Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY
Br. Luc Thuku, OHC
Pentecost, Proper 24 C - October 16, 2022
A woman in Kenya got married around 1965 and like every other woman of the time was expected to immediately bear and rear children to carry on the family name. She however stayed for 6 years before she gave birth to her first born child, a son. After that her womb seemed to have been closed again because she kept trying to conceive but could not. When the boy was 9 years old, he fell gravely ill with appendicitis which in the late 70’s and early 80’s was a killer illness in Kenya. Her life was crashing and her fear of being childless returned all over again. While the boy was in hospital recovering from the appendectomy and a co-infection picked up in the hospital, the mother decided to keep herself busy and went to work in her small scale farm with some ladies who were working for her as casual laborers. As is usual in my culture, as people work together they talk and sing.
At some point, this mother overwhelmed with sorrow sat down and wept bitterly. One of the casual laborers a lady who had a horrible speech impendiment came and sat next to her, broke a twig from a branch that was laying nearby and on the ground drew a Cross. She then stood up and went back to continue working with the others without saying a word. The mother slowly got to her feet, picked up her hoe and joined her workers. Although outwardly nothing had changed, she had received hope inwardly and an assurance that she could not put in words. To cut a long story short, the boy recovered and when the mother went to fetch him from hospital, she had a vomiting episode followed by diziness and when the doctors tested her, she was found to be pregnant and not just with one child but with a set of twins. After that set of twins, she went on and gave birth to 6 other children and she is the proud mother of one of the larger families in my village. This story had a happy ending…most don’t. We shall come back to this in a moment.
In the first reading we heard this morning from the prophecy of Jeremiah, We hear the prophet speak a reversal of Judgement. Israel had to suffer exile for her sins but God intends to reverse the exile, restore them to their land and gives the promise of a new covenant. Israel will become a new People of God in some day to come. They will get to know God to the fullest sense and will have God’s law written in their hearts. Finally and most important of all, they will experience a complete and total forgiveness of sins.
Our first reading gives the first sign of God acting to restore the covenant as re-population of the land with offspring of both people and animals. This Verse (Jeremiah 31:27) is important and relates to the story I gave in that while my friends mother was crying to God for children, she kept reciting this verse and claiming it for herself and she claims God heard and fulfilled this promise to her personally.
The exiles were lamenting in their misery, and being human like all of us, were most likely asking ‘why me’ in an effort to make sense of their situation. The end result was blaming God for punishing the wrong people although we do realize the truth of the fact that God occasionally punished the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation in scripture.
This we can relate with today when we see the intergenerational consequencies on children, of parents, especially those sent to jail for commiting crimes. The fact that the sins of one generation has consequencies on another is however not the same as saying that God punishes an innocent group for the sins of another group that is guilty. The problem with sticking to this understanding of generational curses or punishment, however, is that when bad things like exile, war and the like come, people have a tendency to think they are facing the consequenscies of the behaviors of others and often fail to admit culpability for their own situation.
Verse 30 of our text, however, tells us that people will be punished for their own sins, not the sins of others. I, and hopefully I am not wrong when I say most if not all of us, have enough sins in my own life to justify any punishment from God. To blame someone else will not work. The old order has been turned over and a new maxim is put in place that, whoever eats sour grapes will have their own teeth set on edge… his and nobody elses!
God also promises a restoration of relationship with the people with a new covenant that will be characterized by the knowledge of God being planted in people’s hearts. This time will be an era where the people of God will include more than the inhabitants of Israel and Judah. The knowledge of God will be for all nations and languages. We know that although the restoration begun with the return from exile and the rebuilding of the Temple, it was not fully established until the coming of Jesus who established a covenant not based on the law or ancestry, but purely on faith in him, whose death paid the price for our redemption and inclusion. It is this Jesus whom we hear in the gospel today instructing us on how we ought to relate with God and others.
If we go back to the story we heard at the beginning, what the stuttering woman did to my best friend’s mother that morning in her small farm, Jesus does for us today in the Gospel through the story of the widow and the Judge. My friend’s mother so much needed a renewal of hope and so do we! We need encouragement time and again in our life of faith and especially in regards to prayer. The stuttering woman communicated her message by drawing a cross on the ground but Jesus tells a story.
