inarticulate grunts of the heart

SERMON PREACHED AT ALL SAINTS’, DUNEDIN NORTH

ORDINARY SUNDAY 29 (October 20^th) 2019

READINGS:

Genesis 32: 22-31

Psalm 121

2 Timothy 3:14 – 4:5

Luke 18:1-8

In an age in which we are, hopefully, increasingly sensitive to the nuances of sexist and other stereotyped perspectives it is important from the start of an encounter with our so-called “importunate widow,” however much she is or is not the merit-bearing character in this Jesus-story, that we see beyond gender and into all that this determined, desperate figure represents in the world of Jesus-parables. Utterly powerless in this first century Palestinian world this woman dares to approach the last precarious figure of hope open to her. Like those of us who represent a more liberal, progressive world, wondering if we will ever again see justice across the world in the biased realms of the US Supreme Court, firmly painted in the image of Trump’s priorities, our widow has nowhere else to turn. This is it. The last two of clubs is all that is in her hand.

How many others in our world tremble on such a brink? From the comfort of my desk I think of those whose reality I can’t imagine. Yet I must. Kurds deserted by the nation they trusted? Greta Thurnberg and the millennials viewing the dying planet their predecessors (most of us) are bequeathing them? Or those moments when we are forced against our screaming will to face our mortality, or perhaps vulnerability, and that of those we love? When we cry from the depth of our heart and the universe howls its silence.

Those of us who were here or somewhere similar last week encountered that strange Jesus-tale of the tenth leper, unpacked by the Rev’d Anne. As all and sundry are touched by divine love, providence, one “tithe,” one tenth turns and scampers back to give thanks. 

Be that leper, the gospel tells us. Because we are privileged to have been seized by grace, we are responsible to mumble, sing, shout our thanks and praise, as we do in liturgy, from the depths of our being, on behalf of a too-busy world. 

Once I heard a rabbi asked whether Jews should evangelize. Perhaps unorthodoxly, but from the depths of his heart, he replied “why would we do that … is it not enough that we carry the burden of relationship with an unseen God?” Burden and joy, but burden nevertheless. “As often as you eat/drink ... you evangelize, proclaim.” We as Christ-proclaimers bear that burden, yet are challenged to whisper resurrection-hope, prayer-hope, eternity-hope in a muddled and often hostile world. Shout to God because, like a despondent widow, we are desperate for our God to hear, and answer. 

And sometimes, more perhaps than we deserve, coincidences do happen around the edges of our prayers, and Berlin Walls come tumbling down or cancers abate or … and often they don’t, and yet we who have known and been embraced by God are challenged to stumble on.

Challenged and empowered. Last week we saw the thanks-giver go back to Jesus. This week we are challenged to be the not-giving-up thanks-giver: despite global warming, despite Trump, despite Brexit and Syria and cancer and the horror of another cross beside the road of our life we are called to stumble on. But not alone. 

St Paul in his writings tells of the divine and cosmic Spirit who groans in unison with our spirit – or perhaps attunes ours with hers so we slowly learn to groan in the tunes of heaven and its hope. If I may misapply the words of John Lennon, “Christ you know it ain’t easy,” but isn’t that in part the meaning of the Cross of Jesus? Ours are apocalyptic times, perhaps even more apocalyptic than those of Jesus in one sense, for we can destroy or planet, but apocalypse is apocalypse and our tears for justice for God’s earth are no more nor less heartfelt than the longings and pleas for justice of the powerless and importunate widow of our Jesus-story. 

The Orthodox, incidentally,  tell of the sacred gift of tears: when we and probably the importunate widow pour out our tears in prayer it may be that we are drawing even closer to the benevolent heart of God, though I’d hate to turn the grace of prayer into either melodrama or some kind of tear-competition. Still: in an era of compassion fatigue it will do us no harm to learn to weep for Kurds or for the LBTGQI youth turning to suicide (and shunned by some wings of our Christian community) or for the victims of chemical dependence or the too many homeless of our nation.

The ringing closure to our Jesus parable is the rhetorical question “will there be faith on earth?” You and I – but not alone for we are infiltrated by the hope-bringing Spirit of God – but you and I are called to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice in answer to that question put by Jesus. To be commissioned as a praying people of God is to be commissioned to struggle, as Jacob struggled with a seemingly hostile universe and its mysterious Creator. It is to be honest with God; that sometimes hurts if we genuinely rise to the challenge. It is to know that prayer itself, access to the Creating, Redeeming Sanctifying God is privilege, gift, and responsibility all rolled in one. It is to engage in mystery – what I have called from time to time the beat of a butterfly’s wing of prayer, to engage in what the hymn-writer called the “hush of expectation” … when “the breath of God is moving in the fervent breath of prayer,” and often not ever to see the impact of the movement of our hearts any more than the butterfly sees the cyclone its wingbeat initiated.

Above all this importunate, heartfelt prayer is our responsibility. As our lives are inspired by the God of liturgy and creation and love and hope so there is an onus on us: pray. Participate in the far more fervent breath of God. But we do not do so alone, and perhaps our prayer before all prayer, before answered prayer or unanswered prayer, Lord teach me, teach us, help us to pray, despite everything that is dark and sombre and mortal and seemingly hopeless. Lord teach us to pray. Teach us too to be prepared to be the answer to our own prayers though the answers will be so much more than our stumbling, thank God. And in my experience – and my prayers are usually no more than incoherent stuttering – the God unseen does somehow stir, even when Boris Trumps and Donald Johnsons and cancers and mortality seem to have a passing word.

Lord, teach us to wrestle as Jacob did. To pray as an importunate widow might pray. 

Lord, teach us to pray. Amen.