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“Written on Our Hearts”
Genesis 32:22-31; Jeremiah 31:27-34; Psalm 12; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy
3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8
Rev. Sandy Nuernberg
Oakland-Cambridge Presbyterian Church, Cambridge, WI
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Domestic Violence Awareness Sunday - New Member Sunday
October 21, 2007
Please pray with me, O
God, you who offer us grace upon grace and seek our community with You and
others, we confess that we pray in jumps and in starts and that, indeed, we
sometimes lose heart. As your Holy Spirit surrounds us now, persist in our
realizing that You, O God, are the giver of justice, that you are the One
who put the law within our hearts, and that You are our God of great
strength and hope. AMEN.
“...for they shall all know me, from the least of
them to the greatest , says the Lord;”
Jer. 31: 34b
“And will not God grant justice to (God’s) chosen ones who cry to (God) day and
night?”
Luke 18:7a
Have you ever had the feeling, you
just knew that someone wanted your attention, your presence, and you were not
willing to give it to them? Their persistence in gaining your attention was
downright close to being obnoxious about it, or at least you thought. It might
be a salesperson for a new car, your kids in the car asking, “Aren’t we there
yet? ”, an insurance person for ‘the best retirement package,’ or the injustice
and unfairness of the judge and the persistent woman praying for help. Our
putting them off is more remarkable; for whatever reason.
If we are distracted by someone or
something else at the time that ‘seemed’ important, like that show you can’t
miss on the tube at a particular time, and you answer, “Please call me later.”
Or an excuse, “I’m waiting for someone to call me to see when we’ll be able to
get together, first.” Or perhaps because of time constraints you can’t take the
time to be with them, saying, “I just have so much to do now, I’m sorry.” Or
that familiar stand-by, “Oh, it won’t matter if I’m not at the visitation,
there’s plenty of other people there.” Lastly, maybe you don’t even give anybody
an excuse, you just want the whole matter out of your mind and hope it goes
away....’no, not yet’ or you can’t be bothered. It sounds like the judge,
doesn’t it?
This kind of negative persistence
is what nagged him, the unjust judge in our Gospel text, and yet the persistence
of the widow is probably more important for our understanding today, perhaps
because of its positive effects; the widow wore the unjust judge out and justice
prevailed. Here’s where the parable might end; but I believe this parable is no
different than these last weeks, where if we put ourselves in the role of the
‘other’ character, we find where God really is present in our lives, in many
circumstances. It’s where ‘they all shall know me’ as the prophet Jeremiah has
said, in one of my favorite texts that we read today. ‘I will make a new
covenant and write it upon their hearts.’ It’s like making a new covenant with
God’s people when God places us in a challenge, knowing that the word ‘new’
here means something different, and that ‘new covenant’ means some new way of
doing something ‘old ’; can’t it be doing something old in a ‘new’ way?
“...for they shall all know me,”
from the least to the greatest. Our Lord has written the law upon our hearts in
our baptism, for some of us long ago; a law that included justice and truth
written in our hearts of the Ten Commandments. Also written in our hearts
through God’s Son, Christ Jesus, was God’s listening to us in prayer anytime we
want to ask God for God’s aid. Luke’s parable’s climax is in the opening
sentence: ‘their need to pray always and not to lose heart
(v. 1).’And won’t God grant them/us
justice and mercy and grace, those of God’s chosen ones who cry out both day and
night? Yes, if they pray day and night, they will have experience in prayer and
they/we will know that God answers their/our prayers.
Many of us who pray regularly, you
and I, are convinced that the only way to pray is in the act of praying itself;
try it, you’ll like kind of thing. In worship we include our world, nation,
community in our prayers and those we know by name who we want prayers for
constantly. Henri Nouwen, that ordained priest and author, teacher at Notre
Dame, Yale, and Harvard, and who has written many books, described prayer in a
diary entitled, The Road to Daybreak. He was in Trosly, France at the
time, a place that would lead him “closer to the heart of God” and he said once
as he was walking in a garden, “Prayer continues to be very difficult...(though)
simply being in God’s presence, I know that I am not wasting my time. Though I
am terribly distracted, I know that God’s spirit is at work in me” (
“The Struggle of Prayer”, The Road To Daybreak: A Spiritual Journey,
Doubleday, New York, 1988, p. 116-7). For Nouwen, it was the special
early morning prayer time that was not necessarily successful for him, because
of distractions, but just the looking forward to it on a regular basis; the
peace that overcame, not connected with thoughts or emotions. Perhaps that is a
time for you, as it is for me, and indeed you and I can guard it as a special
time of day.
There are too many times to count and compare in the Gospels where Jesus left
the disciples, left the presence of his followers to pray, in the desert or
another place, to be on his own. But, in pondering this scripture, I thought,
did we ever think that the Someone wanting our attention was God? That God asks
for our attention constantly, and loves us so much to want our attention often.
But what do we do? We reject God on our terms, make excuses, find other things
to do because we don’t know what to say in prayer to God, and maybe for
ourselves, either.
I have told some of you about my
experiencing prayer kind of ‘head on’ when I took my ordination exams a few
years ago in Chicago. It was September in the fall of 2003, at the learning
center; some of us had lap-tops. We were scrunched together taking our exams.
Rather recently after 911, there were questions for us on this national exam for
seminary students and their understanding of prayer. Thankfully, and I do
believe, in the strength and hope that was ‘heaven sent’, I didn’t shy away from
those questions: one was my choice, ‘reflect theologically on a Reformed
understanding of the purpose of prayer and what would constitute an abuse of
prayer, basing your answer on scripture, classical theology, or contemporary
theology?’ I’ll never forget being able to use John Calvin’s definition of
prayer from my class on Calvin’s Institutes. He said, simply, “prayer is
expanding our hearts before God (Institutes of
the Christian Religion).” The other question was required,
‘articulate a Reformed understanding of prayer in public worship, citing by
number passages in our constitutions’, and then answer: a.) ‘Why do we say the
Lord’s Prayer after the Great Thanksgiving when we have the Lord’s Supper?, b.)
Isn’t there a lot more to prayer in worship than just the Lord’s Prayer?, and
c.) Shouldn’t prayer be spoken from the heart rather than read from a piece of
paper? I couldn’t lose heart; I had to answer the questions!
We can be persistent in wanting
other’s attention. But Christ Jesus tells us that it is all right to be
persistent with our heavenly Father, to pray on and on, again, and again, all
through our lives, not losing heart. As we are persistent, as the widow keeps
knocking, God might be telling us, ‘no, not yet’, but God will always hear us.
And as the door opens, God answers us; in God’s timing; ‘Thy will be done,’ not
ours. And sometimes, in God’s persistence for our attention, God answers us in
prayer, with big surprises!
Thanks be to God. AMEN.
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