“Praying Through”

11/12/06

(Luke 18:1-8)

 

A friend of mine has a prayer which she calls her “brat prayer,” when she prays like a petulant child to a parent, screeching “I NEED this!” She states her case and she won’t take no for an answer.

Now this may sound presumptuous, even sacrilegious and it would be if scripture didn’t tell us that we have the right to pray honestly and boldly and expect God to answer us. Just read through the Psalms and you’ll find numerous examples of prayers filled with passion and determination which call on God to hear and answer without delay. In the gospels and epistles we are repeatedly instructed to pray without ceasing, to pray with confidence, to pray almost with a stubborn insistence that God accomplish what God has promised.

The fact that we cannot see-through God’s eyes-things as they are or ought to be must give us pause in making demands upon the Almighty. Yet, on the other hand, if we never allow ourselves to feel our needs, to cry out in our pain and in our longing for relief and comfort, then our prayers become lifeless, bloodless, half-hearted.

I think Jesus is telling us it’s better to be too demanding than too polite.

The parable we read today is sometimes called The Parable of the Importunate Widow which, it seems to me, is a translator’s way of cleaning up the story. Importunate is a “polite” way of calling the widow a nag! a pain in ….the neck!

Maybe we can hear in this a hint of Jesus’ sense of humor. Picture it. This eminent, perhaps pompous judge besieged by this pestering woman who comes after him with all the fierce instincts of a pit bull. She’s going to bite him and hang on no matter what. She follows him everywhere. She goes to his office. She trails him on the street. She stalks him when he goes jogging. She corners him at “happy hour.” She shows up at his home and bangs on the door in the middle of the night.

The judge is pulling out his hair. Finally, he almost has to beg her: “All right! All right! Whatever you want! Just go away!”

Actually, here again, the original Greek has been prettied up. The precise translation would go something like this: “I’d better give her what she wants or she’ll come and beat me up!”

Now we need to be clear; the character of the judge doesn’t represent the character of God. A parable is a story, not al allegory. The heartless judge certainly doesn’t stand for the God of love.

It’s the story as a whole that delivers the message. It’s a story which, in fact, is more about us than about God, more about how we are to pray than how God hears prayer.

The widow faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles in pleading her case to the judge. Not least of all, the fact that she was a woman. Women, of course, were not taken seriously in any legal proceeding. The only reason she can speak for herself is that she is a widow. Otherwise her husband would have had to speak for her.

Think of the weight of convention and prejudice she had to get through before she could even state her needs. But she did it. She got through.

I believe this is what Jesus is teaching us about prayer. There are endless obstacles to face in prayer, and endless reasons we can find to give up on prayer, or water-down our prayers and keep our passion out of our prayers.

Jesus says whatever stands between God and us, whatever blocks our communication with God, our relationship with God, we must pray through it.

When other people or other authorities in the world seem indifferent or hostile to our cause, we must pray through that opposition. When we’re tired and frustrated and think we have a good excuse to give up, we must pray through our despair. When wickedness appears to be on the rise, when anger, hatred, fear and insecurity are swirling all around us, even invading our own hearts and minds, and seem to be gaining the upper hand, we must pray through it all.

God’s hands are always outstretched to us, but so many barriers come between God’s hands our hands. We must pray through the barriers.

One of the strongest barriers is set up by our own intelligence: the temptation to over-analyze and over-rationalize the process of prayer. If the poor widow had stopped to think too much about what she was doing, she might have concluded that she’d never get anywhere with the judge and was only wasting her time.

We may be tempted to consider prayer that way. We can easily talk ourselves into the idea that it’s just a waste of time.

I want to confess that for many years this was my greatest problem with prayer. I had so many requirements for what I considered “proper” prayer that there was very little I thought I could properly pray for!

I told myself I couldn’t say an intercessory prayer for someone I didn’t know. That didn’t make sense to me.

I told myself I couldn’t say a prayer for healing for someone who had just been given a terminal diagnosis from the doctor. That would be unscientific, almost superstitious.

If I received a sealed letter which contained either good news or bad news inside, I told myself I couldn’t pray for good news because whatever news I was going to get-good or bad- was already in the envelope! I couldn’t ask God to change something that had already happened!

Or could I? Who am I, I finally realized, to circumscribe God, to limit God to my frame of reference? Who am I to decide what God can and can’t do?

Now, I say prayers for people I don’t know, all the time. I pray for the total recovery of people who’ve been pronounced incurable. I pray about things that have already happened and decisions that have already been made, because I now understand that our wondrous God can do anything, more than I can ever imagine or conceive, and I don’t know how and it doesn’t matter that I don’t know. I will leave the mechanics of God’s answer to God and I will continue to pray through all obstacles, even the ones I set up for myself.

A prayer is not a theological essay or a doctrinal treatise. We may be tempted to ask ourselves: Why should we pray? Doesn’t God know our needs before we name them? How can God hear me when so many others with more desperate problems are sending up their prayers at the same time? Shouldn’t I be doing more to handle my own challenges instead of throwing them all on God? Sound familiar?

You see how we can make prayer an intellectual exercise in which we have to answer our own objections before we ever seek answers from God.

Prayer has more to do with willpower, heart-power, the courage to knock and knock and knock again, even when the door doesn’t open right away, praying through the barriers, through the doubts, through the disappointments.

It is such passionate prayer that breaks down the walls of worldly distractions, disobedience, and disdain and allows God’s power to stream into our lives.

If we pray through, God will come through. Amen.