Keep Trying

Readings:
Exodus 17:8-13
2 Timothy 3:14-4:2
Luke 18:1-8

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

The message I want to impart to you today comes especially from our Gospel, which is to persevere in prayer. Jesus told His disciples a parable about the necessity for them to pray always, without becoming weary. That’s what I want to talk about today.

As I prepared this message I remembered something I saw as a young man. Some of you may remember it, because it was in the news at the time. It was an athlete, a woman named Julie Moss, who did an Ironman triathlon in 1982. It was a very moving thing to see. I still remember it vividly. She was in the lead in the race. An Ironman triathlon is just an amazing thing. They do a 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile bike ride, and then they run a marathon after that. All on the same day. They start early in the morning and when they finish it’s dark. I actually did one once, it took me 12 hours to do it. But that was a while ago. Julie Moss was an amazing person. That’s what I remembered about her this morning. She was unexpectedly in the lead in this race. This was early in the days when they were doing Ironman races. They started in the 1970s, so this was one of the early Ironman races. She was unexpectedly out in front, and during the run part, the final leg of the race, she got closer and closer to the finish when her legs just gave out. She collapsed in the road, and she struggled to her feet, and she got up and she kept going. The film of it is stunning to watch. You can find it on YouTube and see what she did. Her determination to finish that race is one of the most moving things I think I’ve ever seen. She got sick, she lost control of herself, you know, and she kept falling down and nobody could help her, because she had to finish the race under her own power. And she kept on! And she eventually finished the race, by crawling across the finish line. She wasn’t in the lead when she finished the race anymore, but she finished the race. That is perseverance. That is determination.

We know that God’s grace is free. God’s grace is a gift, but it is a gift that we have to be willing to accept, and our own natures often rebel against accepting that gift. We want to do things our way. We want to be in charge of everything. We want to be in control. That’s just who we are. That’s the way we are as people. So we have to come back. We have to reorient ourselves to seeking God and doing God’s will in our lives. And we have to do this more than once. This isn’t a one-time thing. It’d be great if we could just all instantly become saints and always do God’s will, but that’s not who we are. We’re people, we’re fallible, we’re flawed, were imperfect. God knows us and loves us in spite of that. He wants us to keep coming back to Him. And God knows this about us, hence today’s parable. Jesus is telling the disciples, He’s saying, you’ve got to pray, always, without becoming weary. You’ve got to keep coming back to God.

The parable that he tells us is in Luke, chapter 18. It’s the parable of the dishonest judge. Now the dishonest judge is somebody who was probably a magistrate that the Romans would pay to dispense justice, so-called, to the people that they had conquered and controlled. Somebody like that would be somebody who, very often, was dishonest. They would take advantage of people, use their position to make money, in a word they were corrupt. So that’s who Jesus is talking about, a corrupt official. That’s the image He is planting in the minds of the disciples who were listening to Him. And the woman who comes to him, this is going to be somebody who represents the poor, the vulnerable, somebody who is petitioning for justice. And they likely won’t get it from the corrupt official. But she keeps trying. That’s what happens in the parable. She keeps going back to the dishonest judge. I’ll read part of the passage. “The dishonest judge is one who neither feared God nor respected any human being. And a widow in that town used to come to him and say, ‘Render a just decision for me against my adversary.’ For a long time the judge was unwilling, but eventually he thought, ‘While it is true that I neither fear God nor respect any human being, because this widow keeps bothering me I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.” So he does, he gives her a just decision. What is the point of the story for us? Because we know God isn’t like the dishonest judge. God is God. God is not a corrupt official. Jesus is not likening God to the dishonest judge, instead He’s telling us to be like the woman who keeps coming back. Keep coming back. Don’t give up. Like Jesus tells the disciples. He’s telling them this parable about the necessity for them to pray always, without becoming weary. Persevere in prayer. That is Jesus’ message to the disciples and to us. Prayer opens our hearts to God to seek to do His will. And that’s what we’re supposed to get. When we pray for other people, we can ask the same for them. And when we persevere in this, we’re inviting God into our lives.

I do want to pause for a moment to mention the Old Testament reading. This was from Exodus, chapter 17. How does this relate to this? It’s a story, an image, that’s very familiar from the Old Testament perhaps. In Exodus, in those early books, the historical books, the people have left Egypt and they’re on their way to Canaan, they’re on their way to the Promised Land. They have lots of wars and fighting along the way. They’re being attacked by a group led by Amalek, a political leader who is bringing his people to war against them. As long as Moses has his hands up, the Israelites have the better of the fight. Eventually Moses gets tired or his arms get weak, and so his assistants, Aaron and others, prop his arms up. What does that mean? When we read these things, people in those times lived a rough life, they lived a violent life. And they had this “magical” view of things: if only he holds his hands up, we’re winning.

But remember, as it says in 2 Timothy, the Epistle today, “all Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching.” What does that message teach us? As long as the people are invoking God, God is there. That’s what they needed to understand. Turn to God, petition God, and God is there. That’s what they needed to learn. That message and that image is different to them that it would be to us. God spoke to them in that way, a way that they could understand. They were assailed by enemies, over and over. People with swords coming after them. And as long as they were invoking God, God was with them. That was what they understood. We have a much gentler picture of God in Jesus Christ. We understand it a different way than they did, but Jesus is telling us the same thing: pray always, without becoming weary.

I have to add one thing that’s nice about the passage from Exodus, when Moses got tired, his friends propped him up. His friends supported him and that’s a beautiful image. So what on the surface seems like this horrible, violent image, actually has something beautiful underneath it. Like Paul says to Timothy, “all Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching.” So we keep invoking God. We keep coming back to God. We persevere in praying to God. And when we do that, we’re inviting God into our lives. That’s what we should do. God answers our prayers by His presence with us, by being there. Even when we are most alone, when we’re most troubled, and when we’re in pain, God is there with us. Through our persistence, like the widow in the parable, we can become aware of God’s presence by coming back, over and over again. Even when we have to struggle to do it, if we keep coming back, we can be aware of God’s presence with us. And that is what Jesus is telling us to do.

Amen.