2 Tim 3;14-4:5

Luke 18:1-8

The nagging widow and unrighteous judge

Jesus finds examples of spiritual and moral truth in everyday life. The parable follows a verse that says, “We are always to pray and not lose heart”. In the parable, a whining widow with a shrill voice persistently pursued the judge. She found him on the corner, near the main gate to the city, and everywhere she located him she whined about her case against her accuser. She leaned on the judge night and day, until he finally agreed to support her position. She is like a child in pursuit of that special gift – she wants an answer, not just any answer, no is not an answer she is willing to accept. She continues to ask until she gets a response that treats her with dignity and respect. Jesus said to the disciples: so it should be with us in prayer. We are to cry out to God night and day with our petitions. Don’t worry about bugging God – be pushy, persistent, and continuous. Don’t be reasonable or rational or proper, whine, beg, push, plead, and keep it up until something gives..

How, when and where do you pray?

We are busy and the more wealthy and well off we are, I suspect, the less often we pray. In some interesting research results, surveys discovered that the average American Christian prays four minutes a day and the average American pastor prays seven minutes a day. Now that may mean that some of us pray 15 minutes a day and others less than 1 minute and so the average is 4 minutes. Some pastors and priests may pray 30 minutes and others 1 or 2 minutes but the average is 7 minutes. Have you ever taken a time inventory at work where you wrote down what you did with every 15 minutes of the time on duty? That exercise is useful in showing us how we spend our professional time and often may lead us to realign our time commitments to reflect our priorities or responsibilities. Try for a week to write down how many minutes you spend in prayer each day. At the end of the week, make a notation about what you prayed for and any experience you want to remember.

Prayer elicits faith. It is hard to pray if we don’t think anything will happen as a result.

We may not pray often because we don’t believe prayer does that much good. For many of us prayer is essentially talking to yourself; psychological motivation to be a better person.

The National Cancer Institute and many other medical research institutions have studied the effects of prayer. Like most studies we are likely to get what we look for and design the study to reveal. For example, in one hospital, patients in wing A got prayer but those in wing B did not. The healing rate in both hospital wings was the same. The researchers concluded, “Prayer did not help people nor did it change the mind of God.” In other studies, the recovery rate of patients who were prayed for was faster than those without the benefit of prayer. Which group do you trust? What you think and which research results you take as true may reflect more about who you think God is than about the factual evidence in the scientific studies. If you think God is attentive to prayer and that God answers prayer, you may prefer the later study but if God is way off somewhere, busy with a lot of bigger problems than your prayer request, isn’t it likely that you will believe the first study results? What we believe about God influences whether or not we pray and how we pray.

We don’t pray much when we think God is good and protects us from all disasters in life, from cancer to car accidents to coronaries. When God doesn’t protect us or our friends and family from these things then we may be tempted to think that God is not as interested as I had hoped or maybe I am not important to God. I assure you that you cannot determine or measure God’s love by what happens in response to your prayers. Take our patron saint, the Apostle Paul. Three times Paul asked God to remove his disease, which most scholars think was an epileptic seizure disorder. God did not do it. God could have and should have protected Job from the disasters of life, from the loss of his wife, children, health, wealth, but God didn’t protect Job from these loses and I believe these stories are in Scripture to teach us something important. God is not a candy machine – we cannot put in a quarter worth of prayer and get out the nice sweet answer we want. So if God is good, wholly loving, and attentive to each and every one of us, why do we have to pray?

The answer is we need God as our constant companion and friend. To have a close friend, we must spend time together, talk, share and the same is true if we will have a close relationship with God. Jesus, our example of the way God wants us to be as human beings, prayed often. In Luke’s Gospel Jesus prays before every important event: before calling the disciples, before his baptism, before his transfiguration, before the crucifixion, and Jesus taught the disciples to pray: our father in heaven, etc. Do you do this?

The bible teaches us that God answers prayers, but not always in ways that we ask. From the Bible we learn that Jesus was a person of prayer, that Jesus taught his disciples to pray, that we should pray with perseverance and persistence, with bugging and bothersome consistency, and that prayer is effective and often changes us.

In my own spiritual journey prayer has taken on various forms over the years. Like most of you, the practice of prayer is a private matter, one like tithing that we don’t like to speak about publically. Nevertheless, if I am to be your temporal shepherd, I feel you should know something about my giving practices as well as my prayer life. During several phases of my spiritual journey my prayer life has varied accordingly, such as praying an amplified version of the Lord’s Prayer; praying the daily office; praying the psalms; praying without words through meditation and contemplation; praying through music. No doubt each of these can overlap in a season or given segment of my spiritual journey.

Prayer is simply communication with God. Prayer can be spontaneous. You can cry to God, or laugh and offer it to God, or scream in anger and frustration. God is your closest friend. When words won’t come to describe your joy or sorrow, you can sit still and invite God to join you in whatever place you are. You can pray the daily offices in the Book of Common Prayer. You should pray from the heart and you should be honest. Praying through the rough places and giving thanks in the good times are equally important. We tell our friends about our hopes, our successes, our joys, our doubts, our sorrows, and our fears. In like manner we ought to tell God as well. Moses complained to God, “ever since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has done harm to this people, and you have not delivered them at all (Ex 5:23). Isaiah cried out, “O that you would tear open the heavens and come down” (Isaiah 64:1). Throughout the stories of the Bible there were good and bad times for God’s people, but in the midst of it all, God is God. We too walk by faith, experiencing good and bad things but all our life is a journey from and to God.

When our prayers are not answered the way we hope or expect, we may think God is like the unrighteous judge. It takes faith to continue believing that God is good, loving and present in difficult times of sickness, loss, heartbreak, depression or despair. It may be equally difficult to be prayerfully thankful when all is well, the bank balance is good, the children are healthy, and our careers are soaring. In both seasons, take the advice of St. Paul and Jesus: pray constantly, without ceasing, nag, bug, stay the course and trust that God is good and will give you the gift of faith to pray and trust God’s love is ever present in your life, every day and in every way.