Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Good morning.
Will you please pray with me?
Holy and gracious God, may your Holy Spirit give us a spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that with the eyes of our hearts enlightened, we may know the hope to which Christ has called us, the riches of his glorious inheritance among us, and the greatness of his power for those who believe.
Amen.
This morning's reading is Luke 18:1 8.
Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.
He said, in a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.
In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, grant me justice against my accuser.
For a while he refused, but later he said to himself, though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.
And the Lord said, listen to what the unjust judge says.
And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?
Will he delay long in helping them?
I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?
The word of the Lord.
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Thank you so much for reading scripture. Good morning, Knox family.
Good morning. I call you family because this is a family that I've known for the last almost eight years now, since my family and I moved here in the United States.
And for those who don't know me, my name is William Mweo.
In many cultures, Jewish, African, and even cultures in the global South Kenyan, my culture, wisdom often arrives wrapped in a story and sealed with a question.
A question that doesn't demand an answer, but awakens something inside us. A question that sits with us as long as. I mean after.
Long after the storyteller has gone home.
Jesus is a master storyteller and a lover of questions.
He taught parables and he even asked questions and disturbing question, unsettling question.
Questions that make us stop and breathe and wonder.
And I understand that because I grew up in Kenya, where stories, proverbs and sharp questions shape how we learn and how we make meaning.
A good story can make you laugh, it can make you cry, it can make you rethink your whole life.
But a question, yes, the same question, can also make you really broken, even in some situation.
A story that still lives in me.
My father asks this question once.
And that question which he asked still lingers in me. And I'm going to share a short story from my father. This is not a parable. This is just a real story from my own father.
My father was a young man in grade 8 at Kwamatiny British Intermediate School in Kenya, the equivalent of today's middle school here in the United States.
It was in the year 1946, during the Second World War.
Without warning, the British colonial government in Kenya took him and his classmates, and without parental consent, the government loaded them onto a train to Mombasa, the coastal town of Kenya.
They offered them basic war skills and shipped them off towards Burma, India, as war soldiers.
14 days into the journey, Germany fighters attacked their ship and it began to sink.
And in that moment between life and death, my father cried out, ngai Ngai, will this ship hold?
What is life about?
That question, what is life about? Has stayed with me for 25 years since he first told me this story.
Now, as the ship went down, my father and a group of his classmates held hands together and broke into passionate singing, traditional chanting, a ritualistic response to disaster in a Kenyan culture, especially traditional culture, through which they activated their faith, courage and.
And repentance according to their traditional beliefs.
My father was not a Christian at this time.
In that moment of crisis, they held tightly to all that they ever believed.
Suddenly, a rescue helicopter began rescuing people from the sinking ship.
My dad remembered seeing one of his close friends named Makato rescued, and he was next. But many of his classmates perished in the Indian Ocean waters.
My father survived.
He went to Burma, India, and fought in the war and eventually came back home. That's why I'm alive.
But the question he asked in that moment of terror was not just his own question.
It was a question of life.
It was a human question, a spiritual question, a question that refuses to die.
Across history, people, communities and nations have asked questions, especially when everything around them was shaking.
St. Francis of Assis in Italy in the 12th century was once repassed by lepers, then embraced and kissed one of them. Discovering that what he feared could become a place of his grace, he asked a what if the person I fear most is the one who can teach me mercy?
For Nelson Mandela of South Africa, after 27 years in prison, the question that hounded the world was will this man still believe in reconciliation or will he come out with bitterness?
The world watched to see whether a man could hold on to a vision of humanity after everything had been done.
To crash, to crush it, Nelson Mandela did, was a public test of whether faith in human dignity serves suffering.
Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg speech in 1863. Some of you might remember this is a speech when it was just during the civil rights movement. But this speech particularly was an indication of war cemeteries in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. His question essentially was, will a nation conceive, conceived in liberty and now tearing itself apart, actually endure?
He framed the civil war as a test testing whether the nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long. And it was a question about whether the founding ideal had enough life left in it to survive its own contradictions.
And then comes Wangari Badai, the first Kenyan woman to earn a PhD and a civil rights activist in Kenya. When she was beaten, jailed and ridiculed for planting trees in Kenya and calling out the government of the day in the 1990s, the underlying question was, will ordinary women keep showing up when the system keeps saying no?
Her Nobel Prize lectures in 2004 essentially answered that question. Persistence against injustice is itself a form of faith.
Now, for all these people, the future was possible, but only people had the courage to stay the course, to hang on, to be found present, to be faithful.
Now, Scriptures, today's scripture, and not even today's scripture. Before I go there, I say the Bible is full of questions. You know, when you start from Genesis all the way to Revelation, lots of questions.
God asking, Adam, where are you?
God asking, job, job, where were you? When I eat the foundation of the earth, When I laid the foundation of the earth, where were you?
What about the psalmist asking a question, who shall ascend the hill of the Lord? And who shall stand in his holy place? Who will do that?
Even Jesus himself, asking his disciples, could you watch with me even for one hour?
Again the psalmist asking, when the foundations are shaken, when the foundations are shaken, what can the righteous do?
Now, these are not questions of information, friends.
Perhaps they are questions of identity, questions of courage, questions of faithfulness.
