Thanks to the enviable genius of third grade teachers

and the proliferation of procrastination in the mind

of a nine year old, we have a new motto in our home.

First things first. Simple to remember. Easy to repeat.

Applicable to almost every situation. Oh, you want to

play with your friends? First things first—finish your

math homework. Planning some basketball watching

before bed? First things first—brush your teeth.

Interested in dessert after dinner? First things first—

eat what’s on your plate.

First things first. Not a bad summary of faith’s call on

our lives. Many times each day we make decisions,

and each of those decisions in its own way discloses

our priorities. The accumulation of those seemingly

small decisions over a vast span of time sets the

course of our lives. Following Jesus asks us to be

intentional in setting priorities and persisting in

following through on them.

Jesus told a parable so that his disciples would

remember to pray always. To pray repeatedly. To

pray without ceasing. It’s a story about putting first

things first.

But it’s also a story that might unsettle us. After all,

is Jesus really comparing God to a judge who is both

unjust and unfaithful? Are our prayers really being

equated with the desperate pleas of a powerless

petitioner who only receives justice because of her

persistent pestering? Is that really the picture of

prayer Jesus meant to paint?

Parables tell the truth, but they tell it slant. They

describe reality, but they turn it upside down. What is

being turned upside down in this provocative story?

Perhaps it would help if we begin at the end. Jesus

closes the encounter with a question. That question

hovers in the air as the text ends. The uncomfortable

query is left unanswered. “When the Son of Man

comes, will he find faith on earth?”

It seems to me that the parable’s answer to the

question is “yes, but...” God, whose own faithfulness

is steadfast, whose grace is unconditional, whose

responsiveness is both quick and steady, will

find a measure of faith among us, but it will be in

unexpected places. In fact, if you zoom out on the

Gospel of Luke, the theme is repeated throughout

the story. True faith is found over and over again, not

among the religious professionals and certainly not

those certain of their own righteousness, but among

the outsiders, the marginalized, the rejected, the

unclean, the ones certain of their sinfulness.

We see it in a widow who refuses to surrender in

her fight for justice from the powerful judge. Her

action demonstrates a truth confirmed in our own

experience. Faith is easy when life is good. It requires

little spiritual fortitude to pray when you hold all the

cards, when the world is arranged just right for you.

In fact, our prayers in such circumstances can easily

become lazy, self-righteous, and, perhaps worst of all,

performative. More on that next week.

True faith, according to this Sunday’s parable, is

persisting in prayer when you have reason to doubt

your words will have any impact at all. True faith,

displayed by our unnamed widow, looks like pouring

out your soul in honest petition before God. True

faith, in the words of this story, means praying for

justice over and over and over again. The widow

bothers the judge until he finally relents and gives

her what she asks, gives her what is right. Are we

instructed to bother God with our prayers?

The widow’s example is lifted as a model. What is

that model? Persistent prayer, yes. But there is more

to this parable. The persistent practice of prayer

changes us.

Yes, the time we spend in prayer, in the face of

promises delayed, long seasons of unsettling silence,

even exasperation bordering on hopelessness—that

is the time that transforms us so that we can hold our

prayer’s answer when it comes.

In recent years and even in recent days, I have been

troubled by the bifurcation of thoughts and prayers

on one side and action on the other side. Following

incidents of devastating loss, human depravity, and

unthinkable evil, a familiar pattern emerges. One set

of folks—often in the public eye—tweet, post, and

publish their thoughts and prayers for the suffering.

Another set—also often in the public eye—decry

those thoughts and prayers as ineffectual and

purely performative. Save your thoughts and prayers,

we don’t want them. How often have we seen this

collision in public discourse? Like so much of life in

our time, I’d suggest that we’ve created an either/

or when what is needed is a both/and. Prayer—if

it is true prayer—is never restricted to the realm of

thought or abstraction. True prayer is never restricted

to the realm of abstraction. Prayer, described and

modeled by Jesus, is itself an act of faith because it

drives us more deeply into the needs of those around

us. When we pray, we move our feet. People who

persist in prayer are also compelled to do something.

The story’s widow provides an embodied example of

discipleship. Her activism is her prayer. Her prayer

is activism. The faith she expresses isn’t a passive,

disengaged, ethereal wish that things may someday

be better.

Now, a confession. This morning’s sermon title

was chosen way back last summer when I planned

worship for the program year, and I thought it a

clever confluence of the judge who is bothered into

answering the widow and our call to pray without

ceasing. But all week long I’ve been wrestling with

another possibility.

What if God is bothered not by the abundance of our

prayers but by the emptiness of our words? What if

God is bothered by prayers that lack the conviction

that leads to action and impact?

One New Testament scholari

says, “To those who

have it in their power to relieve the distress of the

widow...the call to pray...is a command to let the

priorities of God’s compassion reorder the priorities

of our lives.”

In other words, first things first. Prayer helps us

with that.

First things first. Do your prayers equip you for

another way of life? Are we bold enough to pray for

a world turned upside down? Do we have enough

courage to pray that our lives might be rearranged

by God’s priorities? Can we together, can our

community, bear witness to the transformation that

persistent prayer makes possible? These are heavy

questions. They’re the consequential questions of

faith. How we answer them determines so much.

Every single week, in this space, we gather for

worship. And every single week, we offer prayers. We

pray out loud, and we pray silently. We pray together,

and we pray alone. We pray creative words we craft,

and we pray ancient words we repeat. It is, then, I

think, a worthy question to ask ourselves: How are

all those prayers changing us? What impact do they

have? Because it seems to me that if we are here

to go through motions, if we leave unchanged, we

are only bothering God. The Reformed theologian

Karl Barth wrote, “To clasp hands in prayer is the

beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the

world.” Can that be true here?

Of course it can. In a few moments we’ll do

something we do every single Sunday morning. We

will pray together these words, “Give us this day

our daily bread.” When we pray those words, we are

praying for sustenance. We are praying for ourselves,

yes. But it’s more than that. “Give us daily bread.” We

make that prayer on behalf of all who hunger. All who,

like the parable’s widow, hunger for righteousness.

All who lack daily nourishment. That prayer, if it is

true prayer, must not end when this service is over.

Once we have prayed, if we have really prayed for

daily bread, our awareness of the hunger in our

community must provoke a response. We can’t be

content with the world as it is when we pray “give

us this day our daily bread.” And so, each week, in

our building, neighbors are offered the sustenance

for which we have prayed in the form of bags of

groceries to meet their immediate needs. That’s

important. But the work of our prayers must not end

there either. We are called deeper. Over Christmas

break, a member of our congregation learned of a

need in our neighborhood, that there were families

struggling to afford school lunches for their children.

And so, on Thursday afternoon, on your behalf, I had

the privilege of delivering funds to cover the debt

of all students whose families had fallen behind on

lunch payments. You did that. Why? Because every

week you had prayed, “Give us this day our daily

bread” and you opened your hearts to make it so.

It’s important. It’s a start, but it’s not enough. Why

are our neighbors hungry? Why in God’s name

is a full-time job insufficient to pay rent and buy

groceries to feed your family? You see, our prayers

lead us more deeply into the needs that surround us.

They keep pushing us to put first things first, to live

the words we profess, to go further in our actions on

behalf of others.

When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith

among us?

The answer is in our hands.

So, Second Church, let’s stop bothering God and

pray for transformation. Amen.