One of the nicest things about preparing for a sermon is when I pull one of my old "textbooks" off the shelf and take a little time to reacquaint myself with thoughts and concepts that have gotten lost in the cluttered closet of my brain. Margaret Guenther's book "The Practice of Prayer" is a wonderful down-to-earth look at praying and why we do it. And it came in handy for this sermon. See what you think.

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Texts: Jer. 31:27-34, Ps.119:97-104, 2 Tim 3:14-4:5, Luke 18:1-8

How many of us can feel the frustration of this persistent widow?

If you’ve ever had to deal with any bureaucratic agency… or a particular favorite around here: AT&T… you know that headache of having to wait and wait… and get transferred to another person who doesn’t fully grasp what’s going on. Maybe you finally reach someone who has a clue about how to help you.

And by this time you have lost three and a half hours of your life that you will never see again.

Nonetheless… you persisted.

Anyone who has ever been engaged in social justice work knows this struggle all too well.

As a reporter… I bore witness to countless efforts to move the hearts and minds of the “unjust judges” of the Florida legislature.

Migrant farmworkers employed to pick Florida’s fruits and vegetables would come year after year to seek protection from getting sprayed by chemicals in the fields.

LGBTQ kids would travel to Tallahassee with their parents to lobby for protection from rampant bullying in the schools…only to have some legislators bully them in their offices.

The survivors of the Rosewood massacre…frail and old… finally got some level of compensation from the Florida Legislature more than 70 years later after the trauma they had endured. Rosewood had been a thriving township of mostly black residents in north central Florida…about 50 miles southwest of Gainesville. The massacre was a terrifying event in the 1920s where a white mob angered over an alleged rape of a white woman…marched into Rosewood, killed an unknown number of people, and ransacked and burned an entire town to the ground. The rampage lasted a week.

The survivors… all children at the time… had fled into the swamps and woods. Many wound up in Gainesville. Others moved to Jacksonville. All of them were so brutalized by the violence that they didn’t want to talk about it.

It wasn’t until the St. Petersburg Times unearthed the story in the 1980s…and the late Ed Bradley of “60 Minutes” discovered his family had roots in Rosewood… that the stories of that horrible week of cruelty came to light. To this day… there are people who deny that destruction of Rosewood ever happened even with archaeological evidence to prove them wrong.

Had not a few people…including journalists…persisted, Rosewood would not even be a memory.

Jesus knew a thing or two about unjust judges as he led a campaign of Love in a society ruled by a Roman Empire that “neither feared God nor had respect for the people.” (18:2). And this parable he tells… which is just that: a story with two extreme positions… was meant to prepare his followers and give them the tools to withstand the violence and difficulties on the horizon.

Again… our lectionary diviners are giving us this one short story to work with and—believe me—there’s plenty here for us to think about.

But something to know about this passage: in the verses just before Jesus tells this tale of the persistent widow and the unjust judge…he’s been warning the disciples to get themselves ready and not look back to the former things.

For the original audience of Luke’s Gospel… this would have been important. Scholars think Luke was written roughly 15-25 years after the second destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem… a devastating blow to the Jewish community. These are people living in turbulent and uncertain times. We might be able to relate to that feeling as we watch the evening news.

With this parable… he reminds them… and us… that our super power… the thing that will keep us from falling apart in the midst of life’s challenges… is prayer.

Constant.

Persistent.

Prayer.

The prayers that call out to God for justice.

For mercy.

For the strength to make it through whatever crisis is happening.

Strangely, to me at least, is that those who preach a prosperity Gospel message apparently use this passage to tell people that if they pray long and hard enough, God will give them great riches and maybe a decent parking space at the store. I push back against that sort of thinking.

While I think that God wants good things for us, I also don’t think of prayer as being like an ATM or gumball machine…where you stick your quarter in a slot…turn the handle… and the God of the gumballs gives you that perfect bright blue ball answer to your prayer. Prayer is a dialogue with God. Sometimes it’s a nice conversation. Sometimes it’s an argument.

I know that there are those times when God might feel like the unjust judge. We “lift our eyes to the hills” (Ps.121)… but we never feel that help is on the way.

Margaret Guenther, an Episcopal priest and spiritual director, writes extensively in her book “The Practice of Prayer” about those times when God is silent…or what the Spanish mystic John the Cross calls “the dark night of the soul.”

The feeling that God has decided to take a break from us fills us with dread and fear and can send our mind into a whirling dervish of anxiety. Nobody likes to be in that uncomfortable place.

And yet…as Guenther notes… John of the Cross embraced that darkness as a pathway back to light. He saw the dark night of the soul as like weaning a baby…God as a mother beginning to feed an infant solid rather than soft food.

This is part of the soul growing up and deepening faith. And even as it feels like our prayers are lacking any connection to God…Guenther says to keep going…just like the persistent widow. Because sometimes all we can do is keep the muscle memory of our prayers exercising to keep from losing all hope.

As one who has been with people in times of despair and deep sorrow, the one thing I can say about prayer is that when we lift our hearts and minds to God, it can bring about a calming of the soul in distress.

Tears may start flowing and these are the physical release of our fears and as we cry and pour out everything that feels wrong… unjust… unfair… whatever words describe that state of hopelessness. And then we reach the moment when we are quiet and still enough to let God speak.

Maybe not it words.

Perhaps in the arrival of a message from a friend.

Or God appears in the form of our dog or cat coming to rub up against us as we wipe the tears from our eyes.

Or maybe we hear God in the notes of a piece of music that raises up in our consciousness to the reminder that we are never alone no matter how lonely we might feel in the moment.

God will manifest in some way that we can perceive the Holy. It may not always be exactly as we imagine…or even want. But it will be what we need for the time.

As Jesus says…if an unjust judge can finally answer a plea for mercy… God will hear the prayers of the people and act in the ways we may not fully understand…but we persistently seek.

In the name of God…F/S/HS.