Proper 24 C + Judge... not + 10.20.19

(https://interruptingthesilence.com/2010/10/18/
overruling-the-unjust-judge-a-sermon-on-luke-181-8/)

M. Campbell-Langdell

All Santos, Oxnard

(Jeremiah 31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8)

Once there was a very mean judge who sat on his high chair in his dusty courtroom and loved putting on his robes so he could show everyone how important he was. His father had been a plumber but he was a judge! And he loved to hand out judgments when it suited him but he didn’t much like other people coming in to tell him how to do justice.

Well, the widow who came to visit him didn’t much care what the judge liked or didn’t like. She knew she was the victim of an injustice and so she came to the court every day, rain or shine, to argue her case. The judge thought, “Who is this woman? She isn’t a lawyer; she can’t even speak properly about her case! I shall ignore her.” But time after time, she came back, until the judge said, thinking out loud,” OK, what will it take to get this lady off my back? I want to go back to the old days when I yelled decrees at people and they quailed. This annoying lady is messing up my tidy life!” And just like that, a certain court clerk said, “Well you can just give her what she wants, sir.” And the judge said, “of course! That is what I will do. I will give the lady what she wants and I never have to see her again.”

Jesus said, God is a bit like that judge, except nine thousand times better. If the old ornery judge didn’t want to listen to the widow, God wants to listen to us so much it makes God’s ears perk up at the mere mention of our name or mere sight of our presence. If the crotchety judge did not really want to give the widow what she wanted, God wants to grant the desires of our hearts more than anything in the world, even though God cannot give us what is not best for us, and so the results are always modified by God’s wisdom.

But how can God give us what we desire, within what is best for us? God can only reach us through our prayers. Yes, sometimes God can reach us in other ways, but we need to be open to seeing God’s hand at work. And most of the time God reaches us in prayer. In telling us what God needs us to know in prayer.

We have a member of our church whom you won’t see very often, as he is the steward of Ormond Beach. He greets visitors, counts birds and other wildlife and helps keep the Ormond Beach wildlife preserve clean. Walter Fuller receives our sermons weekly and once in a while I go to visit him with communion. Walter is a man of great faith. He was telling me the other day that he always prays, even when he has had a bad day. He said, “even when it has been a bad day, and I say ‘I don’t want to pray,’ I at least say the Lord’s Prayer.” Walter knows that for us to truly live out our faith, we must keep connecting to God even in those moments when we are feeling low. Perhaps especially then.

Walter had a very hard day recently. He lives in a trailer at Ormond Beach and a man was eyeing his car windows. Walter asked him not to do so and the man reacted by hitting Walter on the ear. He was shocked and in a lot of pain. But he told me “even that night, I prayed for him.” We talked about how Walter felt his attacker really needed the prayers. I imagine he did. He was so desperate that he would hit a kindly soul who provides such a welcome to an important Oxnard feature. We do not know the story of the person who hit Walter, but God does. And I believe that by commending his attacker to God, Walter was able to let go of bitterness and ask God to keep working in that person’s life. To add insult to injury someone, perhaps the same individual or someone else, stole some items out of Walter’s trailer. Most of them were not super valuable as such, but it was an invasion of Walter’s space and a violation of his property.

But again, as we shared communion earlier this week, Walter prayed for whoever stole the items from his trailer. God forgives and Walter showed that forgiveness. But I am not sure Walter would have been able to do so had he not already had a practice of praying so constantly to God. Of reaching out to God in the good and the bad.
None of us is perfect except Jesus, but this week Walter Fuller was my example of faithfulness in prayer and how it can help us maintain a forgiving heart. A heart that forgives is not wounded by bitterness, but keeps constant in love for God and for people as well as creation. If we do not forgive we are hounded by the feelings that hold onto us, and we try to reach out to God but often the connection gets fuzzy.

Let us each keep in constant prayer so that, in good times and bad times, God will be by our side, guiding us and showing us how to love and forgive and live happy in this world until the kingdom comes.