Saint Mark's Church

Preached by Dcn. Paul Francke

“Will not God vindicate his elect who cry to him day and night? I tell you, he will vindicate them speedily. Even so, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?” (St Luke)

One of the many rivers in this country still called by its Native American name is a river called Kanawha, the meaning of which has been lost. There’s a certain city that rises from the north bank of the Kanawha, flanked by a large capitol building not unlike the national Capital. Staring at the capitol across on the opposite banks of the Kanawha, stand four or five quiet, forested hills: ancient hills, which were once mountains. Pig farmers settled there first, people who weren’t able to settle any closer to the city because of the nature of their work. Later, after the First World War there came professional families who found they could nestle themselves in those hills and feel comfortably distant from the city across the river below, even though the city itself is pretty quiet to begin with. On the very top of one of those hills across the river from the city, there is a tall Depression-era house, uphill even from the nearest street, which is pretty slow compared with Locust Street. The house has an angular, slate roofline, white painted brick walls, and windows hidden and hushed by tall vines. The whole reason the house was built there is so that it would be quiet. And it is, quiet, now. It’s been even quieter since I moved away from it, alleviating it of my songwriting, which once meant lots of prepubescent wailing, painfully and unintentionally off key, about things I did not understand as a 9 year old – things like love, lost love, and England.

That house which was built to be quiet was indeed very, very quiet one night, two years after I’d left for college, when my Mom was awakened by a caller asking  “Are you the parent of Paul Francke?” Mom soon learned that, 500 miles away in a very unquiet city of 3 million people, I had had a grand-mal seizure on the floor of an E.R. waiting room, and that it took 3 large orderlies to hold me down, after which I went into a coma. My parents were not told why, or what were my chances, because no one knew. It was a good thing for me, during the days I spent in that coma, that we do not need to cry out to God day and night for God to keep our souls in life.

I didn’t even believe in God at the time, let alone could I have been the agitating gadfly to him that the widow was to the unrighteous judge (St Luke 18:1-8a). It was a good thing for me that God is not like the unjust judge, and does not need to be annoyed into action. Nothing would have been less compelling to the unrighteous judge than if the righteous widow suddenly fell silent, comatose, unable to plead her case. (The analogy doesn’t completely hold because I wasn’t any more ‘righteous’ than average at that time in my life, but I was a decent runner, and I was suffering from hyponatremia, an electrolyte imbalance that sometimes happens to marathon runners. That’s what had put me in the coma.) Had God been like the unrighteous judge, he would have forgotten about me as soon as he’d gotten his hands on the morning paper.

It’s a good thing God is not like that (not least because ‘he’ is only mystically a ‘he’ or ‘she,’ with no actual ‘big hands’ to read the morning paper), because, that means God’s people aren’t called to be fickle and careless with each other, either. Our Gospel story of the persistent widow and the unjust judge is prefaced by an editorial comment not found in the more ancient telling of this story, in Mark. Luke takes the earlier story, but starts it off with these new words: “And Jesus told them a parable, to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.” For sure, we ought always to pray and not lose heart, but I wonder if that editorial comment really takes in Jesus’ strong words at the end of this parable, the words which our lectionary cuts off: “Even so, will the Son of Man find faith on the Earth?”

Jesus tells what the unrighteous Judge is like, and says metaphorically that God will be even quicker to care for his people than the unjust Judge is to vindicate the widow, because God’s people also cry to God day and night. But even though we do pray day and night, Jesus asks: will the Son of Man find faith on the Earth? For all our words, is there faith? For all our crying, is there trust? Not necessarily, he suggests, and he continues to suggest this in other parables.

We ought indeed to pray day and night when those prayers have meaning. We’ve got to declare injustice, like the widow. We’ve got to locate the ways that we and others and especially those in authority fall short of truth and love, and we must be as persistent as the widow in pushing them to change their ways. But although that is how we bring about change in ourselves and in the world, that’s not, thankfully, what we need to do to reassure ourselves that we’re loved, when our relationships are at their best – and I say that because there is a faint implication in this story, especially given the way Luke changes it from the more ancient version, that says God might just require our constant crying in order to take care of us. But that would not be true, because God, of course, is greater than the unjust judge.

When my parents rushed 500 miles to my side the night that I fell into a coma, I can assure you it wasn’t because I was persistent in prodding them to notice me; they came to my side because they loved me. When you and I are too weak, too forgetful, even too lost in joy to cry out consciously to God, God is already there with us, already watching us, already gracing us with his regard for us. And it’s a good thing that we can have a similarly implicit, time-warn trust in each other.

