Hold Onto Your Heart!
Proverbs 4:1-23; Luke 18:1-8
October 20, 2013
Rev. Rich Gelson, Fairmount Presbyterian Church
If
you had access to the Oval Office of the White House every single day, what
words would you find yourself saying while there?
As I kept
up to date on the grievous unfolding story of our sixteen day government
shutdown, I was quite grateful to also read about Emma Daniel Gray. She was born in Edgefield, South Carolina in
1914, and she died at the age of ninety-five back on June 8th of
2009. Emma was raised by her
grandfather, who had in his lifetime been a slave. He’d been known around their hometown as “Uncle
Ten” because of his great love of the Ten Commandments. This respect for God’s good and just
fundamental rules had a lasting impact on Emma.
It was very much in her heart,
along with her faith in God’s promises of hope, peace and justice through Jesus
Christ when she arrived in Washington, D.C. and joined the Holy Trinity Worship
Center International. This was her
church home during all the days she commuted by public transportation to her work
as a professional housekeeper. Here I
need to mention that in 1943 she began night-shift work as household staff in
the executive offices of the White House.
Her excellent work ethic and character helped her stay employed there
through six presidencies.
What
is celebrated most about her life are the words she spoke each night she worked
in the Oval Office. With cleaning supplies
in hand, she would pause at each President’s chair and offers words of prayer,
asking for God’s blessings of wisdom and safety to be upon him. At the time of her funeral, her pastor spoke about
her prayerful persistence in doing this by saying she always saw life through
the eyes of holy promise. She kept hope in view. “She
learned early on that you set the tone for your environment,” he said, “That’s
why church was so important to her … she preached her own eulogy by the life
that she lived.”[i]
I’m inspired
by her example as someone who held onto her heart. She persistently and prayerfully stayed
centered upon, placed her hope in, and gave witness to the highest, truly
reliable, positively just power in this world -- God’s saving grace and justice
for all in Jesus Christ. And she managed
to do so while working in the heart of a human governing institution that for
decades now has for various reasons caused great cynicism to take root among so
many Americans.
I
have to wonder what Emma Daniel Gray would have to say about the public
research that reveals how for many decades there has also been growing cynicism
towards the institution of the Church. Cynicism
is “an attitude of scornful or jaded negativity, especially a general distrust
of the integrity or professed motives of others.”[ii] I
find this often factors into conversations I have about our long denominational
decline, especially as it relates to the absence of young adults in worship and
overall congregational involvement.
In
2011, The Barna Group, a private and non-partisan organization that researches
spiritual development, released the results of a five year study related to
this. It concluded that such issues as
the Church being overprotective of itself and debates about science and
sexuality, has let not only to skepticism (which can be actually be part of
healthy faith development) but also to the more debilitating condition of cynicism. And as
another observer of this sad trend has remarked, “Cynicism is a spiritually
dangerous thing because it is a buffer against personal commitment … becoming
so cynical that we don’t believe any change is possible allows [people] to step
back, protect [themselves], grab for more security and avoid taking any risks.”[iii]
How
might God be calling us to actively confront this pervasive plight of
cynicism? How can we guard ourselves
from losing heart too? Today’s parable
from the Gospel According to Luke inspires and invites us to an answer.
There
are two central characters to this allegorical lesson taught by Jesus. One is a woman that a fellow preacher has
helpfully called the “Won’t Quit Widow.”[iv] We need to remind ourselves that widows in the
time of Jesus were extremely vulnerable to injustices. They were often left without property, in
great poverty, and subject to the whims of their closest male relative. Rather than lose heart about this, Jesus
tells us of a widow who made persistent appeals for justice to be done in her
favor.
All
such matters in those days were handled by a single judge. In the
parable, Jesus described this power figure as having no respect for God or for
other people. This was certainly not
someone a widow could hope in for help. I
see this judge as representing the worst consequence of cynicism – having a
heart grown scornful and jaded toward caring about the injustices happening to
society’s most vulnerable people as well as toward God’s willingness to help
them.
Jesus
tells us this widow never accepted having her unjust plight rejected. She instead persistently presented herself
to the unjust judge day after day after day.
Eventually, we are told, the judge found himself terribly bothered and
worn out by this. The original language
Jesus spoke also suggests that her persistent presence threatened his
reputation – the phrase “worn out” is more precisely translated as being given
“a black eye.”
Let’s
recall that Jesus prefaced this parable for his disciples by saying that it is
about the need to “pray always and not to lose heart.” So we are to be as prayerfully persistent as
the “Won’t Quite Widow” in pleading for and trusting that moral justice will be
done.
But we
must be careful not find ourselves acquainting God with the unjust judge. That would entirely miss the even bigger point
of the parable. Jesus told his
disciples to pay attention to the unjust judge’s words to hammer home the holy
truth that God acts in the exact opposite way. God always compassionately responds to every
persistent cry of the oppressed. We,
who all suffer the injustices of sin in this world, have no reason to ever be
cynical about the faithfulness and love of God. We need only to persistently and prayerfully
pay attention to our own faithfulness, to holding onto our hearts, to our deep
and active trust in God’s saving grace and justice for all in Jesus Christ.
Another contemporary, inspiring example of
what this looks like also comes out of Washington, D.C. This one’s more recent than Emma Daniel Gray
pausing at the President’s chair for prayer …
Mark Batterson moved from Minnesota to D.C. in
1994 to direct an inner-city ministry. I
trust this presented lots of opportunities to hold onto his heart as he
faithfully responded to multiple situations of social injustice. One blessed result of this was his becoming
the lead pastor of the interdenominational National Community Church in
1996. At that time it was a community
with a core group of just nineteen people.
Since then, it has grown under his leadership into one church with ten
worship services at six different locations.
Where might these be? This
contemporary church meets in theaters all over the metro area. This sure is one way to reach young adults
and lots of other folks who aren’t attending traditional church!
I spent some time reading and agreeing with
what Pastor Mark has written concerning today’s parable. He affirms that the widow is the “gold
standard” for praying with tenacity. And then he reflects on our struggle to find
the right words for prayer, especially as we try to confront cynicism. The following reminder of his about how we are
never alone when holding onto our hearts in prayer is what I’ll end with for
today --
“The
viability of our prayers is not contingent upon scrabbling the twenty-six
letters of the English alphabet into the right combinations like abracadabera. God already knows the last punctuation
mark before we pronounce the first syllable.
The viability of our prayers has more to do with intensity than
vocabulary. That is modeled by the Holy
Spirit, who has been intensely and unceasingly interceding for you your entire
life … God isn’t just for you in some passive sense. God is for you in the most active sense
imaginable. The Holy Spirit is praying
hard for you. And supernatural
synchronicities begin to happen when we tag-team with God and do the same.” Amen!
[i]
http://www.utsandiego.com/news/2009/Jun/28/1c28gray222156-emma-daniel-gray/2/?#article-copy
[ii]
I appreciate the good interpretation of cynicism offered by the rabbit who
preached http://www.congregationsinai.com/rabbi-cohens-sermons/165-from-cynicism-to-hope-
[iii]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/the-post-cynical-christia_b_3474122.html
[iv]
https://bible.org/seriespage/piety-persistence-penitence-and-prayer-luke-181-14
No comments:
Post a Comment