The Godly Widow

The Godly Widow

Luke 18:1-8

This text challenged me this week. It challenged me to look at it and then look at it again. It challenged me to rethink not only what this story is about but what God is about, too.

So, the story involves an unjust judge and a widow. This unjust judge doesn’t care about God. He doesn’t care what anyone else thinks, either. Mostly, he just doesn’t care…period…end of story. This works fine for him until this unbelievably annoying widow shows up. Day in and day out, she just keeps after him, keeps pestering him, keeps crying out to him about how her rights have been violated and how it is his job to protect her.

Finally, the judge can’t take it any more. It’s not that he is moved by her story or that he actually cares about her plight. She just wears him down until he is finally worn out. She’s persistent. She’s relentless. She wins.

In the traditional telling of the story, Jesus points out that this woman is the very model of persistent faith. He also points out that God is a far more fair and caring judge than the one in the story. Therefore, if persistent faith could move a bad judge, then imagine how much more effective persistent faith could be with God! The only problem is how many persistently faithful people are there on this earth?

So…in a traditional reading, this story is about persistent faith. In Paul’s words, it is about “unceasing prayer.” It is about how important it is to bring your needs to God over and over again and trust that God will respond. It’s the person who is willing to pray, “God, I’m sorry to keep bothering you about this but…” It might even be the person to whom faith matters so much that they are willing to pray, “God…I’m so angry at you. What’s happening is so unfair!” (If you’ve never read the Book of Psalms, you might be surprised at how many Psalms—the one’s that folks heard and said, “Yup…that’s a keeper!”—are expressions of anger at God.) If you’re going to life a life of faith things are going to seem unfair and unjust because, well, sometimes they are. Instead of losing our faith in such moments, maybe we need to be super-honest with God. Maybe God can handle that…

That’s the traditional meaning of this text. It’s not like there isn’t real meaning to be found there. Persistence does matter. Honesty and patience and relentlessness are features of a life of faith. Sometimes, we have to pray like there is no tomorrow. Then, when tomorrow comes, we have to keep praying.

However, I want to mess with things this morning. I want to turn the story on its head and see something that we might otherwise miss. I want you to ask yourself, “What if the God-figure in this story is not the judge? What if the God-figure in this story is the widow?”

Let’s start with what it would mean to be the widow instead of the judge. The judge is powerful, no matter how corrupt he is, no matter how little he cares. He has the power to change lives in a moment. What he says, goes. The widow on the other hand would have been almost completely powerless. She would have had no economic standing nor even a chance to make a living on her own. She wouldn’t have been allowed to testify in court. (Women were considered unreliable witnesses, after all.) Her only power would have rested in being persistent and persuasive.

What I want us to do this morning is a thought-experiment. Ask yourself, “Who are we most like in this story?” Forget Luke’s introduction about persistent prayer. Forget the interpretation of the story that follows. Just listen to the story. Here’s a guy who has some standing and some power. Choices that he makes are going to affect others. However, he doesn’t really care all that much about God or all that much about what anyone else thinks. Who is this guy? I think he’s like us on our worst days, just phoning things in, just lost in his own stuff.

Now, think about that widow. She has no power but she is persistent. She keeps calling out to this indifferent man. She’s relentless. Who does that remind me of? To be honest, that reminds me of God. I think God’s presence in our lives is so often to keep putting things in our path that cry out, “This is wrong! Do something! Use the power that you’ve been given to make things right!” I think that God would be the first to agree that there are all sorts of unfair and unjust things in this world. What if God is whispering to us, “So pick one and try to make it right.”

In her book, “Traveling Mercies,” Anne Lamott speaks about the way that faith became powerful in her life: “I went to church for months and months and months without staying for the sermon because it was too bizarre to hear the Jesus beliefs. Then a year later, I just started to feel like Jesus was around me. I would feel His presence. It would be like a little stray cat. You know, I would kind of nudge him with my feet and say, ‘No,’ because you can't let him in, because once you let him in and give him milk, you have a little cat, and I didn't want it. I lived on this tiny little houseboat at the time, and finally one day I just felt like: ‘Oh, whatever. You can come in.’ And from that day on, which was almost 22 years ago, I have really felt a relationship or friendship with Jesus, a connection to Him.”

