We are not blind, are we? Well . . .

The Gospel passage for today is the first 14 verses of the Gospel of John. It is a long passage so rather than include it it here, I offer this link. I also include the YouTube video of Jesus giving sight to a blind man – and what happened after that. It is from the 1977 mini-series, Jesus of Nazareth.

Did you know that this story is a joke? I don’t mean that it is funny, not at all. It is quite serious. Nor do I mean that it did not happen in real life. I believe it did. I am not mocking the passage and what it conveys. I am referring to the narrative structure of the passage.  

That is, this passage presents a situation that begs to be resolved, the blind man. Then the situation is resolved; Jesus gives the man sight. But then notice that the story continues, and in the end, there is a punch line: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

This punch line is the actual point of the story. It is not a funny story but a very serious one. Unlike a normal joke, though, this story tells you the punch line at both the beginning and the end: the kind of sight that matters most is spiritual sight that recognizes the true light of the world, Jesus. Those who think they can spiritually see without him are really the blind people of the world.

The disciples saw the blind man and immediately thought that he was blind because of his sin, or maybe his parents’ sin. Jesus will have none of that, for he knows that God does not smite sinners with such misfortunes – after all, where would God stop? The beggar's blindness is not punishment from God. Jesus knows it is an occasion for the redemptive and healing power of God to be displayed in him.

The man's blindness in this story serves as the dramatic foil for the real point, a point repeated throughout John's Gospel: sin is failure to respond to the presence of Christ and the Gospel. Jesus tells the Pharisees at the end of the story that if they had been blind – that is, never exposed to the presence of God in him, then they would be blameless for not acknowledging him. But they have encountered Jesus, and their assertion that they surely are not blind is the basis for Jesus’ judgment of them as sinners. Unlike the beggar, the Pharisees' physical sight is not the issue. What they refuse to perceive is that God is present and revealed in Jesus. They are blind to the most important fact of all, a fact that should be obvious to them. Hence, says Jesus, their sin remains because they continue to insist that they can see. 

Throughout John, sin is defined not so much as what one does but as how one responds to Christ. For John, the moral foibles of men and women living their daily lives is of concern mainly to lead people to know Christ as savior of the world. This recognition can be likened to a form of new sight.

 Have you ever needed your sight restored? A dad once told me of his son, whom I will call Sam, in fourth grade when they learned that he needed eyeglasses; in fact, he probably had needed them all along. 

Like most children who need glasses, Sam was very nearsighted. When his glasses were ready, his dad took him to get them. When they stepped outside Sam suddenly stopped, his jaw dropped, and he just stood there and stared around him for quite some time. 

"Look!" he exclaimed. "There are birds in that tree! There are wires between the telephone poles." All the way home he stared out the window, marveling at all the things he saw that he had never seen before.

So just imagine what the nameless beggar's reaction must have been to have his eyes opened! A miracle, you say? It's a greater one than you think,

Physicist Arthur Zajoc wrote that light and the mind are entwined. Many studies, he said, have investigated recovery from congenital blindness. Thanks to modern medicine and new surgery techniques, many people who had been blind from birth could gain their eyesight, perhaps not perfectly, but well enough to function as sighted persons instead of blind ones. Yet success is rare for adults even when the surgery is successful. Zajoc wrote, "the world does not appear to the patient as filled with the gifts of intelligible light, color, and shape upon awakening from surgery." Light and repaired eyes were not enough to grant the patient sight. "The light of day beckoned, but no light of mind replied," despite their "anxious, open eyes."

 The patients can see technically, but not practically. Surgeons alone cannot complete the task. The patients’ minds must be trained to recognize what the eyes detect. When patients’ bandages are removed, they are no longer physically blind, but they are perceptively blind, They do not recognize anything they look at. A clock may chime. The patients know what they are hearing, but they have no idea what to look for. They recognize the sound but have no way to associate the sound with anything they see.

Dr. Zajoc concluded, "Vision requires far more than a functioning physical organ. Without an inner light, without a formative visual imagination, we are blind. [That] inner light must flow into and marry with the light of nature to bring forth a world." 

The question for us all is whether we are seeing with inner sight, with spiritual sight. Do we train our souls to recognize what God wants us to see? What are we looking at, and are we failing to perceive the most important things of all? 

During the Covid lockdowns earlier this decade, an American missionary in Italy wrote what it was like to be in the severe social isolation Italy put in place. He emailed to a friend in America, 

But if you do end up in quarantine-- so far, it's not that bad. We've discovered how it's forced us to stop and notice the beauty in the world and our fellow humans and be grateful for things and people we used to take for granted-- sunshine and birds, flowers out the window, calls with people we've been meaning to catch up with one of these days when we both had time.

If there is a silver lining in the cloud of anxiety and fear that often surrounds us, maybe that is it: that we have the chance to see ourselves and others, and indeed the world itself, with new sight and renewed understanding. Despite all the turmoil, it is still a wonderful world, and we still belong to God. 

Remember these things: 

 There is a light shining named Jesus Christ. The light of Christ can never be extinguished.

 We are called to be reflections of Christ’s light – mirrors for Christ, as it were. These days give us the chance to polish that mirror!

“We are not blind, are we?” I do not believe we are – as long as we remember this: when we think we see everything God wants us to see, that is when we blind ourselves. It is not about simply opening our eyes, but also our hearts and our souls. Look first to Christ, and with Christ at one another.

Lent and Chocolate - What's the Point?

The story is told of Sean O'Flannery, a lad who moved to Boston from Dublin. Coming home from school one day he went into an ice cream shop and told the jerk behind the counter (the soda jerk) "One scoop of yer best chocolate ice cream in four dishes!"

Soda jerks get strange requests, so he set four dishes with one scoop each in front of Sean. Sean took a spoon of one, held it before his face and loudly announced, "This is me beloved cousin eating ice cream back in the old country!" He ate the ice cream and took a spoonful from another scoop, "This is me dear friend Kelly eating ice cream back in me homeland!" The third dish he said was his favorite uncle, Finian, eating ice cream back home.

