A sermon preached by Bill Countryman at Good Shepherd Berkeley

19th Sunday after Pentecost, October 20, 2019

Proper 24C: Jeremiah31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

“I have more understanding than my teachers. . . . 

I am wiser than the elders. . . .”(Ps. 119)

I never hear these words without being transported back to my student days in a very stuffy seminary on the other coast, where such sentiments were firmly discouraged. We all sat in assigned seats in chapel, faculty in the highest row, students, ranked by class, below them. And whenever this Psalm came round in Morning or Evening Prayer, a little chuckle would rise from the lowest rows and be answered by a faint snort from on high.

But the truth is that wisdom and understanding are not the monopoly of any age group. I think, for example, of the young people in our own time who are pressing such issues as the environment and gun violence on their supposedly wiser elders. We may—I hope we do—gain new insight as we age; but sometimes we may lose insights we had caught earlier on. And, in any case, the world keeps changing around us so that the wisdom that fit the 1960s may no longer respond well to the teens of the present century.

I’m not sure what prompted the lectionary to give us this particular Psalm today. But the other readings we’ve heard do a good job of reminding us how our world keeps changing and how new wisdom is demanded of us again and again.

Take, to begin with, the reading from 2 Timothy. As some of you know, there is a good chance that this letter was not actually written by Paul, given that it reflects a situation in the church several decades after Paul’s lifetime. (It wasn’t unusual in antiquity for people to write works under the name of earlier figures as they sought to interpret what they might have said to changed situations.) 

But, as I read this passage, I almost felt as if the author of 2 Timothy was speaking prophetically: 

The time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths.

Could there be a clearer prediction of the turn that public discourse has taken in the era of the internet and the web? “Don’t tell me things I don’t want to hear. I don’t care how much scientific evidence you have for them.”

But it was also a pretty good description of early Christianity. Starting off with an astonishing new message about love—the love of God and the love of neighbor—it developed over just a few decades into a welter of sometimes quite bizarre transformations. The center had difficulty holding. The disciple of Paul who wrote this letter was trying to bring people’s attention back to more central things. 

In other words, he was preparing for hard times. He felt a need to rein things back in. Sometimes he may have gone too far. He’s so anxious about people’s thirst for the new and strange and unpredictable that he practically winds up telling people (particularly women) to just sit down and be quiet, which is just another way of losing the focus on love. You can lose the focus on love by turning it weird, but you can also lose it by making it boring, dogmatic, cut-and-dried. 

But what I take from this reading is that we have here one of our early Christian forebears face to face with a world that seemed to flying apart. And our author says to the new generation of leaders, “Don’t give up. Don’t surrender. Be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable. Convince, rebuke, and encourage with the utmost patience in teaching.” 

In a world going crazy, we can profit from this admonition. The wisdom of persistence is something we have to take with us into the years to come. 

It would be a mistake, though, to assume that it’s all downhill from here, that the trends of the last four or five years are inalterable. It feels now as if our world is disintegrating. And we may be living with that, one way and another, for some years to come. But there is no such thing as an inalterable track for history, whether you think of it in modern terms as eternal progress or in ancient terms as endless decline. History goes up and down. Bad times give way to good, which give way at some point to bad. 

We also heard the prophet Jeremiah today saying that things will get better. Who? Jeremiah? the tearful prophet? the prophet of bad things followed by worse? the prophet who predicted the destruction of Jerusalem and lived through it personally and saw everything go—the Temple, the kingship, the people’s hopes all shattered.

But today he’s in an oddly hopeful moment:

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will sow the house of Israel and the house of Judah with the seed of humans and the seed of animals. And just as I have watched over them to pluck up and break down, to overthrow, destroy, and bring evil, so I will watch over them to build and to plant, says the Lord.

2 Timothy sees chaos on the horizon. Jeremiah, who’s been through chaos and lived to tell about it, sees hope.

It’s not a bad picture of human existence over the long haul. Things may seem to be stable and predictable, but then it turns out that they are threatening to spin out of control. We’re left with the wreckage of a lot of our hopes and dreams and don’t know where to turn, really, but then we may begin to spy some sign of hope. 

But the real question for us isn’t so much “Will it get better or will it get worse?” The only answer to that is “Well, yes.” The real question is how do we live, whichever way it seems to be going? For that we need hope and courage and persistence and the willingness to take some risks and trust the ongoing power of God’s love—love for us and for the world.

And that’s where our gospel reading from Luke comes in. The passage is often referred to as “The Parable of the Unjust Judge.” But that’s wrong. The judge is just a stock figure in this story. Unjust judges were a dime a dozen in Jesus’ time. If you hear some one in the scriptures being praised as having judged justly, that’s high praise; that’s the exception. Admittedly this unjust judge is an extreme example. Many judges were just fudging things because they were afraid of the powerful people in town and didn’t want to cross them. But this one boasts about it: “I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone!” But he’s still a stock figure.

No. This is the Parable of the Persistent Widow. She’s the odd, unsettling figure here. Widows were supposed to be meek and mousy and helpless and not call attention to themselves. But she has figured out that she has power—the power to become an insufferable nuisance! It’s brilliant. But just think what it took. “Persistent” is hardly a strong enough term. She devotes her entire existence for however long it takes to force the judge to deal with her. She becomes completely single-minded and refuses to accept the possibility of defeat, even though she’s clearly sane enough to know that that’s still where it might all end. She lives by persistence—by hope and courage and a willingness to risk, trusting the ongoing power of God’s love.

You can see why she’s such an important figure for us as we wade once again into a time of new turbulence in human history. In fact, I hereby proclaim her the patron saint of all social protest movements. This turbulence is an integral part of human existence, not just some stray aberration that’s come crashing in on us from outer space. This is history. Human existence is always in the middle of a process of growth and decay and disaster and rebuilding. This is the universe we live in. This is the reality through which our ancestors passed during the long, stumbling journey of human evolution. This is still at the core of our history and it will continue to be for ages to come. 

But it isn’t the goal. God’s goal is to plant, not to destroy. Even Jeremiah eventually found the strength to say that. And our experiences of loss and distress are ultimately a part of the longed-for replanting. That’s where we need to place ourselves here and now—for our nation, for the world, for ourselves and our communities. Perhaps each of us has only a small gift of persistence, but together we have a great one. We shall not be discouraged. The love of God is indeed the central power of our world, however much fights against it. The love of neighbor makes human life joyful and powerful. And when we look round at unjust judges and people who want to replace truth with myths and leaders who care only for themselves and a world suffering from our own past mistakes and greed, we will persist. We will make intolerable nuisances of ourselves. Because God is in this with us, however hard it may be to see what God is up to at the moment. God is in it to build up, not to tear down. And that is the wisdom all of us, young and old, truly need.