19th Sunday after Pentecost-The Rev Melanie Lemburg
19th Sunday after Pentecost-Proper 24C
October 16, 2022
My paternal grandfather was a United
Methodist minister; I grew up visiting his church, seeing him in his black robe
in the pulpit, hearing him preach. He
was a big man with a deep voice and a commanding presence.
The very first church that I served was
in the same town as the last church Pop had served—the one he officially
retired from. It was a small town and
everyone knew who I was—the young, female, Episcopal priest (with a husband and
new baby) in rural, Southwest Mississippi.
When I went places in town, it was not uncommon for me to run into
someone who would tell me a story about my grandfather. Their favorite stories to tell were the
stories when Pop threatened to beat someone up.
(Yes, there were many of those stories.)
You see, my grandfather was a boxer in
his youth, and there are some parts of us that even seminary and ordination
cannot temper. And it seems that while
he didn’t employ the threat often, there were occasions when Pop thought a
person needed more than words and prayers to whip them back into shape and make
them act right. As best I could tell, no one ever needed to take him up on his
offer to “step outside” with him. The
offer itself was enough to steer the offender back onto the right path. And what I came to learn was that underneath
these stories of my grandfather as a fighter was a man who loved his flock
fiercely and who was willing to fight to make the world a better place (and to
get people to do better, to be better).
Our scriptures for today give us two
stories about people who are fighting for what they want and what they believe
in. First, there is Jacob, who is
returning home and mentally preparing for a big showdown/fight with his brother
Esau who he has cheated out of their father’s blessing. Jacob, the quintessential, scrappy conman,
has sent his entourage ahead when he encounters the mysterious stranger with
whom he fights all night. When the two
reach an impasse, with Jacob holding on for dear life, he demands a blessing
from the stranger-perhaps in the hope it will give him a leg-up in the coming
fight with his brother. And the stranger
not only gives him a blessing, but he also gives him a new name—Israel—which
literally means “God-fighter.”[i]
Then there’s the parable from Luke about
a widow and an unjust judge. Luke gives
the story a framework, telling us that Jesus tells the story to teach his
disciples about “the need to pray always and not lose heart” and about faith or
faithfulness. And Jesus’s parable is all
about fighting. The widow has an
“adversary”, and she keeps going to the judge demanding justice or possibly
vengeance (the word can be translated as either) from the judge toward her adversary. We don’t know what the issue is or whether
the woman’s cause is just or unjust. The
strangely self-aware judge, who admits he doesn’t fear God or respect people,
decides that he will give the widow what she is asking for so that she “won’t
give [him] a black eye”. (The word that
is translated in our reading for today as so that she won’t “wear me out by
continually coming” is actually a Greek boxing term that means to give someone
a black eye. We may very well be seeing
some of Jesus’s humor at work in this.)
Jesus is telling a story about a judge who isn’t afraid of God or other
peoples’ perceptions of him but who is afraid of a widow giving him a black eye
(or at least continuing to bother him with her demand).
So, what does all this have to do with
us or with our faith or with our relationship with God? I’ll confess that my first instinct is to
identify with the fighter. The very
opposite of losing heart is being willing to fight for something or
someone. What does that mean to fight
for something in our relationship with God, in our faith? Maybe it means showing up and when all else
fails, holding on for dear life until God gives us something akin to what we
demand. Maybe it means nagging, again
and again, when even we are sick of the sound of our own voice asking…demanding
justice. Maybe it means finding the same
fire for justice or vengeance or self-interest toward God and the potential for
God’s kingdom in the here and now, in and among us. Maybe it means asking ourselves what do we
love enough to fight for, and how does our faith become that fierce and fiery,
too?
But what if the fighters in these two
stories are meant to reveal to us something about God? What would it mean for us to think that God
fights for what God loves and values with the tenacious, scrappy, persistent
passion of Jacob? What if God fights for
us with the single-minded purpose of a scorned widow seeking vengeance?
If we knew and believed God was already,
always fiercely fighting for us, how would that change our faith? How would that change the way we pray, what
we pray for? Your invitation this week
is to embrace this image of God fiercely fighting for you and to pay attention
to what happens, how that changes you.
[i] From
the Shocken Bible: Volume 1 translated by Everett Fox . Shocken Books:
New York, 1995, 155.
Comments
Post a Comment