Tag Archives: Prayer

The Persistent Widow – Luke 18: 1-8

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Have you ever made a commitment to doing something and then found it really hard? Perhaps a friend has asked you for a favour and you’ve agreed before finding out what they want, and what seemed like a simple job turns into a nightmare. Or perhaps you have started to decorate the lounge only to realise that the plaster is really damp and you need a new damp-proof membrane. If we are not going to just put our heads in our hands and give up, these circumstances call for perseverance.

What other kinds of things have you had to face? Where have you had to persevere against the odds? … Perhaps it is a visit to the hospital, and as you sit waiting for your appointment, or in the casualty department, you begin to realise just how dependent you are on others, how out of control life feels. Or the trip to the benefit office, where you are asked all sorts of intrusive questions and you feel like walking out, but you know that you have to stick it if you’re going to get the cash you so desperately need. Or perhaps you are struggling with the cost of feed and seed rising and the value of grants and the income from produce depleting.

Our Gospel reading this morning talks of a woman facing just this kind of circumstance. Can you imagine how she might have been feeling? Waiting for someone else to do something. Being rebuffed time and again. Sitting in the waiting room, wondering if this time, on this visit, something might be done to change her circumstances. How does she feel? …… Perhaps you can hear the desperation in her cry for justice, “For heavens sake, grant me justice against my adversary. Things just cannot go on like this. I can’t cope any longer.” …. Or perhaps you can hear her anger, “I’m not moving from this spot until you grant me what I ask. And I mean it! I’m not moving, not an inch.” ……

It is quite an image. … Jesus uses it to get us to think about prayer. To show us that we should always pray and never give up.

If that corrupt judge will grant that woman’s request because she would not give up, how much more will God grant the request of those who pray to him day and night? Those who come to him in faith.

So, what kind of circumstances do we face where Jesus’ advice applies? … Perhaps it is our own personal or family circumstances. We have a long-standing illness or complaint. We have somehow found ourselves in conflict with another member of our family, and we are no longer talking, and perhaps that circumstance has lasted for years. Perhaps we have been trying to get justice, or deal with noisy neighbours. Perhaps we have been unjustly accused.

Perhaps it is the world in which we live – perhaps we are weighed down by the conflicts which surround our world and which we wish were resolved – in Ukraine, in Palestine, in Sudan, in Myanmar, among the drug cartels in South America. Perhaps it is the injustice of the distribution of the world’s resources, or even the poverty some face in our own country, even in our rural communities.

Perhaps it is the life of our own churches. Numbers seem to be decreasing, hope for the future life of our congregations just seems to be ebbing away, where are the next generation of church goers?

In all of these areas, what would Jesus say to us? … We have his answer in our Gospel reading. … “Always pray and never give up!” And how do we respond? … “Oh, we’ve tried that and it didn’t work?” …. “Always pray,” says Jesus, “and never give up! … Demonstrate your faith and trust in me by praying and believing that I can change these circumstances.” … “Believe me, trust me,” says Jesus, “Don’t give up on me!”

Jesus challenge is to a renewed commitment to prayer. ……

How can we do this? …. Firstly by making space in our day, perhaps only a little time in the busyness of our lives when we say to God, and remind ourselves that all these things are in God’s hands. That we can trust God. … Secondly by making time to pray together as churches, time to listen out for God speaking to us. These are words in season for us. If we are serious about facing the reality of where we are as churches, with declining numbers and with an air of despondency over us. If we want things to be different, then we need to pray. Even if our prayer is something like this. “Lord, I believe but I also doubt. I fail to consistently trust you. I cannot see where the answers will come from. It all seems hopeless. I am not even sure that you hear my prayer. But, Lord, please act, if you are there and you hear me, please respond!”

With prayers like that, we are in good company – listen to the Psalmists speak out their prayers:

Psalm 10:1: Why, O Lord, do you stand far off? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?

Psalm 13: 1-2: How long, O lord? Will you forget me for ever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and every day have sorrow in my heart?

Psalm 22: 1-2: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, and am not silent.

Like Jacob, in our first reading today, wrestling with God, fighting his fears and doubts, Refusing to let go until he receives God’s blessing, our prayer needs to be honest, embracing our hopes and fears. Like the widow in the Gospel reading, it needs to be persistent and faithful even in the midst of our doubts.

In the midst of the praise and rejoicing that is so much a part of the Psalms, we hear the honest cry of hurt and anger, of loss and anguish.

