Sermon for October 20, 2019 - Proper 24 C - The Rev'd Elise A. Feyerherm
Genesis 32:22-31 – Psalm 121 – 2 Timothy 3:14 – 4:5 – Luke 18:1-8
Praying & blessing
One of the many delights of engaging in a journey along the Way of Love, exploring the seven practices that ground us in life with Jesus, is the discovery of how these practices overlap, intertwine, and reinforce one another. In our parish journey along the Way of Love, we’re coming to the end of a season of focusing on blessing, and our readings for today invite us to imagine another practice joining the dance – that practice is prayer. Prayer and blessing, blessing and prayer.
Our gospel for today is a parable that, Luke suggests, is about the disciples’ need to pray always and not lose heart. One reading of this parable is that we, those who pray, are in the place of the widow; and God, the one who has the power to bless, is represented by the judge, even though the judge is unjust and corrupt. We pray, and if we pray hard and long enough, God blesses. If we’re lucky, we can pass some of those blessings on to those who need them even more than we do.
But what happens if we turn things around? Writer Mark Davis wonders if God might be the widow:
[The] powerful and wealthy and dishonest and brutal often thrive while the innocent and powerless suffer. God sends prophets to speak a word of truth, to demand justice, to call for vindication. They are often ignored, silenced, or killed. God sends another. They speak for God: “Thus says the Lord.”… In the end, justice can prevail, but it prevails because God’s people persistently speak the truth. The widow is how God operates, particularly through a community of truth-tellers.[1]
God as the widow. God as the One whose pleas for justice will never cease until they break open human hearts. A God who is in solidarity with all who cry out. So what if we imagine prayer as whenever human beings align themselves with the desires of God for the healing of this broken world?
The apostle Paul wrote in the letter to the Romans that the Holy Spirit actually prays in us, helping us in our weakness; “for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with signs too deep for words” (8:26). God’s own yearning for a just world flows through us, and when that happens, it is prayer. When we align ourselves with God’s desire to heal the world, blessing flows through us, in us, to wherever it is needed most. Our prayer and our blessing flow together, sometimes indistinguishable. Prayer leads to blessing – us blessing God, blessing others, and being blessed as the circle comes round again.
The image of Jacob wrestling with the mysterious figure in the dark is a powerful image of prayer. Prayer can be a battle: “I will not let you go, unless you bless me.” Perhaps a better way to put this would be: “I will not let you go until I am able to perceive your blessing. And even then, I will reach for you again and again.”
Perhaps even Jacob is an image not of human beings but of God – God wrestles with us, not letting us go until we bless God by entering into the stream of God’s prayer. Imagine God saying to you, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute: “I will not let you go until you bless me, and bless the world.” Imagine us and God saying that to each other. “I will not let you go.” “I will not let you go, until all the world is filled with blessing.”
The story of Jacob has an even darker side, of course, which is that asking for blessing from God, and asking to be a blessing, will change us in ways we cannot imagine or predict. I have found that the more I participate in the mutual blessing between God, the beloved community, and the world, the more vulnerable I become. The more I am exposed to other people’s pain, and the more I care about it. The more I face my own weakness, my inability to take away that pain. There are oh so many wounds that leave us, like Jacob, leave us hobbling for the rest of our life.
I sat with someone the other day who, when I asked how they were, said, my mind is hurting. When I asked how that was, they described the worries, the negative and self-deprecating thoughts that were a lifelong pattern – it was especially bad that day. Tears began to puddle in this person’s eyes. I couldn’t do anything about it. I could offer the blessing of companionship, the reassurance that I too had such worries that logic couldn’t banish. And we blessed each other that day, in conversation, in sharing eucharist, in marking each other with holy oil and the sign of the cross and asking God to heal us both. There was relationship, and prayer, and blessing, and, yes, there were still wounds. But six words, unspoken, made all the difference: I will not let you go.
In our wounded prayer and in our wounded blessing, we speak not only for ourselves but for God, as we seek to tell the truth. We tell the truth to each other, about how we are hurting. We tell the truth to those in power who will not listen. Prayers and blessings are flowing all across this world: protesters in Hong Kong whose longing for freedom will not let them rest, teenaged prophets speaking on behalf of the wounded earth, insisting that we do something about climate change. Those who pray outside detention centers, and those who day after day, week after week, sit with those in prison, reminding them that their wounds have not been forgotten. Prayer and blessing draw us into a great struggle that will leave us limping.
And yet there are those six words again – our prayer, God’s promise, and the source of all blessing – “I will not let you go.”