Sean raised the last scoop and said, "And this dish is for me!"

This practice went on for several months until one evening as the soda jerk was filling the four dishes Sean stopped him and said quietly, "Only three dishes today, please."

The soda jerk asked, "Did you suffer a loss and that is why you only want three scoops?"

"Heaven's no!" protested Sean O'Flannery. "It's Lent now, and I've given up ice cream!"

The word “Lent” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word, “lencten,” meaning Spring, the season in which Easter occurs. The forty days before Easter constitute the Lenten season, but the forty-day count does not include Sundays. All Sundays celebrate the resurrection, and so are excluded from the forty days count. The forty days duration is drawn from the length of time Jesus spent in prayer and fasting in the wilderness before he set out on his three-year ministry.

Matthew 4.1-4:

1 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”
4 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

As originally conceived by the church long ago, the Lenten sacrifice was instituted as a “means of penitential preparation and preparation for baptism, which in the early church customarily took place on Easter Sunday.”

The tradition of fasting during Lent is an early one, originally done between Good Friday and Easter morning, the forty hours that Jesus was in the tomb. Christians would partake of no food or drink at all during that time. The fast was extended to the forty days before Easter sometime between 300 and 325, and changed so that food could be eaten only when evening had come.

The idea behind the fast was to imitate Christ. In addition to fasting, Christians would devote themselves to making prayer a faithful habit. So “prayer and fasting” have been closely linked for a long time.

And that brings me, by a rather circuitous route, to chocolate.

Chocolate is an absolutely unessential food, nutritionally speaking. We eat chocolate for no reason other than it is pleasurable. Since denial of the flesh is a prominent theme of Lent, rejection of chocolate in Lent is often offered as the Lenten sacrifice, particularly by people who wish to diet anyway.

The Lenten season is the time when we are supposed to ponder the extravagance of God’s love for us through Jesus Christ. Perhaps that fact could put a different spin on our concept of giving something up for Lent. The Lenten sacrifice is best oriented toward that which most blocks our spiritual growth. If that thing is chocolate, then it is appropriate to give up chocolate for Lent. But if something else is one’s greatest obstacle in being more Christlike, then giving up chocolate is spiritually pointless. 

The question is this: “What is the one thing that most hinders my Christian growth into the person whom God wants me to be?” The answer may not be easy, but it will always involve self-denial. We think that following Christ is hard because to obey Christ we must first disobey ourselves, and it is disobeying ourselves that makes us think following Christ is hard.

But Jesus said his yoke is easy, his burden is light. We just have to get over ourselves to do it.

As Robert Mulholland put it, “Jesus is not talking about giving up candy for Lent. He is calling for the abandonment of our entire, pervasive, deeply entrenched matrix of self-referenced being.”

If we focus on that between now and Easter Day, then we have a chance to become more mature in Christian faith and practice. It may be a habit that is out of true with Christian character that needs to be overcome for further growth. Or it may be a thing undone which must be done for deeper development to occur. The Lenten idea is for our habits to change enough in the next few weeks so that we can continue at a higher level of discipleship after Easter. The Lenten season and the Lenten sacrifice are not the points in and of themselves, the whole life of discipleship is.

Focusing on the one big thing is not the only Lenten discipline that would be helpful for spiritual development. Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, insisted that the only thing that distinguishes the Christian from the non-Christian are how we use our time and money. So, for the period of Lent I would suggest focusing on those two things in addition to whatever one big spiritual obstacle you might have. Some suggestions:

• Tithe your income until Easter. 
• Devote yourself to prayer daily and attending worship every Sunday. If you are traveling, say on business or spring break, then worship wherever you are.
• Read the Bible each day. 
• Call someone you love and let them know. 
• Ask people who live alone to join you for lunch or whether you can visit them. 
• Become involved in Christian ministries.
• Re-establish or reinforce important relationships in your life.

Spiritually speaking, it is not enough to simply excise sin or personal vices from our lives. We have to replace vice with virtue. Thus, simply giving up something like chocolate for Lent is simply silly if we are only counting the days when we can start doing it again. That’s a game, not a spiritual discipline.

Lent should be a period of joyful, God-directed introspection into how we may be further united with Christ in godly love. If we make Lent into a severe, joyless, self-justifying exercise in self-denial, we have missed the point. Jesus sternly admonished teachers of the religious law and the Pharisees not to practice the letter of the law while neglecting “the more important matters of justice, mercy and faithfulness” (Matt 23:23).

When a lawyer asked Jesus, “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

That is the whole point of spiritual growth and spiritual discipline, and hence the whole point of Lent: love. We are to be living ambassadors from God to one another and the world at large in Christ’s name. Christ was crucified, buried and raised from the dead for our sake and the sake of the whole world. Let us rededicate ourselves to being Christ’s ambassadors. It’s Lent, after all; it’s all about love, you see, Lent is all about love.

Life and dust and promise

Before I retired from full-time pastoral ministry, I had a particular dread every Ash Wednesday that lay people did not share. It arose from the fact that I imposed ashes upon everyone’s foreheads, but in years past I also placed ashes on the foreheads of my wife and children and said to them, “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.” I really would rather not have said that to my own blood.

Ash Wednesday is the one day of the Christian year that is supposed to fill us with dread. Dread that God is just, dread that God will judge, dread that we might be judged in justice rather than in love. If wearing ashes on our foreheads should do anything for us, it should confront us with the fact that for all of us, there is an end coming one day. Before the most holy God, all the things we value will be as ashes. 

The American dream is that we can have it all. Therefore, we often seem not to understand that Christian discipleship is a zero-sum game: if we are to grow in discipleship, we must shrink in something else. If we are to add holiness to our lives, we must give up ungodliness. In his book I Surrender, Patrick Morley writes that the church’s main misconception is “that we can add Christ to our lives, but not subtract sin.” We think we can change what we believe without changing what we do. We want revival without reformation, we want rebirth without repentance. 

