Disgruntled to Gruntled

The Rev. Dr. Skip Ferguson

Manassas Presbyterian Church

Manassas, Virginia

July 5, 2015

Disgruntled to Gruntled

Luke 18:1-8

Then Jesus told them a parable about

their need to pray always

and not to lose heart.

He said, “In a certain city there was a judge

who neither feared God nor had respect for people.

 In that city there was a widow who kept

coming to him and saying,

‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’

For a while he refused; but later he said 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 may not wear me out by continually coming.’”

And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says.

And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones

who cry to him day and night?

Will he delay long in helping them?

I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.

And yet, when the Son of Man comes,

will he find faith on earth?”

**********************************************

A pest.

That’s what this parable seems to suggest we become:

Pests,

pestering God with prayer,

unrelenting, never quiet.

“C’mon, God, answer my prayer.

C’mon God, give me what I ask for.”

Surely that cannot be the lesson.

That cannot be what our Lord

wants us to learn from his parable.

Yes, Paul told us to “pray without ceasing”

(1 Thessalonians 5:17)

but he surely he didn’t say that

because he thought we could wear God down.

A quick read through these few verses

and it seems simple, what we are to learn:

As our Lord said right in the first verse,

“pray always and don’t lose heart.”

But as with so much in the Bible,

we cannot skim across the surface and say,

“Easy; I get it.”

A widow and an unjust, faithless man:

could our Lord have given us

two more extreme ends of the spectrum?

                          

How many times does Scripture tell us

that widows were to be looked after,

watched over,

and protected?

Among the final words Moses said

to the children of Israel was,

“Cursed be anyone who deprives the alien,

the orphan, and the widow of justice.’

(Deuteronomy 27:19)

The Psalmist calls God

“the protector of widows.”

(Psalm 68:5)

In Jesus’ day, anyone who knew

even a little Scripture

would have known those words,

would have known the special responsibility

society had for looking after the widow.

And judges had a higher standard than others.

Moses made that clear, too,

a thousand years before our Lord

taught this parable,

telling those called to the vocation of judging:

“Give the members of your community

a fair hearing,”

and judge rightly between one person and another,

whether citizen or resident alien.

You must not be partial in judgment:

hear out the small and the great alike;

…for the judgment is God’s.”

(Deuteronomy 1:16-17)

Obviously the judge in our story was as callous,

cold, and hard-hearted as could be,

not interested at all in dispensing justice,

relenting only to rid of himself of the widow

and her pestering.

And so, Jesus concludes the parable

by telling us that God will grant us justice

if we just persist, hang in,

don’t give up;

that with tenacity even the most disgruntled

can find themselves gruntled –

which isn’t a word, but should be.

(HBA).

But then why do so many of our prayers

often seem to go unanswered?

Why do we pray and pray and pray

for what we believe is right and good

and just and fair,

only to feel ourselves praying as though

to the wind

rather than to the Lord our God?

Is it that we haven’t been persistent enough,

tenacious enough;

have we simply not yet reached the point

where we’ve worn God down?

It is the last line that guides us,

opens our eyes and our minds;

that line that almost seems to be a throwaway,

a line that Jesus seems to have included

only as one final dig at the unjust judge.

But Jesus’ point about faithfulness

is aimed at you and me.

It is a reminder that when we pray,

we are not to pray to God

as though God was Santa Claus,

there to grant our every wish.

We are to pray ceaselessly,

but we are also to pray faithfully;

and to pray faithfully means we need to understand

that sometimes the things we pray for

may not happen,

no matter how tenacious we might be.

As the great preacher Harry Emerson Fosdick observed,

“What discord should we bring to the universe

if our prayers were all answered “yes”!

Then we should govern the world and not God.”

No, we should pray relentlessly to align our wills

with God’s will.

Or as Fosdick put it,

“Prayer should become

not the endeavor to get God to do our will,

but the endeavor to open our lives to God

so that God can do in us what he wants to do.”

Kierkegaard put it this way:

“A person thinks and imagines that when he prays,

the important thing is that God should hear

what he is praying for.

Yet in the true, eternal sense

it is just the reverse:

the true relation in prayer is not

when God hears what is prayed for,

but when the person praying continues to pray

until he or she is the one who hears,

who hears what God wills.”

The corollary to this parable

is the lesson Jesus teaches us,

not through another parable,

but by example:

we are to pray that in the end,

it is God’s will that is done,

not our own.

Prayer should be “the discovery of God within us;”

as Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, wrote.

We are to “listen for the unexpected,

in which we are open to what we do not yet know,

and in which we slowly and gradually prepare for

…a new level  of being with God.”

That is why we are to pray without ceasing.

As you come to our Lord’s Table,

come forward prayerfully,

lifting up words of praise and adoration,

words of gratitude and thanksgiving,

perhaps even words of confession and contrition.

But then once you return to your seat,

pray as our Lord taught us by his own example:

“Not my will,

but your will be done;

done through me.”

Pray that ceasely.

Pray those words relentlessly.

Pray those words faithfully.

Do that, and you’ll never lose heart,

for in time you will know

that all your prayers are answered.

AMEN