Living love in hopeless times
Proper 24C  |  Luke 18:1-8

Jesus tells a story about a persistent widow and an unjust judge, inviting us to compare that to the generosity of God. Just what we need: a bunch of church people being told they need to complain more. I don’t like that anthem. So I’m going to do what Jesus says to do and to annoy the heck out of the priest and the organist until they stop using it. Thanks, Jesus. That is some really helpful teaching.

This is sort of how it reads, isn’t it? That the lesson is about just pushing and pushing until you get your way. But that doesn’t sound like a particularly Jesusy teaching, does it? It isn’t a Christlike virtue: to bully people into agreeing with us? Isn’t something missing? Heck, it doesn’t even sound loving, and that alone should ring the alarm.

One clue we have to the something deeper comes in the last line of the text: 

“And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
— Luke 18:8

There is something else here, isn’t there? And part of what helps remind us of this is how much the last four chapters of Luke has been about this very thing: faith. 

We know that Jesus isn’t telling us to push for our way, but to offer persistence in faith. This isn’t about one’s power over others, but the power of faith in God.

So let’s backtrack a little bit.

We’ve been talking about faith for a while now.

This has been a throughline in Jesus’s teaching in Luke for several chapters as he made a dinner with Pharisees uncomfortable, told the parables of the lost sheep, coin, and sons, the dishonest manager, and the rich man and Lazarus, taught about the Law, and as the disciples’ faith started to waiver, he taught them about the mustard seed. See, the disciples were hearing these stories and the different responses to them. They watched the poor and the outcast lean in and long to hear more from him. They watched the Pharisees cross their arms, the corners of their mouths turn down as they tightened their lips, squint their eyes, and then, when Jesus stops talking, they start mocking him. People the disciples look up to are ridiculing their rabbi. 

This has to be confusing, doesn’t it? Not just in trying to figure out what to do in the general sense, but to be there, watching this play out. And it is this weird drama that must get to them, like a rogue agent, slipping into the back of their minds, questioning the veracity of this whole following Jesus thing. And the front of their minds, the active part that is doing all of the thinking and reasoning and believing is still going on as normal, but this questioning comes like an intruder, but from within, and it compromises their thinking, questions their faith with simple counters until this is what they are doing, right? Asking themselves what they’re doing here, following this rabbi, because the Pharisees must know something, right?

They ask Jesus “increase our faith!” because it seems to be lagging now. It isn’t what it was. When they started out. Before there were real obstacles. Before they had to contend with religious authorities who mocked Jesus for teaching about love and inclusion. Jesus telling parables which make foreigners and refugees into heroes and make people just like them into fools, bigots, and selfish goats. And instead of slipping into dichotomies, Jesus reminds us that this isn’t an us vs. them deal. It’s an us and us deal. People will turn themselves into a them. Setting themselves apart.

And that’s when he goes to the borderlands knowing he will find people there who only exist there. 

The Kingdom is here!

This was last week’s story, about the healing of ten people with leprosy, when Jesus heals them and commands them to show themselves to the priests so they can be restored to community. They can go home again.

After this, the evangelist who wrote the gospel we attribute to Luke describes an exchange which includes both Pharisees and the disciples, returning again to the crowds following him in safer territory, in from the borderlands. And the Pharisees ask when the Kingdom of God might show up. Here, they’re thinking like those people in our world, a couple weeks back, predicting the rapture for the one thousand two-hundred and thirty-first time. And Jesus says 

“The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among you.”
— Luke 17:20-21

Then he turns to his disciples and says, OK, hear that. And also . . .  times are going to be rough. Because the Kingdom is here and also justice is coming. And all those people who are choosing cruelty and violence and oppression and exploitation and greed and hatred are going to go away.

The love of God is here and the justice of God is coming.

This is what we remind our loved ones who get a little too cozy to the rapture-ready folks — that Jesus announces that those who are disappeared from the earth will be the bad guys, not the good ones! You want to be left behind!

This is what Jesus is talking about as the disciples are questioning and feeling it is all too much to bear and they want more faith. Jesus keeps showing them what love looks like in the midst of a culture that is too comfortable with evil and injustice. And he keeps teaching them about faith and doing this stuff anyway. Loving anyway. Being the children of God anyway. Living into the Kingdom of God that is here. 

This is faith.

And this is when we read that first line from chapter 18:

“Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”
— Luke 18:1

This parable isn’t about persistence, it is about faith in the midst of deep adversity. And Jesus brings out a story about justice, about a woman who has been wronged, who has been exploited by the powerful. She is every woman seeking justice denied them. Not the shameful thing we call justice that is really revenge. But the justice of God, which is about equity and love and belonging. So this is a woman who is a victim of sexual violence or the mother of a child killed by police or the child of a father whose land has been stolen by the state. Or she is a widow because Rome killed her husband and the Temple is stealing her home.

Jesus puts this into the minds of his disciples clamoring for an easier way of following Jesus, of being injected with some faith rocket fuel. He wants them to compare their faith to this woman’s. One who goes into a court that is stealing from her: stealing her land, her community, her voice, her dignity, her very life from her. She is going in and heaping the shame upon the court. Shame the court isn’t willing to accept for itself.

Shame is a tool for the faithful.

This judge doesn’t have shame! He’s a fat cat insulated from all the abuse he is called to care about. Which is less an excuse for his behavior but an explanation for why he can get away with it. And why, I suspect, systems like theirs (and ours today) can engender detachment. It’s a feature, not a bug. Like Supreme Court justices who never once used the internet and didn’t care to learn about it or those enjoying their wining and dining with billionaires on yachts far more than learning about what is going on in those same people’s sweatshops.

The example Jesus uses still makes sense, doesn’t it? 

Our rabbi is telling them and us about faith in the midst of adversity. If this woman shows this much persistence in her faith when the chemicals in her brain fight to keep her at home or the little voice in the back is trying to tell her to consider both sides of the situation (have I considered maybe they have a right to steal my home!) and the most shameless, selfish, money-grubbing man in her community is moved to do the right thing, even for the wrong reasons, then imagine how eager God is to love you.

This is a both/and deal, friends. This is a story about shaming evil and recognizing how good God is by comparison.

It’s people who are stealing from you or sending you into poverty or testing your resolve. Our unjust systems oppress us and keep us poor. They marginalize us based on dozens of factors, including race and gender and ability and age, regardless of what the Supreme Court declares.

People need justice.
And God is generous with grace.

We need both.

Because this is the purpose of our faith. To help us encourage God to rip the proverbial mulberry tree out of the ground and throw it into the sea. To circumvent the laws of nature, time, and space to set things right. To bring justice and peace when Mammon inspires greed and violence. When unjust judges protect exploitation like an intentional insult to God. We have faith because Mammon is the mulberry tree. And we are the people with at least a mustard seed faith who can do something about it.

This is the Kin-dom of God right here, friends, among us. And the justice of God is coming. That’s why he ends with that question about finding any faith at the time of justice: are we up for this? Moving heaven and earth for a better world? For justice and peace: God’s Shalom?

Remember, all it takes is the tiniest speck of faith for that to be a yes. A glimmer is enough. Enough for God to see you and to know your pain and to love you in all of this. To bring grace and hope into the darkest night, like a hand in your hand, sitting under a blanket by a campfire, and songs worth singing by firelight; harmonies rising like smoke past the yellowing leaves of deciduous trees, reaching and dissipating into a sky of countless stars, heavenly bodies aflame with grace, a vision of holy peace and true love.