Let’s heed Jesus’ story of the widow in our Gospel reading, and chose to persevere in prayer, whether our faith is strong or weak, looking to God to act and change things.

John 17: 20-26 – The Sunday After Ascension Day 2025

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During this week the church celebrated Ascension Day. The day when Jesus returned to heaven after his death and resurrection. The Ascension begs a question:

What exactly is happening as Jesus goes into heaven?

Is this the triumphant finale, the final victory parade? When at last Jesus goes home to the Father, to be paraded through the streets of heaven in victory – much like a Roman general would be feted after a battlefield victory, or a triumphant football team parades through its home town or city.

Is the Ascension the final triumphant seal on Christ’s work on earth? Or is it the time when Jesus is welcomed into that indescribable unity which is the Trinity of the Godhead – back home at last?

Or is it a moment of desertion. The disciples have only just received Christ back among them after his death and now cruelly he is taken from them into heaven. A renewed relationship is abruptly ended!!

A commission is given and then the bombshell is dropped. “Listen!” says Jesus, “I have a job for you to do – to be my witnesses throughout the known world.” … “Great, Lord, when do we get down to business, when do we work out the strategy, when do you provide the plan of action?” … “Not us, not me!” says Jesus, “You! I’m going away and you’ll never see me again this side of heaven!”

Or is this, actually, rather than desertion, the point at which followers become leaders, children become adults? Is this primarily the point where Jesus followers can no longer hide behind a leader and have to begin to make choices themselves?

For all the participants in the Ascension story, this must have been a confusing moment. A time which carried so much emotion – parting from friends, losing a friend and leader, going home … All sorts of mixed emotions.

Ultimately this is all true. … Christ goes home in victory. A job well done. … He leaves behind a ragged group of followers who must have felt deserted. … And perhaps most crucially for the church today, Jesus is asking this ragged group to stand up for themselves. To be what he knows that they can be with the Spirit’s strength – a missionary band that will turn the known world upside down within a century.

You may well recognise this prayer of St. Teresa of Avila. … In summary:

Christ has no body now but yours.
No hands, no feet on earth but yours.
Yours are the eyes through which He looks compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

The Ascension story reminds us that we are the ones that count – between now and eternity God has left his concerns, his mission in our hands. And as a result of Ascension Day, it behoves us to commit ourselves again to serving to God – to discovering his way and walking in it, to being his hands, eyes and feet in our local communities.

Our Gospel reading reminds us that in this endeavour, we need to give the highest priority to just one thing …. Working together with a common purpose – being united.

Jesus makes one thing his priority in his final long prayer in John 17 – God’s call to his church to be ‘one’, to be united. ….. We have not done so well with this! Have we?! It is, I believe, our greatest failure.

Rather than unity being the high priority that Jesus makes it in our gospel reading. The church down the ages has always set Jesus’ prayer for unity aside in favour of other things. … Often these other things have been so very important to us. Doctrinal purity comes high up the list, perhaps the role of women in ministry, perhaps issues of human sexuality, perhaps inclusive church, perhaps ….. the list could go on. One of the most significant lessons from church history is that the Church has played fast and loose with Jesus’ call to be one.

‘Being one’ does not mean that we all agree about everything. ‘Being one’ is about recognising just one thing and one thing alone. ‘Being one’ is about recognising that we are family, God’s family. However much we wish it was not true, however much we wish we could choose our Christin sisters and brothers we must not. Our failure to be one, gives the lie to all that we claim as Christians. We cannot claim to love others if we don’t love each other, in our churches, in our communities, in the national church and in the international church.

God’s call is that we work together for a common aim. For the church that aim, that purpose, is the Good News, the Gospel of Jesus.

Just as Jesus, at his Ascension, leaves his disciples to do his work, so God gives us the freedom to choose to build hope, joy and peace in our world and in our church. Each of us, each one of us, sits in the midst of a stream of the overflowing love of God. … We have a choice, over whether we share that love with each other. And so very often we have chosen not to do so.

The national church makes this period between Ascension and Pentecost a time of prayer, it calls it a “Novena” (that just means 9 days – 9 days of prayer). Our prayer needs to be that we will be one just as Jesus desires that we be one. Nothing for God, for Jesus, has a higher priority, not getting things doctrinally correct, not our own priorities, not the state of our buildings, not even the future of our churches. One thing matters above all else to Jesus, that we are united. We are one family under God.

This is Jesus’ prayer for us. Listen again to what he prays:

(John 17:20-23) “I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.”