Sermons

Nineteenth Sunday After Trinity
Sunday 17 October 2004 at 8am and 6.30pm

Simon Cowling

Readings 2 Timothy 3.14 - 4.5; Luke 18. 1-8

How seriously do we take prayer? What do we think we are doing when we pray? Do we pray for things to happen - or not happen? Do we pray about situations without offering specific petitions? Or are we more comfortable thanking God, saying sorry to God, praising God? Most Christians would affirm that prayer is important, but might be more reticent about attempting to examine it, to define it too closely. There are understandable reasons for this: prayer requires us to open ourselves up, to make ourselves vulnerable, and that is never easy.

The parable of the widow and the unjust judge which we've just heard is told by Jesus to exemplify a particular point about prayer for his disciples: the importance of persistence, the importance of never losing heart. As I say in today's bible notes, I do not think that we are to infer anything about the nature of God from the character of the unjust judge, any more than we are to suppose that the purpose of prayer for Christians is to beat God into submission, as the widow did with the judge. Jesus makes his point about persistence, about not losing heart, by giving us two caricatures through whom we are more likely to remember his teaching.

I take something else from the parable - something that Jesus may not have expected his listeners to think of as the primary point, but which is actually apparent in the whole of Jesus' ministry as it is recorded in the Gospels. The other thing I take is this: that prayer is relationship, or rather prayer puts us into relationship. The judge may not have enjoyed his relationship with the persistent widow, but he couldn't avoid the fact that he had one. Fundamentally the relationship we have in prayer is with God - Jesus teaches us to call God 'Our Father' - but within that fundamental relationship we are also in relationship with others when we pray. Each weekday morning a small group - sometimes a very small group - of people say Morning Prayer together in the chapel. Each month a small group - sometimes a very small group - meets on a Monday evening in the chapel to pray for an hour. But the size of these groups - and others which I know meet regularly throughout the parish - is actually irrelevant; for we pray not simply as individuals, but as individuals who are in relationship with each other, with the whole parish which we serve and with the worldwide Church. These relationships have their meaning within the relationship that God, through Jesus Christ, has with the world. If, as St. Paul says, God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, how can it not be true for all of us, wherever we pray, that our relationship as individuals in prayer with God through Jesus Christ involves us necessarily in a relationship with our brothers and sisters. Seen in this light, prayer is an awesome responsibility: not to pray is to say, in effect, I choose not to be in relationship with my brothers and sisters in Christ. Surely none of us would want to say that.

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