(Not) Losing Heart
Luke 18:1-8[1]
I think all of us at
some point find ourselves in a place where we just want to give up. Most of us
know that life can be hard at times. But one of the “uncomfortable” truths is
that it can be so hard that we wind up feeling like we’re just beating our
heads against a wall. When life gets that hard, we may find ourselves just
wanting to quit. We have all kinds of ways of doing that. Usually, it’s about
indulging in our preferred means of escape. And, truth be told, we all need to
take a break at times. No one can stand up to the relentless pace of life,
especially when it feels like we’re getting nowhere.
The question becomes how
we take a break. There are some “escapes” that are good for us. I readily own
up to the fact that I spend hours on my bicycle because it’s one of the ways I
take a break and clear my head. Other “escapes” are relatively benign; they
don’t help us, but they also don’t hurt us. The problem comes in when our
primary means of “escaping” from the frustration, discouragement, or even just
plain boredom we can face in life is through something that actively harms us.
All we have to do is look at the statistics regarding substance abuse to see
that too many of us take that route.
Our Gospel lesson
addresses the question of how we deal with life when it gets hard. Particularly
the Christian life. I think many of us expect our faith to make life easier.
And, of course, our faith does make it easier to bear with life when it gets
hard. But faith doesn’t offer us any guarantees that we’ll somehow be magically
spared from struggles. In fact, I would say that if we pay attention to the
Bible, those of us who embrace faith as a way of life can expect it to bring
some of the very hardships that we’d hoped to escape. And when that harsh truth
sinks in, many “lose heart,” give up, and walk away from faith.
In our Gospel lesson,
Jesus tells a story. Sometimes it can be tough to figure out what Jesus’
parable stories are about. But Luke gives us clues. He introduces this story by
telling us that “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always
and not to lose heart” (Lk 18:1). To figure out who “them” was, we have to look
back into the verses that come before. There, Jesus was warning his disciples
about the hardships they would face as they followed him in a world that
operates very differently from the kingdom of God. Because they can fall on
anyone at any time, Jesus calls those who follow him to “pray always and not
lose heart.”
The story itself is
about a woman and a judge. The judge would have been responsible for resolving
disputes in the community, like a justice of the peace, or perhaps even a
county court judge. The woman was a widow who was supposed to receive special
care from the community. At least that was what it said in the “Law of Moses”
that the leaders of the Jewish people were always claiming to be so devoted to.
But this widow had to keep coming back to this judge to demand
what was due her until he got worried that she was publicly humiliating him.
That should tell us something: leaders aren’t always so keen on what the Bible says.
Jesus describes the
judge as a man “who neither feared God nor cared about people” (Lk 18:2, NLT).
That’s quite a contrast from loving God with all your heart and loving your
neighbor as yourself. Even the judge said he cared nothing for God nor for
anyone else. It would seem all that he cared about was himself. This woman who
had lost her husband had to hound this dishonest, corrupt, and godless judge very
likely just to be able to access the property she was due from her husband’s
estate. In the end, a man who defrauded his own people every chance he got gave
in not because it was the right thing to do, but because he was worried about
his image getting tarnished in public
It’s easy to mistake
the point of this passage. We may be tempted to think that God is like the
judge in the story. But the opposite is true. Jesus reminds us time and again that
God is always loving, always faithful, always generous. God knows what we need
before we even know to ask and delights in caring for us. The point of Jesus’
story is that if a dishonest, corrupt, and godless man would grant the request
of someone he didn’t even care about, how much more can we trust that God not
only hears us when we “cry out to him day and night” (Lk 18:7, CEB), but also that
he will keep his promise to make right all the wrongs we may have endured.
Of course, one of the
problems we have with trusting God is that sometimes it seems like God “delays”
in keeping that promise. We may wonder about God’s notion of what it means to
answer us “quickly,” as Jesus insists he will (Lk 18:8). We may even wonder
whether God is listening, whether God really does care about us, or even
whether God is there at all! When our prayers aren’t answered “soon enough,”
it’s tempting to lose heart, just give up and walk away.
But this is where the
real point of the story comes in. Just like the widow who never gave up, so we
are called to live a life of “persistent faith” (Lk 18:8, MSG). That
means coming to God with all our cares, all our fears, and all our doubts. And
we keep coming back to God no matter what life throws in our path because we
not only pray by ourselves, but we also have each other for encouragement when
we feel like giving up. We keep coming back because we’ve learned by experience
that none of the other “escapes” we use to deal with life really satisfy us in
the end. We keep coming to God because we trust in Jesus’ promise that God will
set things right for us in God’s way and in God’s time.
[1] ©
2022 Alan Brehm. A sermon delivered by Rev. Alan Brehm PhD on 10/16/2022 for
Hickman Presbyterian Church, Hickman, NE.
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