How To Move Forward With Persistence (Strange Wisdom, Part 2)

Genesis 32:22-31

Luke 18:1-8

I follow the writer Maggie Smith on Twitter.  A month ago she posted this Tweet:

Even in the darkest times, the universe is not conspiring against you.  On the other hand, it’s not going to intervene on your behalf.  You have to do the work yourself.  In the darkest times, seek light – or better yet, make some.  Get to work.  Keep moving.

Let me give you a moment to reflect on this, and then I’d like to hear what you’re thinking . . .

 

There’s a lot of truth in that little tweet.  Life is full of what you might call “dark times.”  And the some parts of life are harder than others – call those the “darkest times.”  Sometimes it does feel like the universe is conspiring against us.  And sometimes we get so down and discouraged, so convinced that we have no good ideas left and no energy left, we secretly wish that someone or something would just show up and rescue us. 

But you have to do the work yourself.  When things seem dark, seek light – or better yet, make some.  The reason that Tweet caught my attention is that Smith puts her finger on a real problem.  She gets us straight to the false myth that distorts our lives. 

Myth: The good life should come to us easily.  A meaningful life should unfold without friction and without a fight, requiring little energy and focus.  If I’m careful, I might be able to avoid painful setbacks, deep disappointment, and tragic loss.

Surely there is a way to drift forward, without grit, determination, and effort.

Genesis 32:22-31

The story from Genesis concerns a character named Jacob who is under enormous stress.  Though he has God’s blessing, he also has an angry brother – Esau – who wants to kill him.  And so he prays and prays, asking God for protection for himself and his family, trusting God’s promised blessing even though he can’t quite see how things are going to work out. 

Now Jacob prayed, but he also had a plan.  Because he knew that his brother was angry with him and might attack his family and entourage, Jacob decided to send Esau gifts.  Lots of gifts.  Jacob sent flock after flock as gifts to Esau, hoping that each successive gift would soften Esau’s heart towards him. 

The night before Jacob was to meet Esau, he sent his own wife and children and livestock across the River Jabbock.  And he stayed behind by himself.  This is a man under extreme stress.  His life is under threat.  He is at the end of his rope.  He will endure a sleepless night that involves a wrestling match with a strange angel-like figure.  Jacob proves himself a capable wrestler.  He fights with the strange messenger and refuses to give up.  At one point, he demands a blessing.  Finally, the stranger dislocates Jabob’s hip, blesses him, and leaves him.  Jacob is allowed to move forward, but from here on he will walk as a person who is both blessed and wounded.  He will walk with a limp.  Whenever anyone wants to join the church, we should be honest with them: faith will be a painful wrestling match with God.

Luke 18:1-8

In the gospel reading, Jesus tells an odd parable.  But before we get to the parable, notice how Luke frames the parable.  He introduces the parable as part of Jesus’ teaching to the disciples “to show them that they should pray and never give up.”  Already we see that this gospel writer was concerned that followers of Jesus would get discouraged, would stop praying, would give up.  If you have been a follower of Jesus for longer than a week, you know that this is true.  It’s hard to keep praying, to keep believing, to keep fighting, to keep moving forward.

And on the back end of the parable, Luke has Jesus ask the question, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”  So we ought to read this parable as a story about faith – what faith looks and feels like.  And according to this story, faith looks and feels like determined, resolute, tenacious praying in difficult circumstances.  Faith looks like the refusal to give up, even in the darkest times of life, because we trust in God’s promises to right all the wrongs in the world, and to right what’s wrong in our own lives.

The parable Jesus tells has just two characters, the feisty widow and the unjust judge.  These are cartoon characters, and some biblical commentators suggest that Jesus’ listeners would have laughed at these exaggerated yet familiar characters.  They were Jews living in an outpost of the Roman Empire.  They knew lots of poor women without anyone to protect them.  And they knew plenty of corrupt political officials.  The very idea that this selfish judge was ever going to listen to a poor woman who had no idea to bribe him with money would have been laughable to Jesus’ listeners.

And yet, here is a story about a woman who finally gets what she wants because she refuses to give up pestering and annoying the judge.   She shouts at him when he’s in court and she follows him home and yells at him outside his front door.  He can’t get away from this woman.  Notice that what she wants is “justice.”  And when she finally wears him out, he says, “I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me” (v. 5).  Another possible translation reads . . . “so that she won’t come and slap my face.”  This woman is not afraid of the powerful politician.  She keeps coming, keeps demanding, until she finally wins.

Here’s Jesus’ point: God is nothing like that corrupt politician.  God is ready and eager to grant justice to those who ask.  God will not ignore those who keep crying out day and night, expressing their desire for a world where all that is wrong is put to rights, where all that’s crooked gets straightened out, where all cruelty is turned to kindness.

Part of the good news of God’s love for us in Jesus Christ is that this good news will involve us in a difficult life that will require intensity, focus, resilience, and persistence.  God will bless you.  God is already blessing you.  God promises to take care of you and to bring into existence a whole new world of love.  But God won’t do it without you.  God wants your praying and your working to be a part of the birth of that new world.  For some of you today, the best thing that can happen is that you leave behind the false wisdom that life should be easy, that pain can be avoided.

One of the reasons we need to keep moving forward with persistence is that grief and loss often block us and get us stuck.  So I want you to watch this interview between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert.  It’s a conversation about grief.  Cooper lost his father when he was young.  His mother died not long before this interview took place.  Colbert – who is a comedian and actor – grew up in a Catholic family and was the youngest of 11 children.  When he was ten years old, his father and his two older brothers died in a plane crash.  (It’s about seven minutes long).

[Colbert Interview with Anderson Cooper – video]

Persistence requires a life of prayer, and a life of effort.  But note: the only way we can sustain that kind of persistence is complete trust in God’s love for us, shown to us most clearly in the way God comes to be with us in Jesus Christ.

A woman named Emily Kingsley wrote an essay titled, “Welcome to Holland.”  Kingsley wrote the essay in response to her experience of giving birth to a child with Down’s Syndrome. 

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip – to Italy.  You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans.  The Coliseum.  The Michelangelo David.  The gondolas in Venice.  You  may learn some handy phrases in Italian.  It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives.  You pack your bags and off you go.  Several hours later, the plane lands.  The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”

“Holland?” you say.  “What do you mean Holland??  I signed up for Italy!  I’m supposed to be in Italy.  All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

But there’s been a change in the flight plan.  They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease.  It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books.  And you must learn a whole new language.  And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. . . .

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy. . . . and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there.  And for the rest of your life, you will say, “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go.  That’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away. . . . because the loss of that dream is a very, very significant loss.

But . . . if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things . . . about Holland.

Faith is trust that life is fundamentally a blessing.  The life of faith involves learning to trust in God’s goodness and to long for God’s justice in the world.  And there is no way to survive, to grow and flourish into God’s blessing, unless we learn to pray.  Prayer is wrestling with God, even in our woundedness.  Prayer is persistently crying out to God for justice for the world, for our neighbors, and for ourselves. 

When we are three or four, it is appropriate to believe that our parents – who are big and magical to us – will provide for all our needs and will rescue us from any danger.  But when we begin to grow up – whether that happens at 13 or 73 – faith becomes a wrestling match, life becomes an effort to move forward with a limp, and prayer becomes persistence and resilience in a world out of joint.  May God sustain all of us as we refuse to give up, refuse to stop praying and hoping and working for a better world.