Month: October 2025

Posted on

Persistence Through Prayer

Sermon for October 19, 2025, Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost. Based on Luke 18:1-8.

Recently, I listened to an audiobook titled The Evening and the Morning by Ken Follett, which was set around the year 1000 A.D. in southwest England. Two of the main characters were Wilwulf, an alderman, and his wife, Ragna. For a variety of reasons, the two of them lived in separate houses within the same compound and each had their own money and important documents in treasure chests.

At a critical juncture in the story, Wilwulf was murdered. Ragna and others in the town rushed to the scene of the crime to see what had happened. Wilwulf’s brother took possession of his treasure chest and established that he would take on the role of alderman until the king could name someone. While she was in Wilwulf’s house, someone broke into Ragna’s house and took her treasure chest.

So there she was, widow of a powerful nobleman, mother of three young boys under the age of five who should have been his heirs. But she was literally penniless, the victim of theft. Should she have inherited Wilwulf’s treasure? Perhaps, but his brother just took it, and Ragna had no way to fight against him. What about her money? Well, good luck finding out who stole it, given that the likely culprit was the brother who was now in charge of everything, including law enforcement. The king might make things right eventually, but how was Ragna going to survive in the meantime? Given that this was a novel, she had a powerful friend who helped her out, but real life usually isn’t that convenient.

This is the kind of scenario described in today’s parable. Widows are often entitled to some sort of support, but just as often, their adversaries must be forced to provide it. As Trey Ferguson wrote, “The people who benefit from your bondage will never celebrate your liberation.” The same is true of those who benefit from another person’s poverty.

We would like to believe that today, we are a nation of laws, not men, and that someone can’t simply take your property by force and get away with it. That’s basically true. No longer are we governed by rich men who hire men-at-arms that use violence against the poor and marginalized. Instead, we are governed by rich men and women, and large corporations, who use the legal system against the poor and marginalized. They can afford lawyers who bury their opponents in paperwork. Often, poor people just give in and settle because they can’t afford to fight for their rights.

Injustice comes in many forms. Jesus told this parable, as Luke wrote, “about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” In the preceding chapter, Jesus prophesied about the destruction of Jerusalem. He warned them that hard times were coming. Indeed, most of the twelve apostles were martyred, as were many other early Christians. Those who weren’t killed were persecuted. They were cast out of the synagogues, excluded from Jewish communities. They stood in opposition to Greco-Roman culture as well. So, they had no protection. For four hundred years, they were routinely persecuted and marginalized.

And yet, they persevered. They held fast to the faith they inherited from the Twelve and from Paul. They lived by the Gospel teaching that everyone is welcome in God’s kingdom—male, female, Jew, Greek, free, slave, everyone. Jewish communities were ethnically distinct, and most pagan religions were segregated by class in addition to ethnicity. Christians were different in that the poor and the wealthy would worship together as equals, as siblings in God’s family. Their faithful commitment to God’s kingdom, empowered by persistent prayer, enabled them to preserve the Christian faith so that we might inherit it. They persevered so that we might know Christ.

Five hundred years ago, history repeated itself. During the Reformation, Catholics and Protestants took turns persecuting one another. Yet once again, our faithful ancestors persevered, so that we could come to know a loving God who welcomes everyone who calls on Christ’s name. Like the early church, Protestant churches welcomed people of any class or ethnicity, in contrast to the corrupt Catholic church that privileged the wealthy and powerful. Our Protestant forerunners were committed to their understanding of God despite the injustice that was continually rained down upon them.

Julian of Norwich was a mystic who lived around 1400 A.D. She famously wrote, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” The message revealed to her in her “showings” was that in the end, God wins. This is the central message of the book of Revelation, and indeed a consistent theme throughout the New Testament. In the end, God wins. In the end, all will be well, everything will be reconciled to God, and everyone will be reconciled to one another. If all is not well, then it’s not the end! We cannot know when God’s kingdom will come in all its fullness. We can only experience God’s kingdom in part. But we know that if we persevere, God’s kingdom will be present in and among us. Someday. God’s kingdom is universal human flourishing—the innocent prisoners will be freed, the hungry will be fed, everyone will have what they need. We just need to have faith that God will provide.

