October 21, 2001
Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost
CHRISTIAN GOSPEL: Persistently Seeking Justice ~ Luke 18:1-8
A little earlier, the rain was just pouring down and I saw people coming in with their umbrellas or raincoats. Things pulled up over their head. I thought, “You know, the rain is coming down. The people don’t want to go out and get wet again. The Mariner game is not until almost 5:00 this afternoon. We have enough time for one of those good old-fashioned four hour long Pilgrim sermons. (“BOOOO!!”) I know that some of you cringe every time you get close to that sermon slot and you say, “What is he going to yell at us about again today?” I was thinking about it. Thinking about all of the sermons that I have preached. You know there are only two kinds of sermons. There is either a sermon that is going to provide comfort, or a sermon that is going to provide challenge. That’s all that there is. In fact, there is an old cliché for ministers about “Comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable.” Those are just the two tasks. With some sadness, I recognize that if you had to chart out all of my sermons over the past five years, there would probably be more checks in the challenge column than there are in the comfort column. Maybe that’s because you fall into the “afflict the comfortable” category. It also has something to do about how I understand our call to the Christian faith. How I understand the scriptures. If we look through and see the things that Jesus said, I think that the bulk of the things that we read are not comfort, but they are challenge. Calling us to live up to the high standards of God’s love. Calling on us to be faithful, to be persistent, to continue on, trying to live a good life in the midst of all the rest that goes on.
If we go back into the Hebrew Testament and think about the chosen people and the difficult times that they had in slavery, or trying to find their way through the desert, we find much more comfort in those passages. Jesus said, “All of you need to take seriously what it means to be created by God. To have blessings and to be responsible for living your life faithfully.” That’s what I find important for me and that’s what I find to be an essential thing to focus on when I speak to you.
So, we have this story in the scriptures. The story is about being faithful. Not being faithful pursuing what you want but being faithful in pursuing justice. The story doesn’t say anything at all about what this woman needed. It doesn’t describe her cause. It just says she wanted justice from the judge against her opponent. Jesus said to his disciples, “If you are working for justice, you need to be persistent. God will hear you and God will answer quickly. But if there is ever any doubt about you getting justice, you need to persevere, to continue on, to do all that you can to ask for that justice.”
We are not given to persistence. I know that some of you learned patience along the way. I know a lot of you who are part of the television generation know less about patience. I don’t think that the people who stood in line for two days for play-off tickets count. I don’t think that’s patience. That’s just another kind of event that they are taking part in. Patience is to be able to do something and do it because it is the right thing to do. Do it knowing that you might not ever see the results of your efforts. That it might be another generation that gets to celebrate what you accomplished through your perseverance. But we want things settled. We want things settled in that 27-minute sit-com time frame. We want things settled quickly. E-mail and instant messaging makes it all the worse. When you sent a letter to somebody, you knew that you were going to have a long time before you could expect them to respond. If you were on the responding end, it was good to be able to depend on that. You could say, “Well, it takes a few days to get here, a few days to get back. Gives me a little bit more time to think.” But, if an editor calls and says, “I need your article.” It’s not in four days, it’s, “I need your article in 35 minutes. E-mail it to me.” It’s got to be here, now. We are not going to be patient enough to wait for that time to go by in order to accomplish our goal.
We are an impatient people. We are unwilling to persist at something. Our impatience is coupled with consumerism. We look out for our selves. We demand the very best. We stand up for our rights. All this lends itself to a short term view of things. We want what we want, and we want it now! That is the most important thing of all.
We have already talked about what it means for us to be a people together, a congregation. You could use the same idea if you wanted to talk about a marriage or a family. What is required for a congregation and a family is to take a long view of things. To be able to have patience. To be able to work at something, because it is the right thing to do. And not to expect something to be cured or solved or completed right now.
Our impatience and our desire to have our own way sometimes leads us to say, if we don’t get what we’re needing from this relationship, then I’m going to look for a divorce and go and find it somewhere else. At the end of Saturday Night Live, for years Dennis Miller would end his broadcast with a flourish and say, “Well, I’m outa here.” That’s the way that we want to treat our relationships. That’s the way we want to treat the groups that we are a part of. So we say, if it’s not the way we want it to be then we are going to leave.