Two characters feature in Jesus’ parable… a Widow whom we have baptised Insistent and a judge baptized Unscrupulous. The Judge according to Jesus has neither decency nor a conscience. He is corrupt and only interested in amassing more for himself rather than serving justice. On the other hand the woman is a widow, she must be childless or a mother of girls only and that is why she is appearing to speak for herself in a culture that respected young boys more than their mothers; but what she lacks in money and male relatives, she has in courage and not just courage but persistent courage! She keeps returning to court until the judge acts, not because he decided she deserved justice but to spare himself from further annoyance.
By giving this story, Jesus was not telling us of how God operates because that would depict God as a petty bureucrat or a reckless abusive parent. God, as we heard in the first reading, is not hard hearted or uncaring. God is the author of all justice and compassion and a reverser of curses.
The person we are to immitate in this story is the persistent woman, and when we are in positions of authority should avoid the character of the Judge like a plague! Infact, the woman is a representation of God despite her ‘loud mouth’, or because of it!…God is ever attempting to break into our closed selves to draw us into a relation with Him and others. God is shouting to our ears and into our hearts yearning for justice for those we oppress, those we exclude. He is shouting to the unjust Judge in each of us and the purpose of our insistent prayer is to wear out our hardness of heart, to force us to do justice to ourselves and others. Our prayer is the widows voice, loud but sane insisting that things be different.
Most of us give up on prayer because we put God as the primary focus and keep thinking because he is an all knowing being, we are telling God what God already knows, or persuading God to do other than what He would not otherwise do, or even attempting to change God’s mind. However the primary focus and effect of prayer should be on me, on us. This is because God’s love is unconditional, His justice perfect, His mercy and compassion boundless. God Knows of our needs way before we do. We therefore ought to pray not to inform or change God, but to change ourseleves to fall in line with God. Prayer then becomes our declaration that we want to be opened up, that we are not dependent on ourselves and that we do not know it all. In this we need to be confident, persistent and unconcerned with what others think about us.
Prayer will help us check our attitudes, our doubts that make us feel unworthy, and misplaced humility. This morning Paul reminds us through his letter to Timothy that we should continue in what we have learned and firmly believed knowing from whom we learned it; God himself who writes His law direclty into our hearts. He reminds us that all Sacred Scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness so that everyone who belongs to God may be proficient, equipped for all good work.
Paul goes ahead and urges us to proclaim the message, the goodnews, and be persistent while at it, whether the time is favorable or unfavorable. The stuttering woman in our story could not let a fellow woman and mother continue in anguish knowing there is something she could do. When a person is in pain or anguish, that would not be regarded as a favorable time to speak to them about the goodness of God as per conventional wisdom but not for this stutterer! Her love of neighbor, her empathy, her compassion, her firm conviction and her knowledge that the God of the good times is still God in the bad times, emboldened her! Because she lacked words…literally, she used the earth to proclaim the message of hope, the message that the Cross symbolizes! Paul urges us to convince, to rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching and why? Because these are evil days. The time is coming and is already here when people do not put up with sound doctrine but have developed itching ears and have accumulated teachers to suit their own desires. We have turned away from listening to the truths and have wondered away to myths. We have abandoned the discipline and blessings that come from perserverance for quick fixes!
God On The Mountain - song by Lynda RandleLife is easy, when you're up on the mountainAnd you've got peace of mind, like you've never knownBut things change, when you're down in the valleyDon't lose faith, for you're never aloneFor the God on the mountain, is still God in the valleyWhen things go wrong, He'll make them rightAnd the God of the good timesIs still God in the bad timesThe God of the day is still God in the nightYou talk of faith when you’re up on the mountainBut talk comes so easy when life's at its bestNow it’s down in the valley, of trials and temptationsThat's where your faith, is really put to the testFor the God on the mountain is still God in the valleyWhen things go wrong, He'll make them rightAnd the God of the good timesIs still God in the bad timesThe God of the day, is still God in the nightThe God of the day, is still God in the night
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