to see God as active and present through the people and opportunities that God calls into her life. My hope is that she will begin to see God as the one calling repeatedly for the unjust to act with justice. In the end, that is what Jesus asks of you and me. For the Widow’s persistence moves even the unjust toward justice, and isn’t that what the “Son of Man” is looking for all along?
It is undeniable that there is injustice in our land and in our world. Politicians are going to
make a lot of hay about it all in the coming runoff and in the upcoming presidential election, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. We live in a nation where people call the police on their neighbors out of fear of skin color, and sometimes our neighbors die from a good cop with bad intel. We live in a nation that is creating a privatized industry out of imprisonment, particularly for those seeking asylum from violence in other countries. In this prison economy, we also find disproportionate sentencing between whites and people of color for the same crimes. This is just one way of describing what some call “white privilege.”
Just last week when a Latina author was invited to speak at a college about her experience of not being white, white students responded by burning her book and joyfully posted it on social media. None of these describe the nation that I thought I had grown up in, nor is it the one I thought I had raised my children in. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that we are all bad or without redemption. I’m saying that if we do not believe that there are issues of injustice, then we are the ones benefiting from it.
The good news is that God is in the mix. The good news is that our knowledge of injustice does not have to be incriminating. Instead, it can be the thing that gives us the reason to pray. In our prayer, we can expect God to move, even our hearts, toward justice, toward balance, toward the recognition that there is no us and them.
When there is justice, there’s “just us”, and together we can live in the kin(g)dom that is
already among us! Even as God is moving us toward that end, I want to challenge you to
remember to pray, and don’t lose heart, but also know this: each of you is an answer to my prayers. As we move forward together as God’s people, I want to encourage you to pray for God to continue to call others who can help us to live together as God’s people.
We have been given this love and grace and mercy that we might share it. We have been
given this uncommon unity that we might grow it; so that all we are and all we might become will welcome those in need of the love we have received, the love in which we stand, and the love by which we are saved; and all to the glory of God, now and always. Amen!
The good news is that God is in the mix. The good news is that our knowledge of injustice does not have to be incriminating. Instead, it can be the thing that gives us the reason to pray. In our prayer, we can expect God to move, even our hearts, toward justice, toward balance, toward the recognition that there is no us and them.
When there is justice, there’s “just us”, and together we can live in the kin(g)dom that is
already among us! Even as God is moving us toward that end, I want to challenge you to
remember to pray, and don’t lose heart, but also know this: each of you is an answer to my prayers. As we move forward together as God’s people, I want to encourage you to pray for God to continue to call others who can help us to live together as God’s people.
We have been given this love and grace and mercy that we might share it. We have been
given this uncommon unity that we might grow it; so that all we are and all we might become will welcome those in need of the love we have received, the love in which we stand, and the love by which we are saved; and all to the glory of God, now and always. Amen!
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