But, Jesus calls on us to have persistence. To persevere in following justice. To do what is the right thing. To wait for God’s grace to come in its fullness at some time in the future. But to live faithfully, with love, right now, here where we are at. Even if we are convinced that we need to persevere, often we are not convinced that there is a problem. When we talk about children going to bed hungry, homeless children, children needing things, we can say, “Well that’s sad.” But, our focus comes back to taking care of our children, and the children that we know, the neighbor children, and those on the soccer team or the drama club. This problem has been going on for a long time. The resources for the Children’s Sabbath include a poem from Langston Hughes, an African-American Poet, who wrote in 1925 about the plight of poor children in America. His words could very well have been written today.
Hungry child, I didn’t make this world for you.
You didn’t buy any stock in my railroad.
You didn’t invest in my corporation.
Where are your shares in Standard Oil?
I made the world for the rich and for the will be rich.
And for the have always been rich.
Not for you, hungry child.
It is hard to comprehend all the need in our country. This past week Operation NightWatch did a count around the city of the people who were sleeping out under bridges and in corners behind bushes. More than 1400 people they counted on that night. There are already people in shelters, but they counted 1400 people out on the streets. There is a great need and while we are sometimes are face to face with that need, most of the time we are still trying to live our own lives. You say, “Well, we know the people are needy, but they have to work harder. They just have to try a little bit harder and they will be able to accomplish something.” When we start to talk about specifics. When we start to use words like, “white privilege” people began to get anxious and feel that we are meddling. I don’t know how you feel about issues of preferential treatment, but I know that I am where I am today only in part through my own efforts. There are lots of people in my life that contributed to my journey, to bring me here where I am.
My parents worked hard. Got an education. Moved to a suburb where I would have space to run and good schools to attend. My mother helped me when I had papers to write, to learn how to write a precise sentence, to learn how to write an essay that had a point to it. When I went to college, I wasn’t able to go away to school. The family didn’t have enough money for that, but I did go to college. While I worked to pay for tuition, books and cloths, I had a bed to sleep in, food to eat, someone washing my cloths, a car to drive to classes, gas and insurance. Those things were provided for me. If I would have had to have paid for all of those things, there would have been no way that I would have been able to made my way through school successfully.
In addition to the financial benefits that my parents were able to provide for me, I had the advantages of being an athletic, white male, with good intelligence. All of those things gave me benefits. You might want to argue against that and say, “No, that ‘s not true.” But I know that it is true. If I walk into a store, I know that in many occasions that I will get better treatment than if a woman walks into that store. That is sexism and it exists in our country. It might not exist all of the time. You might be treated very well by most of the clerks that wait on you if you are a woman, but there will be times when you walk into a store and the guy will say, “Just a minute sweetie. I’ll be right with you.” That is sexism. I know that I will be treated better if I walk into a store than a man of color. That won’t be true of everybody. That won’t be true all the time, but it will be true sometimes. And, it will work to my benefit.
When I go to a mall, or a tourist site, I know that people are not going to say, “What is he doing here? Does he really belong here? What are his intentions?” That is racism. There is racism and sexism in our country. It effects what goes on. It keeps justice from taking place. When we live our lives, I don’t think we are called on to live our lives with guilt about why there are poor people. But we are called on the live our lives faithfully to help those who are in need. To do what we can with our resources. Most of us will not do that all the time. We have a house to maintain. Family relationships and friendships and jobs to do. But, while we are doing all of those things we can do them with an attitude that displays our gratefulness for what we have received. A proper attitude recognizes that we have not earned everything we have. A proper attitude results in a commitment to reach out to people in need.
Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Most of us live lives of comfort. We need to be afflicted, challenged to remember our responsibilities to the world around us. May God’s Spirit prod us when we need to be reminded.
We give thanks to God and ask for strength. Amen.