But wait a minute: telling someone that they “just need to have faith” is denying their struggles. It’s denying reality. It’s like telling someone to calm down: Never in the history of calming down has anyone ever calmed down by being told to calm down! When we get wrapped up in our anger, or fear, or anxiety, or despair, we can’t escape just by saying that we should. We need some way to break the cycle. We need a key to unlock the prison of our emotions.

That key is prayer. Remember, that’s the whole point of this parable, to encourage us to be persistent in prayer. What kept the widow going? How was she able to keep attacking the unjust judge? Well, she was probably fueled by a deep sense of injustice. She was certainly confident that she would one day prevail. And she must have had help. She would have needed financial support to keep going, and spiritual strength to endure the continuing injustice of her situation. If you have nothing else and nobody to depend on, you can always turn to God.

My experience of prayer is not so much that I convince God to do something for me. It’s more that God changes me so that I can get what I need for myself. Sometimes, prayer enables me to take a heavy weight off my shoulders and hand it over to God to carry. Sometimes, prayer enables me to see a path forward that was previously hidden from me, or to realize that there are people in my life who can help me or guide me. Sometimes, prayer gives me the confidence to take a step that’s scary. I may not know what the future brings, but I know that God will be there with me, so I can be confident when I make a decision that it will turn out alright. Sometimes, prayer enables me to find wisdom or compassion that someone else in my life needs—a friend, a colleague, someone in the church, or someone in the community. Often, prayer helps me to turn down the noise of life so that I can hear what God has to say.

Most of all, prayer keeps me connected to the Source of all being.  I feel that connection right in my solar plexus, an uplifting, an energy that keeps me going. God is both immanent and transcendent—right here beside, among, and within us, but also above us, lifting us up into a higher state of being. Prayer both reminds me of God’s immanence and connects me to God’s transcendence.

I subscribe to a daily devotion from the Center for Action and Contemplation, which is run by Father Richard Rohr. Their mission is to introduce Christian contemplative wisdom and practices that support transformation and inspire loving action. Their goal is to help people live out this wisdom in practical ways—so that they become instruments of love, peacemaking, and positive change in the world. If all you do is struggle for justice, the inevitable setbacks and failures on that path will wear you down. If all you do is sit at home and pray, you won’t ultimately have an impact on the world. But if you bring the two together, you will be sustained in your work of transforming the world, so that you have the strength to overcome the obstacles in your way. Here is a selection from today’s meditation that is appropriate:

What is needed in Christianity today is far bigger than any mere structural rearrangement. It’s a revolutionary change in Christian consciousness itself. It’s a change of mind and of heart through the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. Only such a sea-change of consciousness—drawing from the depths of the Great Ocean of Love—will bear fruits that will last. 

I believe the teaching of contemplation is absolutely key to embracing Christianity as a living tradition. If we settle for old patterns of habitual and reactionary thought, any new phenomenon that emerges will be just one more of the many reformations in Christianity that have characterized our entire history. The movement will quickly and predictably subdivide into unhelpful dualisms that pit themselves against one another like Catholic or Protestant, intellectual or emotional, feminist or patriarchal, activist or contemplative—instead of the wonderful holism of Jesus, a fully contemplative way of being active and involved in our suffering world. 

Father Richard Rohr, “Emerging Christianity: A Non-Dual Vision,” Radical Grace 23, no. 1 (2010): 3.

The most famous example of this synergy was the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Martin Luther King, Jr., wasn’t just a civil rights leader. He was also a Baptist pastor and the son of a pastor. He was the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church when he led the Montgomery bus boycott. Soon after, he joined about sixty other pastors and religious leaders in founding the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was instrumental in advancing civil rights. The SCLC would routinely gather activists for prayer prior to their protests and other actions, so that they would all have the courage to face their opponents. It’s no exaggeration to say that segregation would not, could not, have ended without God’s help, God working through the activists who tapped into God’s power through prayer.

I am about to go on a retreat. Well, I’ll be carrying a rifle and may harvest an elk, but the real reason I go to the woods is to be present with God. I tell people it’s a professional development retreat because I travel with some high-powered academics—former department chairs, Curators’ Distinguished Professors, and so forth. But once the season opens, I don’t see them much. Instead, I have hours upon hours of silence in which to hear God’s voice. Lots of time in which to pray with my rosary. Lots of time to meditate on God’s Word. Lots of time to turn down the noise of daily life. Lots of time to lay my burdens down and to seek spiritual renewal. I hope to return with a new sense of clarity, a new sense of God’s will for my life, and a new sense of connection to the power of the Holy Spirit.