To repent means more than to regret. Originally a nautical term, it meant to change course, to go in a new direction. Repentance means to change, to be different. That’s the real reason why people are supposed to “give up something” for Lent. How often do we give up something trivial, like desserts or going to movies? It’s no repentance to give up something that we can easily do without and then, once Lent is over, resume. It’s no repentance to pretend we are turning away from actions instead of sins. Repentance is to pull out our deepest sins by the roots, and that will hurt! 

Fasting for Lent means to repent, not merely to do without food for part or all of a day. Fasting means to be focused on repentance so intently that we give up the ungodliness that pervades our lives. It is to be a holy man or holy woman for forty days. We express that turn toward holiness by symbolically wearing ashes to signify our awareness of our mortality, and to turn to ashes the parts of our lives, the parts of our character, that separate us from fullness of grace. 

Yet there is a danger in Lent as well as opportunity. Repentance is necessary, but repentance does not save us. We are saved by what God has done in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Repentance springs from understanding that we have no hope apart from Christ. The danger in Lent is that we will emphasize repentance of our sins to the exclusion of their cure. Our works are part of our faith, but we are justified before God by our works in faith not because of what we do but because of what God has already done. From the ashes of repentance, in grace, God can build anew. 

Peter Perry, a pastor in Texas, told of the time his neighbor’s house burned to the ground. “The trees all around were scorched,” he wrote. “The grass was brown."

A few blackened timbers stood near the back of the house, and the remains of the cast iron plumbing system rose out of the ashes. The day after the fire, as I walked to school with a friend, we saw the woman who had lived there, standing in the midst of what had once been her home, weeping and wondering aloud what would become of her and her family. As she gazed at the ruins of her life, she despaired. But her husband was comforting her. “We can rebuild,” he said. And they did. One year later, a beautiful new home graced that lot. And the home they built was built around the old home’s massive, stone fireplace. But I wonder . . . Did the woman and her husband and their children sit around that fireplace on winter nights, look at the dancing flames on the logs they were burning, and remember the ashes?

We do remember the ashes of our past, do we not? Old hurts, ancient wrongs. Writer Hazel Farris told of her childhood’s fiery temper. 

One day, after an argument had sent one of my playmates home in tears, my father told me that for each thoughtless, mean thing I did he would drive a nail into our gatepost. Each time I did a kindness or a good deed, one nail would be withdrawn. Months passed. Each time I entered our gate, I was reminded of the reasons for those ever‑increasing nails, until finally, getting them out became a challenge. At last the long‑awaited day arrived – only one more nail! As my father withdrew it I danced around proudly exclaiming, ‘See, Daddy, the nails are all gone.’ Father gazed intently at the post as he thoughtfully replied, ‘Yes, the nails are gone—but the scars remain.’

Scars do remain, and we wear them. We’ve made them, too. Sometimes we count our scars and relive the hurt and anger and pain of each one. Sometimes we love to inflame the passions of righteous indignation. But God does not do that. God forgives our sins and God forgets those sins. God does not carry grudges. In our repentance and humility before God, we can see that God’s ways are not our ways. God forgives, God forgets. Our sins were nailed to a cross on Calvary. In Christ’s triumph over the powers of sin and death, our sins have become like ashes, blown away in the wind. 

So, the call to repent must not be ignored. We must respond to God’s initiative. “If there are a thousand steps between us and God,” said Max Lucado, “God will take all but one. God will leave the final one for us. The choice is ours.” 

We are dust and to dust we shall return. The urgency of Lent is that we turn to God now, for later may never come. Dr. George Sweeting told of a visit to Niagara Falls. 

It was spring, and ice was rushing down the river,” he wrote. “As I viewed the large blocks of ice flowing toward the falls, I could see dead fish embedded in the ice. Gulls by the score were riding the ice down the river, feeding on the fish. As they neared the falls, their wings would go out, and they would escape from the falls.

I watched one gull which seemed to delay and wondered when it would leave. It was engrossed in the carcass of a fish, and when it finally came to the brink of the falls, out went its powerful wings. The bird flapped and flapped and even lifted the ice out of the water, and I thought it would escape. But it had delayed too long so that its claws had frozen into the ice. The weight of the ice was too great, and the gull plunged into the abyss.

The moment to turn back to God is this moment.

When we receive the ashes on our foreheads, there first stroke usually is a vertical one with the ashes on our forehead. Think of it as an “I.” The “I” is the egoistic part of each one of us that is the sinful self, the rebellious self, the self that wants to walk alone instead of with God. But right after the “I” we receive a horizontal line, and the “I” will be crossed out. Crossed out. As Bass Mitchell explained,  “The ashes made in the form of a cross remind us of the cross of Christ by which our sins and the sins of the whole world are canceled out!” 

Ash Wednesday reminds us that we come from a world of death and sin, but that we do not have to stay there. “We are dust, and to dust we shall return. Let us repent and believe in the Gospel!”

Contribution or commitment?

Today is the second Sunday of the church season of Epiphany

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

1 Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, 

2 To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: 3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 

4 I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, 5 for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind 6 just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you 7 so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

8 He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. 

When Paul wrote the Corinthians, he reminded them of who they were right off the bat. They were the church of God in Corinth. They were the only church in Corinth, actually. They were sanctified in Christ, called to be saints. They were recipients of grace and peace from the Lord. They had been enriched by Christ in speech and knowledge of every kind. They lacked no spiritual gift necessary for their church to thrive. They were being strengthened every day. And Paul repeated the fact that they were called into fellowship with Christ. 

It is mistaken to think a calling to Christian ministry is something that happens to men and women who become pastors, and that the rest of the people in a church are not called. This notion is flatly contradicted by Scripture. All people of a church are called to Christian discipleship. Even when we recognize that fact, we say that pastors are called to “full time Christian service,” as if there is any other kind. Is there anyone here who feels called to be a part-time Christian? 

I understand that my own calling is to serve as a full-time pastor. But my prior calling, shared by all other Christian people, was to Christian discipleship.

