Preached at Midway Hills Christian Church

August 15, 2004

Today we come to the end of our sermon series on the Lord’s Prayer. Technically speaking (and praying) Bill actually got to the end of the Lord’s Prayer last Sunday—“lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” If you look at this prayer in both Matthew’s and Luke’s gospel you will not find the words “for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.”

This familiar phrase is probably the oldest piece of Christian writing after the New Testament. Textual critics have determined that it is not a part of the original wording of the Lord’s Prayer, but it is found in some ancient manuscripts.

It was added to the prayer by the early church. We refer to it as the doxology. There were actually two doxologies used in the liturgy of the early church. The Greater Doxology whose form is taken from Luke chapter 2 when the multitudes of the heavenly hosts end their message to the shepherds with the praise: “Glory to God in the highest heavens and on earth peace, goodwill to all peoples.”

Then there is the Lesser Doxology, that we have come to know as the Gloria Patri, whose form is taken from the great commission at the end of Matthew’s gospel when Jesus says to the disciples: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

Following the Jewish practice of giving praise to God at the close of public prayer, Christians used these doxologies in public worship at the beginning of a service, or the close of public prayer, or at the end of the recitation of a Psalm.

Karl Barth envisions that this particular doxology was chanted by the congregations of the early church as a reply to the six petitions of the prayer. The celebrant would say each petition and the congregation would respond: “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.”

What is striking to me about this whole process is that we have textual evidence of the way the prayer was shaped and used in public worship. The prayer that Jesus taught the disciples was actually prayed…and taught…to other disciples…and prayed…and used in worship. It was a living prayer on the lips of the early church.

When we pray it corporately we add our voices to the voices of the disciples throughout the centuries in all times and places who have prayed and continue to pray this prayer.

Our gospel lesson for today is a parable that Jesus tells disciples about the need to pray always and not lose heart. We know it either by the name “The Parable of the Unjust Judge” or “The Parable of the Persistent Widow.”

I have this wonderful little book called Politically Correct Parables. And this particular parable is included in the author’s attempt to shed some new light on familiar parables through the use of humor. He calls it “The Parable of the Unintentionally Single Womyn and the Insensitive Judge.”

He retells the parable in this way:

In a certain urban center there was a litigiously accomplished person who, naturally, became a judge. This judge had two character deficiencies. First, he was respect-impoverished toward the Higher Power. Secondly, he was insensitive toward the needs of persons.

In that urban center there was a woman who was martially unencumbered. Her husband had become nonliving several years before. When her case came before the insensitive judge, he looked uninterested and dismissed it with a wave of his hand. BUT, the woman was persistence-gifted. She pitched a tent outside the courthouse and called it ‘Injustice City.’ The newspapers sent reporters to cover her story and she became a local celebrity, appearing on talk shows and giving magazine interviews.

The judge said to himself, “Despite the fact that I am respect-impoverished toward the Higher Power and insensitive to persons’ needs, if I don’t rule in this woman’s favor my reputation is going to be tarnished.” So when the woman presented her case again, he granted her real and punitive damages in the amount of several thousand denarii.

Widows and orphans in Jesus’ day had no rights, no political power. That is why there were special laws in the Torah to protect them. Laws that people obviously ignored because the prophets speak out time and time again against the injustice done to them.

Judges in Jesus’ day were appointed by the Roman government and known for their corruption. So this widow couldn’t even count on a re-election moment of mercy, or even a sudden attack of integrity. All this woman had was her persistence. She literally overwhelmed the judge, and maybe even scared him with her persistence. A literal reading of the Greek in verse 5 of the parable would be: “Indeed because this widow cause me trouble I will vindicate her lest coming finally she may give me a black eye.”

This is a parable about the characteristics of prayer: it is continual and it is persistent. We need to be cautious about approaching this parable as an allegory. God is not to be equated with the unjust judge. Prayer is not a matter of pestering God into being sensitive to our needs. I don’t know about you, but I do not pray to a God that I have to threaten with a black eye!

Rather, this parable is to be taken as a whole. The movement of the whole parable is from lesser to greater. If a cruel judge give way to a persistent widow, how much more will God listen to the prayers of the saints.

In his commentary on this parable Fred Craddock claims that this parable assumes an audience that has been taught to pray “thy kingdom come.” And that by the time Luke’s gospel was written, several generations had passed since Jesus had taught this prayer to the first disciples. Enthusiasm and faithfulness had eroded and there was increased suffering and persecution in the early church.

Luke is the only gospel to include this parable. He holds it up to believers of all time to encourage us to pray always and not to lose heart.

What does it mean to be persistent in our praying? What effect does it have on us? On the world? Craddock says that in the process of ‘hurling petitions against long periods of silence we are shaped into a ‘vessel able to hold the answer when it comes.’

I believe our persistence in prayer is a form of social action. In Ephesians 6 the apostle Paul admonishes us to ‘pray in the spirit at all times.’ His charge to do so comes at the conclusion of a cryptic passage about spiritual battle. “Be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God….For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of the present darkness, against spiritual forces….”

Professor Walter Wink claims that the powers Paul references are not demonic beings floating in the sky. They are the “corporations, the nation-states, the economic systems and religious hierarchies that organize and to a great extent, dictate the life of human societies.”

These Powers not only have an outer physical manifestation, they have “an inner spirit, a corporate personality, a driving interior dynamism that is incarnated in outer forms.”

Wink goes on to say that prayer is not just a two-way transaction between us and God. It also involves the great sociopolitical forces that control much of reality. The equation of prayer is God plus people plus the Powers. Prayer that acknowledges the Powers is a form of social action. No justice struggle is complete that has not first discerned the inner spirit of the Powers. Prayer as social action lifts the inner as well as the outer manifestations of these Powers to God for transformation.

In 1981 Mother Teresa of Calcutta had just returned from a mission to Ethiopia. A terrible drought in the northern part of the country threatened hundreds of thousands of lives. The medicine she had brought from Calcutta was a tiny drop in an ocean of need.

After she returned to Calcutta, she and her sisters prayed and fasted for the people of Ethiopia. Mother Teresa also decided to write a letter to President Ronald Reagan. A week later she received a phone call from the White House. The President himself assured her that he would do everything possible to make sure help was sent to Ethiopia. The United States government did indeed rush food and co-coordinated the efforts of other relief agencies.

A friend of Mother Teresa’s teased her that she was the most powerful woman in the world. She replied with a smile, “I wish I was. Then I would bring peace to the whole world.”

That is the connection between persistence, prayer, and the Powers. We are persistent not because it changes God, but because we believe that our prayers can change the world. In the words of Walter Wink: “History belongs to the intercessors who believe a new world into being.”

For over 2000 years the church has been persistent in praying this prayer Jesus taught us. And in the praying has added this statement of faith:

For thine is the kingdom…and the power…and the glory…forever. Amen.

Amen. So be it.

Far from signaling that the prayer (and this series) is over, to say Amen is to make a commitment to live out this prayer. And so we wind up at the end of the prayer, right back where we started—with conviction that God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven.