Sunday, October 20, 2019

God urges us on in struggle – Luke 18:1-8, Exod 18:8-13

Twenty-ninth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

I wonder what you might come up with if you were asked to tell a story that encapsulates your image of prayer. I think that could actually be a really interesting spiritual exercise, especially for people who naturally like to make up and tell stories, to think through what story you would tell if wanted to talk about prayer through a narrative. It could be something from your life, a story from the life of a saint, or a completely made up story that nonetheless is deeply true. To maybe spark your imagination, and I hope not to shut it down, Exodus and Jesus’ parable in Luke give us two such stories, or maybe, actually, three, and I’ll get to why I think there are three stories there later


Let’s start with Exodus. This story happens reasonably soon after the Israelites have marched free of slavery in Egypt, through the Red Sea. Right before this the people had struggled with thirst, and God had brought forth a miraculous spring of water from a rock. That’s one model of prayer right there: I’m thirsty, needy; I ask for God’s help; God gives thirst-quenching water. That’s not a bad model of prayer. But no model can capture everything about prayer, and that one doesn’t. The story we actually heard from Exodus gives us a slightly different one. The Israelites’ next struggle, after the thirst, was the Amelekites who attack them. And the Israelites fight back; led by Joshua, they defend themselves. But Moses stands back. He’s not an old man at this point (in forty years’ time he will be, so not yet). But, he stands back, and he prays. And he uses his entire body to pray, lifting up his hands, lifting up the staff that God had given him when He first called him. And he gets tired. So, luckily, he has two people to help him, and they hold up his hands while he keeps praying. And then there is no miracle, the Amalekites don’t turn into mist, God doesn’t send lightning bolts or angels, but he supports the Israelites in their struggle and, with God’s aid, cooperating with God’s grace, they are victorious.

What does this story tell us about prayer? It tells us that we pray with our bodies. Posture, gesture matter. They allow us to speak on a deeper level than words in our head. It tells us that we pray with stuff. No lack of stuff can ever rob us of our ability to pray, but physical stuff matters, as does the ways it can remind us of times of grace in our lives. For many of you, a wedding ring might be the profoundest bit of stuff you might pray with. For me, I have my cross and anchors pendant, that I, along with my classmates, received at the conclusion of my novitiate in Holy Cross, and each morning I kiss it as I put it on, and that’s often my first prayer of the day. At the end, is a small image of Our Lady of Guadalupe that I bought while on placement in Mexico, that reminds me of the graces of that placement.


It also tells us that prayer can be tiring. Imagine Moses’ fear, that the people he’d labored to free might be mowed down. Imagine the exhaustion. Many of us, I’m sure, don’t need to imagine to hard, but can just remember, times when prayer has been exhausting because of the weight, not of the stuff we’ve held, but of the needs that have weighed upon our hearts. It tells us that we need people around us to help carry those prayers. We can’t do it on our own, and we need help. The prayer line here at Holy Infant can be a great resource if you don’t know who to reach out to. So can asking for a Mass to be offered for a particular intention.

One last thing to draw out from this story is that it reminds us that prayer doesn’t generally lead to a lightning bolt from heaven. More normally it’s a way of asking God to join us in our struggle. It’s great when the former happens, but the latter, in my experience, is more common. As much as I love the gospel stories about Jesus stilling a storm for the disciples, I wish there was another story in which he’d noticed how bad the weather was and just helped them row. Because I can think of times in my life when Jesus has just stilled a storm, but I can think of a lot more when I’ve known the intimacy of feeling him beside me, rowing. This Exodus story gives us a good sense of that.

That brings me to Jesus’ parable, which Luke tells us was about the need to pray always. That encourages us to think of ourselves as the widow, and God as the judge. And if we concentrate on ourselves as the widow, it works well. Just as she was ceaseless in calling out for justice, so should we be. Just as she had to wait, so will we. Just as she was finally answered, so will we be. And that’s great too, as an image of prayer.


But, when we start to think of God as this judge, things get… uncomfortable. This judge isn’t necessarily corrupt, but he is lazy. He doesn’t want to issue judgments, and he only does because he’s worried that the widow is going to come and give him a black eye! I don’t think that’s helpful as an image of God! So, that’s why I think there are three stories of prayer here. Because reading this parable with ourselves as the widow is helpful, up to a point, but what would happen if we read it understanding ourselves as the judge, and God as the widow? We end up having to examine our lack of justice, our lack of action. We picture God crying out and crying out to us, to act. We’re reminded that prayer is not just about asking, but also about listening. We ask through whom God’s call is coming at the moment. Through the inconvenient, the awkward, the frightening? And maybe we’re roused.


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