And then we come to Luke, chapter 18. The parable presents a widow, one of the most vulnerable people in our society, who keeps showing up at the door of a corrupt judge.
She has no money, she doesn't have an influence, she has no protection whatsoever. But she has something the judge cannot ignore.
You want to call it persistence, of course the text does.
But I also choose to call it prophetic act of resistance.
She keeps knocking, she keeps showing up, she keeps demanding justice. She asks the undress of the cruel king, and she won't stop bothering him with her persistent laments.
This is not just mere piety of persistence in prayer. This is also protest.
This is an exercise of anciency and voice in advocacy.
This is public lament.
It is a Bothersome nuisance, justice seeking mechanism for this woman. She knows that justice and righteousness, I mean, are one and the same thing.
And she stays the cause.
She stays the cause.
She could have prayed from her closet anyway. I mean, it was customarily the Jewish culture just to lock your room and just pray and ask the Lord and he will see you in your secrecy. But she didn't do that.
And I think she didn't do that because we can see she's going to the king. I mean, the king is getting all messages, whatever. She's saying our prayers, our petition, the king is getting them.
She could have prayed silently, but she is on the move.
She knows how to get the judge's attention.
Now this woman actually reminds me the words of Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, a former long serving president of Columbia University, who said that this world consists of three classes of people.
A minority, people who make things happen, many more who watch things happen, they just watch things happen, and an overwhelming majority who have no idea of what is happening. I guess this widow makes things move, of course, I believe by the power of the Holy Spirit who is in her, she makes things move because of our resolve.
Somewhere between our first plea and the judge's reluctant response, a question emerges that unsettles everything we thought we could understand about prayer, justice, and what it means to be found faithful.
Perhaps faithfulness is the final language remaining for those who refuse to forge, I mean, to forget what was promised, those who forget, who choose not to forget what was promised. Maybe faithfulness is the thing.
Now, this woman is an embodiment of faithfulness. And to me in this passage, faithfulness is a person, faithfulness is a person. And that person is this widow, because she embodies what faithfulness to her looks like.
So faithfulness is a person, and we do know faithfulness is a person because Jesus Christ remained faithful until the end, and we know that he never sinned.
He remained faithful as well.
And in this text I see this woman, she's an embodiment of faithfulness.
Now, the Greek word used in verse 8 when Jesus is asking this question.
The Greek word is pistis and it translates faithfulness.
Perhaps what makes that question In Luke verse 18:8 arresting is that Jesus asks it after promising that God will bring justice speedily. Actually, God will bring justice, the text shows us, and yet still wonders whether his people will hold on long enough to see it. Jesus will bring faithfulness whether now or even at the end, whether in the kingdom now or kingdom not yet. He will bring faithfulness, but will his People hold until they see Jesus will bring justice. Will the people hold until the end when that justice will be fully accomplished?
Now, faithfulness is the kind that keeps showing up even when the system is broken.
The kind that refuses to forget what God promised.
The kind that looks like a widow knocking on a judge's door.
That is faithfulness.
Friends, we live in times when justice is contested.
In many countries, justice is on trial, truth is slippery, religion is distracted or distrusted. People don't want to trust a lot about religion. And perhaps many people are not drifting away from faith.
They are moving away from institutions that stopped embodying faith, institutions that prove unfaithful to their calling.
Also, research confirms that most people leaving churches are not departing because of competing beliefs, but competing priorities.
Many could identify with faith and spirituality, but many may not commit, may not prioritize, or may not stay the course.
Pastors and church planters will tell you in our days that it is too hard to get people sign up for church activities.
Friends, when a pandemic or earthquake or even a disaster strike, the question that emerges who shows up?
Who stays?
Who persists in care when the system fails?
Every parent who has raised kids in faith eventually is asking this question.
When they face their own suffering, when they are out there and they face suffering, when they face their own empires.
And when they meet or they are met with the unjust judges, those unjust judges, when they meet them out there, will their faith hold?
Parents are asking that question. Will their faith hold when they get out there and they meet all these challenges or those silencing situations, even in institutions, when the funding dries up, when funders leave, will the mission still hold?
Friends, God will make things right. He will bring justice, whether in this kingdom, the kingdom now, the kingdom, not yet.
But when the time of reckoning comes, will we be found faithful, staying the course, not just because we have our own energy and our own wisdom to stay faithful, but because we know one who stayed faithful.
And he sent us, the Holy Spirit, to help us and to be with us and to guide us to stay the course, to stay faithful.
So much from this woman, a widow, who is marginalized, but who stays faithful. I know she represents not just herself, but even the community, the church today, the people as well. I think she does represent all that but herself. She's an embodiment of faithful for faithfulness. And yes, faithfulness is a person.
Faithfulness is a person. And Jesus himself is faithful.
May the Lord bless us.
Lord, we thank you that you teach us just so much from your questions, your parables. And today one of them, this widow, the embodiment of faithfulness, staying the course.
Help us, Lord. There's so much around us, there's so much to wrestle and to reason and to engage. But may you help us that this question that you answer, you ask us will help us, Lord, take a step back and realize that we need, we need faithfulness. We need to stay the course. And please help us. And help us for sure. We thank you for your word. In Jesus name, amen.
God bless you.