The first step in effective discipleship is heeding the call. We are called to be saints, we are called into fellowship with Christ. This call is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Responding to Christ’s call does two main things. First, it places each man, woman or child within the realm of salvation. This is no little thing! Just what salvation is and what it means is a topic for another day, but we have to recognize that salvation is a big deal. The Scriptures talk about it a lot, and so did Jesus.

 Answering the call to follow Christ is not a purely altruistic thing. Each one of us benefits, but we benefit principally in ways not found in the other areas of our lives. We benefit in peace, fellowship, assurance, faith, hope and other ways, none of which are listed in the benefits package of a Fortune 500 firm. And we will benefit in being resurrected from death to live in God’s presence forever. The need and desire to be saved is part of human nature. It’s a mistake to turn Christian discipleship simply into other-directed servanthood with no self-interest involved, as long as we recognize that the self-interest served by Christ’s call is not selfishness. It is principally love. Human beings are born to love and to be loved. We live best when we live in the love of God, the love of godly people, and the love of godly things. But love is never turned inward; true love is never narcissism. Godly love is patient and kind. Love is effusive and overflows from one person to another and desires the best for others. The call to discipleship is a call to be divinely loved and a call to love others divinely. 

The second main thing the call does is serve the world’s interest. The self-interest of love is paradoxical in that it cannot be served without reaching out to others and inviting them to heed the same call of Christ that we heard. Ministering to others in Christ’s name, witnessing to them and sharing the Gospel with them are two of the most self-satisfying things we can do precisely because they serve others as well as ourselves. They enrich our own souls, the lives of others and the cause of Christ in the world. 

But this Christian activity is not automatic. Hearing the call is simply to acknowledge that it is given. Heeding the call is to reorient our intentions and lives according to the call’s imperatives. In Ephesians, Paul urges us “to live a life worthy of the calling” we have received (v. 4.1). A life worthy of being called is a life of commitment to the caller, to Christ. The commitment part is where we tend to stumble. Hearing the Word and doing the Word are two sides of the same coin, but the one does not automatically follow the other. 

When airliners accelerate for takeoff, there is a point in the takeoff roll, called the V1 speed, at which the pilot must commit the airplane to flight. Once the V1 speed is reached it is not possible to stop the airplane on the ground before the runway ends. No matter what happens, once V1 is reached, the pilot must commit to takeoff.

 Hearing the call of Christ is like being given permission to run up the throttle and point down the runway. But at some point, individuals, churches or even whole denominations have to commit to takeoff rather than just run up the engines and make a lot of noise and never go anywhere. And we have to recognize when we have passed the point of no return because true progress, once underway, can’t be stopped without crashing. 

Much of the time we solicit people to contribute to the church when we should be asking is for people to commit to discipleship. A contributor can simply watch, but a committer is deeply involved. I am thinking of the time a chicken and a pig decided to go out to breakfast. They came to a diner where the chicken read the menu posted outside the door. "Ham and eggs," said the chicken. "That sounds okay to me. Let's go in."

But the pig replied, "Not so fast. To you than a contribution, but to me it's a commitment." 

Maybe the difference between a contribution and a commitment is that commitments involve risk. I don't mean danger, necessarily, although commitment to Christian discipleship can be dangerous. What I am getting at here is not danger, but presence. Contributions can be phoned it, but commitment requires presence. As the pig in the story knew, contributions are what we do using our things, but commitments are what we do using ourselves.

We make a lot of commitments because most of us lead fairly busy lives. Telephones, radios, televisions, meetings, commutes, deadlines, errands, the crowded calendars we keep, all the clutter of too many requirements and too little time. Our busyness constitutes a lot of static in our lives that the call of God has to punch through. Hearing, much less heeding the call of discipleship can be difficult. 

One crucial element of heeding the call to discipleship is being informed in faith by a community of faith. Being a member of a Christian congregation is crucial to hearing God’s call. Yes, it is true that simply going to church does not make you a Christian any more than simply going into a kitchen makes you a chef. But no one becomes a chef who never enters a kitchen. 

Disciples are formed in congregations. People can be religious without going to church, but mere religiosity is not the point of Christian discipleship. People can be spiritual without going to church, but Jesus never called people simply to be spiritual. He calls us to discipleship, and discipleship requires membership because Christianity is covenantal. Christian living always involves Christian community. Christian covenant always involves both the one and the many, not one or the many.

 The vows of membership to join the United Methodist Church are simple: we promised before God and one another to support the church with our prayers, our presence, our gifts and our service. Discipleship takes all four, but I have never known anyone who could do all four in equal proportion. The point isn’t legalistic exactitude, but neither can one part simply be substituted for another. Giving more money to the church does not relieve one from praying. Practicing private devotions does not excuse one from attending worship. Perfect attendance at worship or serving the church on a committee or a ministry does not reduce the obligation to tithe. All of these things take commitment, and they are all necessary responses to the call to discipleship. 

We are being called, each one of us. Let us put aside our childish excuses. No longer shall we ignore the call or pretend not to hear it. No longer shall we hide behind the inactivity of others or pretend that others may be called, but not us. I am called, you are called, and we are all called together.

God is faithful, and by him we are called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us hear and heed so that we may live as, and lead others to become, disciples of Jesus Christ. 

Second Sunday of Advent

The season of Advent is the four weeks prior to Christmas Day. Advent is not specifically a time to prepare for Christmas, but a period to reflect on and prepare for the coming of Christ, starting with the first Sunday's typical focus on the return of Christ at the end of the age. 

Today is the second Sunday of Advent, Year A. Its lectionary passage is Matthew 3.1-12:

3In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, 2“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” 3This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his

paths straight.’” 4Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. 5Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, 6and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 

   7But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8Bear fruit worthy of repentance. 9Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 10Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 11“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” 

In the 1991 movie Grand Canyon, a man’s sports car breaks down in a bad neighborhood where the young toughs wear expensive clothes and carry cheap guns. The driver calls on his cell phone for a tow truck but before it arrives the local toughs surround his car and threaten him with considerable harm. Just in time, the tow truck arrives and its driver, played by Danny Glover, starts to hook the car onto the truck. The tough guys protest. So Glover takes the gang leader aside and tells him, “The world ain't supposed to work like this. Maybe you don't know that, but this ain't the way it's supposed to be. I'm supposed to be able to do my job without asking you if I can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you ripping him off. Everything's supposed to be different than what it is here."

