THE DIVINITY SCHOOL at WAKE FOREST UNIVERSITY
"Prayer changes things." I've heard that all my life, and I believe it. I don't know just how prayer changes things, but I know that it often does. Our lessons today call on God to change things, and they both show that when we really call on God to change us and the world, God gives us a part of the job.
In the local newspaper we have had an exchange of letters about whether prayer is worthwhile at all, with voices on both sides. Those who defended prayer spoke about miracles of healing that they had experienced. Our prayers have a different subject in view: they are prayers for God to heal the world, to bring justice to earth, to set things right in our communities.
And what prayers they are! Our lesson from Isaiah 64 actually begins at 63:7 with a rehearsal of God's former goodness and mercy. It includes a text that can be read two ways. I like the old way, "In all our afflictions You were afflicted" (63:9). God's own Spirit grieved when Israel grieved. Chapter 63 also has this haunting line, "Why, O Lord, do you make us stray from your ways and harden our hearts so that we do not fear you?" God is somehow involved in our failures as well as in our deeds of righteousness.
But an even more haunting line opens Chapter 64: "If only you would rip open the heavens and come down!" Can God really see what is happening on earth? Psalm 139 says that God is present everywhere and always, knows us in every details, and thus surely knows the world's horrors and joys too. Is God really aware of Darfur, of Baghdad, of the cities of earth where life is corrupted beyond belief? God must be, but how can God endure to see and know such things? Knowing such things, would God not rip open the heavens and answer this prayer from Isaiah 64.
The poet grants that Isreal had sinned, but the poet puts God's anger ahead of Israel's sin, once again tying God into the misdeeds of human beings. Like Psalm 44, which flatly says that Israel's sufferings don't correlate with their sins, our poet too believes, with the author of Psalm 44, that "it has to do with You, God, that we are killed all day long and counted as sheep to be slaughtered."
The New Testament text is similar, though at first glance it may not seem to be similar. It's a parable that tells us to pray always and never lose heart. A widow is trying to get a lawsuit settled, but the judge keeps brushing aside her cause. This judge, we are told, cares not a fig about justice, or God, or human beings. He only likes his peace, his secure post, his comfortable life. The widow knows that justice is worth working for, and she will give the unjust judge no peace until he finally, for no reason other than his own each of mind, hears her case and does what he is supposed to do.
Is this a parable about praying always and never losing heart? Yes, that is just what it is. But what a wide-ranging parable it is! Who are the characters? Years ago I heard Andre Trochme, the founder of the Taize community in France, interpret the parable. For him, the widow stands for the believing community saying to the governing authorities of earth, "Give us justice! We will never be silent until you do so." Martin Luther King Jr. had a similar reading: non-violent protests against injustice must never cease, and no matter how indifferent the authorities, they may relent - for the wrong reason - but still relent.
I think that the parable is richer still. The Bible claims that human beings are created in the divine image and likeness and are charged to care for God's good creation. Perhaps the widow represents not the Church but God. The widow's adversary is all the accumulated riches and horrors of human deeds and misdeeds, passed along from one generation to the next. God's adversary is a twisted and distorted and bruised and bleeding cosmos that human beings are to help God heal. God does heal, does help, does insistently pray, and God does not lose heart.
Put the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane in this context. Jesus is not only praying that God spare his life. Jesus is praying for that wonderful and horrible, that bruised and bleeding, but yet good creation he loved so well. Jesus dies for this world, for the world's health, for its healing.
On this view, the unjust judge is we - the human community, with which God pleads day and night for action.
Here we are in a divinity school preparing to join God in this work of healing a glorious but deeply wounded and divided and unbearably unjust world! What are our prospects of making a difference? Can we believe that the world is capable of being mended, healed? Jesus had no doubt. he did not die in despair over the world. He knew what God was doing in this foul and rotten earth: God was transforming it, making it a place of justice and peace. And God was enlisting those who had eyes to see and ears to hear. They were being called precisely to engender hope and confidence in themselves and their neighbors, and they were being called to call on God to come to their aid as they kept working to mend the world for God's and the world's sake.
A line from Amos 6 fits here. Amos describes those who lie on their couches being served with the finest food and drink, listening to the finest music, enjoying all of earth's goods and pleasures. But, Amos says, "they are not grieved over the ruin of Joseph."
And we? Are we grieved over the ruin of Joseph? Does Darfur eat at our heart? Can we endure the suffering of both sides in Israel/Palestine? Does Iraq drive us nearly mad? Do the plagues that wipe out thousands in Africa every day burden us with metaphysical pain? God surely answers yes to every one of these questions, and God has a whole universe to see to.
Isaiah 64 probably did not end at verse 12. The poem, I think , ends with 65:1. God answers the plea of the prophet: I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask,
to be found by those who did not seek me.
I said, "Here I am, here I am," to a nation that did
Not even call upon my name.
Might it be, friends, that we are not adequately empowered to do our part in mending the ills of earth because we do not adequately "grieve over the ruin" of the world in which God has placed up? Maybe one of the tasks that we need to prepare for is precisely that: to learn how to grieve over earth's ills, praying with Jesus in Gethsemane, and quietly marching down to the bottom of our Kidron Valley and up to Zion.
And it is the Bible's pictures of Zion that keep me hopeful and confident. Zion stands for that transformed earth that God is even now calling into being. God sees good things on earth too: life being renewed, faithful followers of the Lamb who was slain who make peace and pursue justice. The great gift of biblical Zion is that God is remaking it - and it is for all. Isaiah 35:8 should be translated,
A highway shall be there; a way,
It shall be called the Holy Way.
The unclean shall not pass it by,
It shall be for them as well.
No traveler, not even the simple ones,
Shall lose their way.
Pray for God to rip open the heavens and come down. Pray without ceasing and do not lose heart. See to it that when the Coming One comes, a trustworthy and faithful community pursuing justice and peace will say,
"Welcome!"