We get into really shaky, Jerry Springer territory whenever our relationships become crowded with cries to be noticed, real or figurative cries that say, “look, look - don’t forget about me.” When those cries start to underlie our conversations Jesus indeed has cause to question our faith: not just our faith in God, but our faith in ourselves and our partners and friends as we bear the image of God. Though you cry out day and night, Jesus asks in Luke, even so, will the Son of Man find faith on the Earth? It’s usually when we have the least trust in someone else that we cry out to them for a reminder of how they feel about us. I’m not saying DTRs haven’t saved my life, just that if they happen every other week, and if we’re suggesting them in passive aggressive ways, something’s up. On the better side of things, it’s possible over time to develop instincts which allow us to trust, to have faith, to know pretty well what someone else thinks of us. When we and another person have known each other for awhile, we begin to be able to trust our instincts, and to lie down to sleep with relative certainty that that person’s feelings for us aren’t going away over night.

That certainty is waiting to be renewed with each other and with God. A quiet trust lies beyond the irritating regularity of the sqeaky wheel asking for grease, beyond the noisy gong and the clanging symbol which have not love, beyond an endlessly rebellious child’s silence which cries its own cry day and night – beyond all that crying, there is a calm, to which Jesus points. There’s a point when we’ve been through enough ups and downs, enough failures, embarrassments, half-victories and grey areas to be able to say: this man has his flaws as I do, this child and I have our sore points, but even so, when I start to worry about them I can be still and know that this is my spouse, this is my child, this is my church, and especially, if nothing else, this is my God. They love me, they’re here for me, and I don’t have to cry out day and night to be reminded. (And if I do want them to remind me, I’m pretty sure they’ll always be happy to.)

We’re not always at that point of calm in our relationships, of course. We go through phases where almost none of our relationships have that implicit trust, that faith which is as well founded as we can humanly discern. That place of quiet trust isn’t where we always find ourselves, but, the Gospel tells us, it’s a place we can always aim for, a reality we can enter, at least with some people.

We get there, paradoxically, through words that can sometimes be painful – not painful out of hate, but painful sometimes out of embarrassment, out of vulnerability, awkwardness, and healthy admissions of anger. We get to that place especially with the people we’ve known longest by saying we’re sorry, so that we can be forgiven. We get there through the determination to broach touchy subjects, so we can learn the hard, stark facts, so that in turn we can forgive what we need to forgive in others. We get to that implicit trust by knowing when silence is being used as an aggressive tool on one hand, or on the other hand, knowing when silence is good: when it is truer and subtler than words.

So it would seem good to ask ourselves from time to time: when I cry out to my friend, to my family, to my God, what’s behind that cry? What’s underneath it? Am I asking for what I really want, and this thing that I want, is it good? In other words, am I coming to prayer to return to God, to bring my thoughts, needs, hopes for the world and thanksgivings before God, to witness myself being re-consecrated to God? Or am I coming to prayer because I’m afraid there’s no other way God will remember me? Am I yelling at my partner because I’m afraid there’s no other way he or she’ll remember me? What’s behind my words when I ‘cry out’ to other people, to appropriate Gospel language for something we do all the time, in various ways? What is my silence crying? Why has it been so long since I called my family? What’s behind that? ‘Did my kids really deserve that lecture I just gave them, or is there something in my life that I’m taking out on them?’, you might ask. What am I really trying to say?

What we should be trying to say is what the psalmist believes God can say to him, in the 139th psalm. With our children, our partner, or closest friends, there can be a closeness that admits of saying to them: ‘I know you. I know how you act; I know pretty well how you think. I’ve seen you doing what it is you love, what it is you do best, I’ve seen your ridiculous sense of humor, and I love seeing you at it. Sometimes, I know you well enough that I can guess what you’re going to say before you say it. I want to guard and protect you, and I want to give you a shoulder when you need to be comforted. There are some things you know that I don’t, and that’s okay.’

And of course we should be prone to say such things to our children, our partner, our friends, our fellow parishioners, those who disagree with us, or even strangers, because we do have a God who says those things to us. And even more than this, we have a God who says: ‘If you ascend to heaven, I am there; if you make the grave your bed, I am there also; you have my body, you have my blood; no matter where you go, no matter what you say. I made your bones and filled you with my Spirit, in which you can be still and know that I am God, even when you can no longer pray.’