August 3, 2025 Joint Worship Service in Southbridge MA
Luke 18:1–8
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 accuser.’ 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?”
May the words of my mouth and the meditations of our hearts be acceptable in your sight, O God our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen.
We are the luckiest people in the world.
Look all around us… look at this beautiful day, this beautiful place… see that we’re here with friends new and long-standing, gathered to worship God and to have fun together.
It could have been 95, right?
It could have been raining.
This is New England; it could just as easily be 62… and raining….
Being together, sharing food, playing games, caring for one another, listening to stories about God, this is as close to heaven as we can get.
And that’s important to remember, because so much of our world stinks.
Sometimes life is so hard it’s almost unendurable.
Maybe for you the hard part is going on out in the world. Maybe it’s a challenge at home.
Maybe part of it is that it seems as though you ought to be handling this better – after all you’re a church-going person! Maybe it feels as though you’re making too much of what’s happening, other people pooh-pooh your concerns?
But here, in this place, in this company we are committed to naming the truth of our world.
If you’re seeing challenges, know they are real. We don’t need to agree on what those problems are to know that they are real problems.
We can be on different sides of arguments and still know that arguing hurts.
The Gospel lesson today is the story of a woman who knows she has a problem — and a judge who wants to pretend the problem doesn’t exist, so he won’t have to do anything. He’s got all the power; she has none. And her complaining, her petitioning, doesn’t seem to be getting anywhere.
You can see how this might fit in with today. We see bad things happening. And though we go to God in prayer, we don’t see changes – just like the woman, it’s as if no one cares.
Maybe a hundred years ago, a little girl got the measles. She was a bright little thing, the apple of her family’s eye, the last of five children. But she got the measles, and – as sometimes happens even now – her measles turned into encephalitis. And encephalitis meant irreversible damage to her brain. She was no longer a bright, happy little child. She wasn’t bright at all, and more and more frequently was taken by uncontrollable bursts of temper. Her family was horrified, and then they were terrified. In tears and defeat, their beloved daughter went to live at a state school and there she died when she was six.
Some twenty years later, her oldest sister had a baby who turned out to have cognitive limitations. When the medical folks said she and her husband should put the baby away at the state school, she remembered her sister, and said . . No. We can do this hard thing. And they did. They kept their daughter home, educated her to her fullest capacity, taught her to be a loving and responsible member of society.
More than that, she worked to make life better for all the other children born with cognitive limitations. She fought to educate people so they wouldn’t be afraid of kids with challenges, fought to create a system of dispersed residences, so children who needed that kind of care would not have to go so far away. She fought to create respectable jobs, and then to create homes in smaller, more family-sized groups. (She didn’t do this alone; there was a whole team. But she was a sparkplug who made things happen.)
Someone once urged her to go to one of those faith healing crusades, saying that with prayer, God would heal her daughter, make her whole. The parents both said, our daughter is whole; this is who she is, and healing her, changing her, just isn’t going to happen. We aren’t going to make her think we don’t love her as she is. Besides, she would never understand when nothing changed. It would break her heart.
But every day, with God’s guidance, those parents did heal their daughter.
They healed her from society’s contempt.
They healed her from the expectation that she couldn’t learn, couldn’t contribute to society.
They even healed her from the expectation that her physical problems would see her dead before she was twenty.
Instead she lived out a full life. And at the same time, their efforts healed the world for others – other young people didn’t have to leave home when they were little kids, other affected people were able to get jobs. I just looked it up the other day – reports say that there are almost 15,000 people under the care of her state; every one of them, and every family member, has a better life because of the efforts of that young woman beset with tragedy as a teen, and then again as a young mother. Healing isn’t about fixing the broken thing; it’s about making good out of tragedy.
So, here’s the thing to remember today: God is not an unjust judge, only responding because we’ve annoyed him for too long. God loves us, creates us out of love, leads and guides and comforts us, out of love. We know God is going to be standing right beside us, no matter how terrible the day.
God stands with us.
God isn’t our creature, doesn’t make “everything all right” like some kind of cheap magic trick, as if we’ve bought healing from God.
God doesn’t remake the world to our specifications.
God has put us in a world that has infinite possibility for good, and an equally infinite possibility of horror or evil. We have been given the potential; it is our work to make good, to create love, to live in joy, out of the day-to-day realities of our world. And we do all that work knowing that God is at our side, offering the gifts of patience, persistence, vision, courage, companionship and love.
If I’m not clear yet, we are the most fortunate of people because God has given each of us a life worth living, given each of us ways to make our world better, no so much for ourselves, but for our communities, our neighbors, our families, ourselves. And when the worst happens, our God will not leave us alone.
Amen.
© 2025, Virginia H. Child
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 