It’s a Beautiful Day to Yell at God.

Luke 18:1-8

A friend of mine recently shared an image with me of an abstract scene in which three figures are shaking their fists at the sky and shouting expletives toward the sun. The caption read “It’s a Beautiful Day to Yell at God.” Among other phrases, one figure cries out “Face us you coward!” Another friend commented that Jesus actually did, in fact, face us. Jesus, God incarnate, came down to face the people who prayed fervently for a new world, a new regime, a new kind of justice.  Not only did God respond by showing up among us, but God confronted us at our worst and loved us to death– his own death, with all the fear and violence and pain that came with it. This is not a god that is too fragile for our anger. This is not a god that is too proud for our disappointment. This is not a god that takes offense, not even when the things we hurl at him are too crass for the pulpit or the pew.

During my recent residency as a Kanuga Fellow, I had the good fortune to learn from the Reverend Doctor Allison St Louis, an Episcopal priest and licensed clinical psychologist. One of the things Dr St Louis taught us was how our beliefs about God’s power and presence influence our behaviors and our fears. If you believe God to be all powerful, but distant, a clockmaker who set the wheels in motion and walked away, you will fear and expect God’s abandonment. You will learn that God cannot be relied upon, and that praying for your own needs is an act of desperation that is not worth the risk. If you believe God to be overpowering and yourself the subject of divine surveillance, you will fear the loss of your agency and the presence of God will feel like a threat. If you believe God is powerless to help us, if you view God as a distant and impotent concept, what is the point of encountering God at all? A powerless and distant God creates a fear of our own powerlessness, a responsibility to be our own savior without the means to save anyone at all. If you view God as all-powerful and up-close, a puppet master pulling every little string, then the only explanation for the suffering in the world is a capricious, fickle God who does not care how his puppeteering harms or damages his puppets. I don’t know about you, but none of these descriptions sound like Jesus to me.

The center of the model Dr St Louis shared with us was, appropriately, a cross, a center point where the two continuums met in the middle. At the center, the middle way between extremes, is the God we meet in the incarnation. Empowering and empathetic, this God has the power to make an impact and shares that power with us. This God comes close to us, understands us, listens to us and hears everything we’re afraid to say. This God cares about our hopes, our dreams, our desires, and respects and protects our free will at all costs. This God is worthy of our trust, our vulnerability, our love. This is a God who is willing to come down and face us, to endure our curses and our anger and our distrust, to let us call God every name under the sun and still embrace us when we finally collapse in tearful exhaustion.

Where on the spectrum do we think the widow in the parable falls? What about the judge? What about Jesus? What about us?

The widow is persistent in her pursuit of justice, perhaps more persistent than many of us would have the fortitude to emulate. There are entire systems in our economy that rely on the likelihood that we will give up and move on rather than follow the example of the persistent widow’s pestering. Have any of you ever tried to cancel an Amazon account before? They have layer upon layer of opportunities for you to get exhausted and change your mind. They move the confirmation and cancellation buttons around on the screen so that with each new page you run the risk of accidentally returning to the start, as if you had changed your mind. Many subscription-based services now make cancellation so troublesome that most people have neither the time nor the energy to go through the process, so we keep spending money and the owners of the systems keep profiting. If it takes the fortitude of the persistent widow just to cancel an online service, it is no wonder so many of us are feeling drained, apathetic, and even despondent.

But the persistent widow’s actions show us what it looks like when someone believes in an empowering and empathetic God, one who cares greatly for her welfare and empowers her to advocate for justice to be done. That tenacity, that insistence, that deep down belief that her actions can make a difference, is not the product of a belief in a distant or powerless God. She, like so many real life women and men of faith, has a prayer life that feeds her and fuels her actions.

The judge is apathetic, disengaged, uninterested in the basic requirements of his role and actively disrespectful of his cultural and religious duty to protect vulnerable widows. He has become his own god, his power wielded over others and his mercy extended selectively and unpredictably. Even when he does render judgment and justice is done, he does so purely out of self-interest. He is tired of hearing from this woman, he is bored and annoyed and ready to move on. His idolatry blinds him to his own sin, and ultimately the woman receives recompense in spite of him, not because of him.

We are meant to see the irony in this, the humor even. Jesus tells this story of a judge who can’t be bothered to do his job and only caves when he becomes too annoyed to ignore the buzzing of the supplicant in his ear. The judge is a caricature, a cartoon of lazy disinterest. By contrast, Jesus points out, God has chosen us and is anything but disinterested in our welfare. If even a disrespectful, blasphemous, selfish politician will eventually act justly if enough pressure is applied, how much more will the God who loves us give freely what we need most. After all, our persistent prayers are not directed toward the unjust judge; our prayers are addressed to Jesus, our empowering, empathetic God.

Some of the most faithful prayer warriors I have ever known have been women who have seen suffering, who have known loss, who know intimately the damage of justice deferred. These are the people most comfortable with shouting at the sky, with asking God to come down and face them, because they have faced down things bigger than themselves before. They know that they can ask God for what they need, because they trust God to listen and to challenge them and to understand what they’re really asking for. They know the power of God because they have felt it in their own lives, they have seen what comes of faith the size of a mustard seed because there have been days that was the most they could muster. Maybe that’s why Jesus chose a distressed widow to make his point about prayer to his disciples. It takes wisdom to know when and how to persist, and to understand that some prayers will not be answered in one lifetime. It takes wisdom to know that God’s justice will always be done. We do not pray to pester God, although God probably wouldn’t mind it much if we tried. We persist in prayer because God persists in loving us. God insists on including us in the story, on inviting our participation in salvation history. We pray because it is how we learn our role, how we rehearse our lines in the great narrative of divine justice and mercy. We pray “thy kingdom come” until we really mean it. So pray always, and never lose heart.