John the Baptist saw it that way, too.. He confronted the power hierarchy of his day and place, men who were secure in their position and who had all the right ancestors in a land where ancestry meant something. John's message was threefold: 

• the way things are is not the way things are supposed to be. 
• God intentions for human life and community have not been realized. 
• But help is on the way.

We see daily a disconnection between how things are and how we can imagine them to be. We submit to and commit wrongdoings so commonplace that we hardly notice them anymore. I still remember the indignity of high school gym class during basketball season. The same two guys appointed themselves team captains every time. The rest of us formed a meat line and the two self-anointed captains took turns choosing their team’s members. Basketball was my worst sport. I was always the next-to-last kid chosen. I remember the smirks on the gym teacher’s face as we dregs of basketball talent were picked over after the more talented kids had been selected, and the contempt on the team captains’ faces for us runts of the litter. And I remember my own smug self satisfaction that there were always one or two kids who were even less desirable than I was. 

Adults are not really nicer than children. Adults are just more devious in the ways we harm others, or accept being harmed as just the way things are. We are more ingenious in our justifications, but we adulterate our lives and the lives of others with greater magnitude: we spoil our relationships, pollute nature, bomb cities. 

Most people tend to think of human behavior in psychological terms, so they have no real way to grapple with the fact that things not like they're supposed to be. But John the Baptist addressed the problem head on. The concept is sin, a word much in disfavor nowadays. Somehow “sin” has come in popular culture to be understood as the word used by self-appointed moralists to put the rest of society on a tight moral budget. Sin is a category of conduct used by the puritanical, moral arbiters of culture: the fear that someone, somewhere, may actually be having a good time. 

The prophets of old would have been impatient with such juvenile concepts of sin. They did not confuse sin with mere error or innocent folly. They understood sin to be a deeply inbred fabric of human nature. Theology professor Cornelius Plantinga explained it this way: 

“The Bible presents sin in an array of images: Sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it – both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack, or evade, or neglect their divine calling. ... even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and, then, resistance to divine restoration of it. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways.” 

Sin perverts what is excellent in human nature and amplifies what is evil. 

The fact that so many things are so excellent about human nature makes contrasts with sin all the more disturbing. We know something is crooked only because we enjoy the things that are straight. We remember times when human beings seemed so close to everything God wanted them to be, and then we know that for all the progress we have made, we still have so far to go. There is much redemptive work yet to be done in humankind. 

Like John the Baptist, we dream of a time when human crookedness will be straightened out and the roughness of life will be smoothed over. The prophets looked to a time when “the deserts would flower, the mountains would run with wine, weeping would cease, and people could go to sleep without weapons on their laps. People would work in peace, their work having meaning and point. A lion could lie down with a lamb – the lion cured of all carnivorous appetite. All nature would be fruitful, benign, and filled with wonders and all human beings would be knit together” as a new family (Plantinga). 

But it’s a long haul from here to there. In the interim, the advent of the savior of the world into human form and life in Bethlehem was understood by John the Baptist as judgment upon the world. The advent, this dawning of a new work of God in the world, was not seen by John as an occasion for children’s pageants. We have made Christmas into a kiddie event, with visions of sugar plums, sounds of sleigh bells, and visits by a jolly old elf, who never actually leaves the coals and ashes threatened for bad behavior. Maybe we’ve sucked all the deepest significance out of Christmas, the advent of God’s personal presence in the world. Maybe John the Baptist got it right: the baby born in the manger will bear a winnowing fork in his hands to clear the threshing floor. 

For if we and God alike envision a better world to come, then we have to face the judgment that the world as it exists is not the way it is supposed to be. If we accept that, then we cannot point the finger at others because our own resistance to God’s redemption is sin, too. The only way to move the world along to what it should be is to start with oneself. We must daily strive to bear fruit worthy of our calling, and we cannot rely on some religious birthright for justification. John said that God could make stones into children of Abraham, so God can make good church members out of rusty beer cans lying along the roadside if wants to. Being on a membership list is less the point than being a disciple. 

Repentance and confession are the first steps of the journey to the transformed world. They are the first steps in shedding sin. We should flee from sin because God is not just arbitrarily offended by it. God hates sin because it separates us not only from his own being, but from the way things are supposed to be. God stands for a peaceful world of justice, and therefore stands against whatever hinders it. Our sin hinders it. 

We are less than three weeks from the manger now. When we reach the manger we will find that in the birth of Jesus is the coming of the Kingdom of God in power, the beginning of the transformation of the world that is into the world that should be. It is an ongoing work. God comes into this world to change it and that it begins with us. It begins when we kneel at the manger. It takes us beyond Bethlehem to Nazareth and then, finally, to Jerusalem itself to a hilltop named the Place of the Skull, Golgotha. 

 Perhaps we do not really want to hear that. We generally want Christmas to be carols and good cheer, parties and fine food. We want it to be an escape from the world, a ceasing of the daily grind. And it can be, but only if we go into the manger prepared to receive God’s greatest gift, his very life and being, and give in return our own lives and being. 

Images that seem to John to be fearful – winnowing, gathering and burning – are really transformed into statements of God’s grace by Christ because Jesus was greater than John. Former Yale chaplain John W. Vannorsdall wrote that the coming of Christ assures us that God comes to us with the message of love, not wrath. “I am prepared for the anger of God,” Vannorsdall wrote, “and believe that God has a right to wrath. What is so amazing is that when God comes among us, God comes not with violence but with love, even as a child vulnerable to our further hurt” (“He Came to His Own Home,” 24 December 1978). 