God is like a tiny little stray cat that just keeps showing up at our door—relentlessly: once we let him in, he’s never leaving! Or, God is like a tiny little baby, born in the humblest of circumstances and visited by a bunch of smelly shepherds. Or, God is like a homeless guy who walks from town to town, telling stories and hoping to inspire people but most of the people aren’t inspired because he’s not telling them what they want to hear. Or, God is like a guy dying on a cross, the ultimate symbol of defeat for all his talk about love and forgiveness, except for the fact that he’s still loving and forgiving until the moment that he dies.

That’s the thing…the whole vision of God that Jesus puts before us and that he embodies is of a God who is weak by the world’s standards. The God whom Jesus reveals is the God of the overlooked and the ignored, the grieving and the meek, the widows and the tax collectors.

Last week, I suggested that a big part of learning to live a life of faith is learning to listen to what we feel. Feelings, I suggested, are feedback, feedback that helps us to find our balance and then rebalance again, feedback that helps us ultimately to discern and follow God’s presence. There’s that wholeness and exhilaration that come when we are are part of something full of meaning and purpose. There is also the simultaneous sense of humility that comes with the realization that this something meaningful of which we are a part is far larger than ourselves and that it is pure grace that we get to be a part of it at all. That’s one kind of experience of the significance of feelings in a life of faith.

What I’m suggesting to you this morning is that there is another pattern, as well. Like the corrupt judge in the story, we have all “fallen asleep at the wheel” a time or two. We have become numb to the significance of the choices that are ours to make. Maybe we’ve been “burned” enough along the way that we’ve decided the best approach is to just no longer care.

That is usually the moment when the “nagging” begins. A situation pops up and grabs our attention. We almost care but save ourselves at the last minute by distracting ourselves in some way. Not that much later, in what, at first glance, seems like a very different situation, we end up running into something that seems eerily familiar. It starts to feel like there is a common theme and each new moment is just a new verse between the choruses. To put it concretely, there is something that we are not dealing with and until we deal with it, it is just going to keep rearing it’s ugly head…like, oh, I don’t know…maybe a relentless widow who won’t be quiet.

This is how feelings work, for sure. They pop up. We either hear what they have to tell us and then the feeling gives way to the next feeling or we stuff the feeling and it just keeps coming back louder than before. If we feel something in an overwhelming way, at a volume that is almost unmanageable, the question to ask ourselves is this: “How did I miss this feeling the first 27 times?” The only reason that feelings ever get that loud and overwhelming is because we refused to hear them until they roared.

I honestly believe that God is at work more often than not in those feelings, poking and prodding us, asking us, “Doesn’t that bother you? Don’t you think you should do something about this? Don’t you care?” It’s not that God is going to overpower us. It’s not that God is into manipulation or control. In fact, it is the complete opposite. God believes that if we are given the chance, sooner or later, we are going to do the right thing. God wants us to wake up and to be bothered and do what we can to right the wrong. And, if, initially, we only do that to make our feelings pipe down or to quiet our nagging consciences…well, then, that’s a start.

The truth that is at the heart of such an understanding of God—of a God who is powerless in the world’s terms, who refuses to control or manipulate or coerce or shame us—is that God wants us to love. God wants us to love God and love one another and such love is never the result of control or manipulation or coercion or shame. We don’t love because we have no choice. We choose to love. We decide to let that stray cat in. We decide to do the right thing and quiet that relentless widow down. We decide to stand at the foot of the cross and look at all the suffering that is real and still know in our hearts that God’s love and the love we are invited to live will always be more powerful.

Imagine that every time we pray to God to do something, God whispers back a question: “What are you going to do?” What if God’s greatest dream is to be partners with us in doing something great— but we have to do it together? What if God is going to keep nagging us until we do?