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.
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