Then being renewed and refreshed, I will have the strength to persist in doing good. We are all called to participate in the blossoming of God’s kingdom. We are all called to help other people to flourish and to foster reconciliation. There is so much work to do. Every time I read the news, I’m disheartened by yet another crisis, or dysfunction in Washington, or a continuing war, or whatever. But through prayer, I find the strength to carry on doing my little part in fostering human flourishing. That’s all I can do—my little part. But if we all do our part, if we are all empowered through prayer, then together, we can experience a glimpse of God’s kingdom here and now. Through prayer, may God grant you the patience and persistence to seek the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness, God’s reconciliation, God’s renewal of all Creation. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Posted on

Faith in Action

Sermon on October 5, 2025, 17th Sunday After Pentecost. Based on Luke 17:5-10.

During this part of the year, the lectionary marches through the Gospel of Luke. I like that. You get a different sense of the Gospels when you read them straight through, rather than picking out a verse or short passage.

Today’s lesson comes after a few hard teachings. A couple of weeks ago, Susan preached about the shrewd manager, which is pretty tricky to interpret. Last week, I preached about poor man Lazarus and the rich man. That’s a difficult teaching about wealth and privilege. The lectionary skips over the next little passage where Jesus tells the disciples that if anyone sins against them, they must forgive—up to seven times a day! Boy, Jesus just doesn’t let up, does he?

In desperation, the disciples cry out to Jesus, “Help us! We can’t do it! Increase our faith!” The Gospel message is hard. For chapter after chapter, Jesus tells his disciples how hard it is to live in this world as if the kingdom of God were already present, and then he demonstrates what happens when you take God’s commands seriously by picking up his cross. Our only hope is that God would give us the strength we need to carry on.

Jesus’s retort is a bit of a challenge to his disciples. A mustard seed is tiny, proverbially small. Maybe it wasn’t actually the smallest seed, but it was used symbolically to represent something unreasonably small. Jesus is almost saying that the disciples have no faith. He is saying that even a tiny bit of faith is enough, so if the disciples are struggling, their faith must be almost unmeasurable.

But wait—these were the people closest to Jesus, the ones who followed him all around Galilee and Judea and the surrounding regions. Surely they had some faith! They left their families, their homes, their jobs, everything for the sake of following the man they thought was the Messiah.

So how are we to understand Jesus’s implicit criticism of his disciples? If the disciples did not even have a mustard seed of faith, what hope do we have?

I’ve probably said this before, but the way we use the word “faith” is perhaps not exactly what is meant by the Greek word in the New Testament. We typically use it to mean an intellectual belief in something that we cannot prove empirically. Like, when we say we have faith in God, we usually mean that we believe that God exists even though we have no tangible evidence. That’s a good Enlightenment way of thinking rationally about the divine and transcendent mystery.

But a better way to think about “faith” in the New Testament is something like “fidelity” or “faithfulness.” It’s less about intellectual assent and more about action. If I say I’m faithful to my wife, I’m not saying that I believe intellectually that we love each other. I’m saying that my actions are consistent with my words of love. In the same way, Christian faithfulness is acting in a way that matches your professed beliefs about God’s Word, Jesus Christ.

Bo McGuffee is an ordained PC(USA) Minister of Word & Sacrament. He writes on Substack about a new way of following God. In a paywalled article titled “Alchemy of Belief,” he wrote:

Personal beliefs are what we actually believe, and they have a direct effect on our behavior. For example, if you believe that political protests make a difference, then you are more likely to attend or support them. If you believe that political protests don’t matter, then you are less likely to attend or support them. So, personal beliefs manifest themselves in our behavior.

Inherited beliefs come from our community, and they function primarily as virtue signals. By saying “I believe” in that which my community believes in, I assert that I belong to the tribe. Sharing inherited beliefs is to share an identity. The problem is that people often don’t realize the difference. They often think that they personally believe certain inherited beliefs when they don’t.

Bo McGuffee, The Alchemy of Belief

Simply put, McGuffee is pointing out the difference between beliefs that we profess and beliefs that impact our behavior. I can say that I believe that Jesus Christ was raised on the third day, but if I don’t live like death has lost its sting, do I really believe it? I can say that I believe in the Holy Spirit, but if I never listen for Her leading, what difference does that belief make in my life?