As we experience God's presence in Advent, we are led to begin or continue a life-long practice of measuring our lives by the call of the gospel. We can rightly celebrate the baby in the manger only by trusting that God goes with us every step of the way. Writer and theologian Madeline L'Engle wrote,

God did not wait until the world was ready,

until the nations were at peace.

God came when the heavens were unsteady

and prisoners cried out for release.

God did not wait for the perfect time

God came when the need was deep and great. 

In joy God came to a tarnished world of sin and doubt

To a world like ours of anguished shame

God came and God's light would not go out.

We cannot wait till the world is sane

to raise our songs with joyful voice

for to share our grief, to touch our pain

God came with Love. Rejoice! Rejoice!

No, things are not like they are supposed to be. But God's promises are true. “In a world that assumes the status is quo, that things have to be the way they are and that we must not assume too much about improving them, ... God’s people are [to be] fundamental indicators that wonders have not ceased, that possibilities not yet dreamt of will happen, and that hope” is a reasonable thing (Miller, Theology Today, 1988).

A Thanksgiving Reflection

   Thanksgiving! When we take a day off to celebrate with families reunited and get stuffed fuller than the Thanksgiving turkey! It is a day we remember what we are thankful for. What are you thankful for? Shortly, we will have a time for everyone who wishes to share what they are thankful for. But I can explain that right now:

I am thankful for - the fork!

As table utensils go, the fork is a recent invention. The knife was first, of course, dating to prehistory. The spoon also dates to the Stone Age, literally. But forks date only to ancient Greece, and then they were large cooking utensils, not for the dining table. In the 600s, table forks were invented but used only in the Middle East. Table forks did not appear in Europe until a thousand years ago, and then only in Italy. The Italians were very slow to adopt them, not using them widely until five hundred more years passed. Forks did not reach France until 1533, but the French thought using them was an affectation and their adoption was very slow. The first table fork reached England in 1608, where they were promptly ridiculed as effeminate and unnecessary. Over many years, forks came to be adopted by the wealthy, who had them made from expensive materials intended to impress guests.

The first Thanksgiving celebration in Plymouth Colony was in 1621. There were no forks. The pilgrims and their guests used knives, spoons, their fingers, and cloth napkins to manipulate their food. So, I am thankful to have a fork to make eating Thanksgiving dinner easier.

The connection between food and giving thanks that reaches back thousands of years. As the children of Israel prepared to cross into the Promised Land, Moses told them,

When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it, 2you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name. … 8 “The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders; 9and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me.” You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God. 11Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house (Deuteronomy 26:1-2, 8‑11).

Giving thanks to God has a connection with food about three millennia old. The ancient Jews knew of course that life depends on food. But they emphasized that their lives were sustained by the presence of God. After all, not only had God brought them out of slavery in Egypt, he had sustained them with manna as they wandered in the Sinai. They understood that filling the soul was as important as filling the plate.

There was once a man who was struck by a city bus and was critically injured. He was rushed unconscious to a hospital and went immediately into emergency surgery. The surgeon barely saved the man’s life after several hours on the operating table. The victim regained alertness five days later. The day after that, the surgeon stopped in to see him. Incredibly, the injured man launched into a litany of complaints about the care he had received in the last 24 hours – the food was cold, the nurses were slow when summoned, the TV was too small and too far away, the room was either too hot or too cold, and so on.

The surgeon interrupted, “Look, you were almost dead when you got here! I worked on you for five hours! I repaired both your shattered legs, set your broken arm and three ribs. One lung was punctured, and I saved you from suffocating. You were gashed across your head and I sewed it up. Your heartbeat was irregular, and I got it stabilized. A little gratitude might be in order!”

“Okay, doc, thanks,” the patient answered, “but what have you done for me today?”

Probably everyone here has had a moment like that doctor, being informed of perceived failure to meet someone’s else’s demand. One day in Galilee Jesus miraculously fed more than five thousand people, starting with just five small loaves of bread and two fish. That night Jesus left the area. The next day the crowd tracked Jesus down.

John 6:25-35

25 When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?"

26 Jesus answered them, "Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. 27 Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal."

28 Then they said to him, "What must we do to perform the works of God?"

29 Jesus answered them, "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent."

30 So they said to him, "What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? 31 Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, 'He gave them bread from heaven to eat.'"

32 Then Jesus said to them, "Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. 33 For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world."

34 They said to him, "Sir, give us this bread always."

35 Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

Jesus said the only reason the people followed him was because they saw him as a sort of walking grocery store. It was time, Jesus said, for the people to work for the food that endures for eternal life. The people asked what they needed to do to perform the works of God. Jesus answered they needed to start with believing in him because God had sent him.

They asked what sign, or miracle, Jesus would perform so that they may see it and believe in him. Now, just the day before the people had miraculously eaten their fill because of Jesus’ power, but now they said to him, what have you done for us today? It seems a strong sense of entitlement people often have is no new phenomenon.

Baby boomers like me were raised by the generation that grew up during the Great Depression and came of age during World War Two. Much of what my parents’ generation went through is out of place with how my age group knows life. Pulitzer Prize winning author William Manchester wrote of how his mother would cut and re-sew bed sheets to make them last longer. My grandfather, born in 1900, told me of young men he knew in the 1930s who worked ten-hour days on a farm to earn a dollar a day, and were glad to do it.

Yet my age group saw none of this. Robert J. Samuelson wrote of us baby boomers, “We didn't merely expect things to get better. We expected all social problems to be solved. In our new society most workers would have rising incomes and stable jobs. … Poverty, racism and crime would disappear. … We expected almost limitless personal freedom and self-fulfillment. After a while we thought we were entitled to them as a matter of right.”

Yet, as author Mike Bellah points out, when our parents told us how things were, they failed to tell us how things usually really are. In telling the stories of the Great Depression and the Great War, the generation who lived them wanted to create in their children a sense of gratefulness that those tribulations were over, but what they often created in us instead was a sense of entitlement. Why? Says Bellah, “Because of what they didn't say. What our parents failed to tell us is that conflict and want are part of humankind’s future as well as its past. There have been no utopias in history, and as long as the human condition remains the same (imperfect people living in an imperfect world), there will be no utopian tomorrows either.”

