October 19, 2025 First Congregational Church UCC, Brimfield 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.
How does it make you feel when you hear this story? Have you ever found yourself mired in a no win situation, where prayer is all that’s left, and it’s not working? I know I have. And I have to say, when I’m in that place, reading this particular parable, story, isn’t all that helpful. It kinda feels like a condemnation of my ability to pray. Do you know what I mean? If only I were more persistent, if only I were stronger, then that unjust judge would respond.
Now, all the scholars are united in the idea that when Jesus told this story, what he wanted us to know is that God is ever so much more faithful than the unjust judge, and that God will give us what we ask for. It’s just that I’m not sure, at least for myself, that his idea works today the way he intended.
And so, I want to turn the story inside out and see if it doesn’t make more sense that way.
Here’s what I mean:
We always hear this as the story of the poor believer begging the mean judge to listen to them, right? But what happens if we think of it as if the widow is actually God, begging an unbelieving person to listen for God’s love? What if we’re like the judge and God is like the widow?
It seems to me that when we turn the story inside out, it becomes a story of a loving God who never gives up calling us to be our best selves. It becomes a story that helps us understand just who we are and who we can be. And that’s really good news.
Last fall, when I had just come here, I began treatment for type 2 diabetes. I should have known that it was coming. My dad was diabetic, his sister was diabetic, my brother is, too, but like many folks (see how I’m excusing my choices?) I chose to ignore those road signs, and continued not only to eat what I wanted, and as much as I wanted, but paid no attention to my weight. And I knew that, while for some, my weight wouldn’t be a problem, for my health it was… well, I’d certainly heard the doctor say that, but I can’t quite say honestly that I paid it much attention.
So, there I was, closing my ears to the persistent comments of my (very good) primary care physician. Like the judge in the story, I didn’t want to hear anything that would mean giving up all the foods I loved.
Mean people like being mean the same way people like me like to eat donuts. We don’t think about the consequences. In fact, we really don’t think consequences exist.
But God is like that widow woman. She saw the consequences of what was going on. She saw mistreatment, she saw that her world was not operating along God’s principles, but rather along the desires and wants of selfish and greedy people. And so she kept on knocking at the door, kept on reminding him that there was more to the world than his selfish wants and desires, kept on loving him.
That’s the good news for today. No matter how hard we work to close our eyes to the parts of life we don’t want to see, no matter how we turn away from the needs of others to satisfy the wants in our own hearts, God will persist.
What’s wrong will never be right. What’s right will never change.
Sure, it’s easier to keep on doing what feels good, what satisfies our surface wants. But when we do that, we’re just skimming off the un-nourishing parts of life, making our lives something like living on the icing on the cake.
It’s when we dig in and live a whole life, recognizing the good and the bad, standing up and naming when things are wrong, it’s then that we’re fully nourished, and growing into our real identity as Christians.
It’s not easy. It’s easy to close your eyes to evil, it’s easy to say there’s nothing to see here. Being a Christian means keeping your eyes open not just to pretty trees and great cider donuts – it’s means noticing when someone cringes at the sound of a gunshot, or when someone is still wearing a tatty sweater in January – does that mean they don’t have a coat?
Being a Christian is about not just noticing but also working towards making things better. So we feed the hungry at Dismas House. We collected school supplies to help kids and teachers. We open the doors of this church so that folks can come in and experience unconditional love. We continue to learn to pay attention, to hear the ways in which people hurt, and to do what we can to build a community where we can love and care for one another.
It isn’t easy, but it’s the faithful way to go. Today’s story reminds us that we have choices in our world. We can be like that unjust judge, ignoring the pain of others and only responding when we begin to get annoyed by their persistence. We can take that easy path.
Or we can take the hard way, the challenging way, the way that calls us to pay attention, to take action, to be representatives of God’s unfailing love, here in our church, in our families, in our world.
Which will it be – the easy way or the hard way?
Amen.
© 2025, Virginia H. Child
To Believe is to Care. . . To Care is to Do 