Too often, we fall back into “functional atheism.” That is, we say that we believe in God, we say that we believe God will make a way, we say that God will provide, but then we live like everything depends on our own will and our own work.

I think that’s what Jesus was getting at. The disciples professed that Jesus was the Messiah, but they didn’t really understand what they were saying. They didn’t truly believe that Jesus had come to conquer sin and death. Instead, they thought that Jesus had come to lead an army to vanquish the Romans, or perhaps that he had come to overturn the Temple hierarchy, and that the disciples were needed to support his revolution and help him rule a re-established nation of Israel.

But Jesus came for a different kind of revolution, one filled with LOVE. Jesus challenged his disciples to trust that His love, God’s love, the Holy Spirit’s love would empower them. They would not have to act on their own. They could trust that God would enable them to change the world.

Trusting in that way is really hard. I mean, really hard. For most of us, it goes against what our experience has taught us. In The Happiness Hypothesis, Jonathan Haidt says that our brain is like a rider on an elephant. The rider is our conscious awareness, the part of our brain that intellectually believes and decides and reasons through decisions. But most of our brain is the elephant. It takes in information and guides our actions. Now, how much influence does a rider really have on an elephant? Mostly, elephants go where they think they should, based on their experiences in the world. The rider can cajole them to go a certain way, or can train them to behave in certain ways, but at the end of the day, the elephant is really in charge.

Usually, when confronted with a problem, our subconscious mind makes a decision, and then our conscious mind figures out why we chose what we chose. Psychologists call this “confabulation,” because the reason we give may have little or nothing to do with the real reason. Maybe the real reason has to do with a habit we’ve developed, or an experience deep in our memory that was triggered by a new situation, or whatever.

My point is that our real beliefs live in the elephant, not the rider. That’s why we can say we believe certain things, but our actions have no relation to those beliefs. We may say that all people are equal in God’s eyes, but then we make snap decisions and exclude someone based on the way they look or talk or act. We may say we believe that God will provide, but then anxiously check how the stock market is performing.

So what can we do? We need to train the elephant. If you want your actions to match your beliefs, you need to embed those beliefs down in your subconscious. Let me tell you about what I’ve been doing for the last couple of months.

I read a book called Miracle Morning. In it, the author describes a set of practices that he does each morning so that his day goes well. The acronym he uses is SAVERS: silence, affirmations, visualization, exercise, reading, scribing. For silence, I pray. Scribing is a word for journaling that makes the acronym work.

I want to focus on affirmations and visualization. These are not things like saying, “I am rich,” or “I will be famous.” These are ways of setting an intention for how you will live your life. By repeating the same words that commit yourself to a certain path, and then visualizing where that path will lead, you slowly train your subconscious to make choices that lead where you want your life to go.

One of my current affirmations is this: “I am committed to becoming strong and fit and to losing weight, no matter what. There is no other option.” I say a few other things to flesh that out, and then I visualize myself hiking confidently up the mountain with my 70-pound pack on as I head to spike camp, or with a hindquarter of elk in my pack. In this way, I increase the probability that I will choose to be active and to eat right.

My other current affirmation is this: “I am committed to starting an LGBTQ ministry in Rolla, no matter what. There is no other option. This is how God has called me to serve Their kingdom. Now is the right time: all of the conditions are right.” After I say a few other things, I visualize the LGBTQ+ Rolla Community Center filled with faithful people talking about how God is moving in their lives.

Now, am I certain that this will be successful? No. But I am training myself to keep this goal in focus and to make the choices that are more likely to lead to its success. The reason I can commit to this path is that I believe God will amplify my efforts. I know that alone, I can do little more than plant seeds, but that God will give the growth.

This is faith like a mustard seed. A lifetime of experiences has demonstrated that nothing succeeds without my planning and execution, but I know that God has called me to this ministry, so I know that God will give me what I need to succeed. I can read the Bible and see examples of God giving the growth. Anxiety can kill my initiative, but through prayer, affirmation, and visualization, God will give me the courage to act.

There is only one way to ensure failure, and that is to not even try. With God’s help, anything is possible. What is God calling you to do? May God bless you with a vision of how you can contribute to the flourishing of Their kingdom, wisdom to see the path, and courage to put your faith into action. Amen.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Skip to content