Since Jesus's day the human condition has remained the same – imperfect people living in an imperfect world. This new millennium is only twenty-one years old, and we are already shocked by its events. It seems depressingly much like the last one – and the one before that.

So, we may say to Jesus, what have you done for us today? And what sign will you give us so that we may believe in you?

In John, Jesus does not perform miracles on demand; in fact, John's Gospel doesn’t even use the word miracle. Jesus does signs that attest to his identity as the one sent by God, on whom God has set his seal, the mark of authenticity. The constant theme in John is that those who believe without seeing miracles or appearances are blessed. When we say, however sophisticated our words may be, what has Jesus done for us today, what sign can he give us so that we may believe, Jesus’ answer is always the same: “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes will never be thirsty.”

Christ has nothing to offer us except himself. And that is more plentiful than we imagine. Perhaps we should be thankful this Thanksgiving not for things; I doubt that this year mere stuff is what we are thankful for, anyway. Despite the violence, despite the threats, despite the uncertainty, despite our politics, we may be thankful that we can rejoice in the Lord always and that the Lord is near. The peace of God will guard our hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

   Thanksgiving, then, is not really a once-a-year celebration, except in a secular sense where it handily marks the day before Christmas shopping frenzy. Thanksgiving is for Christian people a continuous state of praise that acknowledges to God what God has done for us in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Thankfulness enables us to face the future with hope, for it is by thanking that we remember. To thank someone is to remember what he or she did for you. To remember what God has done is to be filled with hope, because God isn’t finished with the world or with us. As God has done, so God will do, and as God has given, so God will give. 

Thanksgiving is a joyful noise, a glad worship. Despite outwards circumstances, our hearts in faith do heed what the psalmist announced: The Lord is good, his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness lasts to all generations.

Bridging the Gap Between Scientism and Classical Theism

I know you have been anxiously awaiting when you can read my M.Div. thesis. Well, good news! Academia.edu has used AI to turn it into a podcast! And their page also used AI to create 12 slides of its points. They are below.

My thesis, or as Vanderbilt called it, Senior Project, is entitled, "The Disjunction Between Scientific Materialism and Classical Theism: A Process Solution." Before getting to the podcast and slides, here is an intro to the subjects concerned.

What is classical theism?  In classical theism, God "is believed to have created the entire universe, to rule over it, and to intend to bring it to its fulfillment or realization, to "save it." Classical theism draws on "intuitions and assumptions of Greek philosophy as much as biblical images," says Tyron Inbody. 

Catholic Scholasticism developed Aristotelian formulations of God "as absolute, changeless, eternal being or actuality." This idea of impassive immutability remained in the Reformation, though the Reformers emphasized God's sovereignty as unchallenged, absolute power, wholly righteous and gracious. God was understood to have "absolute priority and decisiveness" in divine election. 

Always known as powerful in the Jewish and Christian traditions, God was now understood as absolutely omnipotent, able to do anything God chose. "The concept of God's omnipotence is located at the center of classical theism," wrote Inbody, and so is at the heart of theodicy problems. (Theodicy is the theology of the problem of human suffering and evil.)

What is Scientism? Scientism is faith in science. Scientism is faith in science. As the dominant world view of our day, it is considered self validating. Scientism makes two major claims, neither of which, however, are  provable using the scientific method:

    (1) only science reveals the Real and only science can discover truth; 

    (2) scientific knowledge of reality is exhaustive, not inherently limited, is holistic and sees reality as  reality really is.

The challenge of the new, scientific ways of understanding the world resulted in theological liberalism, which attempted to ensure Christian faith in a world dominated by the increasing power of science. However, "Attempts to render God and the modern world view compatible have been unsuccessful," observed David R. Griffin in God and Religion in the Postmodern World. This has led either to religious pantheism or insulation, which define the disjunction between scientific materialism and theism.

And so, here is the podcast. Slides are below: 

Nag, nag, nag!

Luke 18.1-8

1 Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. 2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ 4 For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’ ”

6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 8 I tell you he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Now think of this situation. A powerful magistrate, insensitive to public opinion polls or the will of God, is pestered day and night by a widow who is evidently so poor she cannot hire an attorney even to get her case listed on the docket. She nags the judge day and night. He eats dinner, the phone rings, it’s her, nagging for justice. When he pulls up at a traffic light, she pulls up beside him, rolls down her window and yells for justice. When he goes to his kids’ soccer games and cheers for the team, she is there screaming for justice. He can’t sleep and gets the shakes. His hair is turning gray. Finally he grants her petition just to be rid of her.

Obviously, Jesus is not making a positive comparison between this judge and God. In the end, the judge is not redeemed. He grants her request purely from pragmatism, just to shut her up. That’s not justice. He never actually hears her case, apparently. He just goes in one morning and has the clerk of court draw up the paperwork finding in her favor. Note that the unnamed other party of the case never gets a voice.

And Jesus explains that if even a crummy judge finally grants petitions, then how much quicker will a wholly just God answer those who cry out to him? But when the Lord returns, will he find people of persistent faith?

There are some real difficulties in just accepting this parable at face value. Probably almost everyone here has prayed in earnest for something that God did not grant. We pray for sick people to become healed, but they aren’t, not always. We pray for marriages to be saved but some fail anyway. Cathy and I knew a couple in our church in Virginia who had one child. They wanted another one or two. But the doctors had told the mother that there was some problem and that the odds of her having another baby were small to the point of vanishing. 

So they prayed and prayed and prayed and tried and tried and tried. The doctors prescribed fertility drugs to no avail. They were as persistent and faithful as the widow in the story. The doctors could give them no medical hope, so they turned to God. Nothing is impossible with God, right? And what could possibly be wrong with asking God for another child? The God of Jesus loves children, clearly. Finally, it sunk in that they were never going to be blessed by either science or religion with a second baby. And I think it killed their faith in both.

