Praying persistently

One Sunday morning in a large church just before the services were to begin, it was discovered that the organ wasn’t working. 

A member of the congregation happened to be rather handy and he immediately went to see what the problem might be and he found it was a simple electrical problem. 

When he finally got it fixed it was just about the middle of the prayers. He quietly passed a note to the organist which read: "After finishing prayer - the organ will work !” 

I heard another story, apparently true, of a woman who lived in a remote valley. She went to a great deal of trouble and expense to have electrical power installed in her home. However, after a couple of months, the electric company noticed she didn’t seem to use very much electricity at all. 

Thinking there might be a problem, they sent an engineer to check on the matter. The man came to the door and said, "We’ve just checked your metre and it doesn’t seem that you’re using much electricity. Is there a problem?"

"Oh no" she said. "We’re quite satisfied. We turn on the electric lights every night to see how to light our lamps and then we switch them off again." 

This woman had recognised the existence of electricity and what it could do. She’d even gone to the trouble of having it fitted in her house at considerable cost, but she didn’t use it properly, she didn’t see it’s full potential... 

And I think there are people who use prayer in the same way.... 

They believe in prayer.

They know of the promises God has made about answering prayers.

They’ve even read and heard stories about answered prayers so they know it works.

But they don’t pray or don’t pray enough… and I think this is largely because they’ve failed to see how prayer really works, and that is one of the things that Jesus is trying to reveal in the parable that we have heard in today’s gospel reading (Luke 18:1-8).

Often it is portrayed as a parable urging us just to be constant and persistent in prayer, and there is no doubt this is true. Jesus is reminding his followers, people who probably had trouble with prayer occasionally, probably just like us, that whatever they felt, God was hearing their prayers and attending to them.

And prayer whenever it comes, or however we do it, is an important thing. A young man went into a sweet shop to buy 3 boxes of chocolate: small, medium, and large.

When the owner asked him about the three boxes, he said, “Well, I’m going over to my new girlfriend’s house for supper. Then we’re going out. If she’s just polite, then I’ll give her the small box. If she lets me hold her hand or put my arm around her, then I’ll give her the medium box.

But if she lets me give her a kiss then I’ll give her the big box.” He made his purchase and left.

That evening as he sat down at dinner with his girlfriend’s family, he asked if he could say the prayer before the meal. He began to pray, and he prayed an earnest, intense prayer that lasted for almost five minutes. When he finished his girlfriend said, “You never told me you were such a religious person.” He said, “And you never told me your dad owned a sweet shop !”

Prayer and its use come in many forms and if persistent prayer is all that this parable is about then perhaps we will reach a fairly disturbing conclusion as well, because that suggests that God hears persistent prayer better than he hears one-off prayers. It suggests some sort of reward for keeping-on ! But this isn’t the case at all.

This parable isn’t a call to persistence for the sake of it, but rather a call to keep trusting God who has promised to hear all of our prayers. I’m sure we have all prayed for things and it has seemed like those prayers haven’t been heard or at least answered – but what Jesus is saying here is that God is listening and answering however it looks to us at times !

Prayers are heard and answered in God’s way, not always in our way, and not always in a way that we can even understand. And so we have a call to remain faithful and trust in God. But I think the parable goes even further. The 2 central characters of the parable are particularly important clues to this.

There is the nasty judge. A man who has no respect for people or for God. A man who is not particularly interested in justice. Though the Jewish law made it clear that widows should be cared for, this wasn’t often the case, and it certainly wasn’t so with this man. And then there was the widow, defenceless against the power of the judge. Without his help she had no chance of helping herself. But she did all that she could do – she kept on, she pestered him so much that eventually he gave in and granted her the justice she deserved.

She did it herself, but perhaps this parable is also calling us to stand up for and help the disadvantaged, those who are unable to fight for themselves, those caught up in all kinds of misery, those without a voice in our society today. 

Individuals, like this widow, are all around us, fighting for some sort of justice, fighting for a life – some will keep going until they get it, but for others the battle will be too long and too difficult. As Christians we are called to be alongside them….

And there is another element to the parable as well. Firstly, there is a call to trust God, secondly, a call to be there for our neighbours, whoever they may be, and then Jesus ends with a challenge as he effectively sums all this up in that last sentence, ‘And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’

Jesus has promised that prayer will be heard, and he has promised that God will deliver justice to all, but what about our response ? 

Are we faithful in prayer, do we put our trust in God? 

And are we practising the kind of faith that is not just concentrating on a relationship with God or with the Church, but on a relationship with everyone around us, are we practising the kind of faith that makes a difference, not just to ourselves, but to others in our communities and throughout the world ??

Simone Weil, the French philosopher and mystic, once said, ‘"If you want to know whether someone is truly religious, do not listen to what they say about God, listen to what they say about the world" Perhaps we could even take that a stage further, and think not just about what we say, but about what we actually do…

We can be sure of God’s strength and power, and we can be sure of God’s love for us and for all people, seen in the life of Jesus, who came amongst us to offer hope, even to those in most despair… So let’s be people who look like our lives have been transformed by God, people who know his love and peace....

And strengthened by his power, may we go about offering this hope, and a message of love, peace and salvation available for all...

I’d like to finish with a short prayer : ‘Lord, help us to go into this week rejoicing in the knowledge that God's love permeates every fibre of our being, that Jesus' love is deeply inscribed on our heart, and that the Holy Spirit's love is the inspiration of our life.’ AMEN