Pentecost 19 2007 | Luke 18:1-8

One day in the 16th century, a young Spanish soldier named Ignatius was fighting alongside his fellows at the siege of Pamplona. Ignatius was brave, he was handsome, he was wealthy. In fact, things could hardly have been going better. Then he caught a cannonball in the hip.

Well, that’s just not something you get up and walk away from. Awash in grime and gore, Ignatius was carried from the battlefield, and began a very long and tedious convalescence, where his true battle began.

He had not, up until that time, been particularly devout. At least not more than most young men his age with means and ambition. The Church was just part of the furniture. God was in heaven the same way the King was on his throne. One paid taxes and one went to church, and no one questioned or grumbled about either one of them, at least not in public.

But sitting on your butt for months on end waiting for a shattered hip to mend gives a guy lots of time to think, to read, and yes, even to pray. And when Ignatius started praying, really praying, he was quiet enough to notice some very interesting phenomena that he probably would never have been aware of were he not forced to stay still.

He noticed that when he prayed for healing so that he could return to his former life—a life of carousing, of male comraderie and female pursuit—he felt empty inside. He enjoyed his fantasies, but they left him feeling hollow. The words he used were these: “It aroused within me a spirit of desolation.”

When, however, he prayed for God’s will to be done, when he read of the surrender that the saints enjoyed, and fantasized about a life focused on God, he felt very different. This kind of prayer left him with what he called “a spirit of consolation.”  

He noticed that as he prayed for what he wanted, a strange and subtle process of discernment was taking place. He discovered that his prayer wasn’t speeding his healing, it wasn’t getting him what he wanted, it wasn’t affecting ANYTHING “out there.” Instead, it was changing HIM, from the inside out.

He discovered that what he THOUGHT he wanted wasn’t what he wanted at all, and that his soul’s true desire was being made known to him. And when he figured this out, and clued in to what God was doing in him, he was overwhelmed by the grace that was being shown to him. And he was able to cooperate with the process, so that it accelerated and turned him into a very different creature than that guy that had become cannon fodder.

Ignatius had hit upon a spiritual secret that still confounds us today. Most of us are brought up with a very childlike notion of prayer. If you ask for stuff persistently enough, Daddy will give it to you, especially if you are sufficiently whiny. And this is what most of us still think of when we hear the word “prayer”: asking God for stuff. As if God were a gum-ball machine. Put in a prayer-quarter, get a yummy prize back.

So when we grow up and realize how absurd this is, it often just sours us on the whole prayer thing. Prayer itself seems absurd, and most of us just stop it eventually, unless we miss a period or fall suddenly ill. Humans are weird, and fear makes absurdity temporarily palatable. It’s the “no atheists in a foxhole” thing.

And that’s the kind of prayer that seems on the surface of things to confront us in Jesus’ parable today. You’ve got the unjust judge, who doesn’t really care that this woman has been wronged. He’s not going to give her justice just because it’s the right thing to do. He doesn’t really CARE about justice. But the woman just won’t let up. She pesters him until he gives in and puts things right for her.

Luke’s Jesus implies that the unjust judge is like God, who will always give in and give us what we want if we are persistent in prayer. But I am unsatisfied with interpretation. It is too easy, too juvenile, too…unrealistic. ???’s Gospel also has Jesus saying, “Ask for anything in my name and God will do it” and we all know that that’s just bunk.

A far more realistic and human interpretation, I believe, is to see the unjust judge as being symbolic of myself. I AM unjust, after all, and I am the ruler of my own life. This is a tyrant very much like the ego in Jungian thought, isn’t it? I am sitting on the throne of my own life and making judgments continuously, not all of them for the purest of motives.

God, then, in this story, is the widow, the one who has been left behind, the one who is badgering me for my attention; the one who is, apparently, relentless in her pursuit of justice.

It is God who will wear ME down, not the other way around. And note that it is not the widow in this story who has any power. Only the judge has power. Just so, God is not going to coerce me in any way—that’s not how God works. God’s just going to bug me to death, because that IS how God works.

God is just like that water than Rabbi Akiva saw could bore through a rock, even though the rock was hard and strong, and the water soft and weak. God is at once the weakest creature in the world, because God either cannot or will not coerce any creature. But God is also the strongest being in the universe, because God has an infinite amount of time, God is patient, and God does not tire. And God does not give up on us, ever. God is always, continually, calling us, prodding us, whispering to us, badgering us toward wholeness and authenticity and intimacy. In other words, God is RELENTLESS.

And THIS is what prayer is for. What God desires more than anything is intimacy with us. But we are so defended. We can throw up walls and roadblocks faster than we can turn around. Intimacy is ALWAYS scary, and intimacy with God, even more so. We are ashamed, we don’t measure up, so we throw up a wall. We feel guilty, so we throw down a barrier. We are afraid of what we will see if we looked in the mirror that God holds up to us, so we turn away. As Meister Eckhart so wisely said almost five hundred years ago, “God is at home—it is we who have gone out for a walk.”

But these barriers are so unnecessary. God knows we’re human, we’re fallible, that we don’t measure up to the ideals so violently foisted up us by our families, by our culture, by the church. God know this, and feels compassion for us. God isn’t asking us to measure up to anything or anybody. God only wants us to be who we are, just as we are. God only wants one thing more: to be who we are IN RELATIONSHIP with him.  

In prayer, we don’t give God a laundry list of things we want. God is not Santa Claus, however often the two might be confused. Instead, in prayer God and I sit together cross-legged, in easy reach, and in the small space between us I lay before God all the broken pieces of my life, and all the whole and shiny ones as well. We examine every one with care. Some we cry over together, some we laugh about. Some we just shake our heads. And, as we’re poring over the more beat-up pieces of my life, if the pain gets too intense, I know I can always fall over into his lap and just be held.

In prayer, I sit in all my naked vulnerability in God’s presence. God knows all there is to know about me, and loves me anyway, so what reason is there to hide anything, or to run away? What need is there for distance? How could I possibly be safer? And in giving God this thing he so earnestly desires, something magical happens in me as well. I become more open, more honest, more authentically myself. My hidden motives become clear to me, the things I think I want are revealed for what they truly are, and the deepest desires of my heart are made known to me. As Ignatius discovered so very long ago, prayer does not change things OUT THERE, it changes things IN HERE.

In prayer, we are transformed at a rate controlled only by us, by the amount of love and honesty we can handle at any given moment. And it’s okay if it takes a while. God has time, and God certainly knows how to pester. Let us pray…

Holy God, you are a widow,
for we have died to you and left you behind.
You desire nothing so much as to be with us
to hear our deepest desires,
to hold us in our fear,
and comfort us in our distress.
For you have married yourself to us forever,
and do not understand why we run away.
We don’t really understand it, either,
and we want it to be different.
Help us to have the courage
to bring before you the pieces of our lives
the broken ones as well as the shiny ones,
not for judgment, or even to be fixed,
but to be considered, to be talked about,
and to be held in love. Amen.