So when this passage in Luke seems to indicate that God will quickly grant our petitions, it is easy to be skeptical. People of faith know that it simply is not true that anything we ask for in Christ’s name will be granted. We know that Joan Baez's song, "Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?” misses the point; in fact, missing the point was the point of the song. God is not a cosmic vending machine for which prayers are the currency. No one of minimally mature faith really thinks that God is anxiously waiting to be our personal genie in the lamp, always prepared and able to grant us wishes. Anyway, wishes usually are trivial in nature. It's the life-shattering things that can show the fragility of faith. Over time devout Christians discover that loved ones die young despite prayers, careers are shattered, or jobs lost despite prayers, children do drugs, marriages break down, what have you, even though the most heart-wrenching prayers are offered in true faith.

I have to say I don’t have magic Methodist foo-foo dust to sprinkle on that problem. The best I can offer people wrestling with that is where I come out on it. First, as Paul wrote in Romans chapter 8, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Jesus Christ, although the full flower of God’s love is not necessarily going to be realized by us in this here and now. As a matter of faith, I keep on trying to serve God because I believe another thing Paul wrote, that our present sufferings do not compare with the glory God has in store for us (Rom 8:18). That is the best I can do.

Jesus was no dummy. He surely knew ordinary people of genuine faith who did not have the benefit of being the son of God like he did. Those folks endured and were confounded by prayers that were apparently unanswered by a just God. So I think Jesus structured this parable pretty carefully.

Widows were specially mentioned in Jewish law. There were numerous commands in the Law of Moses to care for widows. Judges were under special admonition by religious law to be scrupulously fair, especially when dealing with matters relating to person-to-person cases. 

 Once Jesus has explained that God’s compassionate nature is the opposite of the unjust judge’s, Jesus’ plea to pray without losing lose heart takes on a different tone. The God to whom we pray is compassionate, ready to respond to the needs of the powerless and oppressed. But we should not pray selfish prayers, “concerned with petty issues, or irrelevant to God’s redemptive purposes” (NIB). We should pray first of all to be agents of God’s redemptive work in the world.

Like any parable, this one invites the hearers to find God inside the story and to place themselves inside the story somehow. The central figure is God, and the central lesson is the call for justice. But where do we find God in the parable? God can’t be found in the part of the judge; Jesus own explanation of the parable does not permit that. 

What if we consider the widow as the God figure? The prophet Micah wrote “what does the LORD require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8). This is exactly the requirement that the widow is making of the judge – to act justly and to love mercy within the law. By doing so the judge will learn to fear God and walk humbly with him.

This reversal of roles isn’t so far-fetched. If God is willing to become one conceived as human, born in a barn, and endure the shame of dying on the cross, then I don’t think a Scriptural portrayal of God as a powerless widow is beneath the holy dignity. 

This characterization moves the focus of the story away from prayer and its potential to be answered or unanswered by God. Instead, we see the persistence of God’s demands for human beings to act justly and love mercy, and we see the human tendency to do anything but that. How long will we scoff at God and set God aside before God wears us down?

We have in so many ways “the power to relieve the distress of the widow, the orphan, and the stranger.” If we think of God as a powerless widow – one of the “least of these” whom Christ said represent his presence in history – then “the call to pray night and day is a command to let the priorities of God’s compassion reorder” the priorities of our lives (NIB).

So we are called to re-examine our faith. Faith isn’t just believing beliefs, but also doing the work of Christ in the world where and when we can. If we do not believe, in faith, that God has turned a deaf ear to us when we call, then integrity demands we not turn a deaf ear to God when he nags us to work for justice in the world. We must not be deaf to those who cry out in need to their fellow men and women.

When the Lord returns in power, will he find us faithfully acting justly and loving mercy? That is the question. The question is not, "Will I be cured?" The question is not, "Will I find a new job?" These are all important questions to be sure and more than deserving of prayer. But they are not the questions Jesus addresses in this parable. This parable is about persisting in prayerful work for justice, not in competition with an unjust Lord, but in cooperation with a just and loving God. 

So another way of looking at the parable is that of the widow was able to achieve justice by persisting against an unjust judge, then how much more quickly will our God of ultimate and perfect justice respond to our persistence in conforming to God's will? It will be difficult; we will suffer setbacks. But God will never brush us off and will always persist with us. 

How long will it take for God's justice to be established? From now to the Second Coming, according to the parable. How long should we persist in demanding justice and working for it? From now until the Second Coming, according to the parable. This time frame shows that the persistence and work called for here is not only for individuals, but for the Church in all its history. The Church itself, in its institution as well as its membership, must be persistent in discipleship and dogged in seeking justice. 

Will Willimon was serving as dean of the Duke University chapel until he was elected bishop in 2007 and assigned to the North Alabama Conference of the United Methodist Church. He once told a story about this passage that goes like this:

A person I know works for the telephone company, in the area of customer complaints. She has a tough job because she must represent the demands of the company, and at the same time, she must try to be open and caring about customers. She told me about a person who called her, complaining about some grave problem with her telephone service. My friend said, while this was a bad problem, it did not come under company guidelines. In other words, it was the customer’s problem, and not hers. 

The customer, a widow, living alone by herself on a fixed income, persisted. My friend said, “During the conversation, she at last said something that really got through to me. She said, I’ve always loved and respected the telephone company. Since I was a young child, coming home alone, my mother always told me, if you have any problem, just call the telephone operator and she will help. I trust the phone company to do what is right.”

My friend said that a light went on in her brain and she realized that this was not merely a complaint about bad service. It was a discussion about the character of the phone company. Was this a company that cared, a company that valued its long term relationship with a customer, a company that could be trusted? My friend reached out and solved the woman’s problem. 

In the same way Jesus's parable calls us to ponder what we really believe about God. Is God someone who can be trusted even when our prayers seem futile? Jesus says yes but tells the parable in a way that also calls us to examine ourselves. The discussion is about the character not only of God but of each one of us and of the Church itself. God can always be trusted. But can God trust us? That is the chief question the parable presents, and the one we must answer affirmatively.