“Then
Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always, and not to lose
heart.” From the Gospel for today, the Gospel according to Luke, chapter 18,
the first verse.
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen.
We
have Our Lord’s word for it. These two things go together. Pray always. Don’t
lose heart. We pray in order not to lose heart, and we don’t lose heart, in
order to pray. If my own experience is anything to go on, the two experiences
are definitely connected. If I begin to lose heart, my own prayers begin to
fall apart. I have to make myself return to them. I go through this all the
time, almost, it seems, every single day. And if my prayers begin to fall
apart, I begin to lose confidence in myself, and lose confidence in God. I lose
heart, in other words. This is easy to do, as I suspect we all know.
Pray always. Don’t lose heart. Do one
thing, and don’t do another. Following the first command makes it easier to
follow the second. Our Lord is proclaiming that prayer is central to everything
we do. This is one meaning of “always” in “pray always.” Every activity,
thought, and mood is in some way influenced by prayer, and prayer in turn is
influenced by everything that we experience. The “heart” in “don’t lose heart”
is that center of feeling and will and love that we all have, that influences
prayer. This double motion is really one, since the two experiences can’t
really be separated. Prayer needs a lot of heart to support it, and if we begin
to lose it, heart needs a lot of prayer.
Jesus in this reading is talking to his
disciples. And he tells them the somewhat odd story about the widow and the
unjust judge. The story is odd because it seems to be comparing God to an
unjust judge, who grants the widow’s request simply because he is tired of her.
But of course that is not the real point. The story is really about the widow’s
persistence, and there, in her persistence, we have the main clue to the nature
of prayer, and how to keep going if we find ourselves losing heart.
Persistence. Standing firm. Not giving up.
Years ago I heard a homily by an Orthodox priest about what it takes to
maintain prayer. People, whether lay people or clergy or monks, typically need
a structure, a daily or weekly structure, to maintain prayer. In the Western
Church in the Middle Ages and later, there were several offices, several
periods of prayer a day, said or sung in common in monasteries and many
churches. Usually, offices were not much more than three hours apart. In other
words, in the monasteries it took regular prayer several times a day, to
maintain the monks’ prayer life. And it was prayer in common. It is important
to remember that prayer is never purely individual. The prayer Our Lord taught
us, the “Our Father,” is “Our” prayer, not just an individual prayer. Our own
Prayer Book reminds us of this, with its title “The Book of Common Prayer.” Even,
especially, when we are praying on our own, at home or in some other situation,
we must remember that we are actually praying in a very large company of people
past, present, and future, on earth and in heaven, who are constantly at
prayer, asking God for help, offering prayers of adoration, and so on. This is another
meaning of Our Lord’s command to “pray always.” It is always to be aware that
our prayer is part of a vast, deep river of adoration, flowing from past,
present, and future, from earth to heaven. Awareness of this is very
strengthening; it helps us not to lose heart.
For those of us who are not monastics, our
Prayer Book suggests different ways to pray. We can use the daily offices for
morning, noon, evening, and night which the book provides. There is also a
collection of brief daily devotions which are modeled on the daily offices. And
there are many, many prayers included in the book, which we can use. The book
is not the property of the clergy only, for use in daily and weekly services.
It is meant for the prayerful use of everyone. So, when you go home, please
look through your copy of the Prayer Book, if you haven’t done so before, and
work out ways you can use it in your daily prayer life.
Prayer, our own or the prayer of others, is
always there to support us, no matter how we may be feeling from one moment to
the next. We may imagine that we are losing heart, but even the desire to pray,
or the awareness of that it is sometimes difficult to pray, are themselves
kinds of prayer. Prayer is never far from us, even if we think it is, and we
need not imagine that we have somehow failed, just because we don’t feel up to
it, that we have somehow lost heart. The prayer of the Church, on earth and in
heaven, is there to support us, no matter what.
Today’s reading connects prayer with
justice, with our desire for justice, and God’s granting of it. “I tell you, he
will quickly grant justice to them,” the Gospel says. This brings to mind the
great issue that many people have with prayer, that it does not often seem to
be answered, at least not immediately, especially prayer for justice. This
problem, justice, has occupied minds great and less great, for centuries. It is
the subject of Plato’s dialog ‘Politeia,’ or ‘The Republic,’ and people today
are seeking justice all over the world, in all kinds of situations: war, economics,
and social causes of one kind and another. Prayers ascend endlessly to heaven,
seeking justice in those and many other situations.
I came across a cartoon, just the other
day, that illustrates the nature of this problem. I can’t remember where I saw
it. I went looking for it online, but could not locate it. But the story goes
something like this: A young man is having a conversation with God. It looks
like they are in a park or some such setting. The young man says, “God, I have
a question for you. Why do you allow injustice and war and starvation and
disease and exploitation and abuse?” And so on, in this vein. And God replies,
“Man, I have a question for you. Why do you allow injustice and war and
starvation and disease and exploitation and abuse?” And so on. According to the
cartoonist, at any rate, the solution to the problem of justice is actually
within our power; God has in fact answered the prayer for justice by giving us
the means, the power, the understanding, actually to do something about it.
And, so far it seems, we humans have been taking our time getting around to it.
Now of course I know that the situation is much more complicated than that, but
at root, the prayer for justice, which Jesus mentions in this parable, is a
prayer which has, in a way, already been answered in God’s granting to us the
ability to take responsibility for justice ourselves.
But we are reluctant to, at least some of
the time. This is one meaning of the concluding line of today’s Gospel, “And
yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” This line seems
to be out of place in a teaching about prayer, and seems especially out of
place as the concluding line of a parable about God’s granting of justice. But
is it really?
Have we lost heart in our prayer for
justice? Have we lost faith in it? We remember that one meaning of ‘faith’ is
‘trust.’ Have we lost trust in God’s promise that he will grant justice
quickly, that is, that he will give us, has given us, the means to work for it?
Let us pray, then, and not lose
heart. That is, let us not lose trust in God’s promises, especially today in
his promise of justice.
“Then Jesus told them a parable about
their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”
In the name of God, Father, Son, and Holy
Spirit. Amen. (20.X.13 Adv. 20.X.19 Adv)
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